Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  Everywhere peoples stared out of the abyss, their certainties and traditions replaced by extreme anxiety and dangerous novelty. The experience of war, so totally brutalizing and massive in its industrial scale, had shaken their faith in progress itself. The technologies that were supposed to bring comfort and prosperity had instead brought death and unbelievable destruction. No one, save a few eccentric doomsayers, had entered the war imagining its catastrophic consequences. Not the intellectuals, not the generals, not the leaders, the philosophers, or the clerics. How, then, should they now make sense of the world?

  People could have blamed themselves. Many had tolerated or encouraged their governments in arms races, in belligerent patriotism, in imperial ambitions, in bellicose diplomacy and egoism. Journalists and writers had embraced the prospect of conflict—conflict in which one’s own side was inevitably victorious and one’s troops would be home by Christmas. Those who had argued loudest against war had been the most reviled. The people of 1919, however, were no more likely to point the finger of blame at themselves than we are today, we who enjoy universal adult franchise, a free press, and the free exchange of information. Instead, they looked elsewhere. They had, it seemed, been badly led, politically and militarily. Some went as far as to believe they had been actively duped, fooled, lied to, and, where defeated, betrayed.

  For the socialist and Marxist left, the culprit was obvious. Imperialism was to blame, an imperialism fostered by the insatiable demand by business interests for cheap raw materials, new markets, and vast profits. Who, after all, had gained from the four years of warfare? Men in top hats with currency signs on them, men from Krupp, Vickers, and Nobel, men with access to the highest reaches of government. The industrialists had effectively encouraged the carnage to begin and had then kept it going, making fortunes from the slaughter. You had to look no further than them and their agents; monopoly capitalism was the hidden hand.

  For many people, however, capitalism was an abstraction. They needed to find a group that appeared to have benefited from the war and the revolutions that followed it. For if they had benefited (and were still benefiting), might they not also have helped bring this situation about?

  The Jews

  It did not seem ludicrous to the conservative man or woman of 1919 to suspect the Jews. Unlike most peoples, the Jews were international, living in every country and apparently holding positions of influence and wealth in almost all of them. But though they were omnipresent, they were also aloof, and though ubiquitous in public life, they were separate in the private domain. With their archaic language of worship, their aversion to mixed marriages, their extreme attachment to education, they gave the impression of being heirs to a great secret.

  What was more, throughout history the Jews could be found standing next to—or just behind—the agents of radical change. It was pointed out by many right-wing writers and amateur historians that one of Oliver Cromwell’s earliest acts, after executing Charles I, was to readmit Jews into England, whence they had been banished nearly four hundred years earlier, and that both the American and French Revolutions, with their advocacy of the rights of man, had released Jews from previous restrictions. Napoleon’s conquests had been followed by Jewish emancipation, and in 1806, the Corsican tyrant had even convened the Grand Sanhedrin, a gathering of notable European Jews. Jews had been prominent in the bourgeois and nationalist revolutions of 1848, in the Paris Commune of 1871, and in the 1905 revolution in Russia.

  But it was not just a matter of political radicalism. Jewish banks had financed the Industrial Revolution; Jewish entrepreneurs were at the forefront of the revolution in retailing, their names to be found on the fronts of great department stores. During the second half of the nineteenth century, public Jews like Disraeli and fictional Jews like Trollope’s adventurer Melmotte in The Way We Live Now excited public opinion with their political and economic activities. The large populations of ordinary, poor, or illiterate Jews mostly failed to register. In proportion to their numbers, it was said, the Jews did incredibly well.

  For the most part, this was seen as a product of the character of the Jewish community—family-oriented, cosmopolitan, and ambitious. There had always been that strain in European conservatism, however, which, observing that the natural order of things was being subverted by progress and radicalism, preferred a more organized explanation. They suggested that secret societies had been behind the major upheavals of the past century or so: the Freemasons had been the organizing force behind undermining the eighteenth-century ancien régime; a secret body called the Illuminati had been involved in French Jacobinism and the revolution; and the Jews and Freemasons working together were responsible for the Year of Revolutions in 1848. There was some historical basis for these beliefs. In the early stages of the movement for Italian unity, for example, secret societies known as the Carbonari (charcoal burners) had indeed met in dark forests, sworn horrible oaths, and conspired against foreign occupiers and petty kings. As the century ended, real anarchists with bombs and guns hatched plots to kill prime ministers and blow up emperors, sometimes with real success. So the idea of a more ambitious conspiracy seemed not so very far-fetched, and the possibility that the Jews might act in concert to achieve particular objectives not so very eccentric.

  What brought the two ideas together was the Russian Revolution of October 1917. From the beginning, it was evident that a large number of those most active in the building of the new Soviet Russia were Jews. Persecuted under the tsars and subject to occasional massacres, known as pogroms, whenever there was political unrest in the empire, Jews had tended, naturally enough, to side with the reforming or revolutionary left, which promised an end to repression. In fact, the Bolsheviks had relatively few Jews in senior positions, in contrast to their allies the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were led by men and women from Jewish families. These few, however, caught the eye. There was Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) at the head of the Red Army; Grigory Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), boss of the revolution-spreading Comintern; and Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) at Lenin’s right hand.

  The supposed prominence of the Jews in Soviet Russia was remarked upon by the professional diplomats working for the British Foreign Office. In 1919, the British ambassador in Copenhagen, Lord Kilmarnock, wrote to Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon that most Bolsheviks, as far as he could see, were either Germans or Jews. In the same year, an official report published by the Foreign Office contained observations made in a dispatch by the Reverend B. S. Lombard, a naval chaplain serving in Russia. The revolutionary movement, Lombard claimed, “originated in German propaganda and was, and is being carried out by international Jews.” Lombard had also been ashore in Russia and seen the consequences of Red control over certain towns. “All business becomes paralyzed,” he wrote, “shops were closed, Jews became possessors of most of the business houses.”1

  American diplomats were telling their bosses much the same thing. Documents from the State Department archives include a file dealing with the relationship between Jewish financial interests and the Russian Revolution. The main document, “Bolshevism and Judaism,” dated November 13, 1918, is a report stating that a Bolshevik takeover had been planned in early 1916, and listing ten or so Jewish companies whom the report’s author, an employee of the U.S. War Trade Board, believed to have been involved. Also in the file are a number of cables sent between the State Department and the American embassy in London. One, which illustrates how this perception was commonplace among Western diplomats, is worth quoting in full.

  October 16, 1919 In Confidential File. Secret for Winslow from Wright. Financial aid to Bolshevism & Bolshevik Revolution in Russia from prominent Am. Jews: Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Otto Kahn, Mendell Schiff, Jerome Hanauer, Max Breitung & one of the Guggenheims. Document re—in possession of Brit. police authorities from French sources.2

  The perception that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution informed the opinions of some of the most illustrious political figures of the time,
even in phlegmatic Britain. On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill contributed an article to the Illustrated Sunday Herald. In it he addressed the threat from Bolshevism. “This worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstruction of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality has been steadily growing,” he warned readers. And as to who was behind it: “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.”3

  In the minds of some, then, including a certain former corporal in the German army who, a thousand kilometers away in Munich, was saying similar things but with rather more venom, the notion that the Jews were behind the war and revolutions that had traumatized Europe began to take root. But this suspicion was as nothing compared to the conspiracy that others were suggesting might be at the heart of things.

  Enter the Protocols

  “Since the autumn of 1919,” wrote a commentator seven years later, “a remarkable book has been circulating in Germany, the civilized countries of Europe and America.”4 This book was titled Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion—in English, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and it contained within it the missing link between the events that had turned the world upside down and the Jews who seemed so prominent in upending it. It was what would now be called the smoking gun.

  What were the Protocols? They consisted of eighty pages or so of instructions and observations with the amibitious goal of destroying all existing powers—empires, kingdoms, churches—and establishing a new world empire ruled by a supreme Jewish autocrat from the House of David. Getting to this hyperexalted point required the fomenting of class hatred, the provoking of wars, the incitement of revolutions, the discrediting of national institutions, and the promotion of liberalism to undermine traditional values and loyalties. This would lead to socialism, then Bolshevism; states would die and eventually the world would cry out for order. And when it did, guess who (with the help of the Freemasons) would be ready? The true, supreme—and Jewish—government of the world.

  Set out under twenty-four headings, the Protocols now read like a series of lectures given to a senior management team by a very determined CEO, and much of what is said is couched in lofty abstraction. Toward the beginning of Protocol One, for example, we are told, “It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorisation than by academic discussions.” You can almost imagine a number of the supposed plotters nodding along, and some of the more conscientious or junior elders noting it all down on the paper provided.

  Taken together, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion amounts to the ultimate election manifesto. There are sections on foreign policy, security, armaments, monopolies, the press, tax policy, and education. But this is a manifesto expressly designed to be hidden from the electorate. It is relentlessly Machiavellian in tone, calculating how to use the weakness of men for the ends of the would-be rulers. Take Protocol Twelve, on the control of the press. As the speaker says, “Literature and journalism are two of the most important educative forces, and therefore our government [the Jews] will become proprietor of the majority of the journals . . . This, however, must in nowise be suspected by the public.” But how do you divert such suspicions?

  All journals published by us will be of the most opposite in appearance, tendencies and opinions, thereby creating confidence in us and bringing over to us our quite unsuspicious opponents, who will thus fall into our trap and be rendered harmless . . . All our newspapers will be of all possible complexions—aristocratic, republican, revolutionary, even anarchical . . . Like the Indian pagan god Vishnu, they will have one hundred hands and in each shall beat the pulse of a different intellectual tendency.5

  There is also a call, not made even by the most liberal Swedish or Dutch party today, for more pornography. “Senseless, filthy, abominable literature” should be disseminated by the conspirators, so as “to provide a telling relief by contrast to the speeches and party programs, which will be distributed from exalted quarters of ours.” So the pill of seriousness will be sweetened by the honey of smut, a kind of infernal Reithianism.

  But if the Protocols were indeed born out of a meeting or a series of lectures, who exactly delivered them, when, and where? The German editor of the edition in circulation in 1919 was one Gottfried zur Beek—the pen name of a seventy-year-old former army officer, Captain Ludwig Müller von Hausen, who had dedicated the work “To the Princes of Europe.” In the introduction to his edition, zur Beek explains how he came by the text. History records that in August 1897, in the Swiss city of Basel, the First Zionist Congress was held. What wasn’t recorded, he says, was that alongside the official plenaries, which were open to all and which discussed the question of a homeland for the dispersed Jewish people, there were twenty-four secret sessions. At these sessions, Dr. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, presided, and it was he who delivered the Protocols—a distillation of the wisdom of ages—much as Moses delivered the Commandments.

  Of course, the very last thing that such a clandestine meeting would have wanted was the publication of a record of its deliberations. Unfortunately, some men have a price. After the congress finished, an emissary of the elders, en route to God knows where, took a manuscript of the lectures to a Masonic lodge in Frankfurt am Main. Waiting at the lodge was an agent of the Russian secret police and a crack team of transcribers. In return for payment, the emissary gave the agent one night to copy the Protocols in their original language, presumably Hebrew. In the morning, he collected his sensational cargo and disappeared from history. The copied manuscript itself was taken back to Russia, where it was recopied and given to scholars for translation and study.

  For some reason—and oddly, given the extraordinary contents of the manuscript—this process took an inordinate amount of time. It was only in 1905, according to zur Beek, that a certain Sergei Nilus, described as a scholar from Moscow, published a book, The Great in the Small, that consisted mostly of the views of a pious Orthodox conservative on the imminence of the coming of the Antichrist. The Protocols were to be found as one of its appendices. As the book went through subsequent editions in 1911, 1912, and 1917, the protocols became more prominent. Zur Beek’s book claimed to be based on the 1911 Nilus edition, brought to Germany after the Russian Revolution by anti-Bolshevik exiles.

  One reason for the slow burn before the book came to widespread attention might be that it wasn’t until after the Russian Revolution that it could be seen as prophetic. Nilus himself, though, had always understood the connection between the writings and real life. In the introduction to the 1911 edition, he anticipated: “The educated non-Jewish reader will see in his daily life and in the lightning-like events that have struck Russia and all of Europe a fullness of evidence for the authenticity of the Protocols.” By 1919, he was right. Zur Beek’s edition was followed by the publication of a Polish version in Warsaw, three French translations, an English version, three separate publications in America, and more in Scandinavia, Italy, and Japan. In 1925, following the publication of an Arabic version, the Latin patriarch in Jerusalem praised the work and called upon Christians to buy it.c What had been discovered appeared to be, in the words of the American academic Richard S. Levy, who has made a study of the Protocols, “the veritable Rosetta Stone of history.”6 It suddenly explained everything.

  The Protocols on the Move

  Nowhere had they been more anxious for that explanation than in Germany. Within weeks of zur Beek’s publication, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was circulating in the highest echelons of the old Reich. Prince Otto zu Salm-Horstmar, who in July 1918 had already called attention to the links between the Jews and the Freemasons in the German parliament, was an influential sponsor, as was the chair
man of the Conservative Party in the Prussian upper house, Count Behr. Prince Joachim Albrecht of Prussia, youngest son of the abdicated kaiser, would strew the restaurants and luxury hotels that he visited with copies of zur Beek’s book. And when Lady Norah Bentinck visited Wilhelm II in exile in Doorn in the Netherlands, she found the former emperor recommending it to his guests and reading individual chapters out loud after dinner.7 It must have been a relief to the kaiser to discover that, contrary to Allied propaganda, it was not he who had started the First World War but somebody else.