By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — After October 7, 2023, Israelis experienced, and continue to experience, the shock of a pogrom in the south of the country that they deeply believed could not have happened in a Jewish state established to prevent anti-Jewish pogroms. Many of them were horrified to realize that something had happened that was believed could only have happened in the Holocaust.
However, as a result of this massacre by Hamas, powerful actions for and against its justification began around the world. The scope of antisemitic demonstrations on all five continents surpassed the most pessimistic predictions: the people of the victims of the pogrom and Holocaust began to be presented as criminals, as “white people” oppressing “colored” Arab, Palestinian fighters against “colonialism.” The Holocaust, which made Jews the greatest victims of violence in history, was forgotten and excluded from the list of the greatest crimes against humanity.
Jews have been dressed up as colonizers, which they never were. Jews lived in the Middle East before the Arabs for 3000 years. Jews are not only white-skinned; there are dark-skinned Jews among them. Israel is not the colonizer, but the US, Australia, New Zealand and Russia are. The US colonized the Indians, and Australia and New Zealand colonized the natives, Russia has 160 peoples, 159 of which were colonized by the Russian people.
The picture painted in the forgery of the Russian tsarist security service of the early twentieth century, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was repeated: the victims were presented as criminals on a global scale, as “rulers of the world.” However, this pogrom has prospects, as the massacre of October 7, 2023 is interpreted by opponents of Jews as a rehearsal before such new actions. At the heart of these antisemitic events is the spirit of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is always relevant. Let us remember how forgery became a historical reality, how slander turned into legitimate argumentation, and how fakery was able to successfully play the role of truth.
Russia is the birthplace of the blood libel, the writing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a forged document outlining Jewish plans to establish world domination and destroy the Christian world. In 1905, the First Russian Revolution broke out, and that same year the religious antisemitic writer Sergei Nilus published the full text of the Protocols. The book was most likely written or compiled by police officer Matvei Golovinsky at the initiative of Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the International Branch of the Tsarist Guard in Paris and vice-director of the Police Department in 1905 – 1906.
The October Revolution made adjustments to the myth of the “conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.” A document allegedly found in the possession of a murdered Red Army commander, the Jew Zunder, in 1918, identified the “Jewish conspiracy” with the October Revolution. The modernized forgery arrived in Berlin in 1919 through the activities of two White immigrants, officers and Black Hundreds, Peter Shabelsky-Bork and Fyodor Winberg. According to English researcher Norman Cohn in his book “The Blessing of Genocide: The Myth of the World Conspiracy of the Jews and ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘” (1967), Winberg met the first translator of the Protocols into German, Ludwig Muller.
In Berlin, Winberg and Shabelsky-Bork collaborated on the yearbook Ray of Light, the third issue of which (May 1920) contains the full text of Nilus’s book. All issues of the yearbook obsessively interpreted the existence of a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, as did Winberg’s own book, The Way of the Cross, which was translated into German. In German, Winberg denounced the Weimar Republic and Soviet Russia and “explained” their similarities: “The common link between our revolution and the German revolution lies in the fact that both coups d’état were carried out artificially, by means of a world-wide network of intrigues and secret machinations of Jewish-Masonic organizations. In these organizations Freemasonry in its lower strata plays the role of a blind instrument of the famous World Jewish Council, and the higher strata (degrees) of Freemasonry are completely absorbed and filled with Jews, so that the highest administration is concentrated exclusively in Jewish hands.” The distributors had every reason to believe that in Germany the Protocols would be a success.
The Jewish writer Benjamin Segel wrote in the early 1920s, “In Berlin I attended meetings devoted entirely to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The speaker was usually a professor, teacher, editor, lawyer, or something of that sort. The audience consisted of members of the educated class, officials, merchants, former officers, ladies, students. […] Passions were brought to the boiling point. There, in front of everyone, the cause of all evils was called the Jews, who started the war, brought it to defeat and organized the revolution. […] I watched the students. A few hours earlier, they had probably been racking their brains in a seminar of a world-renowned scholar trying to solve some legal, philosophical, or mathematical problem. Now young blood was boiling, eyes glistening, fists clenched, hoarse voices roaring for revenge. […] Whoever dared to express a slight doubt was shouted down, often insulted and showered with threats. […] German science allowed belief in the truth of the Protocols and in the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy, which had penetrated so deeply into the educated circles of the German population that they were now (1924) ineradicable. […] Not one of the great German scholars […] has exposed the forgery.”
As Cohn notes, “While the Nazi Party was already characterized by rampant antisemitism from its founding in 1919, hatred of Russian communism only swept over it in 1921 – 1922, primarily, apparently, thanks to the future Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. He [Latvian German] became a link between Russian antisemitic Black Hundreds and German antisemitic racists. “Already in 1920, hundreds of thousands of copies of the Protocols and their commentaries flooded into Germany. The first edition was published in 120,000 copies and sold out instantly. Russian antisemitism enriched German antisemitism. A new batch of slander spawned a new bloody anti-Jewish march across Europe. Rosenberg, in his pamphlet The Plague in Russia argued that Rathenau and his kind “have long been ripe for prison and the gallows.” This article of his was printed in many newspapers two weeks before the minister’s assassination.
In 1923, Rosenberg published a book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish World Politics, which went through three editions in one year. “Less than two years after Hitler came to power,” Cohn wrote, “the intellectual and moral level in Germany had fallen so low that the Minister of Education was able to declare the Protocol‘ one of the essential books for reading in schools.” This forgery took a place of honor in the system of education for hatred of Jews in Germany. Hitler welcomed the Protocols, although long before Mein Kampf was written, in 1921, Philip Graves, the Times of London‘s correspondent in Istanbul, had already proven that the book was a forgery. August 18, 1921, the latter reported that the Protocols – plagiarized pamphlet Maurice Joly Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, or Machiavelli’s policy in the XIX century (1864), directed against the regime of Napoleon III. Russian emigrant, Saratov landowner Mikhail Raslovlev sold in Istanbul to an Englishman Joly’s book for 337 pounds and offered to compare the texts of Protocols and Dialogue.
The Nazis picked up and glorified the legend of the danger of Jewish domination, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Holocaust became a real and monstrous response of world antisemitism to the imaginary attempts of Jews to establish world domination, recorded in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Publicist and publisher Vladimir Burtsev published in 1938 in Paris a book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proven Forgery. In it he characterized the Protocols and their connection to the coming Nazism: “The Protocols of Zion could be a kind of revelation for those who were looking for in the Jews the culprit of the World War, all the revolutions. The scapegoat for all the sins of mankind had been found. The Protocols of Zion was to explain all the troubles of our darkest days. And so, The Protocols of Zion became the board book of antisemitism. In the hands of Hitler and the Nazis, they became a weapon of rabid persecution against Jewry.”
The success of an exposed forgery, a primitive book like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in Russia and especially in Germany, demands an explanation.
“The greatest of new developments – that ‘God is dead and that belief in the Christian God has become something untrustworthy – is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” – Nietzsche wrote in The Merry Science between 1881 and 1882. The weakening of the authority of the Christian religion led to the transformation of Christian antisemitism into racial antisemitism. The process began with the appearance of Wilhelm Marr’s book The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, viewed from a Non-Religious Standpoint (1879), the first to use the term “antisemitism.”
Disappointment with the authority of God causes critics to focus on his antipode, the devil. The power of God is transferred to the opposite pole – the power of Satan. Satan’s rule simply explains complex phenomena. The demonization of the Jews simplified the perception of difficulties, evil and suffering caused by revolutions and wars. People made up the devil. Then they concocted the sale of a non-existent soul to a non-existent devil. But the devil and the soul were unconvincing creatures. Something more tangible was needed to illustrate evil.
In 1921, an analyst for the newspaper Deutsche Volkische Bletter (German People’s Daily) portrayed Rathenau as the spawn of the devil: “You spread satanic justice around you, unfold satanic activities, glorify satanic morality.” The turbulent streams of consciousness of the times of revolutions and wars contain confusion, insecurity, loss of stability and habitual ideals. To orient themselves in critical situations, people need to put a face to evil. Such a face is easier to find in the alien faces of Jews. To confront evil, humans need to give it an anthropomorphic form.
In the article Christianity and antisemitism: the religious fate of Jewry (1927) Berdyaev wrote: “Hatred of Jews is often a search for a scapegoat. When people feel unhappy and connect their personal misfortunes with historical misfortunes, they look for a culprit on whom they can blame all their misfortunes. […] Nothing is easier than to convince people of low consciousness that the Jews are to blame for everything.”
In his essay Reflections on the Jewish Question, Jean Paul Sartre notes the Manichaean origin of antisemitism, which considers Jews to be the spawn of the devil: “It is true that the freedom in question here is thoroughly condemned: a Jew is free to do evil, but not to do good; he has free will only so far that he can bear full responsibility for his crimes, but not so far that he can reform himself. […] I know of only one creature that is so totally free and so committed to evil, and that is the Spirit of Evil himself, that is Satan. Thus, the Jew is identified with the spirit of evil. His will, in contrast to the Kantian will, is the pure, disinterested and all-embracing desire for evil, it is the evil will itself. This is the form in which evil appears on earth, and whatever happens: crises, wars, famines, upheavals or revolts – in all the troubles of society, directly or indirectly, the Jews must be blamed. The antisemite is afraid of discovering that the world is badly organized: for then something would have to be invented, something would have to be changed – and man would once again find himself the master of his fate, assuming a lingering, immense burden of responsibility; that is why the antisemite places all the evil of the universe in the Jew.” Antisemitism stems from a laziness of thought and action that dictates a simplistic description of reality.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion accumulated non-religious hatred. For centuries Jews had been persecuted for their faith. The new way of “slowing down” the Jews, leveling their success in education, business and social activity required a new approach – the blame was not on religion, which could be changed and which had already ceased to play the role of dominant, but on blood. The fate of blood gravitated toward the Jews, and in their blood was “found” the desire to seize power in the world, a genetic curse. The Jews were presented as infernal beings in whom “infernal” qualities were hereditary.
The German historian, philologist and jurist Theodor Mommsen, author of The History of Rome and winner of the 1902 Nobel Prize for Literature, however, gave a rational explanation for the satanic design of antisemitism: its main cause was rooted in “envy and primal instincts, […] a barbaric hatred of education, freedom and humanism.” The pace at which Jews avidly studied and excelled in science, medicine, crafts, business, literature, music and political activity was for many an incomprehensible, threatening and unacceptable phenomenon. Not many were able to accept and forgive the Jews for their achievements, as Goethe wrote that Jews: “are generally keenly inquisitive and more inclined to do good than any German nationalist.” Goethe remarked, “Their ability to understand things quickly and analyze them deeply, as well as their innate intelligence, make them a much more receptive audience than you can find among the real and true Germans with their slow and dull brains.”
What may have commanded the respect and understanding of Goethe was an unpardonable transgression for many Germans. Envy was covered up by a Jewish conspiracy theory. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was composed by envious people, shocked and annoyed by the Jewish intellectual revolution that had lifted this people from the bottom of European society to its pinnacle. Their goal was to bring the Jews back to the bottom, to destroy successful competitors, using a pile of lies and fiction to do so.
The ideology of antisemitism derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not based on religion. It is not based on the racial superiority of non-Jews over Jews, but, on the contrary, on inferiority complexes against Jews, fear of their intelligence and envy of them. Unlike the religious and racial prejudices of the traditional varieties of antisemitism, the “new” Judophobia is based on fear of competition and envy. These feelings are heightened at the sight of the state of Israel, a prosperous regional superpower based in the swamps, in the desert, without natural wealth, surrounded by vastly outnumbered enemies.
The Protocols fiction of a Jewish oligarchy ruling the world encourages hatred of the Jewish oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine “ruling” those countries. The mythical Protocols live their real, not mythical, lives. Their bloody specter is haunting all five continents.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and the author of 10 books. He has been published in 91 journals in 17 countries in Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.