The myth of the Jewish menace in world affairs Part 2

to rouse the ma.s.ses whenever we please, to lead them into upheavals and revolutions.

Each of these catastrophes will advance by a long stride our own racial interests and will rapidly bring us nearer to our one great end--that of reigning over all the earth as it has been promised to us by our Father Abraham."

It would be easy to quote many other equally deadly parallels, but this one will a.s.suredly suffice to show that, in their main argument, at any rate, the Protocols are not what they pretend to be--that is an actual statement of secret Jewish teaching by a Jew--but that they are not even an echo of Jewish ideas, seeing that they are derived from a Gentile forgery based on a work of confessedly Gentile imagination.

When we examine Nilus's added matter the revelation of fraud becomes still more remarkable. The main difference between Nilus and his German and Czech fore-runners is that he works out in detail the alleged Autocratic and Bolshevist philosophy of his Elders of Zion. He pictures these fabulous personages as genuine believers in Autocracy, but more intent on Jewish political domination than on merely mercenary exploitation. Accordingly, he attributes to them the design of practising a sort of State Bolshevism when their domination shall have been accomplished--that is to say, the creation of a paternal Jewish autocracy basing itself on a carefully controlled communistic system. It is by this ingenious device that he endeavours to show that the Jews are the arch-enemy at both extremes of the social organism.

Now, whence comes the autocratic philosophy he puts into the mouths of his Jewish Elders? It is exclusively a Russian doctrine. Nilus knows this very well, and he does not waste time in the hopeless task of finding counterblasts to democracy in Jewish political literature. He goes straight to the fountain-head of Russian obscurantism in the person of the late Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantine Petrovich Pobyedonoszeff! This expedient has the appearance almost of a practical joke, for Pobyedonoszeff was not only a pure Muscovite and a fanatical Greek Christian, but so conspicuous an anti-Semite and oppressor of Jews, Stundists, and other Russian allogenes that he earned for himself the sobriquet of "the modern Torquemada." Nilus's Jewish Antichrist is, in short, nothing more than the austere super-Christian Procurator masquerading, like Edward Alleyn's Barabas, in a false nose and a prodigious property beard.

The evidence of this jumps to the eyes if we take the trouble to compare the first part of "The Jewish Peril" with Mr. Robert Crozier Long's translation of Pobyedonoszeff's "Reflections of a Russian Statesman,"[43] especially the chapters on "The New Democracy" and "The Great Falsehood of our Time." Many parallel pa.s.sages might be quoted, but it will, perhaps, suffice if I extract one, fundamental to both writers, in which Nilus makes the Jewish Elder plagiarise the argument of the Christian Procurator, in part almost textually:--

POBYEDONOSZEFF. NILUS.

"Forever extending its base, "It suffices to give the the new Democracy now aspires populace self-government for a to universal suffrage. By this short period for this populace means, _the political power to become a disorganised would be shattered into a rabble.... Is it possible for number of infinitesimal bits, the ma.s.s to discriminate of which each citizen acquires quietly and without jealousies a single one_. What will he do to administer the affairs of with it then; how will he State? Can they be a defence employ it?... _Each vote against a foreign foe? This is representing an inconsiderable impossible, _as a plan broken fragment of power, by itself up into as many parts as there signifies nothing_.... The are minds in the ma.s.s loses extension of the right to its value, and therefore partic.i.p.ate in elections is becomes unintelligible and regarded as progress, and as unworkable_. Alone an autocrat the conquest of freedom by can conceive vast plans democratic theorists who hold clearly, a.s.signing its proper that the more numerous the part to everything in the partic.i.p.ants in political mechanism of the machine of rights, the greater is the State. Hence we conclude that probability that all will it is expedient for the employ this right in the welfare of the country that interests of the public the Government of the same welfare. Experience proves a should be in the hands of one very different thing. The responsible person. Without history of mankind bears absolute despotism witness that the most civilisation cannot exist, for necessary and fruitful reforms civilisation is capable of emanated from the supreme will being promoted only under the of statesmen or from a protection of the ruler, minority enlightened by lofty whoever he may be, and not at ideas and deep knowledge, and the hands of the ma.s.ses".[45]

that, on the contrary, the extension of the representative principle is accompanied by an abas.e.m.e.nt of political ideas".[44]

In the second part of "The Jewish Peril," where the Elders of Zion are made to expound their State Bolshevism, the sources are not quite so clear. It is practically certain, however, that they are not Jewish.

Had Nilus waited a few years he would, perhaps, have been able to quote convinced Bolshevist writers of Jewish birth like Radek and Zinovieff, but when he wrote in 1905 there were no such exponents of pure Leninism. The great split of 1903 found all the leading Russo-Jewish Socialists, such as Martoff, Axelrod, Trotsky, Martinoff, Liber, Dahn, and the whole of the Bund, ranged with the Mensheviks against Lenin.[46] The result was that, in reproducing Bolshevist ideas, Nilus must have been dependent on Gentile pamphleteers. It is not easy to identify these ephemeral writings with certainty, but many interesting parallels of this section of the Protocols may be found in Bucharin's "Programme of the Communists," which codifies all the early Bolshevist literature.[47] And Bucharin, be it noted, is just as little a Jew as was Pobyedonoszeff. This, of course, explains the alleged prophetic character of the Protocols which the _Morning Post_ and its friends hold to be convincing evidence of their genuineness.

If the Bolsheviks have acted on some of the principles attributed the Elders of Zion, they have done so not because they were of Jewish origin, but because they were exclusively the work of Lenin and his bodyguard of Gentile proletarians.

So much for the literary history of the Protocols. Their political history is not less discreditable. They were not published because they were discovered--whether in the pages of Goedsche or elsewhere--but they were discovered because they were wanted for the ign.o.ble purpose of a pogrom-weapon. In the first edition of his book, published in 1901, Nilus knew nothing of them, but was absorbed by the more abstract aspects of the problem of Antichrist. In 1905 occurred the Russian Revolution, and this was followed by the incendiary conspiracy of the Okhrana to stir up pogroms all over Russia and drown the new Const.i.tution in a welter of Jewish blood.[48] Nilus appears to have been employed by the Okhrana in this wicked campaign. At any rate, the Protocols first appeared at this date in the shape of small pamphlets or broadsheets and they were only afterwards collected and incorporated in a second edition of Nilus's work as a _denouement_ of his theory of the Judeo-Masonic nature of Antichrist. Nor has their _role_ as a pogrom-weapon been confined to the year 1905. Quite recently abstracts of them were widely circulated in Denikin's and Koltchak's armies. They were printed in the Eparchial Library at Rostoff, and were distributed by the remnants of the organisation of Black Hundreds known as the Union of the Russian People. How effective they were for their murderous purpose we know from the horrible ma.s.sacres of inoffensive Jews and Jewesses which dogged the foot-steps of Denikin's armies throughout South Russia.

But this was not the only sinister movement with which the Protocols seem to have been a.s.sociated. The year in which they were first published in Russia was also the year of a very serious Russo-German intrigue against the Triple Entente; and here again these Protocols--or, rather, their argument--appear as one of the main weapons of the plotters.

It will be remembered that in July, 1905, the basis of an anti-British Alliance was secretly agreed upon by the Tsar and the Kaiser at Bjoerkoe.[49] A few months later, while the Treaty was still incomplete, Count Lamsdorf proposed to the Tsar that advantage should be taken of "the new friendly relations" with Germany to conclude an agreement between the two countries for combating the alleged Jewish and Masonic peril.[50] Now, the secret Memorandum in which this precious scheme was set forth, and which the Tsar formally approved in January, 1906, is virtually a reproduction of the anti-Semitic argument which the alleged "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are designed to prove. It is true that the Protocols themselves are not mentioned, but Count Lamsdorf is none the less positive, with the fabricators of those doc.u.ments, that the Jews are the soul of the Revolutionary movement in Europe, that their "princ.i.p.al aim is the all-around triumph of anti-Christian and anti-Monarchist Jewry," that their millionaires subvention this movement with "gigantic pecuniary means," and that they are abetted in this enterprise by the Freemasons. The Protocols are, indeed, little more than a dramatic version of Count Lamsdorf's Memorandum. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that in some occult way--perhaps not so very occult--Nilus's book was intended to serve the sinister ends of the pro-German foreign policy of Count Lamsdorf in the same way as it served the b.l.o.o.d.y purposes of the pogrom-mongers. It should be especially noted in this connection that the book is as anti-British as it is anti-Jewish, and that it was published in December, 1905, that is to say, at the very time that the Tsar had the Lamsdorf scheme under consideration.

The more recent history of the Protocols is even more unsavoury. It is incredible, but it is nevertheless a fact, that these crazy forgeries have played a part behind the scenes in the international combinations for a.s.sisting the anti-Bolshevist reaction in Russia, which have filled so much of the public mind during the last two years, and which have cost this country close on 100,000,000. There was a moment when the Great Powers were disposed to leave the Russians to fight out their quarrels among themselves. Various objections to this policy were urged by the friends of Admiral Koltchak and General Denikin, and among them was the argument that there was, in fact, no civil war in Russia, that Bolshevism was not Russian, but exclusively alien, the work of international Jews who were themselves the instruments of a world-wide and deep-laid Jewish conspiracy against Christendom and the political order of Europe. Bolshevism was, in short, a European menace. Russia was pictured as the first instalment of the Jewish conquest of Europe, which had already sent its _eclaireurs_ to Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, and Budapest, whence they were advancing to the Rhine and the Alps. In support of this argument, Russian Intelligence Officers, armed with doctored typewritten translations of the Nilus Protocols, with the anti-British pa.s.sages carefully expunged, were sent to London, Paris, Rome, and Washington, where they circulated this precious literature confidentially among Cabinet Ministers, heads of public departments, and persons of influence in society and journalism. That this campaign was not fruitless is attested by many curious facts, which, unfortunately, cannot be more particularly referred to at this moment without a breach of confidence. Overt evidence of the mischief that was wrought is, however, not wanting. It may be found, for example, in certain oracular utterances of Mr.

Winston Churchill in a Sunday paper, in the anti-Semitic outbursts of the _Morning Post_, and the itching of the _Times_ and the _Spectator_ to do likewise, and, finally, in the discreditable propaganda leaflets distributed in the interior of Russia by the air service of the British armies at Archangel and Murmansk.[51]

Why the Protocols were circulated thus secretly is clear. Their political purpose had nothing to gain, and, indeed, everything to lose from public criticism and discussion. Nevertheless, they leaked out. A copy got into the hands of an official of the United States Department of Justice, and he, anxious for further information, and following some tactless office rule, sent it to the President of an important Jewish organisation in New York for his observations. The President promptly replied that it was a forgery of a very familiar type, and took no further notice of it. In June, 1919, the present writer, while in Paris, heard of the circulation of the Protocols as a pogrom pamphlet in Denikin's country, but he also attached no special importance to it. Later on came the first intimation of the proposed publication of the Protocols in Western Europe. It came in very characteristic shape. One day the members of a certain Jewish Delegation in Paris received a visit from a mysterious Lithuanian who had been connected with the Russian Secret Police. He professed himself anxious to serve the Jewish community, and said that he was in a position to prevent the publication of an exceedingly dangerous book, which, if it saw the light, would probably involve the whole house of Israel in ruin. Quite naturally, he wished to be paid for this service, but the sum was a mere trifle, a matter of 10,000. He was asked for a sight of the volume, and he produced it. It was, of course, "the Protocols." Needless to say, no business was done. It was possibly only a coincidence that in the following December a German edition was published under the t.i.tle "Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion," and two months later the English edition saw the light under the t.i.tle "The Jewish Peril: Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion."

The German and English publication would have been simultaneous but for the fact that difficulty was experienced in finding a reputable London publishing house to take the Protocols seriously.

One further word about the English edition. Its history and aims are much less clear than those of its Russian original, owing partly to the circ.u.mspect anonymity in which its sponsors have elected to veil themselves. It is inconceivable that it is intended to stir up pogroms in this country, though the suggestion is not obscurely made in recent articles in the _Times_ and the _Spectator_. More probably--as has already been hinted--it is part of a German intrigue to prejudice the recent German general elections in favour of the Militarist Reactionaries and perhaps even to justify the forcible upsetting of the German Government by means of another Kapp _Putsch_. Here is the evidence for this startling conjecture.

The German Reactionaries have lately been putting all their money on anti-Semitism. Their publicity agencies in Charlottenburg and Munich have flooded the country with pamphlets denouncing the Republican Government as a Judaized Junta, the instrument of a far-reaching Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to ruin Germany and to involve the whole of Christian and Monarchical Europe in her fate. This campaign has lately become official, and a paragraph was inserted in the Electoral Manifesto of the German Nationalists--the party of Kapp and Lutzow--formally adopting anti-Semitism as a plank in their platform.

One of the aims of the party is to secure foreign sympathy and help, and they hope to do this by finding a common ground in anti-Semitism.

In these circ.u.mstances the publication of "The Jewish Peril" in England wears a disturbing significance, but it becomes much more disturbing when we find that the German edition was published almost simultaneously with it, with a dedication appealing not only to the German people, but also to "The Princes of Europe." The object was clearly to get English support, and unfortunately the response was not long in coming. On May 8th the _Times_ was inveigled into publishing an article expressing alarm at the revelations of the Protocols and calling for an investigation. The delight of the German Reactionaries knew no bounds. It was voiced by Count Reventlow in a long article in the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_ of May 17 welcoming the _Times's_ acceptance of the Jewish peril as an indication that English public opinion was beginning to recognise the righteousness of Kapp and Co.

in their resistance to the Ebert _regime_ and what the Count called the "pax Judaeica."[52]

Whether the translators and editors of "The Jewish Peril" have consciously lent themselves to this intrigue, which is part of the German Reactionary plot to upset the Treaty of Versailles and perhaps plunge Europe into another war, cannot be said. But a.s.suredly the worst suspicions are permissible so long as these gentlemen elect to skulk in the _coulisses_ and shrink from responsibility for their scrubby handiwork. Even t.i.tus Oates had the courage of his forgeries.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Lond., Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1920. _Morning Post_, July 16 and 17, 1920.

[25] See Isaac D'Israeli, "Curiosities of Literature," Vol. III., pp.

143-150.

[26] _Anabaptistic.u.m_, etc. (1702). See particularly the tract ent.i.tled _Erschrockliche Bruderschafft der Alten und Neuen_.

[27] Preface to Schieferl's edition (Dresden, 1893).

[28] As a matter of fact, he was not the first worker in this field, though he was the first literary ancestor of Nilus. The idea of the dramatic treatment of a Jewish conspiracy against Christian Society was worked out by the Polish poet Kra.s.sinsky in his _Nie-Boska Komedya_ ("The Undivine Comedy"), published in 1834. It differs in scope and detail from Goedsche. Its attack on the Jews was strongly censured by Adam Mickiewicz.

[29] _Meyer's Konversations-Lexikon_ (1897), Vol. VII., _sub. voc._ Goedsche and Waldeck. _Stenographischer Bericht uber die Verhandlungen in der Anklage gegen Dr. Waldeck_ (Berlin, 1849).

[30] In four volumes, Berlin, 1868.

[31] It was a custom of some mediaeval German Jews to place the "first fruits" of their cattle to gra.s.s in the cemeteries. This gave rise to a popular belief that the idolatrous cultus of the Golden Calf still lingered among them. (Schudt: _Judische Merckwurdigkeiten_ (1714), Vol.

II., p. 376.)

[32] _Biarritz_, Vol. I., pp. 130-180. Further characteristic references to the Jewish question will be found in a later novel of the Retcliffe series ent.i.tled _Um die Weltherrschaft_, Vol. I., pp.

309-310, 338, 360, 415; Vol. II., pp. 55, 56, 63; Vol. III., pp. 127, 130; Vol. IV., pp. 190-191, 467; Vol. V., pp. 22, 83-84, 206.

[33] _Berichte uber die 3 Generalversammlung des Vereins zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus_ (Vienna, 1893), pp. 8, 9.

[34] Hebrew for "Gentiles."

[35] _Stenographische Protokolle des Hauses der Abgeordneten des Oesterreichischen Reichsrathes_ (1901), pp. 1282-1284.

[36] Wolski: _La Russie Juive_ (Paris, 1911), pp. 7-19.

[37] The text is quoted by Meister: _Judas Schuldbuch_, p. 155.

[38] "The Jewish Peril," p. III.

[39] _Ibid._, p. 88.

[40] _Berliner Tageblatt_, May 18, 1920. The story is repeated with further variations, in the fourth edition, published in 1917, extracts from which are given in the _Morning Post_, August 12, 1920. In this edition Nilus quotes certain enigmatic statements of the late Theodor Herzl as proof of a secret Jewish teaching. It happens that the correspondence with Herzl on this subject is in the possession of the present writer. It has nothing to do with a secret Jewish teaching.

[41] Fourth edit., cap. III. (Quoted by _Morning Post_, Aug. 12, 1920.)

[42] "The Jewish Peril," pp. 12, 13, 14, 32.

[43] Lond., 1898.

[44] Pobyedonoszeff: "Reflections" (English edit.), pp. 26, 27, 28.

Allowance must be made for the different styles and qualities of the two translations.

[45] "The Jewish Peril," pp. 2, 5.

[46] Mautner: _Der Bolschewismus_ (Stuttgart, 1920), p. 95. See also Landau-Aldanov: _Lenine_ (Paris, 1920), pp. 31-32. It is amusing to note that the _Morning Post_ (July 21, 1920) counts almost all these Jewish Mensheviks as Bolsheviks.

[47] The date of the original Russian edition is unknown to the present writer, but a German edition was published at Zurich in 1918.

[48] s.e.m.e.noff: "The Russian Government and the Ma.s.sacres" (Lond., 1907).

[49] "The Nikky-w.i.l.l.y Correspondence," _Times_, Sept. 4, 1917; _Daily Telegraph_, Sept. 4, 27, and 29, 1917; and _Morning Post_, Sept. 15, 1917.