The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion, is a fabricated text purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination. Largely plagiarized from several earlier sources, it was first published in Imperial Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. It played a key part in popularizing belief in an international Jewish conspiracy. Beginning in 1933, distillations of the work were assigned by some German teachers, as if they were factual, to be read by German schoolchildren throughout Nazi Germany, although the text had been exposed as fraudulent by the British newspaper The Times in 1921 and by the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924. Today, it remains widely available in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by antisemitic groups as a genuine document. It has been described as "probably the most influential work of antisemitism ever written" since it emerged from Russia shortly before World War I. Creation The Protocols is a fabricated document purporting to be factual. Textual evidence shows that it could not have been produced prior to 1901: the document alludes to the assassinations of Umberto I and William McKinley, for example, as though these events were plotted out in advance. The title of Sergei Nilus' widely distributed first edition contains the dates "1902–1903", and it is likely that the document was actually written at this time in Russia. Cesare G. De Michelis argues that it was manufactured in the months after a Russian Zionist congress in September 1902, and that it was originally a parody of Jewish idealism meant for internal circulation among antisemites until it was decided to clean it up and publish it as if it were real. Self-contradictions in various testimonies show that the individuals involved—including the text's initial publisher, Pavel Krushevan—deliberately obscured the origins of the text and lied about it in the decades afterwards.