The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first published in 1903 in a Russian newspaper. Where the publisher claimed to have discovered real documents that proved there was a Jewish organisation that controlled the world, which facilitated the popular Jewish world conspiracy theory at the time. Although Antisemitism was already a thing, It became wide spread in the 19th century and the Protocols only brought them closer together. It amplified the already growing hatred for the Jewish community and political leaders would use it to their advantage.
After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, where the Party seized power in Russia in a coup, later becoming the Communist party. Fear spread across Europe, and with no one else to blame they turned towards the Jews, and blamed them for plotting the communism revolution.
In the following years, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was translated and published all around the world, where a German edition appeared in Germany 1919. Where the Nazi Party used the book to encourage antisemitic beliefs and to justify their horrific crimes against the Jewish population. Hitler claimed that the Protocols “revealed the nature and activity of Jewish people.”
But in 1920 London, the newspaper declared that the Protocols were a forgery, a fake copied from a 1864 French political satire: Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.
Example:
Now I understand the figure of the god Vishnu; you have a hundred arms like the Indian idol, and each of your fingers touches a spring.
— Montesquieu, Dialogues, p. 207
Our Government will resemble the Hindu god Vishnu. Each of our hundred hands will hold one spring of the social machinery of State.
— Protocols, p. 65
Despite the fact the book had been exposed as a fake, it still held tremendous power. The Nazi party would still use the Protocols as propaganda to defend itself from “Jewish aggressors.” They picked out and used specific ideas included in the Protocols as well as continued to circulate Nazi editions of the book throughout Europe. And even today, the Protocols still holds great influence and continues to fuel antisemitic beliefs.
Isn’t that terrifying?