Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fabricated conspiracy text that the novel traces through layers of plagiarism, political opportunism, and antisemitic propaganda. Its changing origins and uses expose how an invented account of secret Jewish control could be made to look like evidence—and how the novel’s own conspiratorial investigators repeat that error by absorbing the text into their imagined Templar Plan.

Publication and Political Use

The characters place the major antisemitic campaign associated with the Protocols at the end of the nineteenth century, while noting that the work appeared in Russia. In their conspiratorial reconstruction, the text is attributed to the Paulicians, whom they imagine as mystics aligned with landowners and the Russian court and opposed to a rival Jerusalemite network. The theory turns the Protocols into an instrument for discrediting Jews and, through them, political adversaries abroad. The novel presents this as the characters’ speculative account, not as an established history.

The publication record they recount is more concrete. An incomplete version appeared in 1903 in the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamia, edited by the antisemitic Krushevan. In 1905, a complete text was published anonymously as The Source of Our Evils, edited by Boutmi, who had founded the Union of the Russian People with Krushevan. The organization later became known as the Black Hundreds and enlisted criminals in pogroms and other right-wing violence. Boutmi subsequently issued further editions under his own name, calling the work The Enemies of the Human Race: Protocols from the Secret Archives of the Central Chancellery of Zion.

A longer version appeared in the third edition of Sergei Nilus’s The Great in the Small in 1905. Issued under the auspices of a local Red Cross chapter, Nilus’s edition placed the text within a broader framework of mystical reflection and reached the tsar. The metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud in the city’s churches. This route from cheap pamphlet to a work endorsed by religious and political authority shows how the text’s reach depended not on reliable proof, but on successive channels of circulation and institutional attention.

The Text’s Claims and Their Sources

As the characters describe it, the Protocols consists of twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion and framed as a program for acquiring world power. Its proposals are internally contradictory: it would abolish freedom of the press while encouraging libertinism, denounce liberalism while exploiting social confusion, and intensify inequality while promoting revolution. It invokes gold, controlled governments, war, arms production, and the construction of underground metros as tools of domination. It even advocates antisemitism, supposedly as a way to manipulate both Jewish poverty and gentile responses to Jewish suffering. The document’s claims reproduce the antisemitic stereotype they purport to expose, turning prejudice itself into part of the alleged plot.

Diotallevi draws attention to the text’s historical texture. Its supposedly ancient conspiracy refers instead to specific French controversies of the late nineteenth century: the educational program associated with Léon Bourgeois, figures implicated in the Panama Scandal, and complaints about Jewish shareholders in the Paris Metro. These details support the theory that the text was assembled in France during the 1890s, amid the Dreyfus Affair, to weaken liberal politics. The text’s apparent grand design is thus built out of contemporary political materials, not evidence of an age-old secret organization.

The novel extends that genealogy backward through a chain of borrowings. In 1921, the Times of London investigated a Russian monarchist refugee’s purchase of old books in Constantinople and identified an uncoversed volume marked Joly, with a preface dated 1864, as the source of the Protocols. The book was Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, a liberal pamphlet against Napoleon III in which Machiavelli voices a dictator’s cynicism in debate with Montesquieu. Joly was imprisoned after its publication and later died by suicide. The Protocols borrowed the pamphlet’s political language, including the principle that the ends justify the means; the novel’s characters add that Joly himself had copied an earlier document by Sue, which predates his pamphlet by at least seven years.

Reattribution and the Manufacture of Proof

The text’s supposed authorship shifts as political factions redirect accusations. When Sue’s novel Les Mystères du peuple attributed the Ordonation to the Jesuits, the Jesuits, exploiting Simonini’s letter, turned the accusation against the Jews. In 1869, Henri Gougenot de Mousseaux published a work claiming that Jews used the cabala and worshipped Satan, and that a secret descent linked Cain to the Gnostics, Templars, and Masons. The account received a special blessing from Pius IX. The sequence shows how an accusation could be adapted to identify a new enemy without establishing the truth of the underlying conspiracy.

The novel also recounts how Nesta Webster, an antisemitic writer devoted to conspiracy theories, responded when the Protocols’ dependence on Joly became known. Rather than treating the dependence as evidence of fabrication, she proposed that Joly had been an initiate who knew the Unknown Superiors’ Plan and had attributed it to Napoleon III. Since the supposed Plan seemed to match what Webster believed Jews did, she concluded that Jews must have invented it; because it also matched what Templars were said to want, the characters in turn recast it as the Templar Plan. Each apparent contradiction is made to reinforce the theory rather than disprove it.

A further proposed origin centers on Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky. The novel’s account connects him to Count Sergei Witte, whose opponent Elie de Cyon had written against him using ideas drawn from Joly or Sue. After Rachkovsky searched Cyon’s villa in 1897, he allegedly took a pamphlet that attributed Machiavellian political ideas to Witte, substituted Jews for Witte, and circulated the result. The name Cyon itself was then taken as suggestive of Zion, making the document appear to indict a Jewish conspiracy from within. Juliana or Justine Glinka is said to have passed it to General Orgeievsky, through whom it reached the tsar. The proposed forgery consequently harmed Witte, Rachkovsky’s own sponsor, while the novel leaves Rachkovsky’s later fate uncertain. These claims belong to the characters’ increasingly elaborate reconstruction; their confident chain of inference exemplifies the Plan’s self-confirming method.

The Protocols and the Invented Plan

The text becomes a template for the characters’ own conspiracy. Belbo observes that replacing references to the Metro with the tunnels of Provins, Jews with Templars, and the Elders of Zion with the Thirty-six Invisibles transforms the Protocols into the Ordonation of Provins. The resemblance is not independent confirmation: it is produced by substitutions that the characters themselves perform. Their ability to make one conspiracy text resemble another demonstrates how the Plan grows through analogy rather than discovery.

That interpretive habit also appears when Casaubon is assigned the role of Templar expert. He proposes that a secret society might exist whose purpose is to spread the rumor that a universal conspiracy exists. The idea captures the circular logic at work: a theory’s circulation becomes evidence for the hidden organization supposedly behind it. The novel contrasts this logic with the less grand explanation that people and dictatorships may blame external enemies for failures and social problems.

The characters’ most extreme appropriation appears when they use their Plan to explain the Holocaust. They reinterpret the procedures of persecution and murder as a search for a hidden message, imagining that one of the millions of victims carried a clue to the terrestrial point where the currents supposedly converged. This is the Plan’s false logic at its most destructive: historical atrocity is stripped of its actual human reality and made to serve an occult pattern. The passage does not validate the theory; it exposes the moral horror of forcing genocide into a conspiratorial puzzle.

Significance

The Protocols links political propaganda to the novel’s broader concern with overinterpretation. The characters can identify evidence of borrowing, historical anachronism, and deliberate substitution, yet their own invented system turns those very findings into further proof of a hidden design. The text’s history therefore supplies both a case study in the manufacture of conspiracy and a warning about the urge to make every fact confirm a total explanation.

By tracing the work through pamphlets, books, newspapers, political actors, and institutions, the novel shows that a fabricated text can have real consequences even when its claims are false. Its circulation helped give antisemitic accusations a durable documentary form; its appropriation by the characters reveals how easily false authority can be recreated whenever analogy is mistaken for evidence and prejudice is disguised as interpretation.