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THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION
The infamous �Protocols of the Elders of Zion�, being, supposedly,
evidence of a plot by Jews to take over the world, are repeatedly posted
by anti-Semites as if they were true. However their authenticity has
been disproven on numerous occasions. Despite this, some people are
unwilling to accept the evidence. The following historiographies are
worth reading in this regard.
David S. Maddison [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ARTICLE 1
This article was written by Prof. Saul Wallach of Bar-Ilan University.
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Danny Keren)
Subject: Re: Protocools of Zion
Message-ID:
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
References:
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1993 18:15:22 GMT
The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the most notorious and most
successful work of modern antisemitism, draws on popular antisemitic
notions which have their roots in medieval Europe from the time of the
Crusades. The libels that the Jews used blood of Christian children for
the Feast of Passover, poisoned the wells and spread the plague were
pretexts for the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities throughout
Europe. Tales were circulated among the masses of secret rabbinical
conferences whose aim was to subjugate and exterminate the Christians,
and motifs like these are found in early antisemitic literature.
The conceptual inspiration for the Protocols can be traced back to
the time of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. At
that time, a French Jesuit named Abbe Barruel, representing reactionary
elements opposed to the revolution, published in 1797 a treatise blaming
the Revolution on a secret conspiracy operating through the Order of
Freemasons. Barruel's idea was nonsense, since the French nobility at
the time was heavily Masonic, but he was influenced by a Scottish
mathematician named Robison who was opposed to the Masons. In his
treatise, Barruel did not himself blame the Jews, who were emancipated
as a result of the Revolution. However, in 1806, Barruel circulated a
forged letter, probably sent to him by members of the state police
opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte's liberal policy toward the Jews, calling
attention to the alleged part of the Jews in the conspiracy he had
earlier attributed to the Masons. This myth of an international Jewish
conspiracy reappeared later on in 19th century Europe in places such as
Germany and Poland.
The direct predecessor of the Protocols can be found in the pamphlet
"Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu", published by
the non-Jewish French satirist Maurice Joly in 1864. In his "Dialogues",
which make no mention of the Jews, Joly attacked the political ambitions
of the emperor Napoleon III using the imagery of a diabolical plot in
Hell. The "Dialogues" were caught by the French authorities soon after
their publication and Joly was tried and sentenced to prison for his
pamphlet.
Joly's "Dialogues", while intended as a political satire, soon fell
into the hands of a German antisemite named Hermann Goedsche writing
under the name os Sir John Retcliffe. Goedsche was a postal clerk and a
spy for the Prussian secret police. He had been forced to leave the
postal work due to his part in forging evidence in the prosecution
against the Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck in 1849. Goedsche adapted
Joly's "Dialogues" into a mythical tale of a Jewish conspiracy as part
of a series of novels entitled "Biarritz", which appeared in 1868. In a
chapter called "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of
Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel", he spins the fantasy of
a secret centennial rabbinical conference which meets at midnight and
whose purpose is to review the past hundred years and to make plans for
the next century.
Goedsche's plagiary of Joly's "Dialogues" soon found its way to
Russia. It was translated into Russian in 1872, and a consolidation of
the "council of representatives" under the name "Rabbi's Speech"
appeared in Russian in 1891. These works no doubt furnished the Russian
secret police (Okhrana) with a means with which to strengthen the
position of the weak Czar Nicholas II and discredit the reforms of the
liberals who sympathized with the Jews. During the Dreyfus case of
1893-1895, agents of the Okhrana in Paris redacted the earlier works of
Joly and Goedsche into a new edition which they called the "Protocols of
the Elders of Zion". The manuscript of the Protocols was brought to
Russia in 1895 and was printed privately in 1897.
The Protocols did not become public until 1905, when Russia's defeat
in the Russo-Japanese War was followed by the Revolution in the same
year, leading to the promulgation of a constitution and institution of
the Duma. In the wake of these events, the reactionary "Union of the
Russian Nation" or Black Hundreds organization sought to incite popular
feeling against the Jews, who they blamed for the Revolution and the
Constitution. To this end they used the Protocols, which was first
published in a public edition by the mystic priest Sergius Nilus in
1905. The Protocols were part of propaganda campaign which accompanied
the pogroms of 1905 inspired by the Okhrana. A variant text of the
Protocols was published by George Butmi in 1906 and again in 1907. The
edition of 1906 was found among the Czar's collection, even though he
had already recognized the work as a forgery. In his later editions,
Nilus claimed that the Protocols had been read secretly at the First
Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897, while Butmi in his edition wrote that
they had no connection with the new Zionist movement, but rather were
part of the Masonic conspiracy.
In the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the
reactionary White Armies made extensive use of the Protocols to incite
widespread slaughters of Jews. At the same time, Russian emigrants
brought the Protocols to western Europe, where the Nilus edition served
as the basis for many translations, starting in 1920. Just after its
appearance in London in 1920, Lucien Wolf exposed the Protocols as a
plagiary of the earlier work of Joly and Goedsche, in a pamphlet of the
Jewish Board of Deputies. The following year, in 1921, the story of the
forgery was published in a series of articles in the London Times by
Philip Grave, the paper's correspondent in Constantinople. A whole book
documenting the forgery was also published in the same year in America
by Herman Bernstein. Nevertheless, the Protocols continued to circulate
widely. They were even sponsored by Henry Ford in the United States
until 1927, and formed an important part of the Nazis' justification of
genocide of
the Jews in World War II.
Bibliography
Lucien Wolf. The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion. Press Committee of the Jewish Board of Deputies, London
(1920).
The Truth About "The Protocols": A Literary Forgery. From The Times of
August 16, 17, and 18, 1921. Printing House Square, London.
Encyclopaedia Judaica. Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem (1971), entries
on Antisemitism and Elders of Zion, Protocols of the Learned.
Herman Bernstein. The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion" (reprinted
with introduction by Norman Cohn). Ktav Publishing House, New York
(1971).
Norman Cohn. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World
Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Brown Judaic
Studies, No. 23). Scholars Press, Chico, CA (1981).
-Danny Keren.
ARTICLE 2
The author of this article is not known.
http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~nevai/ISRAEL/The_Protocols_of_The_Learne
d_Elders_of_Zion.README
(Note: The URL no longer seems to be valid.)
About "The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion"
In a sentence it is a fraud, a forgery. Based upon an earlier
anti-semitic tract even it appeared over 10 years previous to the
"meeting" it claims to document. It was apparently written by some
members of the secret police force working for the czar, in the late
19th century. See the text below for details.
-//-
This is quoted from _Holy Blood, Holy Grail_, written by Michael
Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It is THEIR theory, not mine.
There were esoteric, powerful enclaves surrounding the Czars of Russia
long before Rasputin. During the 1890s and 1900s one such enclave formed
around an individual known as Monsieur Phillipe and his mentor, a French
esotericist named Papus. Their enclave was opposed by other powerful
interests--the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, for example, who was intent on
installing her own favorite close to the throne. One of her favorites
was a contemptible individual known as Sergei Nilus. Sometime around
1903 Nilus presented a highly controversial document to the Czar--a
document that supposedly bore witness to a dangerous conspiracy. The
Czar declared the document to be an outrageous fabrication and ordered
all copies of it to be destroyed. Nilus was banished from the court in
disgrace.
Of course the document--or at any rate, a copy of it--survived. In 1903
it was serialized in a newspaper but failed to attract any interest. In
1905 it was published again--this time as an appendix to a book by a
distinguished mystical philosopher, Vladimir Soloviov. At this point it
began to attract attention.
The document in question was a tract, or more strictly speaking, a
purported social and political program, It has appeared under a variety
of slightly differing titles, the most common of which is _The Protocols
of the Elders of Sion__ The Protocols allegedly issued from specific
Jewish sources. And for a great many anti-Semites at the time they were
convincing proof of an "international Jewish conspiracy." In 1919, for
example, they were distributed to troops of the White Russian army--and
these troops, during the next two years, massacred some sixty thousand
Jews who were held responsible for the 1917 Revolution. By 1919, the
Protocols were also being circulated by Alfred Rosenberg, later the
chief racial theorist and propagandist for the national Socialist Party
in Germany. In _Mein Kampf_ Hitler uses the Protocols to fuel his own
fanatical prejudices, and he is said to have believed unquestioningly in
their authenticity. In England the Protocols were immediately accorded
credence by the Morning Post. Even the Times, in 1921, took them
seriously and only later admitted its error. Expert today concur--and
rightly so we concluded--that the Protocols, at least in their present
form, are a vicious and insidious forgery. Nevertheless, they are still
being circulated--in Latin America, in Spain, even in Britain--as
anti-Semetic propaganda.
The Protocols propound an outline, a blueprint for nothing less than
total world domination. On first reading, they would seem to be the
Machiavellian program--a kind of interoffice memo, so to speak--for a
group of individuals determined to impose a new world order, with
themselves as supreme despots. The text advocates a many-tentacled
hydra-headed conspiracy dedicated to disorder and anarchy, to toppling
certain existing regimes, infiltrating Freemasonry and other such
organizations, and eventually seizing absolute control of the Western
World's social, political, and economic institutions. And the anonymous
authors of the Protocols declare explicitly that they have
"stage-managed" whole peoples "according to a political plan which no
one has guessed at in the course of many centuries."
When they were first publicized, the Protocols were alleged to have been
composed at an international Judaic congress that convened in Basle in
1897. This allegation has long since been disproved. The earliest copies
of the Protocols, for example, are known to have been written in
French--and the 1897 congress in Basle did not include a single French
delegate. Moreover, a copy of the Protocols is known to have been in
circulation as early as 1884--a full 13 years before the Basle congress
met. The 1884 copy surfaced in the hands of a member of a
Masoniclodge--the same lodge of which Papus was a member and
subsequently Grand Master. Moreover, it was in this same lodge that the
tradition of Ormus had first appeared--the legendary Egyptian sage who
amalgamated pagan and Christian mysteries and founded the Rose-Croix.
Modern scholars have established that in fact the Protocols, in their
published form, are based at least in part on a satirical work written
and printer in Geneva in 1864. The work was composed as an attack on
Napoleon III by a man named Maurice Joly, who was subsequently
imprisoned. Joly is said to have been a member of the Rose-Croix order.
It can thus be proved that the Protocols did not issue from the Judaic
congress at Basle in 1897. That being so, the obvious question is whence
they did issue. Modern scholars have dismissed them as a total forgery,
a whollly spurious document concocted by anti-Semitic interests intent
on discrediting Judaism. At the same time, they contain a number of
enigmatic references tha are clearly not Judaic. They are so clearly not
Judaic that they cannot plausibly have been fabricated by a forger. No
anti-Semitic forger with even a modicum of intelligence would possibly
have concocted such references in order to discredit Judaism, for no one
would believe those references to be of Judaic origin.
For instance, the text of the Protocols ends with a single statement,
"Signed by the representatives of Sion of the 33rd Degree."
Why would an anti-Semitic forger have made up such a statement? Why
would he not have attempted to incriminate all Jews rather than just a
few--the few who consititute the "33rd Degree"? Why would he not declare
that the document was signed by, say, the representatives of teh
international Judaic congress? In fact, the "representatives of Sion of
the 33rd degree" would hardly seem to refer to anything in Judaism at
all, or to any "international jewish conspiracy." If anything, it would
seem to refer to something specifically Masonic.
The Protocols contain other even more flagrant anomolies. The text
speaks repeatedly of the advent of a "Masonic kingdom" and of a "King of
the blood of Sion" who wil preside over this "Masonic kingdom." It
assert that the future king will be of "the dynastic roots of King
David." It affirms that "the King of the Jews will be the real Pope" and
"the patriarch of an international church." And it concludes in a most
cryptic fashion, "Certain members of the seed of David will prepare the
kings and their heirs... Only the King and the three who stood sponsor
for him will know what is coming."
As an expression of Judaic thought, real or fabricated, such statements
are blatantly absurd. Since biblical times no king has figured in Judaic
tradition, and the very principle of kingship has become utterly
irrelevant. The concept of a king would have been as meaningless to Jews
in 1897 as it would be to Jews today; and no forger can have been
ignorant of this fact. Indeed, the references quoted would appear to be
more Christian than Judaic. For the last two millennia the only "king of
the Jews" has been Jesus himself--and Jesus, according to the Gospels,
was of the "dynastic roots of King David." If one is fabricating a
document and ascribing it to a Jewish conspiracy, why include such
patently Christan echoes? Why speak of so specifically and uniquely Chri
stian a concept as a Pope? Why speak of an "international church" rather
than an international synogogue or temple?
The conclusion drawn by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail is:
There was an original text on which the published version of the
Protocols was based. The original text was not a forgery. It had nothing
to do with Judiasm or an "international Jewish conspiracy." It issued,
rather, from some Masonic organization or Masonically oriented secret
society that incorporated the word "Sion." The original text may well
have included a program for gaining power, for infiltrating Freemasonry,
for controlling social, political, and economic institutions. Such a
program would have been perfectly in keeping with the secret societies
of the Renaissance. Nilus brought this document to the attention of the
Czar with the purpose of discrediting the enclave of Papus and Monsieur
Phillipe, doctoring the language before he did. When this failed, he saw
it as a means to foster anti-Semitism.
References:
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide
Bernstein, Truth about the "Protocols"
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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