_Call for Inquiry_
(From a correspondent)
The _Times_ has not as yet noticed this singular little book.
Its diffusion is, however, increasing, and its reading is
likely to perturb the thinking public. Never before have a
race and a creed been accused of a more sinister conspiracy.
We in this country, who live in good fellowship with numerous
representatives of Jewry, may well ask that some authoritative
criticism should deal with it, and either destroy the ugly
“Semitic” bogy or assign their proper place to the insidious
allegations of this kind of literature.
In spite of the urgency of impartial and exhaustive criticism,
the pamphlet has been allowed, so far, to pass almost
unchallenged. The Jewish Press announced, it is true, that
the anti-Semitism of the “Jewish Peril” was going to be
exposed. But save for an unsatisfactory article in the March
5 issue of the _Jewish Guardian_, and for an almost equally
unsatisfactory contribution to the _Nation_ of March 27, this
exposure is yet to come. The article of the _Jewish Guardian_
is unsatisfactory, because it deals mainly with the personality
of the author of the book in which the pamphlet is embodied,
with Russian reactionary propaganda, and the Russian secret
police. It does not touch the substance of the “Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion.” The purely Russian side of the
book and its fervid “Orthodoxy” is not its most interesting
feature. Its author, Professor S. Nilus, who was a minor
official in the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, had,
in all likelihood, opportunities of access to many archives and
unpublished documents. On the other hand, the world-wide issue
raised by the “Protocols” which he incorporated in his book and
are now translated into English as “The Jewish Peril,” cannot
fail not only to interest, but to preoccupy. What are the
theses of the “Protocols” with which, in the absence of public
criticism, British readers have to grapple alone and unaided?
They are, roughly:—
(1) There is, and has been for centuries, a secret
international political organization of the Jews.
(2) The spirit of this organization appears to be an undying
traditional hatred of the Christian world, and a titanic
ambition for world domination.
(3) The goal relentlessly pursued through centuries is
the destruction of the Christian national States, and the
substitution for them of an international Jewish dominion.
(4) The method adopted for first weakening and then destroying
existing bodies politic is the infusion of disintegrating
political ideas of carefully measured progressive disruptive
force, from liberalism to radicalism, and socialism to
communism, culminating in anarchy as a _reductio ad absurdum_
of egalitarian principles. Meanwhile Jewry remains immune
from these corrosive doctrines. “We preach Liberalism to
the Gentiles, but on the other hand we keep our own nation
in entire subjection” (page 55). Out of the welter of world
anarchy, in response to the desperate clamour of distraught
humanity, the stern, logical, wise, pitiless rule of “the King
of the Seed of David” is to arise.
(5) Political dogmas evolved by Christian Europe, democratic
statesmanship and politics, are all equally contemptible to
the Elders of Zion. To them statesmanship is an exalted secret
art, acquired only by traditional training, and imparted to a
select few in the secrecy of some occult sanctuary. “Political
problems are not meant to be understood by ordinary people;
they can only be comprehended, as I have said before, by rulers
who have been directing affairs for many centuries.”
(6) To this conception of statesmanship the masses are
contemptible cattle, and the political leaders of the Gentiles,
“upstarts from its midst as rulers, are likewise blind in
politics.” They are puppets, pulled by the hidden hand of
the “Elders,” puppets mostly corrupt, always inefficient;
easily coaxed, or bullied, or blackmailed into submission,
unconsciously furthering the advent of Jewish dominion.
(7) The Press, the theatre, stock exchange speculations,
science, law itself, are, in the hands that hold all the
gold, so many means of procuring a deliberate confusion and
bewilderment of public opinion, demoralization of the young,
and encouragement of the vices of the adult, eventually
substituting, in the minds of the Gentiles, for the idealistic
aspiration of Christian culture the “cash basis” and a
neutrality of materialistic scepticism, or cynical lust for
pleasure.
Such are the main theses of the “Protocols.” They are not
altogether new, and can be found scattered throughout
anti-Semitic literature. The condensed form in which they are
now presented lends them a new and weird force.
Incidentally, some of the features of the would-be Jewish
programme bear an uncanny resemblance to situations and events
now developing under our eyes. Professor Nilus’s book was,
undoubtedly, published in Russia in 1905. The copy of the
original at the British Museum bears the stamp of August 10,
1906. This being so, some of the passages assume the aspect
of fulfilled prophecies, unless one is inclined to attribute
the prescience of the “Elders of Zion” to the fact that they
really are the hidden instigators of these events. When one
reads (page 8) that “it is indispensable for our plans that
wars should not produce any territorial alterations,” one is
most forcibly reminded of the cry, “peace without annexations”
raised by all the radical parties of the world, and especially
in revolutionary Russia. And again:—
We will create a universal economic crisis, by all possible
underhand means and with the help of gold, which is all in
our hands. Simultaneously we will throw on to the streets
huge crowds of workmen throughout Europe. We will increase the
wages, which will not help the workmen as, at the same time, we
will raise the price of prime necessities ... it is essential
for us at all costs to deprive the aristocracy of their lands.
To attain this purpose, the best method is to force up rates
and taxes. These methods will keep the landed interests at
their lowest possible ebb.