top of page

exposing the origins of antisemitism

Logo Image
Logo Clean.png
Title page of Sergei Nilus's 1905 Russian book The Great in the Small, which reprinted the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION

Title page of Sergei Nilus's 1905 book, which reprinted the forged Protocols as an appendix. Antisemitic forgery, Russia, 1905. Sergei Nilus, Velikoe v malom i Antikhrist (1905). New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery, first printed in a Russian newspaper in 1903, exposed in 1921, and still sold as "proof" of a Jewish plot to rule the world.

 

First published: October 3, 2026

 

 

 

Key Facts

  • What it claims: That secret "Elders of Zion" plotted to control the world's politics, economy, media and education. This is false. The meetings never happened, and the Elders never existed.

  • First published: In autumn 1903, as a serial in Znamya, a St. Petersburg newspaper owned by Pavel Krushevan, who used his papers to spread hatred of Jews. Who wrote the text is still debated.

  • How it spread: After the 1917 Russian Revolution it was translated around the world, recycled by Henry Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and reprinted by the Nazi Party's publishing house.

  • Modern form: It still circulates in print, on television and online, in versions that blame Jews for wars, COVID-19 and other crises.

  • Why it's false: In 1921 The Times of London showed that much of it was copied from an 1864 French satire that never mentions Jews.

 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is, in the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), "the most widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times." It "falsely purports to be the record of secret meetings of Jewish leaders who were plotting to take over the world."

 

It is a forgery. The meetings it describes never took place, and much of its text was copied from an 1864 French satire that never mentions Jews. Journalists exposed it in 1920 and 1921, and courts and governments have rejected it since.

 

Even so, the Protocols has been reprinted for more than a century. Henry Ford spread it in the United States, and the Nazi regime used it to justify hatred of Jews. Today it circulates in many languages, in print and online. Knowing how the forgery was made, and how it was exposed, helps us recognize it when it appears again.

 

What the Protocols Claims

The Protocols presents itself as the secret minutes of meetings held by Jewish leaders, the so-called "Elders of Zion." According to USHMM, early publications had 24 chapters, or "protocols," each claiming to reveal plans to control "world politics, the economy, financial markets, media, education" and other parts of society.

 

None of it is real. As USHMM states, "These meetings never took place and the purported leaders, the so-called Elders of Zion, never existed." Some promoters claim that the text records the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. USHMM says such claims are "not true."

 

Old Myths in One Text

The Protocols did not create new accusations against Jews. USHMM notes that it "did not invent these prejudices against Jews" but "brought them together in a single source."

 

Many of the claims it gathered are older tropes covered elsewhere on this site. The idea that Jews secretly steer the press is the core of the media control myth, and the American Jewish Committee's Translate Hate glossary ties the Protocols to that antisemitic "control" myth. The picture of Jews as hidden manipulators of money goes back to medieval charges such as coin clipping. The Protocols also became a vehicle for the blood libel: a 2003 television series based on it showed Jews murdering Christian children.

 

1903: A Newspaper Serial in St. Petersburg

The first known version of the Protocols appeared in the Russian Empire. According to USHMM, in the fall of 1903 it was serialized in Znamya (also spelled Znamia, "The Banner"), a newspaper in St. Petersburg.

 

Znamya was owned by Pavel Krushevan, a writer who used his newspapers to spread hatred of Jews. In April 1903, USHMM notes, articles in one of his newspapers "helped incite a pogrom in Kishinev." When Znamya printed the Protocols, Krushevan added a foreword and an afterword. He presented the text as the minutes of a "World Union of Freemasons and Elders of Zion." No such body existed.

 

1905: Nilus and the Antichrist

In 1905, the Russian mystic Sergei Nilus included the Protocols as an appendix to his book The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth. According to USHMM, Nilus presented Jews "as agents of satanic forces."

 

Nilus's book was not the only version. Scholars who have compared the early texts identify several distinct Russian versions dating from 1903 to 1905, according to a review of the historian Cesare G. De Michelis's study The Non-Existent Manuscript.

 

Who Wrote It? An Open Question

No one knows for certain who wrote the Protocols. Historians have proposed several answers:

 

  • Pavel Krushevan: USHMM notes that "Some scholars are convinced that Krushevan was the original author." The historian Steven J. Zipperstein examines Krushevan and the Kishinev pogrom in his 2018 book Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.

  • The Russian secret police: The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe describes the Protocols as originating "in circles of the Russian secret police who borrowed material from certain French and German antisemitic writings." In 1999, as JTA reported, the Russian historian Mikhail Lepekhin named Matvei (Mathieu) Golovinskii, who worked for Piotr Rachkovskii, the Paris chief of the Okhrana, the tsar's secret police.

  • Disputed theories: Other scholars question the secret-police account. De Michelis, in his 2004 book, reconstructs a Russian original of the text. Routledge, the publisher of the historian Michael Hagemeister's 2022 book The Perennial Conspiracy Theory, says it analyzes "the murky origins of this notorious forgery and the contested claims of authorship."

 

The question of authorship remains open. On one point, every serious account agrees: the Protocols is a forgery.

 

After 1917: The Forgery Goes Global

The Protocols spread far beyond Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. USHMM explains that fear of Communist revolutions reinforced one of the text's central lies, that Jews were to blame for communism. This false accusation is often called "Judeo-Bolshevism."

 

Translations followed quickly, according to USHMM:

 

  • 1919: A German-language edition appeared in Germany.

  • 1920: Editions were published in France, England, the United States and Japan.

  • 1921: Italian, Swedish and Norwegian editions appeared.

  • 1923: The Protocols was published in Poland.

  • 1925: An Arabic translation was available "in Syria by 1925."

 

Exposed: Plagiarism and "Clumsy Forgery"

The Protocols was shown to be fake soon after it reached a wide audience:

 

  • Lucien Wolf, 1920: The British journalist and diplomat published The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. He showed that ideas in the Protocols came from Biarritz (1868), a German novel by Hermann Goedsche, who wrote under the pen name "John Retcliffe."

  • The Times, August 1921: The Times (London) showed that much of the Protocols was copied from Maurice Joly's Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864), a French political satire that, as USHMM notes, does not mention Jews. The paper called the Protocols a "fake" and a "clumsy forgery." Its reporter, Philip Graves, printed passages from the two texts side by side; USHMM dates one of his articles August 17, 1921. The Times then reprinted the exposé as a pamphlet, The Truth about "The Protocols": A Literary Forgery.

  • Herman Bernstein, 1921: In The History of a Lie, the New York Herald reporter called the Protocols "a cruel and terrible lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people."

  • Benjamin Segel, 1924: The journalist, working in Germany, published another book exposing the Protocols as a forgery.

 

Henry Ford and The International Jew

In the United States, the forgery reached a mass audience through the automaker Henry Ford. On May 22, 1920, his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, began a series under the banner headline "The International Jew: The World's Problem." USHMM notes that the first article drew directly on ideas from the Protocols. Ford ordered the series stopped in January 1922.

 

The articles were reissued as books under the title The International Jew. According to USHMM's article on the Protocols, the book sold more than 500,000 copies and was translated into at least 16 languages. After a libel case against Ford, Sapiro v. Ford, ended in a mistrial, Ford signed an apology drafted by the attorney Louis Marshall. It "was published in multiple newspapers on July 8, 1927," USHMM reports. Ford also told overseas publishers to stop printing the book. They ignored him. For the newspaper side of this story, see Media Control.

 

In Nazi Germany

During the early 1920s, Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi Party thinker, introduced Adolf Hitler to the Protocols, according to USHMM. Hitler wrote about the book in Mein Kampf (1925). In 1929, the Nazi Party secured the copyright to the 1919 German-language edition. By 1938, the party's central publishing house, Franz Eher Verlag, had issued the Protocols 22 times, USHMM reports. The Nazi introduction to a 1938 Eher edition survives in English translation in Calvin University's German Propaganda Archive.

 

Nazi leaders knew the text was not genuine. In his diary in 1924, Joseph Goebbels, later the Nazi propaganda minister, called the Protocols a forgery. He then wrote, "I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols." What mattered to him, USHMM explains, was that the Protocols could advance the Nazis' antisemitic agenda.

 

Nazi propaganda carried the Protocols' lies far beyond the book itself. USHMM notes that Julius Streicher's newspaper Der Stürmer "ran many stories during the 1930s that relied on ideas included in the Protocols." USHMM also cautions that "most Germans likely did not read the Protocols." Instead, they would have known its lies "from relentless Nazi propaganda campaigns." Nazi educators did push antisemitism across the curriculum. A 1937 pamphlet for teachers from Streicher's publishing house, Fritz Fink's The Jewish Question in Education, urged that "the Jewish question" must "run like a red thread through education at every level."

 

The use of the Protocols continued during the war. In 1943, after millions of Jews had already been murdered in the Holocaust, German authorities published editions in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.

 

On Trial

In the 1930s, people who spread the Protocols outside Germany were challenged in court:

 

  • Grahamstown, South Africa, 1934: Leaders of a group of South African Nazi sympathizers, known as the "Greyshirts," were sued for circulating a document that resembled the Protocols. According to USHMM, a division of the South African Supreme Court ruled that the Protocols was a "defamatory document."

  • Bern, Switzerland, 1933–1935: In 1933, two Jewish organizations filed a lawsuit over the distribution of the Protocols by members of the Swiss National Front, which USHMM describes as a Nazi group. In 1935, the court ruled against the defendants, and the presiding judge called the Protocols "ridiculous nonsense." The University of Bern notes that the judge, Walter Meyer, fined the two defendants 50 and 20 francs under a cantonal law against "trash literature."

  • The appeal, 1937: According to the University of Bern, a higher court in 1937 lifted the fines, ruling that the trash-literature law did not cover political texts. It did not lift the defendants' costs, and it did not endorse the Protocols.

 

After the Holocaust

Exposure did not end the forgery's career. USHMM records how it continued:

 

  • The U.S. Senate, 1964: A Senate subcommittee report called the Protocols "a vicious hoax" and "gibberish."

  • The Hamas charter, 1988: Article 32 of the Hamas charter cites the Protocols (see October 7, 2023).

  • Russia, 1993: A Russian court ruled that the Protocols is a forgery.

  • Television, 2002 and 2003: A 41-part Egyptian television series in 2002 and a 2003 series on Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV drew on the Protocols.

  • COVID-19, 2020: Versions of the Protocols were used to blame Jews for the pandemic.

  • Russia, 2024: According to USHMM, a 2024 U.S. State Department report says the Protocols "retains significant influence in Russia."

  • Holocaust denial: USHMM notes that "Some recent versions of the Protocols deny that the Holocaust happened."

 

Why the Protocols Is False

The evidence against the Protocols is overwhelming:

 

  • It is copied: The Times showed in 1921 that much of the text came from Joly's 1864 satire, which does not mention Jews. Lucien Wolf traced other ideas to Goedsche's novel Biarritz.

  • The meetings never happened: USHMM states that the meetings "never took place" and the Elders of Zion "never existed." The claim that the text records the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel is "not true."

  • Its promoters knew: Goebbels called the Protocols a forgery in his own diary, yet said he believed in its "inner" truth.

  • Courts and governments rejected it: A South African court called it a "defamatory document," a Swiss judge called it "ridiculous nonsense," a U.S. Senate subcommittee called it "a vicious hoax," and a Russian court ruled it a forgery.

 

Why It Still Matters

The Protocols has survived every exposure because it tells a simple story. USHMM observes that its appeal "relies on its ability to provide simple explanations to a complex world." Wars, revolutions, economic crises and pandemics are hard to understand. The Protocols offers a single, false answer: blame the Jews.

 

That is why the forgery keeps being adapted to new events. The working definition of antisemitism used by the U.S. State Department lists "the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy" as an example of antisemitism. The Protocols, the most widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times, is that myth in book form.

 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion began as a newspaper serial in St. Petersburg in 1903, built from borrowed fiction and old hatreds. It was exposed as a forgery in 1921, rejected by courts and governments, and still spread by Henry Ford, the Nazi regime and many others. It is not a record of anything real. Recognizing it, in whatever form it appears, is the first step toward rejecting it.

 

Sources

Last updated: October 3, 2026

bottom of page