The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has for a century served as a virtual Bible for anti-Semitism. One can only welcome any attempt to more fully expose the origins of this most famous of all forgeries. — Ed.
Further inquiry into the Protocols of Elders of Zion helps disperse sinister historical phantoms.
It is nice to realize that the spirit has once again been incorporated in the letter, this time in an essay titled “On the Issue of Authorship of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” written by noted Ukrainian scholar and publicist Vadym Skurativsky and published by Dukh i Litera [Spirit and Letter Publishers] as part of the Library of the Judaic Institute Series. Despite the author’s publicist style, the opening lines make it clear that the reader will have to deal not so much with his emotional response to facts, as with an emotional account of their concentrate. One’s attention is immediately arrested by the huge baggage of unearthed, systematized, studied, and perceived sources that stand almost behind every paragraph. In the first place, the author must be credited with the determination of the Protocols’ starting point, its lower chronological margin. Proceeding from well grounded argumentation, the Protocols appeared at the very start of the twentieth century. Understandably, the researcher’s sharp eye will not fail to notice the fact of the Protocols’ being first published in Russia, although even at that period conscientious scholars, writers, and journalists treated the much-advertised “discovery” with a palpable degree of mistrust (one is reminded of Menshikov’s phrase about people “with a high brain temperature”). Yet the materials that did become public knowledge on the pages of Novoe vremya in 1902 proved nothing new for Russia’s ruling elite, for manuscript copies had been available since 1895.
The author of the essays correctly points to the outwardly strange temporal coincidence of the first printed versions of the Protocols with Leo Taxil’s self-revelation that shook all of Europe. Indeed, recognizing all the previous anti-Masonic works of the French publicist as none other than sheer imagining could not but discredit the Protocols’ appearance on the European terrain, presenting it as yet another scandal-mongering forgery. At the same time, the credibility test, to which that “evidence of a conspiracy against mankind” was put among Russia’s intelligentsia and ruling elite, was generally positive. The hysteria concerning “Judeomasonry” (outrage over a mythical link supposed to exist between Jewry and Freemasonry — Ed.
) found reflection in Russian periodicals, even in Russian poetry and prose. The book cites many examples showing how the creative elite treated the stated “literary work” — with trust and seriousness, and simultaneously undisguised irony, even sarcasm concerning its truthfulness or authenticity. There is a quote from Andrei Bely’s novel, Petersburg , which this author considers very much relevant and material, where the editor of a conservative newspaper speaks with a funny mixture of Protocols-inspired guidelines and reflections, along with Taxil’s self-debunking. The scene ends with a big finger being pointed at the roots of the Protocols, while a man looking amazingly like St. Petersburg’s chief of secret police appears among those taking part in the discussion.
It is further correctly pointed out that the imperial period of Russian history is literally brimming with attempted coups inspired from both without and within a given royal entourage. Russian society seemed frighten even more by a certain inertia in those quarters — in other words, the memory of attempts to translate the idea of replacing the regime into real life, multiplied by mythologizing whatever force allegedly striving to implement the idea. It was spontaneously receding into the background, an optimal substratum in or against which the society of that day could perceive any explanations concerning its perils, precisely what the architects of the mythical Protocols had managed to use most effectively. Since there was no actual evidence of any trace of Zion, the version of some mysterious enemy proved the most digestible one, as has often been the case. That “mysterious enemy” was described as well-organized and well-hidden behind a variety of conspiratorial patterns. The absurd effectiveness of this version was emphasized by the associative unity of the hostile and mysterious components with phenomena originating from the elements only. The author of the essay notes that this was facilitated by the appearance of old legends being recaptured by Jewish periodicals, lauding anonymous Judaic prophets secretly trying to help their kin, which, of course, caused entirely different reverberations in the Russian press, in the context of the Novoe vremya’s publications. In fact, spurious eyewitness accounts appeared in Hebrew, obviously to heighten the Protocols’ effect, although once again no more or less conclusive evidence was ever produced.
Most likely those well acquainted with Vadym Skurativsky’s work, particularly his publicist research, should not be bothered with an in- depth analysis of the procedures he used in establishing the Protocols’ authorship. With his innate meticulousness, the author analyzes at length sizable quotations from The Writer’s Diary, On the Experience of Critique of Bourgeois Morals, written by a certain “Dr. Faust,” and from Matvei Golovinsky’s booklet, The Black Book of German Atrocities, comparing them with the Protocols’ postulates. This comparative analysis allows the researcher to infer that the Protocols of Elders of Zion was most likely written by a Russian journalist (as earlier assumed), apparently a physician by training, likely an agent of the Russian secret police. His identity is given as Matvei Golovinsky. Although the crux of the matter is not so much the authorship of this odious work as is the political coloration of its public appearance. The fact remains that the abominable booklet still makes waves the world over, periodically subsiding lowering to a minor key or swelling to a hurricane scale.
In this context it would perhaps well serve the subject to refer the author to yet another book bearing the meaningful title Zagubione czlowieczenstwo ([Lost Mankind], 1999 Edycja Polska, s. 51], written by Alain Finkielkraut, a Parisian philosopher and essayist. Among other things, he quotes from Adolf Hitler (the F Я hrer said in 1920 that he felt gratified after reading the Protocols, for now he was able to perceive the inner logic of, and the ultimate objective being pursued by, the Jewish people) and notes that, concealed in these words, is mortal hatred that does not want to remain blind; it wants to be intelligent. This kind of anti-Semitism has no weak points, because any manifestation of anarchy or resistance is interpreted as conspiracy. No one can be sure about what was fabricated by the Russian clandestine agencies with the aid of the Protocols’ clever author, later to trigger off the most horrifying crimes against humanity, yet the above excerpt proves that the Protocols must have played a major role in the very physiological process giving sustenance to twentieth-century anti-Semitism. Incidentally, Alain Finkielkraut now and then reminds the reader that in Imperial Germany society was off and on brainwashed by the Protocols. In other words, the ground was made fertile to sprout hatred well before the Nazis came to power. We will not go into details as to what formed the Soviet subspecies of anti-Semitism. The fact remains that Stalin’s ideologues digested and adopted the theory of permanent conspiracy, reaping its bloody harvest. After Stalin, the Soviet regime put special emphasis on the parentage line in the Soviet passport [officially labeled nationality], while proclaiming “a new historic entity, the Soviet people,” which automatically blacklisted millions of that “world’s happiest and most protected” Soviet people. And this was not all — far from it! — that Golovinsky’s booklet did or could inspire. For this reason, there is no need to explain the importance of an in-depth analysis of this particular brilliant writing commissioned by the government machine of coercion. We can find fresh evidence of its effectiveness almost every day.
As with any given literary work, this research is not without fault. In some cases the author overdoes it with details, in others his argumentation vs. Golovinsky is insufficiently substantiated, offering the reader ample room for argument. On the whole, however, the essay emerges solid and logical, the result of tremendous painstaking, and most importantly, successful work is reflected in the very title as the mission the author set himself and effectively accomplished. Even if he is wrong about the true identity of the Protocols’ author(s), his essay remains a scholarly attainment, the importance of which can hardly be overstated; the Protocols are debunked, point by point.
The essay’s opening line read: “Books each have their destiny, yet destiny also has its books.” Despite the substantive and argumented “anti-Protocols” orientation, there are not many reasons for optimism; writings such as the Protocols are still in demand, likely to remain so for years to come, unfortunately; the more problems a given society is faced with, the higher the public interest in that “invisible enemy,” encouraged mostly by rampant corruption and incompetence within the upper echelons of power — or by a certain political force determined to win the power play at all costs. This is something one also wanted to read about in Vadym Skurativsky’s essay.
Still, there is hope that the booklet causing the essay will eventually be removed from what the author mentions as a symbolic bookshelf, never to return.
