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 identity 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 scrapheap 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 assured Germany’s defeat; while in some of the allied countries the Jews are denounced for constituting “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 documentary 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.
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 titles, in different versions, it was reproduced in the United States, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and even Japan. The Japanese 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 “documents” 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, Japan 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 passions, insinuating, accusing, pointing their fingers at “the source of all evil”—at the Jews who constitute 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 documents 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.
The 1917 edition is published with a prologue and an epilogue, like a drama, which indeed it is, with all the ingredients of melodrama—a villain, a mysterious woman, a Grand Duke, a conspiracy to destroy the world, and a saint—Nilus, who convicts himself in his own writings of falsification in the giving of these various accounts of how the Protocols came into his possession.
Nothing is known of Sergius Nilus. Russian standard reference books and encyclopedias contain no mention of his name.
The anonymous American editor of the Nilus book gives the following information about Nilus:
“Serge Nilus, in the 1905 edition of whose book was first published the Zionist Protocols, was, as he states, born in the year 1862, of Russian parents holding liberal opinions. His family was fairly well known in Moscow, for its members were educated people who were firm in their allegiance to the Tsar and the Greek Church. On one side he is said to have been connected by marriage with the nobility of the Baltic provinces. Nilus himself was graduated from the University of Moscow and early entered the civil service, obtaining a small appointment in the law courts. Later, he received a post under the Procurator of a provincial court in the Caucasus. Finally, tiring of the law, he went to the Government of Orel, where he was a landowner and a noble. His spiritual life had been tumultuous and full of trouble, and finally he entered the Troitsky-Sergevsky Monastery near Moscow. ‘In answer to his appeal for pardon, Saint Sergei, stern and angry, appeared to him twice in a vision. He left the Monastery a converted man.’
“From 1905 until the present, little is known of his activities. Articles are said to have appeared from time to time in the Russian press from his pen. A returning traveller from Siberia in August, 1919, was positive in his statement that Nilus was in Irkutsk in June of that year. Whether his final fate was that of Admiral Kolchak is not known.”
The American editor of Sergius Nilus’s book containing the “Protocols” is hiding behind anonymity. The name of the traveller from Siberia who was so positive in his statement that Nilus was in Irkutsk is also concealed. And Serge Nilus to whom Saint Sergei “appeared twice in a vision” “is said to have written articles in the Russian press” of which nobody has knowledge.
In Germany, Nilus is described as follows:
“Sergius Nilus was an employee of the Russian secret police department, of the okhrana, connected with the Church, especially relating to ‘foreign religions.’ He lived for some time at the Optina Pustina monastery. In 1901 he published a book entitled ‘The Great in the Small and the Anti-Christ.’ According to the Lutsch Sveta, Nilus claims to have received in 1901 a copy of the text of the Protocols from the secret archives of the Main Zionist organization in France, but he published the ‘protocols’ only in 1905. A second edition appeared in 1911, and finally another edition was brought out in the beginning of 1917, but all copies are said to have been destroyed.”
“The Cause of the World Unrest,” an anonymous book published in England and reprinted in this country, speaks of Nilus and the “Protocols” as follows:
“In the year 1903 a Russian, Serge Nilus, published a book entitled The Great in Little. The second edition, which was published at Tsarskoye Selo in 1905, had an additional chapter, the twelfth, under the heading ‘Anti-Christ as a Near Political Possibility.’ This chapter consisted of some twenty pages of introduction followed by the text of twenty-four ‘Protocols of Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion,’ and the book ends with some twenty pages of commentaries on these protocols by Nilus.
“Directly after the protocols, comes a statement by Nilus that they are ‘signed by representatives of Zion of the thirty-third degree.’ These protocols were secretly extracted or were stolen from a whole volume of protocols. All this was got by my correspondent out of the secret depositories of the Head Chancellery of Zion. This Chancellery is at present on French territory.”
In the edition of 1917 Sergius Nilus wrote:
“My book has already reached the fourth edition, but it is only definitely known to me now and in a manner worthy of belief, and that through Jewish sources, that these protocols are nothing other than the strategic plans for the conquest of the world under the heel of Israel, and worked out by the leaders of the Jewish people—and read by the ‘Prince of Exile,’ Theodor Herzl, during the first Zionist Congress, summoned by him in August, 1897, in Basle.”
It will be shown later that the so-called Butmi edition of the “protocols” published in 1907 contains the definite statement of the man who claims to have translated them into Russian from the French in 1901 that the Elders of Zion mentioned in the Protocols are not to be confounded with the Zionist movement.
In the 1917 edition Sergius Nilus wrote:
“In 1901 I came into possession of a manuscript, and this comparatively small book was destined to cause a deep change in my entire viewpoint as can only be caused in the heart of man by Divine Power. It was comparable with the miracle of making the blind see. ‘May Divine acts show on him.’
“This manuscript was called ‘the protocols of the Zionist Men of Wisdom,’ and it was given to me by the now deceased leader of the Tchernigov nobility, who later became vice-governor of Stavropol, Alexis Nikolayevitch Sukhotin. I had already begun to work with my pen for the glory of the Lord, and I was friendly with Sukhotin. He was a man of my opinion, that is, extremely conservative, as they are now termed.
“Sukhotin told me that he in turn had obtained the manuscript from a lady who always lived abroad. This lady was a noblewoman from Tchernigov. He mentioned her by name, but I have forgotten it. He said that she obtained it in some mysterious way, by theft, I believe.
“Sukhotin also said that one copy of the manuscript was given by this lady to Sipiagin, the Minister of the Interior, upon her return from abroad, and that Sipiagin was subsequently killed. He said other things of the same mysterious character. But when I first became acquainted with the contents of the manuscript I was convinced that its terrible, cruel and straight-forward truth is witness of its true origin from the ‘Zionist Men of Wisdom,’ and that no other evidence of its origin would be needed.”
Feodor Roditchev, one of Russia’s most famous liberals, a member of the nobility, a former member of the Duma, writing recently of the Nilus protocols and of Sukhotin whom Nilus described as a man of his own opinion, says:
“For months I hear on all sides about the Nilus book and its success in England, and I am asked, Who is Nilus? There was a Nilus, an associate justice of the Moscow District Court. It is said that the manuscript was given to Nilus by Sukhotin, the notorious zemstvo official of Chernsk.
“The Berlin edition contains no mention of Sukhotin, but in that edition Nilus said, ‘Pray for the soul of the boyar Alexis.’
“The name of the notorious Alexey Nikolayevitch Sukhotin means nothing to the present generation. But there was a time when his name attracted attention.
“Sukhotin arrested the peasants of a whole village for refusing to cart manure from his stables because the animals there were infected with glanders. Judge Tsurikov released the peasants. Tsurikov was removed for this, while Sukhotin justified his act by writing to the Minister of the Interior, Durnovo, that he had arrested the peasants not because they refused to cart his manure but because they dared disobey him as a zemstvo official. The reactionary Chernsk nobility made Sukhotin marshal of nobility. So it was this man who furnished the protocols of the secret meetings of the representatives of Zion! But how did Sukhotin get the protocols? An unknown friend had brought them to him. They were given to him by an unknown lady who had received them from an unknown but energetic participant in the Basle Congress. Is this credible? Well, then, there is another version of the origin of the protocols—but that is for the German readers. The Russian government sent a spy to the Basle Congress. He did not go to the Congress himself, but bribed one of the participants. He was carrying the protocols from Basle to Frankfurt to the local masonic organization. He stopped on the way in a little town, and gave the protocols to the spy. He engaged copyists who worked all night and copied the protocols.
“In the first Russian version the protocols were supposed to have been brought to Russia in French. According to the German version, the protocols were copied, consequently they were in German, but the most important thing is that the protocols are not protocols at all, but a monograph—which could be called ‘the dream of a member of the Black Hundreds.’ ”
A distinguished Russian publicist says of the sponsor of the “protocols” as follows:
“In Russia the problems of Christianity and Judaism have been studied by such men as Vladimir Solovyov, Professor Troitzky, Professor Kokovtsev, Kartashov, Bulgakov, Berdyayev—men