Part 1 (1/2)
The History of a Lie.
by Herman Bernstein.
_FOREWORD
_This is the history of a Lie-of a cruel and terrible Lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people. Given out as fiction, by a German anti-Semitic writer, involved in the Waldeck forgery case, who concealed his ident.i.ty under the pen-name of an Englishman, it was gradually changed and elaborated, and finally groomed as fact. Agents of the Russian secret police department and of the unscrupulous ”Black Hundreds” then utilized this fiction as the framework for the ”protocols” through which they sought to crush the Jews and prop up the tottering Russian dynasty.
Tsarism destroyed itself, but the agents of Tsarism, still dreaming of their past glory and of a restoration of their privileges, are at work again, both here and abroad.
Out of the sc.r.a.pheap of Russian autocracy, they have exhumed their old weapons and are striking at the Jews again. Upon the structure of the old myths they are striving to erect new falsehoods in order to intensify everywhere chaos and confusion and dissatisfaction so that they may attain their own dastardly and selfish ends.
In the war's aftermath the Jews are being blamed by the minions of autocracy and reaction for all the ills that have befallen mankind. Some blame them for the war, and others for the peace. Some attack them for the defeat of the German military machine, and others for the victory of the allies. In Germany they are attacked by the Junkers for having opposed the submarine warfare and thus a.s.sured Germany's defeat; while in some of the allied countries the Jews are denounced for const.i.tuting ”the brains of Germany.” All the revolutionary leaders of Germany are credited to the Jews, and bolshevism, which has as little in common with Judaism as it has with Christianity, is branded as a Jewish movement; and there are Jew-baiters who in their blind madness have gone so far as to declare that ex-Kaiser Wilhelm was not only influenced by the Jews but is himself of Jewish descent, and for this reason did not defend Germany as loyally as he should have done. He conspired against the Hohenzollern dynasty and undermined it. He destroyed his own throne because he was serving the secret Jewish world organization.
On such absurdities have people been fed, since the armistice, in civilized countries by antisemitic agitators and their dupes, while Jews have been slaughtered in the Ukraine, in Poland and in Hungary.
I submit in this little book the doc.u.mentary evidence showing how the so-called ”Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” on which this new crusade is predicated, were forged._
HERMAN BERNSTEIN.
_New York, February, 1921._
CHAPTER ONE
THE MYSTERIOUS PROTOCOLS
The Lie of a Jewish World Conspiracy-Is There a Jewish Conspiracy?-Anonymous Accusations-The Mysterious ”Protocols” of Sergei Nilus-How did ”Nilus” Secure Them?-Contradictory Explanations-Who is ”Nilus”?-How his Sponsors Disagree-What Russian Publicists Say.
Is there a Jewish conspiracy against the world or is there a conspiracy against the Jews? What are the so-called ”Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion?” Who is ”the Russian mystic,” Sergius Nilus, the sponsor of the Protocols? What forces are behind the anti-Jewish propaganda that is international in scope and that seeks at this time to spread all over the world the poison of prejudice and hatred against the Jews, reviving long-exploded mediaeval legends?
Many Americans have asked these questions ever since the publication of ”The Cause of the World Unrest,” ”The Protocols and World Revolution,”
”The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,” and the anti-Jewish articles in Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent.
In 1919 a translation of extracts from what purports to be a book by one Sergius Nilus was published in Germany. During 1920 a translation was published in England under the name of ”The Jewish Peril,” and under various t.i.tles, in different versions, it was reproduced in the United States, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and even j.a.pan. The j.a.panese edition is in the Russian language. In all these books ”the Russian mystic,” Sergius Nilus, is given as the sponsor of a number of secret ”doc.u.ments” by which it is intended to show that the Jews are responsible for all the ills that have already befallen the world and that are still to come.
The method is simple. Was there a revolution in Russia? Blame the Jews.
Was there a revolution in Germany? Blame the Jews. Who made the French Revolution? The Jews. Who caused the World War? The Jews. Who profited by the war? The Jews. Is there anywhere an industrial crisis? The Jews are, of course, the cause of it. Has the World War brought forth Bolshevism? The Jews are naturally the fathers of it. First the Jews engineered the war, and then they pulled the strings behind the scenes of the Peace Conference. They secured special privileges at the Peace Table, because, according to the Protocols, they control the gold of the world, the press of the world, the rulers of the world. And if, as a result of the World War, millions of Jews have suffered untold agonies, persecution, starvation, and pogroms, it is no doubt only part of their deep-laid plot to gain control of the world for Zion through poverty and suffering!
Are governments just to the Jews, giving them equal rights? Then it is obvious that Jews are either at the head of such governments or are hidden behind the present rulers. If the Jews cannot exert sufficient influence over the rulers themselves, there are Jewesses in high places, through whom the cause of Zion is served-and all this is done by the Jews with but one aim in view-to dominate the world, to become its autocratic masters, to break down the moral power of Christendom and set up Israel as ”the despot” over the peoples of the earth. According to the Protocols, all this is engineered with the aid and through the instrumentality of the Freemasons.
The propagandists everywhere, in Germany, England, France, the Scandinavian countries, j.a.pan and the United States, basing all their arguments on the ”Protocols” vouched for by ”the Russian mystic” Sergius Nilus, see in the present chaotic conditions the absolute fulfillment of the prophecies outlined by the so-called ”Wise Men of Zion” years ago.
The propagandists are violent and vicious, foaming at their mouths, appealing to the basest pa.s.sions, insinuating, accusing, pointing their fingers at ”the source of all evil”-at the Jews who const.i.tute but a fraction of one per cent of the world's population, and who are in Europe to-day, after the close of the World War, more wretched and miserable than ever before,-persecuted, hounded and starved.
What are these mysterious Protocols? How did they come to ”the Russian mystic” who revealed them in 1905, and which have now been exhumed from obscurity for the purpose of enlightening the world, and which point to the Jews as the cause of all unrest, chaos and confusion?
Nilus, ”the Russian mystic,” is credited with several versions of how he had secured the Protocols, and his stories flatly contradict one another. In 1905 he said that the Protocols were given to him by a prominent Russian conservative whose name he did not mention, and who in turn had received them from an unnamed woman who had stolen them from ”one of the most influential leaders of Freemasonry at the close of a secret meeting of the initiated in France.” Then, several years later, Nilus wrote that his friend himself had stolen the Protocols from ”the headquarters of the Society of Zion in France.” Several years afterwards, in a new edition of his book, Nilus said that the ”Protocols” came from Switzerland and not from France. This time he named his Russian conservative friend, Sukhotin, who had died in the meantime. He added that the Protocols were not Jewish-Masonic but Zionist doc.u.ments secretly read at the Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897.
Then followed a new edition of the Nilus book bearing the date of 1917.
A translation of this edition has recently appeared in this country, containing a brand-new explanation as to how the Protocols were rescued and given to the world. This explanation is taken from the German version published in Charlottenburg. The introduction to that edition says that the Protocols, having been read from day to day at the Basle Congress, were sent as read to Frankfort on the Main. The disclosure of them came through the infidelity of the messenger.