Jerusalem School

The Jerusalemites are a fictional secret faction in the Plan assembled by Casaubon, Jacopo Belbo, and Diotallevi. Within their invented history, the group divides into three branches whose supposed descendants span neo-Templar movements, scientists and bankers, and Russian political life. The faction’s importance lies not in a verifiable organization but in the way the Plan turns scattered historical material into an apparently connected conspiracy—and, in doing so, exposes how antisemitic fabrications can be repurposed as evidence.

Place in the Plan

The Jerusalemites appear as one of several groups that the three men struggle to place in their growing scheme. When Casaubon asks what the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites are doing, Diotallevi admits they do not know. Rather than treating this uncertainty as a limit on their theory, the men continue searching for a connection. Their unresolved status becomes an invitation to invent further links.

The scheme’s governing pressure is total explanation: if the Plan exists, Belbo argues, it must involve everything, or explain nothing. Elsewhere, the collaborators turn that premise into a rule that every fact must disclose a mystery. The Jerusalemites therefore function as a flexible piece in an all-encompassing design: their history can be rearranged whenever the Plan needs another bridge between movements, periods, or political events.

The Three Supposed Branches

In Belbo’s account, the Jerusalemite group has broken into three branches. One passes through Spanish and Provençal cabalists and is said to inspire the neo-Templar camp. A second is taken over by the Baconian wing, whose members become scientists and bankers and are opposed by the Jesuits. A third settles in Russia. These are not presented as independently established histories; they are the collaborators’ explanatory construction, which converts disparate identities and conflicts into the lineage of a single organization.

Belbo’s Russian branch is defined through a contrast with Russian Jews. In his account, Jewish literacy and participation in liberal and revolutionary intellectual life make Jews objects of hostility among impoverished peasants. The Paulicians, by contrast, are cast as mystical reactionaries allied with landowners and established at court. Belbo concludes that the two groups cannot cooperate: the Paulicians supposedly seek to discredit Jews and, through them, harm their foreign adversaries, including neo-Templars and Baconians. This fabricated factional logic gives the Plan a way to make political antagonism look like evidence of an unseen struggle.

Antisemitic Texts and Political Reuse

The collaborators attribute the Protocols to the Paulicians and make them an instrument against the Jerusalemites. In their invented narrative, the text’s anti-Jewish claims disguise a conflict among secret factions. The passage describes the Protocols as a series of twenty-four declarations, yet its supposed program is contradictory: it condemns liberalism while encouraging revolution, calls for control of public life, and presents the alleged conspirators as both enemies of and users of antisemitism. The contradictions do not weaken the Plan within its own logic; they are absorbed as signs of a complicated strategy.

The account also traces how accusations of a Jewish plot are attached to older polemics and recycled. When the Jesuits find themselves blamed for the Ordonation, they turn to Simonini’s letter and attribute the document to Jews. The novel then recounts how the Protocols were exposed as borrowing from Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, while the conspiratorial explanation invents another layer: Joly must have known the Plan, and the Jews must have created it because it resembles what the Templars supposedly wanted. Each exposure or contradiction is converted into another link, so the theory feeds on the very process that should test it.

A further proposed origin makes the mechanism explicit. Rachkovsky, working under Count Sergei Witte, is said to have adapted a pamphlet derived from Joly or the earlier Sue text, substituting Jews for Witte as the alleged conspirators. The name Cyon is then treated as an insinuation of Zion, and the document is passed through Juliana or Justine Glinka to Russian officials and ultimately the tsar. This chain belongs to the men’s speculative reconstruction, not to a reliable account of Jewish organization. Its narrative force comes from showing how a text can be altered, circulated, and given political purpose while the Plan recasts the resulting damage as proof of its own hidden history.

The Plan’s Self-Confirming Logic

The Jerusalemites’ alleged history demonstrates how the collaborators’ game becomes a habit of belief. They begin by recognizing their associations as unwarranted and ironic; as they repeatedly collect material and connect everything to everything else, the distinction between pretending to believe and actually believing starts to erode. Casaubon thinks his involvement with Lia and the baby leaves him less affected, while he later understands Diotallevi as becoming corrupted and Belbo as becoming converted. Their invented Jerusalemite genealogy belongs to this drift from playful construction toward conviction.

The theory also becomes socially consequential because others accept and inhabit it. Casaubon concludes that the men invented a nonexistent Plan, yet their imagined adversaries identify fragments of their own confused mythologies in it and treat those fragments as parts of a coherent design. Once people believe the Plan is real and act within its framework, the invention acquires real effects. The Jerusalemites thus exemplify the novel’s warning about conspiracy thinking: a secret organization can be fabricated from analogy and suspicion, then made persuasive—and potentially harmful—by the people who mistake the construction for history.