18. How Russian Officials Kicked Off One of History’s Ugliest Hoaxes
One of history’s most insidious hoaxes began in 1903, when a conservative Russian newspaper published what it claimed were the minutes of a late-nineteenth century secret meeting between Jewish leaders. Per the minutes, the Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish domination. It was to be brought about by Jewish infiltration and domination of the global media and economy. From such positions of influence and power, the Jewish infiltrators would act as agents saboteur, and subvert the morals and undermine the foundations of Gentile societies to render them weak and vulnerable. In reality, the minutes, which came to be known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, were crude forgeries that had first made the rounds in Russian right wing circles.
Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus, a Russian Tsarist official, edited several versions of the Protocols, each time with a different account of how he came by them. In 1911, for example, he claimed that his source had stolen them from a (nonexistent) Zionist headquarters in France. From Nilus and his conservative circles, the Protocols slowly spread. Eventually, they went viral, and gained widespread acceptance throughout Russia and the world beyond. For years after their creation, the Protocols languished in relative obscurity, confined to Russian right wing circles. That changed with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Bolshevik seizure of power later that year. Conservatives, whose ranks were rife with anti-Semites, sought to discredit the Revolution by painting it as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy for global dominance.