The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

***The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*** is an antisemitic forgery published in 1903. It claimed that a "Jewish plot" existed for "world domination". In 1921, British newspaper _The Times_ proved that it was false. It had been plagiarized from the unrelated book _The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu_.

## Background

The Russian Empire promoted ***The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*** to make the Bolsheviks look bad by equating them with Jews. They accused the Jews of being a horrible group that was trying to destroy the Empire. After the White Russians lost the Russian Civil War to the Bolsheviks, some White Russian refugees brought the forgery to Europe.

### Interwar period

Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German who became the Nazi Party's chief propagandist, used the forgery's ideas in Nazi propaganda. In the United States, well-known industrialist Henry Ford paid to have the theory reprinted and included its ideas into his anti-Jewish text _The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem_. Barsalina, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, circulated copies of the forgery's Arabic translation within his church.

### The Great Depression

Many everyday Germans accepted the ideas in the _Protocols_. These ideas allowed them to blame the Jews for their hardships during the Great Depression and the Nazis' rise to power. Many of these people already had anti-Jewish views and helped the Nazis rise to power. World War II and the Holocaust resulted.

During this period, translations of _Protocols_ began circulating in other countries.

### Post-war period

Malcolm X, a famous Black American activist who was assassinated on February 21, 1965, believed _Protocols_ was true. He introduced it to the Nation of Islam (NOI), a Black nationalist religious movement. The NOI also influenced a non-Muslim religious movement called the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI). Both movements promote disproven conspiracy theories: that "Jews ran the Atlantic slave trade" and that "European Jews descended from the Khazars".

In several of his speeches, Malcolm X accused Jews of being "bloodsuckers [...] perfecting the modern evil of neocolonialism". He also engaged in Holocaust denial by blaming Jews for having "brought it upon themselves". In 1961, he spoke at an NOI rally along with the American Nazi Party's leader, George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell claimed that Black nationalism and White supremacy shared a common vision.

NOI's popularity helped these antisemitic tropes to become more mainstream among Black Americans. This helped to cause deep-rooted antisemitism in American society. As per a 2016 survey by the American civil rights group Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 23% of Black Americans held negative beliefs about Jews. A 2023 survey showed that one-eighth of Black Americans doubted whether the Holocaust really happened.

## Reception

In one of his books, German-American Jewish historian Walter Laqueur said that the forgery was popular in Germany because it allowed German right-wingers to blame the WWI defeat on an "outside enemy" – the Jews – to free themselves of their responsibility.

## Related pages

- Khazar myth
- Holocaust denial
- Secondary antisemitism
- Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
- Roman Catholics and antisemitism in the 21st century