Our Notes & References

Important émigré edition of the most notorious of anti-semitic slanders, famous for its visual cover.

“The Protocols” is an anti-semitic hoax purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. It was first published in Russia in 1903, later translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. The text purports to document the minutes of a late 19th-c. meeting of Jewish leaders discussing their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of “gentiles”, and by controlling the press and the world’s economies.

Following the October Revolution, the Protocols of Zion came to be seen in a new light by the Russian right. Viewed through the prism of their anti-semitic beliefs, the predominantly Jewish make-up of the new Bolshevik government appeared to provide material proof of the prophecies that the text had purportedly first revealed. In order to make those links explicit, this émigré edition uses as its cover a photograph of some Soviet officials titled “The Jewish Government in Russia” (without neither Stalin nor Lenin – although some other anti-semitic works claimed Lenin was also Jewish!). The text of the 24 protocols comes from Nilus’ 1911 edition, with addition of an extensive introduction by the publisher, Duke Mikhail Gorchakov.

Books on Jewish and Masonic conspiracies abounded during the early years of Russian emigration, finding fertile ground amongst the more reactionary elements of the community. In reality, these works tend to reveal rather less about the given subject matter than they do about the émigré community’s own attempts to make sense of their own unhappy fate.

In 1930s it was proved that the source material for the forged text consisted jointly of “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”, an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly and a chapter from “Biarritz”, an 1868 novel by the anti-semitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche.