The Record of the Council of Zion

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forged antisemitic tract whose imagined account of a Jewish conspiracy to control governments becomes, in the novel, a case study in the manufacture and circulation of political falsehood. The text’s changing provenance, its use in Russian antisemitic politics, and its resemblance to the characters’ supposed Plan reveal two processes at once: the deliberate recycling of accusations against Jews, and the way Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi turn a fabricated document into apparent confirmation of their own conspiracy theory.

Publication and Political Use

The novel traces the Protocols through Russian publication and political networks. An incomplete version appeared in 1903 in the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamia, edited by the antisemitic Kruscevan. In 1905, a complete text was issued anonymously as The Source of Our Evils, with the approval of government censors. Its editor, Boutmi, had helped Kruscevan found the Union of the Russian People, later known as the Black Hundreds, which enlisted criminals for pogroms and other acts of far-right violence. Boutmi subsequently published further editions under his own name, under the title The Enemies of the Human Race: Protocols from the Secret Archives of the Central Chancellery of Zion.

A longer version appeared in 1905 as part of the third edition of Sergei Nilus’s The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is an Imminent Political Possibility. Published at Tsarskoye Selo under the aegis of a local Red Cross chapter, this edition supplied the work’s mystical framing and became the version translated internationally. The text reached the tsar, and the metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud in the city’s churches. The sequence shows how an anonymous fabrication gained authority not through a reliable documentary origin, but through repeated publication, institutional reach, and the status lent to it by religious and political settings.

The novel also gives a glimpse of how the document is invoked by believers. Salon, who says he was born in Moscow, cites a passage from Document Number Nine about metropolitan railways and underground passages being used to blow up world capitals. For him, underground infrastructure confirms a secret Jewish design: he insists that plots must be made underground and links world dominion to hidden subterranean currents. Casaubon recognizes the antisemitic frame of the claim, distinguishing between some Jews whom Salon accuses and Jews as a whole. Salon’s interpretation converts a specific, sinister allegation into a general theory in which the ordinary fact of underground passages becomes evidence of hidden control.

Contents and Internal Contradictions

The Protocols comprise twenty-four declarations presented as a program of action attributed to the Elders of Zion. The characters note that this program is internally inconsistent. It advocates abolishing freedom of the press while also encouraging libertinage; condemns liberalism while recommending the use of liberal ideas to sow confusion; and proposes both exacerbating inequality and fomenting revolution. It combines plans to manipulate governments through controlled figureheads with praise for gold, military preparedness, and the manufacture of arms. The imagined conspirators are also said to promote sports and visual education to dull the working class, and to build metropolitan railways that could facilitate the mining of cities.

The text makes antisemitism itself part of its alleged strategy. It claims that anti-Jewish hostility could be used to control impoverished Jews and to elicit sympathy from non-Jews when Jewish suffering became visible. It casts the supposed conspirators as greed-driven and vengeful, reproducing the antisemitic stereotype already circulating in the press, and calls for the abolition of classical and ancient history. The novel’s account makes clear that these accusations are not evidence of a Jewish plot: they are elements of a forged tract that attributes contradictory, politically charged aims to an imagined Jewish leadership.

Diotallevi draws attention to the document’s historically specific references. Although it purports to describe an ancient conspiracy, its allusions point toward the political disputes of late nineteenth-century France. The passage about visual education recalls the educational program of Léon Bourgeois, whose government included Freemasons; the recommendation to elect compromised politicians evokes figures associated with the Panama Scandal, including Émile Loubet, who became president in 1899. The references to the Metro reflect contemporary right-wing complaints about Jewish shareholders in the Compagnie du Métropolitain. These details support the theory that the text was assembled in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century, in the period of the Dreyfus Affair, to weaken liberal politics.

A Fabrication with Earlier Sources

The novel relates the Protocols to earlier texts through a chain of plagiarism and reinterpretation. In 1921, the Times of London investigated a claim that a Russian monarchist landowner who had fled to Turkey had bought old books from a former Russian secret-police officer living in Constantinople. Among them was a book with no cover, the word “Joli” on its spine, and a preface dated 1864. The newspaper identified the source as Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, a political pamphlet published in 1864. Joly wrote against Napoleon III, using a debate between Montesquieu and Machiavelli to stage a conflict between constitutional principles and dictatorial cynicism. Joly was arrested, served fifteen years in prison, and died by suicide in 1878.

The novel says that the Protocols borrowed almost literally from the language Joly put in Machiavelli’s mouth, including the principle that the end justifies the means; in later transmission, those words are associated with Napoleon. It then adds another layer to the alleged source chain: the characters conclude that Joly had copied a political document produced by Sue, which predates Joly’s book by at least seven years. The Times’s identification of Joly’s work thus exposes plagiarism without, in the characters’ account, reaching the supposed beginning of the chain. Instead of treating each newly discovered source as a reason to question the conspiracy, they extend the conspiracy backward to accommodate it.

That mechanism appears starkly in the Plan’s own account of the Protocols’ creation. Diotallevi argues that the Jesuits, after Sue’s novel attributed the Ordonation to them, used Simonini’s letter to shift the accusation onto the Jews. The text also describes how antisemites connected Jews with cabalistic and satanic allegations, including claims about a secret descent linking Cain, Gnostics, Templars, and Masons. Such accusations show how an existing narrative could be transferred to a new target while preserving its underlying structure: a hidden group supposedly acts across centuries to control public life.

The Characters’ Reinterpretation as the Plan

Belbo identifies the resemblance that makes the Protocols useful to the characters’ Plan. In his reading, the tract’s supposed Jewish world conspiracy repeats the Ordonation of Provins: replace its references to Jews with Templars, and its Elders of Zion with the Thirty-six Invisibles divided into six, and the two schemes appear to coincide. The likeness does not establish the truth of either document. It demonstrates how Belbo’s interpretive method works: he swaps the names and historical references while preserving the pattern, then treats the pattern’s recurrence as proof that the texts share a secret source.

The novel places this reading within a larger practice of suspicious interpretation. Casaubon describes reading the manifestoes not to accept their literal claims but to look for concealed meanings, skipping some passages and privileging others. Because the texts seem absurd, contradictory, and riddling when read literally, he assumes that they must be coded and that an unknown grid would reveal their real message. The Protocols’ apparent parallels with the Plan enter this pre-existing interpretive frame. Discrepancies no longer disprove the theory; they are recast as signs that a hidden message has been concealed or misdirected.

The characters also invent a political genealogy for the document. Belbo claims that an original Jerusalemite group divided into three branches: one inspiring neo-Templars through Spanish and Provençal cabalists, another becoming the Baconian scientists and bankers opposed by the Jesuits, and a third establishing itself in Russia. In his account, the Russian Jews’ literacy and participation in liberal and revolutionary movements make them targets of reactionary mystics called Paulicians, who supposedly use the Protocols to discredit their rivals abroad. This elaborate explanation is presented as the Plan’s conjecture, not as established history. It repurposes antisemitic claims about Jewish influence as an invented account of how one branch of a secret order manipulates public prejudice against another.

Rachkovsky and the Afterlife of the Text

The characters propose Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky as a possible maker of the Protocols. Their reconstruction begins with his connections to Count Sergei Witte, a modernizing Russian minister, and Elie de Cyon, Witte’s political opponent. In 1897, at Witte’s order, Rachkovsky had Cyon’s villa searched and found a pamphlet based on Joly’s book—or, in the characters’ expanded account, Sue’s earlier document. That pamphlet attributed Machiavellian ideas to Witte. The novel’s conspiratorial reconstruction has Rachkovsky replace Witte’s name with that of the Jews and arrange for the rewritten text to circulate, with Cyon’s name lending it a suggestive association with Zion.

The proposed route into the imperial court extends the same chain. The document passes to Juliana or Justine Glinka, who is described as moving in Madame Blavatsky’s Paris circle and spying on Russian revolutionaries in exile. The characters imagine her as an agent of the Paulicians, allied with landowners and opposed to Witte’s reforms. She sends the text to General Orgeievsky, who ensures that it reaches the tsar through the commander of the imperial guard. In this version, Rachkovsky’s antisemitism helps damage his own sponsor, Witte, while the forgery serves a political struggle within Russia. The account is deliberately nested inside the Plan’s speculative system; its accumulating names and connections do not turn its conjecture into verified provenance.

The Protocols continue to circulate because readers and publishers keep reproducing them. Diotallevi observes that publishers once presented reprints with expressions of indignation, claiming a duty to make an historical document available, but later did so with less embarrassment. The novel’s point is not simply that a false text can survive exposure. Its survival depends on successive acts of publication and on readers who find new uses for it, whether as political propaganda or as a key to another alleged conspiracy.

The most disturbing extension of that logic comes when the Plan is used to explain the Holocaust. Belbo proposes that the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews concealed a search for a message supposedly carried by a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles. In his invented explanation, the bureaucracy of the genocide becomes an attempt to locate a clue that would let Hitler use the Pendulum to find the convergence of subterranean currents and claim mastery of the world. This is the Plan’s paranoid fiction, not an account of historical motive. It exemplifies the moral danger of the characters’ method: instead of recognizing the Nazi genocide as an antisemitic crime, Belbo’s conspiracy makes its victims and their suffering into props in a fabricated hidden-history narrative.