As a followup to our recent discussions about UC Berkeley instructor Abbas Kadhim and his refusal to make a “judgment” on the validity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Jersualem Post has a good concise history of this notorious forgery: ‘Protocols’ still inspire anti-Semites a century later.

Copies were displayed at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Last year, officials of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad’s party gave out translated copies of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic book The International Jew, inspired by and containing excerpts of the Protocols, to delegates at the annual United Malays National Organization conference in Kuala Lumpur. A mini-series based in part on the Protocols was aired on Egyptian television last autumn and again this summer.

“To be sure, there are many Arab writers and some important ones who are well aware that the Protocols are a forgery,” Menahem Milson, professor of Arabic language and literature at the Hebrew University, said at a conference on anti-Semitism earlier this year. “Nevertheless they continue to make use of them, because they argue it doesn’t matter whether they are fact or fiction. Their predictions, so they say, have largely come true, which proves that even though the document you hold in your hands, the Protocols, is in itself a fabricated document, the material contained in it is authentic.”

The genesis of the Protocols predates its appearance in Znamya by several decades. Scholars believe the original source was a pamphlet written by French satirist Maurice Joly in 1864, entitled Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, an attack on Emperor Napoleon III that made no mention of the Jews. It was later plagiarized, reworked, and translated by Pytor Ivanovich Rachkovsky, an agent of the Russian secret police in Paris, to discredit liberal voices in Russia that were sympathetic to the Jews, and as part of the propaganda campaign that accompanied the officially backed pogroms.

After the 1917 revolution, Russian emigres brought the Protocols to Europe and elsewhere, where it fell on attentive ears, particularly in Germany, where 120,000 copies were sold in 1920. Adolf Hitler read the Protocols and praised it in Mein Kampf.