FOREWORD
This is the history of a Lie—of a cruel and
terrible Lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish
people. Given out as fiction, by a German anti-Semitic writer,
involved in the Waldeck forgery case, who concealed his identity
under the pen-name of an Englishman, it was gradually changed and
elaborated, and finally groomed as fact. Agents of the Russian
secret police department and of the unscrupulous “Black Hundreds”
then utilized this fiction as the framework for the “protocols”
through which they sought to crush the Jews and prop up the
tottering Russian dynasty.
Tsarism destroyed itself, but the agents of Tsarism, still
dreaming of their past glory and of a restoration of their
privileges, are at work again, both here and abroad.
Out of the scrapheap of Russian autocracy, they have exhumed
their old weapons and are striking at the Jews again. Upon the
structure of the old myths they are striving to erect new
falsehoods in order to intensify everywhere chaos and confusion and
dissatisfaction so that they may attain their own dastardly and
selfish ends.
In the war’s aftermath the Jews are being blamed by the
minions of autocracy and reaction for all the ills that have
befallen mankind. Some blame them for the war, and others for the
peace. Some attack them for the defeat of the German military
machine, and others for the victory of the allies. In Germany they
are attacked by the Junkers for having opposed the submarine
warfare and thus assured Germany’s defeat; while in some of the
allied countries the Jews are denounced for constituting “the
brains of Germany.” All the revolutionary leaders of Germany are
credited to the Jews, and bolshevism, which has as little in common
with Judaism as it has with Christianity, is branded as a Jewish
movement; and there are Jew-baiters who in their blind madness have
gone so far as to declare that ex-Kaiser Wilhelm was not only
influenced by the Jews but is himself of Jewish descent, and for
this reason did not defend Germany as loyally as he should have
done. He conspired against the Hohenzollern dynasty and undermined
it. He destroyed his own throne because he was serving the secret
Jewish world organization.
On such absurdities have people been fed, since the
armistice, in civilized countries by antisemitic agitators and
their dupes, while Jews have been slaughtered in the Ukraine, in
Poland and in Hungary.
I submit in this little book the documentary evidence showing
how the so-called “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” on which this
new crusade is predicated, were forged.
CHAPTER ONE THE MYSTERIOUS PROTOCOLS
Is there a Jewish conspiracy against the world
or is there a conspiracy against the Jews? What are the so-called
“Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion?” Who is “the Russian mystic,”
Sergius Nilus, the sponsor of the Protocols? What forces are behind
the anti-Jewish propaganda that is international in scope and that
seeks at this time to spread all over the world the poison of
prejudice and hatred against the Jews, reviving long-exploded
mediaeval legends?
Many Americans have asked these questions ever since the
publication of “The Cause of the World Unrest,” “The Protocols and
World Revolution,” “The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,” and the
anti-Jewish articles in Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent.
In 1919 a translation of extracts from what purports to be a
book by one Sergius Nilus was published in Germany. During 1920 a
translation was published in England under the name of “The Jewish
Peril,” and under various titles, in different versions, it was
reproduced in the United States, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland
and even Japan. The Japanese edition is in the Russian language. In
all these books “the Russian mystic,” Sergius Nilus, is given as
the sponsor of a number of secret “documents” by which it is
intended to show that the Jews are responsible for all the ills
that have already befallen the world and that are still to come.
The method is simple. Was there a revolution in Russia? Blame
the Jews. Was there a revolution in Germany? Blame the Jews. Who
made the French Revolution? The Jews. Who caused the World War? The
Jews. Who profited by the war? The Jews. Is there anywhere an
industrial crisis? The Jews are, of course, the cause of it. Has
the World War brought forth Bolshevism? The Jews are naturally the
fathers of it. First the Jews engineered the war, and then they
pulled the strings behind the scenes of the Peace Conference. They
secured special privileges at the Peace Table, because, according
to the Protocols, they control the gold of the world, the press of
the world, the rulers of the world. And if, as a result of the
World War, millions of Jews have suffered untold agonies,
persecution, starvation, and pogroms, it is no doubt only part of
their deep-laid plot to gain control of the world for Zion through
poverty and suffering!
Are governments just to the Jews, giving them equal rights?
Then it is obvious that Jews are either at the head of such
governments or are hidden behind the present rulers. If the Jews
cannot exert sufficient influence over the rulers themselves, there
are Jewesses in high places, through whom the cause of Zion is
served—and all this is done by the Jews with but one aim in view—to
dominate the world, to become its autocratic masters, to break down
the moral power of Christendom and set up Israel as “the despot”
over the peoples of the earth. According to the Protocols, all this
is engineered with the aid and through the instrumentality of the
Freemasons.
The propagandists everywhere, in Germany, England, France,
the Scandinavian countries, Japan and the United States, basing all
their arguments on the “Protocols” vouched for by “the Russian
mystic” Sergius Nilus, see in the present chaotic conditions the
absolute fulfillment of the prophecies outlined by the so-called
“Wise Men of Zion” years ago. The propagandists are violent and
vicious, foaming at their mouths, appealing to the basest passions,
insinuating, accusing, pointing their fingers at “the source of all
evil”—at the Jews who constitute but a fraction of one per cent of
the world’s population, and who are in Europe to-day, after the
close of the World War, more wretched and miserable than ever
before,—persecuted, hounded and starved.
What are these mysterious Protocols? How did they come to
“the Russian mystic” who revealed them in 1905, and which have now
been exhumed from obscurity for the purpose of enlightening the
world, and which point to the Jews as the cause of all unrest,
chaos and confusion?
Nilus, “the Russian mystic,” is credited with several
versions of how he had secured the Protocols, and his stories
flatly contradict one another. In 1905 he said that the Protocols
were given to him by a prominent Russian conservative whose name he
did not mention, and who in turn had received them from an unnamed
woman who had stolen them from “one of the most influential leaders
of Freemasonry at the close of a secret meeting of the initiated in
France.” Then, several years later, Nilus wrote that his friend
himself had stolen the Protocols from “the headquarters of the
Society of Zion in France.” Several years afterwards, in a new
edition of his book, Nilus said that the “Protocols” came from
Switzerland and not from France. This time he named his Russian
conservative friend, Sukhotin, who had died in the meantime. He
added that the Protocols were not Jewish-Masonic but Zionist
documents secretly read at the Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897.
Then followed a new edition of the Nilus book bearing the
date of 1917. A translation of this edition has recently appeared
in this country, containing a brand-new explanation as to how the
Protocols were rescued and given to the world. This explanation is
taken from the German version published in Charlottenburg. The
introduction to that edition says that the Protocols, having been
read from day to day at the Basle Congress, were sent as read to
Frankfort on the Main. The disclosure of them came through the
infidelity of the messenger.
The 1917 edition is published with a prologue and an
epilogue, like a drama, which indeed it is, with all the
ingredients of melodrama—a villain, a mysterious woman, a Grand
Duke, a conspiracy to destroy the world, and a saint—Nilus, who
convicts himself in his own writings of falsification in the giving
of these various accounts of how the Protocols came into his
possession.
Nothing is known of Sergius Nilus. Russian standard reference
books and encyclopedias contain no mention of his name.
The anonymous American editor of the Nilus book gives the
following information about Nilus:
“Serge Nilus, in the 1905 edition of whose book was first
published the Zionist Protocols, was, as he states, born in the
year 1862, of Russian parents holding liberal opinions. His family
was fairly well known in Moscow, for its members were educated
people who were firm in their allegiance to the Tsar and the Greek
Church. On one side he is said to have been connected by marriage
with the nobility of the Baltic provinces. Nilus himself was
graduated from the University of Moscow and early entered the civil
service, obtaining a small appointment in the law courts. Later, he
received a post under the Procurator of a provincial court in the
Caucasus. Finally, tiring of the law, he went to the Government of
Orel, where he was a landowner and a noble. His spiritual life had
been tumultuous and full of trouble, and finally he entered the
Troitsky-Sergevsky Monastery near Moscow. ‘In answer to his appeal
for pardon, Saint Sergei, stern and angry, appeared to him twice in
a vision. He left the Monastery a converted man.’
“From 1905 until the present, little is known of his
activities. Articles are said to have appeared from time to time in
the Russian press from his pen. A returning traveller from Siberia
in August, 1919, was positive in his statement that Nilus was in
Irkutsk in June of that year. Whether his final fate was that of
Admiral Kolchak is not known.”
The American editor of Sergius Nilus’s book containing the
“Protocols” is hiding behind anonymity. The name of the traveller
from Siberia who was so positive in his statement that Nilus was in
Irkutsk is also concealed. And Serge Nilus to whom Saint Sergei
“appeared twice in a vision” “is said to have written articles in
the Russian press” of which nobody has knowledge.
In Germany, Nilus is described as follows:
“Sergius Nilus was an employee of the Russian secret police
department, of the okhrana, connected with the Church, especially
relating to ‘foreign religions.’ He lived for some time at the
Optina Pustina monastery. In 1901 he published a book entitled ‘The
Great in the Small and the Anti-Christ.’ According to the Lutsch
Sveta, Nilus claims to have received in 1901 a copy of the text of
the Protocols from the secret archives of the Main Zionist
organization in France, but he published the ‘protocols’ only in
1905. A second edition appeared in 1911, and finally another
edition was brought out in the beginning of 1917, but all copies
are said to have been destroyed.”
“The Cause of the World Unrest,” an anonymous book published
in England and reprinted in this country, speaks of Nilus and the
“Protocols” as follows:
“In the year 1903 a Russian, Serge Nilus, published a book
entitled The Great in Little. The second edition, which was
published at Tsarskoye Selo in 1905, had an additional chapter, the
twelfth, under the heading ‘Anti-Christ as a Near Political
Possibility.’ This chapter consisted of some twenty pages of
introduction followed by the text of twenty-four ‘Protocols of
Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion,’ and the book ends with
some twenty pages of commentaries on these protocols by Nilus.
“Directly after the protocols, comes a statement by Nilus
that they are ‘signed by representatives of Zion of the
thirty-third degree.’ These protocols were secretly extracted or
were stolen from a whole volume of protocols. All this was got by
my correspondent out of the secret depositories of the Head
Chancellery of Zion. This Chancellery is at present on French
territory.”
In the edition of 1917 Sergius Nilus wrote:
“My book has already reached the fourth edition, but it is
only definitely known to me now and in a manner worthy of belief,
and that through Jewish sources, that these protocols are nothing
other than the strategic plans for the conquest of the world under
the heel of Israel, and worked out by the leaders of the Jewish
people—and read by the ‘Prince of Exile,’ Theodor Herzl, during the
first Zionist Congress, summoned by him in August, 1897, in Basle.”
It will be shown later that the so-called Butmi edition of
the “protocols” published in 1907 contains the definite statement
of the man who claims to have translated them into Russian from the
French in 1901 that the Elders of Zion mentioned in the Protocols
are not to be confounded with the Zionist movement.
In the 1917 edition Sergius Nilus wrote: