Chief among the _pieces justificatives_ relied upon by the
demonologists of the _Morning Post_ is an anonymous pamphlet which
calls itself "The Jewish Peril."[24] As has been stated in the
previous chapter, this pamphlet is a forgery, or, rather, a garbled
translation of a clumsy Russian forgery by a certain Sergyei Nilus,
intended to pander to the superstition of the "Hidden Hand." There is
reason to believe that it has itself been engineered by a more
substantial hand reaching out stealthily from the arcanum of German
Militarist Reaction.
The literary and political history of this pamphlet is quite easy to
trace, though it has been a little obscured by its author's
infirmities of memory. Fundamentally it belongs to a type of forgery
which was common enough in the 17th and 18th centuries, when party
passions ran high and the reckless scurrilities of political warfare
could not be made effective without the concoction of bogus
documents.[25] In our own time this fraudulent traffic has become
relatively rare, though the notorious Pigott and Dreyfus forgeries are
there to show how easily it may be tempted into life when malicious
controversialists venture on accusations which they cannot otherwise
substantiate. This is precisely the case of "Professor Sergyei Nilus,"
the alleged author of the Russian original of "The Jewish Peril."
His documented "discovery" that the Jews, in conspiracy with certain
secret brotherhoods, are at the bottom of all the political and
religious convulsions and all the social instabilities throughout the
world, has been devised to bolster up a theory which has long failed
to convince. The theory itself, of which the _Morning Post's_
"Formidable Sect" is the latest product, is at least three centuries
old. It was the staple of the pseudo-Apocalyptic literature of
Antichrist and the Wandering Jew which assailed the early years of the
Reformation and filled the literary armoury of the League during the
Thirty Years' War. It took more definite political shape in the tracts
and broadsheets, afterwards collected by the German Evangelical
Clericals under the title of _Anabaptisticum et Enthusiasticum
Pantheon_, which, among other fearsome things, explained the Puritan
Revolution in England--the Bolshevism of its day--as a plot against
Christianity and Monarchy contrived by the _Quaecker, Frey-Geister und
Heil- und Gottlosen Juden_.[26] In the early eighteenth century its
specifically anti-Jewish aspects were emphasised by the misapplied
learning of Eisenmenger, whose anti-Semitic classic, "Entdecktes
Judenthum," was published at the cost of King Frederick of
Prussia.[27] After the French Revolution and the upheavals of 1830 and
1848, a fresh impulse was given to the agitation. Meanwhile, the
Illuminati had come into existence, and Freemasonry had become known,
and they were promptly annexed by the scaremongers and substituted for
the Quakers and Freethinkers in their new redaction of the "Hidden
Hand." A number of blood-curdling works dealing in minute detail with
their supposed activities as authors of the Revolutions were published
by such writers as Father Barruel (1797, etc.), the Chevalier de Malet
(1817), Eckert (1854), Gougenot des Mousseaux (1860), Cretineau-Joly
(1863), Saint-Andre (1880), and Chabauty (1883). These books all fell
flat. The blood of the public refused to be curdled, and to-day they
are only found in second-hand bookshops or in the libraries of
collectors of Masonic and Occult ana.
In 1868 an ingenious German named Hermann Goedsche conceived the idea
of galvanising the agitation into effective life by giving a dramatic
form to all its theoretical extravagances.[28] Formerly in the
Prussian postal service, where he also acted as a spy for the Secret
Police and the _Kreuz Zeitung_ party, he had been dismissed from his
office for subornation of forgery in connection with the prosecution
of the famous Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck.[29] He was now
engaged in palming off on the German public a series of apocryphal
works, half memoirs and half historical romances, which he alleged
were written by an Englishman named "Sir John Retcliffe." They dealt
with all the palpitating international political problems and events
of the middle of the nineteenth century, from the Crimean War to the
War of the Danish Duchies. In one of these romances, entitled
"Biarritz,"[30] he touched on the economic question which had been
opened in its most formidable shape by the foundation of Lassalle's
Workingmen's Union and the publication, in the previous year, of
Marx's "Das Kapital." This led him to a melodramatic Jewish interlude.
Two of his characters, a Jewish Social Democrat named Lasali and a
scientific dreamer named Faust, overhear the proceedings of a secret
assembly of the "Elect of Israel," held once in every century round
the tomb of a mythical "Holy Rabbi" named Simeon ben Jehudah in the
ancient Jewish cemetery at Prague. The conclave is pictured as engaged
in the worship of the Golden Calf,[31] which, we are told, has been
preserved as the profoundest mystery of the Jewish Cabala by which the
Jews may eventually secure their domination over all the nations of
the earth. The practical application of the principles of this cultus
is discussed in a long series of cynical speeches, which are in close
agreement with the hypotheses of Gougenot des Mousseaux and similar
writers. The Jews are to work with gold and the Press for the
subversion of Christianity, and they are to act as a universal
disturbing and demoralising instrument, so that in the fulness of time
they may establish the Jewish Universal Dominion on the ruins of
Christian society. When on the stroke of midnight this uncanny
conventicle breaks up, Lasali solemnly pledges himself to his friend
Faust to fight the hideous materialism of his co-religionists with the
ideals of Social Democracy.[32]
This was the _editio princeps_ of a number of forged anti-Semitic
documents, of which the Nilus Protocols are the latest redaction. They
differ among themselves in detail, according to the varying stages of
the evolution of the political and economic struggle, but in their
broad lines they are constant to the original presentation of their
case by Goedsche.
The first forgeries, in which Goedsche's avowed fiction was
transformed into protocols or reports of alleged Jewish confessions,
were produced early in the eighties by the more irresponsible elements
of the German anti-Semitic movement then in process of formation by
Treitschke and Stoecker in Germany, and were widely circulated as
broadsheets. In 1893 the same material was worked up simultaneously by
two German anti-Semitic papers, the _Deutsch-soziale Blaetter_ and the
_Antisemitische Korrespondenz_, and published as an authentic speech
delivered by a Jewish Rabbi at a secret meeting of his disciples held
in the Jewish cemetery at Prague.[33] The source of this fabrication
was placed beyond doubt by a thoughtless editorial statement that it
was extracted from a work written by an eminent Englishman named "Sir
John Retcliffe," and entitled "Memoirs of the Politico-Historical
Events of the Last Ten Years." Needless to say, this book is as
apocryphal as Retcliffe himself, the alleged speech being chiefly a
condensed paraphrase of Goedsche's avowed fiction. There is, however,
one important deviation from the original which brings it nearer to
the Nilus text, the Jews being pictured not as divided into
anti-Christian Materialists and Socialists, but as being all
simulators of Socialism and Anarchism for their own revolutionary
purposes while still remaining, among themselves, devotees of the
Golden Calf, with all its moral, or rather immoral, implications. In
1901 a literal Czech translation of this precious protocol, but
without the acknowledgment of indebtedness to "Retcliffe," was
published in Prague under the title "A Rabbi on the Goyim."[34] It was
immediately confiscated by the police on the ground that it was
calculated to disturb the peace, but the anti-Semites revenged
themselves by incorporating the whole text in an interpellation to
the Minister of Justice, which was brought forward by the deputy
Brzenovsky in the Austrian Reichsrath on March 13, 1901, and gave rise
to a lively debate.[35] It was not heard of again until 1911, when it
was translated into French--this time with the "Retcliffe"
acknowledgment--by M. Kalixt de Wolski, and published together with a
_rechauffe_ of the more notorious forgeries of Braafmann and
Lutostansky.[36] Finally, in 1912 the anti-Semitic Press in Germany
republished it in a new form. Instead of an alleged historical
document, it now appeared as a piece of news--a stenographic report of
a speech delivered by a "Jewish Rabbi" at a Jewish Congress held at
Lemberg.[37] Anyone who takes the trouble, however, to make the
comparison will find that it is a textual _precis_ of the speeches
made by the Golden Calf worshippers in Goedsche's "Biarritz."
It is consoling to note that none of these scandalous fabrications
made any durable appeal to the relatively sober mentality of those
happy pre-war days. No reputable newspaper noticed them. Even M.
Drumont, while appropriating all the theories of Gougenot des
Mousseaux in his "France Juive"--without acknowledgment, by the
way--does not mention Goedsche or any of his malicious plunderers.
Now it needs but a very cursory glance at these forgeries and their
raw material in the treatises of the literary scaremongers to perceive
at once the fraud which has been practised on the public by Nilus's
book. But before I press this point home, let us see whether Nilus
himself has any reasonable explanation to offer of the _provenance_ of
his documents. It should be borne in mind that these documents consist
of a number of so-called "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," in
which, as in the Goedsche romance, certain Jewish teachers are made to
avow to their disciples the dark designs of Jewry for the corruption
and subjugation of Christendom. Nilus does not refuse to say how he
came by these Protocols. On the contrary he gives us no fewer than
three explanations. Unfortunately for him, they are not only elusive
and incredibly melodramatic, but they are also hopelessly
contradictory. Two of them will be found in the English edition.
According to one, the Protocols came from a deceased friend unnamed,
who received them from a woman, also unnamed, who stole them from "one
of the most influential and most highly initiated leaders of
Freemasonry ... at the close of a secret meeting of the initiated in
France."[38] According to the other, there was no woman intermediary
and no despoiled French Freemason, but the whole business was done by
the deceased friend himself, who rifled the safes of "the Headquarter
Offices of the Society of Zion in France."[39] The inconsistency of
these two stories may conceivably be explained, but it is not so easy
to account for the third story, which Nilus relates in a third and
enlarged edition of his work published in 1911. Here he tells us that
the documents came not from France, but from Switzerland, that they
were not Judeo-Masonic, but Zionist, and that they were the secret
Protocols of the Zionist Congress held in Basle in 1897.[40] From
these conflicting statements it is perfectly clear that Nilus is not a
witness of truth, and the damaging conclusion suggested by a
comparison of his Protocols with the Goedsche fiction and its progeny
of forgeries becomes irresistible.
The Protocols are, in short, an amplified imitation of Goedsche's
handiwork adapted to the circumstances of the Russian Revolution of
1905. Whether it was made direct from the melodramatic text of
"Biarritz" is doubtful. Had Nilus worked with that document his
credulous mysticism would assuredly not have resisted its Golden Calf
theory, of which he is refreshingly innocent. On the other hand, he
does adopt the blending of the Materialist and Social Democratic
elements which are separate and conflicting in Goedsche, but which,
with the exclusion of the Golden Calf, were the chief points of
difference between the Czech forgery of 1901 and its Goedsche
original. It therefore seems probable that it was with the Czech text
that Nilus operated, and this is confirmed by his own avowal that the
"manuscript" which first made him acquainted with the alleged
Protocols was given to him in 1901, the year in which the Czech
pamphlet was published.[41]
In his main ideas Nilus followed this pamphlet very closely, but
borrows, or, rather, purloins, additional matter, especially in regard
to the Freemasons, from Gougenot des Mousseaux. He also annexes
political and economic ideas on a large scale from modern Russian
reactionary writers and from certain early Bolshevist programme-mongers.
How closely his main thesis follows that of the Czech-Goedsche
pamphlet is shown by the following parallel, in which both explain how
the Jews hope to accomplish their fell purpose by simulating sympathy
with the proletariat and leading it into destructive, and eventually
suicidal, political revolution:--