When advance notice of a meeting on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated in Stroud in early March, many people just thought ‘What’s that?’
The Protocols were first published in English over a hundred years ago. But the fact that the event was paired with another celebrating the birthday of Adolf Hitler may have given a clue.
This publication is one of history’s most toxic antisemitic texts. Not just conveying proven lies, it is a call to action which underscored Nazi violence culminating in the Holocaust. A literal “warrant for genocide”.
Consider the history: The Protocols made an initial appearance in 1903 in the Russian newspaper Znamia, reappearing again two years later as part of a religious tract by a Tzarist civil servant (1905). 1903-1905 were notably a high point in the violent history of Russian pogroms, with the New York Times reporting on ‘scenes of horror’ with piles of corpses and the wounded, and no attempts by police to intervene.
The Protocols were translated into German, French, English, and other languages. It’s still a live idea, and regularly surfaces in anti-Jewish contexts – most recently at the US Republican National Convention.
The document claims to be a report of meetings held Switzerland in 1897 in which Jews and Freemasons made a plan for world domination, undermining Christian civilization and constructing a world state. Liberalism and socialism were the means to this supposed end. Many of the details would be familiar to conspiracy-mongers today.
As early as 1921 the Protocols was exposed as a crude forgery. Some of the text was lifted from a satire on Napoleon’s ambitions for world rule published in 1864, and some from Biarritz, an anti-Jewish German novel published in 1868, in which a meeting of Jewish elders is presided over by the Devil himself..
In 1934 a trial in Switzerland found the Protocols to be an antisemitic forgery. The Russian historian Vladimir Burtsev, sometimes called the “Sherlock Holmes of the revolution”, provided documentary evidence of the forgery.
And still the Protocols continue to circulate, in print and in new incarnations on the internet.
Thanks to community opposition the meeting planned in Stroud to promote the Protocols as a “Blueprint for the 20th and 21st centuries” was cancelled. But this was not the first and likely not the last time we’ve heard them promoted locally. Community Solidarity Stroud District will continue to expose and challenge the promotion of this conspiracy theory and other antisemitism locally where we find it.
Community Solidarity Stroud District 