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- [00:02]
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- [00:31]
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- [01:01]
Rob Attar
This is a History Extra Production Conspiracy.
- [01:06]
Professor Pamela Nadell
Theories can take us to some pretty dark places and few more so than the story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First published In Russia in 1903, the text purported to be evidence of a world Jewish conspiracy, and even though it was soon thoroughly debunked, it has remained a key plank of anti Semitic conspiracy theories ever since. Welcome to History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories from History Extra. I'm Rob Attar, and for this episode I was joined by Professor Pamela Nadell, Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the American University in Washington, to explore how the Protocols have been taken up by everyone from Henry Ford to to the Nazis to anti Semites across the world in the 21st century. Pamela, I wonder if to begin with, you could please just briefly describe to us what exactly the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are.
- [02:01]
Rob Attar
First of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here and to talk about this conspiracy theory that has absolutely no basis in fact, because we even know that it is based. It was drawn from a novel, an 1864 novel, which we can certainly talk about. What the Protocols of the Elders of Zion charges is that it imagines an international conspiracy orchestrated by a secret cabal of Jews who are bent on controlling the world. And what it imagines is that you are dropping in on the Elder of Zion, who is checking in and talking about how much progress the Jews have made in their effort to harness liberalism to ultimately seize control of the entire world.
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Professor Pamela Nadell
So I wonder then, if we could come back to the origin story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When was it actually written and who.
- [03:05]
Rob Attar
Wrote it the origin story, what we think we know now, and this is the work of the outstanding scholar Steve Zipperstein. What we know now is that the Protocols first appeared. They were serialized in a St. Petersburg newspaper in 1903, not long after the Kishineff pogrom. And I probably need to explain what that was. In 1903, there was a horrible attack on the Jews of Kishineff, and 49 Jews were murdered and hundreds were injured and raped. This was seen as a massive outrage, even though there had been pogroms breaking out against Jews since the early 1880s in Russia. And the result of that outrage, which Jews around the world were up in arms over it. Maybe up in arms is not quite the right word, but they were marshaling resources to get people to denounce what had happened. And the idea that so many different places from America across Europe would denounce this horror shocked Russian nationalists who believed that the only group that could have orchestrated something like this had to have been the Jews. And so what happened is the journalist Pavel Krushevan published a series of these Protocols. And we knew this actually by the 1920s, that what he was doing was he was adapting them from a little known work of political satire written by a French lawyer named Maurice Cholly. And it was called Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. And while it certainly described the perils of authoritarianism, it was actually an attack on Napoleon iii. It never mentioned the Jews. And what he did was he lifted it from there and then kind of inserted the Jews. And actually the London Times in the early 1920s publish a comparison side by side. Here's from the Protocols. Here's from the Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. So we know it was, you know, what we would call today something that was plagiarized.
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Professor Pamela Nadell
So when the Protocols were published, and as you've already explained, they weren't what they purported to be. But how were they received by people in Russia and further afield?
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Rob Attar
In Russia, they really don't seem to make that much of a splash. It's a fairly obscure newspaper and they don't get a whole lot of attention in Russia, frankly, or anywhere until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And that's really the turning point. That's what launches the Protocols out into the world. Because various Russian nationalists, those who were supporters of the monarchy that had been toppled, they begin to read the Protocols and they pass them around and. And then when they flee, when they go into exile in France and in England and in Germany and in the United States, they bring the Protocols with them and that's how it begins to take off.
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Professor Pamela Nadell
And is this in any way connected to the perception at least that there was quite a strong Jewish presence among the Bolshevik revolutionaries?
- [06:36]
Rob Attar
Exactly. It definitely is connected to what becomes really one of the most enduring anti Semitic myths of the 20th century. And I do want to emphasize the words myth and that is the charge of Judeo Bolshevism. The notion, and your question is absolutely right. There were Jews, relatively small number, but there were Jews who were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution. The most famous of course being Trotsky, who was the head of the Red Army. And Jews had joined the revolution because it promised them equality. After all, they had been subject to pogroms, they were subject to anti Semitic legislation. And Lenin, eventually he outlawed anti Semitism. That didn't mean it didn't continue to exist. But on the books it did not continue to exist. The protocol surface among these opponents of Bolshevism. And they're charging that it's only the Jews who could have masterminded this revolution. And that like the Jews, as the Protocols talk about, the Jews masterminded the French Revolution. Well, now they've masterminded the Russian Revolution. And the thing about the Protocols is that the reason they get so widely believed is that they do have like this tiny, tiny grain of truth because there were Jews who were supportive of the Bolsheviks. So they point to that and then it seems that Bolshevism is fulfilling the prophecy of the Protocols. But let me emphasize again, they are.
- [08:14]
Professor Pamela Nadell
A fiction in terms of the US A key player in how they spread to that country is Henry Ford, the American industrialist. I wonder if you could explain how he became involved.
- [08:25]
Rob Attar
So actually I'd like to start the year before Ford because I think it's important to understand how the Bolshevik Revolution drives what's going on in the United States. A minister who had spent a decade in what had been St. Petersburg by the time he comes to the United States has been renamed Petrograd. And he flees the revolution. And he testifies in 1919 before a Senate Committee, Senate of the Congress of the United States. And he is pointing to all the Jews who are involved in in the revolution. He actually says only 16 of 388 members were real Russians. And we know that he's lying. We know that his information was false. But the Senate was really worried that there was going to be a Bolshevik Revolution in America. And this is laying the groundwork for what becomes what we call the first Red scare in the United States. So the first time that we actually see the Protocols appearing in the United States is in this Overman committee hearing in 1919. And Henry Ford, a year later, in May of 1920, he begins publishing a 91 week series called the International the World's Foremost Problem. And in the very first issue of his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, this is a newspaper that he owned on May 22, 1920, the headline stories is titled the International Jew the World's Problem. When all the articles are collected and they're put together, then it's called the International Jew the World's Foremost Problem. And it says that the Jews control international finance and that even though they still face legal discrimination. And I'm going to quote the principal, though unofficial rulers of the earth, end quote, are the Jews. And then he calls them the power behind many a throne and the International Jew. The series does exactly what the Protocols did. In fact, actually it republishes parts of the Protocols. It literally just republishes them because by this time they've been translated into English. And it talks about how the Jews are achieving their goals by manipulating the economy, by manipulating the press, and by being the power behind the throne.
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Professor Pamela Nadell
Do we know why Henry Ford was so drawn to these theories? Was it something in his personal experience? Was it just his pure anti Semitism? What was it?
- [11:07]
Rob Attar
I think there are three different explanations. The first one is we really do not know why Henry Ford entered into the business of peddling antisemitism. And after all, he was a very successful car manufacturer. One scholar thinks that he was deeply influenced in his movement towards antisemitism by a series of children's books that were taught in elementary schools. They were primers for reading. And each year you would graduate, you would get to a higher level primer. They're called the McGuffey Readers. And these McGuffey Readers, they certainly include a great deal of information that is about the Jews, that is anti Jewish. A lot of it will come from traditional Christian anti Semitism. So that's one possibility. A second possibility is that In World War I, Henry Ford was involved in an effort to bring peace to Europe. And he funded something called a peace ship. And one of the champions of that peace ship, which ultimately proved to be a fiasco, was, was a Hungarian Jewish woman. And he begins to rail against her. What we do know is that by the summer of 1919 he's on a camping trip and he's with a friend and the Friend begins to record his anti Semitic rants, and they're clearly anti Semitic. So by that time, he has embraced the ideas behind the Protocols. And the other thing that happens is he had bought this newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Dearborn's a town in Michigan not far from Detroit. He bought that, and he had hired somebody to help him publicize the newspaper. It was a small local newspaper, fairly modest circulation. And what his publicist said is find something controversial, find something, you know, that will galvanize people and go after it. And what he decides to do is he goes after the Jews. So it's all those reasons combined.
- [13:21]
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- [13:52]
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- [14:23]
Professor Pamela Nadell
Now, you mentioned earlier that the Times in Britain did a debunking of the Protocols of the Elders of zion in the 20s. How successful in general were attempts to prove that the Protocols were false?
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Rob Attar
This is the real problem with the Protocols, because as we know, they continue to circulate widely today. The problem is that even when they have been proven to be an outright forgery, an outright fiction, there is no evidence that the Jews do the things that they say in the Protocols, that somehow it just doesn't gain any traction. So Even though in August 1921, the London Times showed that the Protocols, which, by the way, in Great Britain were called the Jewish Peril, showed how they were copied from Jolie's book, called the book a historic fake, even though there was a trial in 1935 in Switzerland, in Bern, where the Jewish community sued the publishers of the Protocols in Switzerland, and. And the judge in that trial also calls them a fake and A forgery. Even though they have been debunked over and over again over the decades, people still continue to believe them.
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Professor Pamela Nadell
Antisemitism has been a fact for thousands of years. The Protocols, yelp design. And they're not the first instance of antisemitism, of course. But were they in any way different from previous antisemitic theories or views about Jews?
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Rob Attar
The major difference is the issue that they're written in the modern period. So I think what's important to understand is that antisemitism enmity against the Jews starts in Christianity with the charge that the Jews killed Jesus and that they were responsible for his murder, that they clamored for it, and also that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. And what we get almost immediately, once Christianity begins to gain adherence, in the century after the death of Jesus and through the teachings of Paul, what we see are these dual ideas that the Jews are Christendom's enemy, mortal enemy, because of what they did, and also that they are nefariously associated with. With money. And those ideas gain new currency in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, we begin to see the Jews who by now are living in small communities scattered across England and France and the various German states and also in Italy, we begin to see the Jews being stereotyped in dangerous new ways. The first one is that they are charged with the blood libel. And the very first blood libel in Norwich In England in 1144, a child was murdered and the Jews were blamed. And a monk named Thomas of Monmouth writes an account of this. He writes it several decades after the accusation. And he claimed in his chronicle, he claimed that another monk had confided in him the Jewish texts commanded this murder, and that every year Jewish leaders would meet to cast lots to choose the place for the coming year's victim. So it's almost the first intimation of some kind of Jewish international conspiracy. And then, of course, when we get to the bubonic plot, plague. In 1348, 49, as the plague was ravaging Europe and people were trying to figure out what had happened around Europe, the Jews were accused of poisoning the water sources, the wells, the rivers, and causing the Black Death. And the result is that Jews were persecuted across Europe and murdered or exiled in various different places. So what we have in both cases is we have early false conspiracy theories being spread about the Jews. And of course, the other thing that happens in the Middle Ages is that because of limitations on the Jews ability, they cannot own land, they cannot join the guild. So the limitations on their ability to earn a living. They're actually driven into money lending. It's also at this point, the church does not want Christians lending to Christians. They have a very literal interpretation of a passage in Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verse 20, 21, where it says, you shall not lend at interest to your brother, but you may lend at interest to a stranger. So we sort of move from Judas having sold out Jesus, and now we have these rapacious Jewish money lenders and who of course, by the time we get to Elizabethan England are cast forever as Shylock, the figure from the Merchant of Venice.
- [19:34]
Professor Pamela Nadell
Now the time where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion really get going, if that's the right word, is also coincides with the rise of Nazism and other far right fascist movements in Europe. How far did Nazism draw on the Protocols?
- [19:48]
Rob Attar
So Hitler's writings are definitely drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I mean, he is blaming the Jews. He's talking about international Jewish world finance. This is from Mein Kampf. He kind of morphs from the Jews are going to murder civilization. He starts out by saying, they're going to destroy Christianity. But the thing about Hitler is that he's learning from Henry ford. So in 1923, in March, even before he attempted the Beer Hole Putsch in Munich that November, he was interviewed by a journalist from the Chicago Tribune. And he talks about how much he admires Heinrich Ford. Of course, he calls him Heinrich. And it's at this point that Ford is actually contemplating whether or not to run for President of the United States. And he says Hitler says that if he could, he would send some of his shock troops to the United States to help Heinrich Ford in his presidential campaign. And he knows he can't do that. But what he does say is what he really likes about Ford is his anti Jewish policy. And he talks about here already again railing against international Jewry, which of course is the phrase that Ford was using in his series.
- [21:10]
Professor Pamela Nadell
By the end of the Second World War, when Nazism has been defeated and the world is aware to some extent at least of the horrors of the Holocaust, did that challenge the Protocols and other anti Semitic theories at all, the idea that this is where it can take you to?
- [21:26]
Rob Attar
We like to think that it did. And in some places, obviously it did. And to some extent it obviously did. Yet we also know that after World War II in the United States, an organization called the Christian Nationalist Crusade, which was founded in 1947, was republishing the Protocols and republishing the International Jew the world's foremost problem. And the way they could do that is because the four volumes of the articles, which by the way were translated into 16 languages, they were never copyrighted. So they have continued to be published and republished. And today, while it may not be so easy to find an actual hard copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you can certainly find them everywhere on the web.
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Professor Pamela Nadell
Is it fair to say that in the period since the Second World War they have proliferated around the world? It's not just in America or Europe, is it anymore?
- [22:22]
Rob Attar
They've proliferated around the world so much that certainly they make their way across the Arab world. In Japan they're published in 2004. So now we're into the 21st century. In 2002, Egyptian Satellite Television developed a 41 part miniseries that was based on the Protocols. And In March of 2021, an officer of the Capitol Police at the United States capitol in Washington D.C. was found with a copy of the Protocols near his security post. So happened to be a congressional aide had seen that he had it out at his post. And so the text remains potent today, widely available and still used.
- [23:13]
Professor Pamela Nadell
Now, we are talking specifically about the Protocols today, but there are many other conspiracy theories that include Jews in them. For example, the idea that Mossad was involved in 9, 11, the Rothschilds being behind pretty much anything you can think of. Why do you think people so often bring Jews into their conspiratorial worldview?
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Rob Attar
I think that the Jews are really at the heart of so many conspiracy theories and they remain there because of this millennial old hatred of the Jews and this fear that the Jews are enemies of Christendom that goes back to Christianity and this fear that anyone's opponents are the Jews. There's a very important book by a scholar named David Nirenberg on Western antisemitism, where he shows how intellectuals across European history from antiquity. He stops shortly before the French Revolution, how they always called their enemies Jews. Like if their enemies embraced a particular idea, they derided it as a Jewish idea. And he argues that one of the things that sits at the core of Western civilization is this argument about the Jews. Now we do need to remember the word antisemitism is not coined until 1879. It's a new term and it's a term that's there. This kind of gets back to one of your earlier questions. It's developed in Germany by a man named Wilhelm Maher. He popularizes it by. Because the problems that they're seeing with the Jews are not the problems of traditional Christianity because the Jews have been theoretically emancipated, they've been made equal citizens. And so he needs a new way of explaining Jewish distinctiveness. And he uses antisemitism to designate that the Jews are racially different and racially distinct.
- [25:14]
Professor Pamela Nadell
At the moment, antisemitism is on the rise around the world. Certainly where I'm in Britain, where you are in the United States. Are anti Semites around the world still drawing on the Protocols today?
- [25:27]
Rob Attar
Certainly anti Semites on the right are drawing upon the Protocols today. I would also say that we see some of the anti Semitism that comes from the left, the idea that the Jews are powerful, the idea that the Jews are controlling the levers and mechanisms of government, that. And of course, a lot of what happens today is around Israel, and so that the Jews in Israel are able to manipulate other governments. Again, this is all false. But I certainly think that the ideas behind the Protocols are coming from both sides.
- [26:00]
Professor Pamela Nadell
Now, as you know, as you mentioned earlier, the Protocols have been debunked for a century, even now, but yet people still continue to spread them, to believe them. Is there anything more that historians or other people in public life can do to try to suppress this or. Or will it just be there forever?
- [26:19]
Rob Attar
Such a tough question. If people would listen to historians, we would be in a much better place, because as a historian, I believe that we cannot understand the present unless we actually know the past. But when we have so much invective being spewed, especially today on social media, that they're not listening to the historians, they're listening to media figures and people who are in those spaces and who just continue to spew these horrible ideas. And of course, what we see today are the dog whistles that are used to talk about the same ideas of the Protocols have changed slightly. You know, today people talk about Soros and they talk about globalist, but the ideas underlying both of them. Soros, as a philanthropist, someone who uses his money to promote liberal causes, is the heir to the conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds. And the idea of globalist is the heir to the idea of the internationalists that Henry Ford gave us so much information about.
- [27:30]
Professor Pamela Nadell
Now, over the course of the series, we've looked at a lot of different conspiracy theories. Some of them may be quite light hearted, don't necessarily cause that much damage. But is it fair to say that this is a conspiracy theory that causes significant damage to people in the real world?
- [27:44]
Rob Attar
This is a conspiracy theory that helped fuel the Holocaust? Yes, this is the conspiracy theory that.
- [27:51]
Professor Pamela Nadell
Has had horrific ramifications, that was Professor Pamela Nadell. Her next book, antisemitism An American Tradition, will be published this October by Norton. And that's all for this, this episode. But do join us next time when we'll be exploring the conspiracy theories that surround the Knights Templar. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.