Napoleon's convocation of the Grand Sanhedrin is invoked in the novel as a historical episode that becomes raw material for a conspiracy narrative. The researchers' account connects Napoleon's political engagement with Jewish representatives to later anti-Semitic accusations, showing how borrowed texts, political rivalries, and invented genealogies are made to look like evidence of a continuous secret plan.

Political Context and the Conspiracy Narrative

In the account discussed by the researchers, Napoleon's contact with the Grand Sanhedrin alarms the Paulicians, who are portrayed as fearing that Jewish unity will undermine the Christian church. A Russian Orthodox declaration casts the convocation as part of a plot to make Napoleon the Messiah. The narrative then folds this claim into a larger accusation: the supposed conspiracy is described as both Masonic and Judeo-Masonic, with its alleged enemies repeatedly expanded to include new political opponents.

The novel presents these links as stages in a story being constructed, not as verified history. Diotallevi places the major anti-Semitic campaign later in the nineteenth century and points to the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russia. Belbo then assigns the imagined Jerusalemite movement three branches: a neo-Templar line, a Baconian line associated with science and banking, and a Russian branch opposed to the Jews. The supposed conflict between these branches turns political and religious difference into a self-confirming account of hidden coordination.

The Protocols and the Reuse of Texts

The Protocols are described as twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion, but their alleged program is internally contradictory. It calls for restrictions on the press and also for permissiveness; denounces liberalism while advocating the exploitation of revolutionary ideas; and combines the promotion of war and arms with schemes to control governments and public opinion. The text’s contradictions do not weaken the conspiratorial reading developed by the researchers. Instead, they are treated as evidence of a supposedly comprehensive strategy.

The novel then traces a textual source that exposes the construction beneath that strategy. In 1921, the Times of London investigates an old book acquired by a Russian exile in Constantinople and identifies it as Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, a liberal pamphlet directed against Napoleon III. The Protocols reproduce ideas and formulations from Joly’s work, where Machiavelli voices the dictator’s cynicism. The Times identifies this borrowing but, within the researchers’ invented account, fails to pursue an earlier source: a document attributed to Sue that supposedly predates Joly. Each discovery is absorbed into the Plan rather than allowed to end the theory.

Fabrication, Political Use, and the Escalation of Belief

The proposed chain of transmission becomes more elaborate when the researchers discuss Rachkovsky. They claim that Count Sergei Witte employed him against the political opponent Elie de Cyon, whose writing had adapted ideas from Joly or Sue but did not blame the Jews. Rachkovsky is said to have substituted Jews for Witte in the text and circulated the altered version. The name Cyon is then treated as suggestive of Zion, and the supposed document travels through Juliana or Justine Glinka to Russian authorities and ultimately to the tsar. In this story, the forgery damages Witte, the sponsor whose interests it was meant to serve, and Rachkovsky later disappears from the researchers’ account.

This intricate explanation is presented with a confidence the evidence cannot justify. Its method is to turn resemblance into connection, borrowing into lineage, and political consequences into proof of an unseen design. The novel’s sharpest irony is that the researchers recognize the Protocols’ history of reuse and falsification while continuing to construct an even larger conspiracy from those same fragments. Their imagined account makes the convocation of the Grand Sanhedrin one link in a sprawling chain that can absorb contradiction, exposure, and uncertainty without relinquishing its claim to explain everything.