The Protocols Forgery

Why this Chapter exists

A forgery exposed a century ago, still in print today.

In August 1921, a correspondent for The Times of London set two books side by side. One was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text then circulating across Europe and America as the stolen minutes of a secret Jewish plot to rule the world. The other was a French political satire from 1864 that was not about Jews at all. Page after page, the words matched. Long stretches of the Protocols had been copied, in places almost line for line, from the older book, with the target changed.

More than a century after the forgery was demonstrated in print, the Protocols is still published, translated, and sold, in many languages, online and on paper. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that it “continues to be published today.”

The Protocols raises a question historians still study: how can a text that has been publicly and repeatedly disproven continue to persuade readers?

What it is

A fabricated text presented as authentic.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a short text, roughly a hundred printed pages in most editions, organized into twenty-four chapters or “protocols.” Some editions carry the longer title The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion. Each chapter is presented as the minutes of a secret meeting of a council of Jewish leaders. The supposed plan: seize control of the world through banking, the press, the schools, parliaments, organized labor, and the law. The document presents itself as an authentic stolen record of a real conspiracy.

It is a forgery. No such council ever met, and no such proceedings ever took place. The text was produced by Russian writers around the turn of the twentieth century, drawing on identifiable earlier sources. The major scholarly studies have settled its sources, and the fact of its forgery, beyond serious dispute. They include Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide (1967), Stephen Eric Bronner’s A Rumor About the Jews (2nd ed. 2019), Cesare De Michelis’s The Non-Existent Manuscript (2004), and Hadassa Ben-Itto’s The Lie That Wouldn’t Die (2005).

The Russian origin

Russian radical-right circles, around 1902–03, and a contested Paris connection.

The Protocols was produced in the late Russian Imperial period. The regime of Tsar Nicholas II, the emperor of Russia, faced rising revolutionary pressure, and antisemitism was woven into the ideology of the state itself. Historians long traced the forgery to circles connected to the Okhrana, the Russian Imperial secret police, and to its foreign operations division in Paris. More recent research questions that account, which rests on later and doubtful testimony. The precise chain of authorship remains uncertain.

Those Paris operations were run by Pyotr Rachkovsky (1853–1910), a senior security official. He built a network of agents and writers across Europe, and he used planted stories and forged documents, black propaganda, to discredit the movements ranged against the Tsar. Most historians now place the text in Russian radical-right circles around 1902–03. Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide argued for Rachkovsky’s Paris operation. De Michelis’s textual study points instead to compilation inside Russia, and so does the work of the historian Michael Hagemeister. Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian writer working in Paris, has been proposed as a principal compiler, but that attribution belongs to the disputed Paris account and remains unproven.

The text’s first job was domestic. It was meant to tie the Empire’s revolutionary and reformist movements (populist, liberal, Marxist) to an imagined Jewish conspiracy. That gave the autocracy an ideological weapon against them. For its first decade the Protocols was mainly a Russian political tool. Its international career began only when the Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the empire, scattered Russian exiles (émigrés) across Europe.

The Joly source

A French political satire of 1864.

Long stretches of the Protocols are lifted (paragraph by paragraph, in places word for word) from an 1864 French political satire: Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu). Its author was the French lawyer and writer Maurice Joly (1829–1878).

Joly’s Dialogue is an attack on the regime of Napoleon III, then the emperor of France, written as an imagined underworld conversation between two famous political philosophers. In it, Machiavelli explains how a modern despot could hollow out a constitutional democracy from within: manage the press, corrupt parliament, steer public opinion, centralize power. It is a critique of Bonapartist rule. It contains not one reference to Jews, to Judaism, or to any Jewish conspiracy.

The Protocols took the Machiavelli speeches, stripped out Napoleon III, and reassigned the words to the imagined Jewish “elders.” Detailed comparisons establish the plagiarism conclusively. Lucien Wolf argued the forgery case in 1920 from older sources. The Joly comparison itself was Philip Graves’s demonstration of 1921, and Cohn, De Michelis, and Bronner have refined the case since. The same phrases, the same examples, the same paragraph structures appear in both, with only the target changed. Historians treat this comparison as the strongest single piece of evidence in the case.

Joly’s book had been suppressed by the Second Empire’s censors in 1864, and Joly himself jailed for fifteen months. It survived in a handful of copies among French political readers. To a Russian audience it would have been wholly obscure, unless someone knew the French political literature of the 1860s. How Joly’s text reached the forgers is not known. The older account credits the Okhrana’s Paris operation, but recent scholarship treats that link as unproven.

First publication · 1903

The text enters the public record.

The first known publication of the Protocols ran in the Russian newspaper Znamya (“The Banner”), serialized in August and September 1903. The paper’s editor was the antisemitic publisher Pavel (Pavolachi) Krushevan. Months earlier, in April 1903, the Kishinev pogrom had struck: a mob massacre that killed forty-nine Jews in a provincial city of the Russian Empire. The Russian Pogroms Chapter tells that story. Krushevan had been implicated as an ideological instigator of that pogrom through another of his papers.

In 1905 a more elaborate version appeared as the closing chapter of the second edition of a book by the mystical writer Sergei Nilus, The Great in the Small. The Nilus version became the form in which the Protocols would travel internationally. Its provenance story shifted from edition to edition. A later version claimed the text came from the First Zionist Congress, the 1897 founding meeting of the movement to build the Jewish people a country of their own. Nilus’s 1905 text supplied the base for most later translations. His editions of 1911 and 1917 recycled and expanded it.

Through the prewar decade the text circulated mainly inside the Empire. The regime did not adopt it as official policy, but it ran freely in pro-regime publications. It also entered the materials of the Black Hundreds, the violently antisemitic movement aligned with the state in its final years. Then came the First World War, the Revolutions of 1917, and the Civil War of 1918–1921. Those upheavals dispersed Russian émigrés across Europe, and the Protocols went with them.

The global spread · 1917–1925

From a Russian text to an international phenomenon.

Between the Revolution and the mid-1920s, the text moved out of Russian and into the other languages of Europe. Three channels carried it.

The Russian émigré press. Russians loyal to the old regime, the “Whites,” fled the Bolsheviks, the communists who had seized power. They carried Nilus’s edition across Europe and to the Americas, and reissued it in Russian in Berlin, Paris, Belgrade, and other émigré centers. They added a new claim: the Revolution itself had been the work of the supposed Jewish conspiracy. The charge was used to discredit the Bolshevik regime and rally opinion against it in the West. Inside Russia, during the civil war, propagandists spread the text widely to turn people against what they called the “Jewish Revolution.” It helped fuel the pogroms of those years, in which at least 50,000 Jews were killed.

The German translation of 1920. The first German edition, Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion, was the work of a publisher of Germany’s racial-nationalist (völkisch) right writing as “Gottfried zur Beek” (the retired captain Ludwig Müller von Hausen). It went through multiple printings in the early 1920s. It supplied the text through which the Protocols entered German nationalist and early Nazi circles.

The English translation of 1920. The first English edition, published by Eyre and Spottiswoode as The Jewish Peril, brought the text into the English-speaking world. A separate Boston edition the same year extended its reach in the United States.

By the end of 1920 the Protocols existed in German, English, French, and Japanese as well as Russian. Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, and Polish editions followed by 1923, and an Arabic translation was available in Syria by 1925. Many editions added introductions and fake scholarly notes that sharpened the antisemitic reading. Within a few years, a document created for late-Imperial Russian politics had become one of the most widely circulated antisemitic texts in the world.

Henry Ford and The Dearborn Independent · 1920–1927

The Protocols enter American mass circulation.

The main vehicle for bringing the Protocols to a mass American audience was The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper owned and controlled by Henry Ford, the automaker. Between May 1920 and January 1922 the Independent ran a long series of antisemitic articles under the title “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” The series drew heavily on the Protocols. The articles were collected into four bound volumes that circulated internationally in several translations.

Ford’s promotion put the text in front of a far larger readership than the European editions had reached. At its 1925 peak the paper’s circulation approached 900,000. The bound volumes of The International Jew circulated widely in Germany. Hitler reportedly kept a portrait of Ford in his Munich office in the early 1920s. Hitler praised Ford by name in the first edition of the second volume of Mein Kampf, his political manifesto, in 1926. Later editions dropped the name.

Ford withdrew his sponsorship in 1927 while facing a libel suit. He issued a public apology in July 1927, shut down the Dearborn Independent, and arranged to recall the bound volumes. Pirated editions of The International Jew kept circulating, especially in Germany, through the Nazi period and after.

The 1921 exposure

Philip Graves and the establishment of the fraud.

The decisive demonstration that the Protocols was a forgery came in August 1921, in three articles by Philip Graves, the Constantinople correspondent of The Times of London. A Russian émigré contact had given Graves a copy of Maurice Joly’s 1864 Dialogue. Setting it beside the Protocols, Graves found the plagiarism that all later scholarship has confirmed and extended.

The articles ran in The Times on August 16, 17, and 18, 1921, under the headline “The Truth About the Protocols: A Literary Forgery.” They laid out the Joly–Protocols parallels in detail. They showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that the Protocols was a rewrite of Joly’s text with the target changed and Jewish elements inserted. The Times, then one of the most authoritative papers in the English-speaking world, had previously given the Protocols some credence. The August articles therefore also corrected the paper’s own earlier stance.

The articles entered the international press at once. Further investigations, by Lucien Wolf, by Herman Bernstein in the United States (his 1921 book The History of a Lie), and, in 1924, by the Galician Jewish writer Binjamin Segel, confirmed and extended the analysis. Within months, the Protocols had been established in the international press as a forgery.

From 1921 onward, the document’s authenticity was no longer an open historical question.

The Bern Trial · 1934–1935

A Swiss court rules.

In June 1933 the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities and the Bern Jewish Community brought a criminal complaint against five Swiss Nazis who had handed out copies of the Protocols at a meeting in Bern. The complaint rested on a law of the canton (the Swiss state) of Bern against “trash literature” (Schundliteratur). The statute was not written for political material, but the complainants argued it covered a knowingly fraudulent text used for incitement.

The Bern Trial, running from 1934 to 1935, became one of the most fully documented legal proceedings ever held on the Protocols’ authenticity. The court appointed experts, heard witnesses, received the Joly textual parallels in evidence, and produced a detailed record that has been preserved and studied since. Historians value the trial because its proceedings assembled, tested, and preserved the evidence of forgery in a public legal record.

On May 14, 1935, the court ruled the Protocols “ridiculous nonsense” and “forgeries” and convicted two defendants under the statute. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 1937, on the narrow ground that the cantonal law did not cover political literature. The authenticity of the Protocols played no role in the appeal. The trial took place while the Nazi regime in neighboring Germany was spreading the Protocols.

Nazi use of the Protocols

State-sponsored circulation, 1933–1945.

The Nazi movement spread the Protocols before and after it took power in 1933. The Nazi party’s publishing house, Franz Eher Verlag, issued 22 editions between 1919 and 1938, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Hitler wrote about the text in Mein Kampf (1925), presenting it as a revelation of Jewish aims. The regime used it in full knowledge of the 1921 exposure and the scholarship that followed. Joseph Goebbels, later the regime’s propaganda chief, wrote in his diary that the text’s literal truth mattered less than the “reality” it supposedly depicted.

During the Second World War the Protocols circulated across Nazi-occupied Europe through Nazi-controlled channels, in German, French, Polish, Dutch, and other translations. In 1943 German authorities published editions in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. It sat alongside Der Stürmer, the crudest of the Nazi antisemitic weeklies, the broader Goebbels-coordinated press, and Nazi Arabic-language broadcasting.

The major studies of Nazi propaganda (Bytwerk’s Bending Spines, Herf’s The Jewish Enemy, and others) treat the Protocols as one element in a much broader system of propaganda. That system combined older religious prejudice, nineteenth-century racial theory, conspiracy thinking, and modern state-controlled media.

The Arabic translations · 1920s and after

The Protocols enter the Middle East.

The first Arabic translations were circulating by the mid-1920s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that an Arabic translation was available in Syria by 1925. An early edition was published in Cairo by Antoine Yamin, a Maronite Christian. Further Arabic editions followed across the interwar and postwar decades. By the late twentieth century the Protocols had appeared in dozens of Arabic editions across the Arabic-speaking world.

The Arabic circulation intersected with Nazi Arabic-language broadcasting and with the postwar politics of the region. In 1988 Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, cited the Protocols by name in Article 32 of its founding covenant. The Eastward Turn Chapter follows the radio years and the covenant. The text has kept circulating in Arabic into the present, with printings in Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran (in Persian), and elsewhere across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The principal scholarly references on the Arabic reception are Esther Webman’s The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth (2011), the fullest single survey, and Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust (2010).

Why a refuted text persists

The analytical question.

The evidence against the Protocols (Joly’s text, the Russian context, the textual parallels, the refutations by Wolf, Bernstein, and Segel) was available to any literate reader within months of August 1921.

The text still circulates. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that it has “circulated widely in multiple media, including the Internet and social media.” The museum also cites a 2024 U.S. State Department report finding that it “retains significant influence in Russia.” It turns up in conspiracy literature in the United States and Europe as well.

The scholarship offers several converging explanations:

The contemporary record

The continuing circulation, 2026.

The Protocols continues to circulate in 2026.

The Anti-Defamation League documents editions in print and online. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University, and the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University all track the text’s circulation.

A 1964 report by a United States Senate subcommittee called it “a vicious hoax.” In 2002, Egyptian channels, state-owned and private, broadcast Horseman Without a Horse, a Ramadan television series drawing on the Protocols. Several governments protested formally, and the research institutions documented it.

Object Spotlight

Three articles in The Times, August 1921.

Three newspaper articles, printed in plain type, ran on three days in a row in August 1921. They had no pictures, only dense paragraphs under a flat headline: “The Truth About the Protocols: A Literary Forgery.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion claimed to be the secret minutes of a Jewish plot to take over the world. By 1921 it was in print in many languages. These three articles in The Times of London proved it was a fake. Their author, the correspondent Philip Graves, had been handed an old French book: Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers of 1864, a satire that attacks the French emperor Napoleon III and never mentions Jews. (The title page of that book appears in this Chapter’s banner.) A Russian reader had made the connection: the Protocols seemed to be copied from it.

Graves set the two texts side by side and printed the matching passages in parallel, line against line. Readers could see that whole stretches of the “secret Jewish plot” had been lifted from a book about French politics, with the target changed from Napoleon III to the Jews. The comparison required no special access, only the two books, read closely.

The method is repeatable. A reader in 1921 could check Graves’s work by comparing the texts, and a reader today can do the same with the copy of Joly’s book held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, linked below.

Where the scholarship stands

The questions still open.

Historians of the Protocols, from Norman Cohn in 1967 to Michael Hagemeister in 2008, work from the same evidence: Joly’s 1864 satire, the Russian printings of 1903 and 1905, and the record of the Bern Trial. The questions still open concern who compiled the text, and where.