Protocols of the Elders of Zion published

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first appeared in August and September 1903 as a serialized text in Znamya, a Saint Petersburg newspaper run by the antisemitic publisher Pavel Krushevan. It claimed to be the minutes of secret meetings in which Jewish leaders laid out a plan to control the world by manipulating the press, finance, liberalism and revolution. In 1905 the religious writer Sergei Nilus included a version in a widely read book, and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 White Russian emigres carried it west, where it was translated into many languages.¹

The text arrived at a time when modern political antisemitism, the idea that Jews were a hidden political force rather than only a religious group, was spreading across Europe. In 1921 Philip Graves, a correspondent for The Times of London, showed that large parts of it were copied, sometimes almost word for word, from Maurice Joly's 1864 satire of Napoleon III, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which had nothing to do with Jews. A Swiss court in Bern ruled in 1935 that the Protocols were a forgery. Historians still debate exactly who produced it: an older theory points to agents of the tsarist secret police in Paris, while more recent research favors Russian antisemitic circles around 1902 to 1903.¹³⁴

The exposure did little to slow its spread. In the United States, Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent printed material based on it, and in Germany Hitler and Nazi propagandists used it, and it was taught in schools after 1933. It remains in circulation today, printed in many countries and widely shared online, which makes it one of the most consequential forgeries in history.¹²