The Jew and American Ideals

by John Spargo

Is it necessary, I wonder, to waste words in exposing this pious fraud? His own statement comes pretty close to convicting him of being, as I have suggested above, a hireling of the Secret Police, an agent provocateur. Sukhotin, from whom he now claims to have received the manuscript, was a notorious anti-Semite and a despot of the worst type. Sipiagin, to whom, it is alleged, the manuscript had been previously given, was also a bitter anti-Semite and one of the most infamous of Russian bureaucrats. He was notoriously corrupt and unspeakably cruel while he was Minister of the Interior. He was assassinated by Stephen Balmashev, in March, 1902. Even if we credit this revised version of the way in which he came into possession of the manuscript, Nilus is closely identified with the secret agencies of the old regime. Let us take note, however, of other peculiarities of the canting hypocrite, Nilus. He names Sukhotin and Sipiagin only after they are dead and denial by them is impossible; he has "forgotten" the name of the "noblewoman from Tshernigov," the person alleged to have stolen the original documents; he suggests that the documents need no other evidence than their own contents. Truly, a very typical criminal is the mysterious, elusive, unknown "Prof. Sergei Nilus"!

Now let me call attention to two other very interesting facts in connection with this story of 1917. The first is that Nilus omits the very important statement made in the edition of 1905 that the alleged protocols were "signed by representatives of Zion of the Thirty-third Degree," without offering the slightest explanation of that most important omission. The second fact is even more conclusive as evidence of the man's absolute untrustworthiness. Having told us in the edition of 1905 that the friend who gave him the protocols assured him that they had been "stolen by a woman," and in 1917 that it was Nicholaievich Sukhotin from whom he received the documents, who not only told him that they had been stolen by a woman, but told him also the name of the thief (which he has forgotten, unfortunately), he proceeds, in the Epilogue of the 1917 edition, to tell a very different story. He says in this Epilogue that the protocols "were stealthily removed from a large book of notes on lectures. My friend found them in the safe of the headquarters offices of the Society of Zion, which is situated at present in Paris."

Was ever perjurer more confused? First we have an unknown woman stealing the documents from "one of the most highly initiated leaders of Freemasonry"; next, we have a "noblewoman of Tshernigov" as the thief and Sukhotin as the intermediary through whose hands they reached his friend Nilus. Now, finally, Nilus says that his friend—i.e., Sukhotin—was the thief, and not a woman at all! Instead of being stolen from the person of "one of the most highly initiated leaders of Freemasonry," they are "found" in a safe in Paris! The woman has disappeared; the highly initiated Freemason has disappeared. Now it is Sukhotin who is identified as the thief, and he is pointed out as having robbed a safe in Paris. So much for the perjury of Nilus. I may add that I am assured—though I cannot vouch for the statement—that Sukhotin was not outside of Russia between 1890 and 1905.

But it may be argued, as it has been argued in the Dearborn Independent following the suggestion of Nilus—that the authenticity of the protocols, and the reality and seriousness of the Jewish conspiracy, are sufficiently demonstrated by internal evidence. I confess that I do not find in the documents any reason for reaching such a conclusion, though I have studied them with all the patience and care I could command, and have read the principal arguments made in their defense. I find not a scrap of evidence to show that there exists, or ever has existed, such a body of men as "The Elders of Zion," or "The Men of Wisdom of Zion," or any similar secret body of Jews. That such a secret conspiratory body exists has been charged from time to time during more than a century, yet not a particle of evidence to sustain the charge has ever been produced. I am quite well aware of the capacity of the human mind to believe whatever accords with preconceived prejudices, suspicions, or impressions, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, and, correspondingly, to reject the most conclusive evidence when it runs counter to such prejudices, suspicions, or impressions. Laying upon my own mind the warning implied by this knowledge, and guarding myself against the danger of rejecting, or ignoring, or undervaluing unpleasant and unwelcome facts, I am bound to say that those who find in these alleged protocols a sufficient basis for bringing the Jewish race under indictment seem to me to have brought preconceived suspicion and fear of the Jew to their study of the documents themselves. Personally, I can find nothing in them which suggests any highly organized intelligence, such as the leaders of the Jewish race represent and command in abundance; rather, they seem to me to clearly indicate the disordered mind and distorted vision of a very common type of monomaniac, the genus "crank."

I believe that historical study is not one of Mr. Ford's strong points, but, even so, he must be aware of the fact that it is one of the commonest things in history to encounter charges of conspiracy directed against religious and political sects, supported by more or less plausible arguments and believed by considerable numbers of people. Were it necessary to my purpose, and did time permit, I could quite easily fill a considerable volume with illustrations of this fact. For example, there exists a great literature devoted to the object of proving that the Vatican is the headquarters of such a conspiracy to bring about or to attain world domination. Thousands of books and pamphlets have been written to convict the Jesuits of such a conspiracy, many of them far more convincing than these protocols. Pamphlets aiming to convince the American people that the Knights of Columbus is an organization aiming at the overthrow of the American Republic and the establishment of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope over the United States have been circulated by the million. It is a matter of court record that this charge has been supported by the publication of what purported to be exact copies of oaths pledging the members of that organization to the end stated. Let me say at once that I do not credit these sensational stories and charges. I have confined myself to charges made against one of the two great sections of Christianity for reasons which seem to me peculiarly cogent. The charges made against the Jews have produced the most terrible results in the countries where the Roman Catholic Church is strongest, and no leader of the Christian religion has such strong reason for denouncing such appeals to prejudice and hatred as the head of that Church.

Belief in widespread conspiracies directed against individuals or the state is probably the commonest form assumed by the human mind when it loses its balance and its sense of proportion. I venture to hazard the opinion that of all the cranks who have pestered Mr. Ford since he has attained a conspicuous position, those who imagined themselves to be the victims of conspiracies have outnumbered all the others. These protocols are either preposterous forgeries deliberately wrought for the purpose of fostering anti-Semitism in Russia, or they are the pitiable ravings of a familiar type of monomaniac.

Concerning the authorship of the protocols, there has been much conjecture, especially on the part of those who have seriously regarded them as an authentic expression of Jewish opinion. It has been whispered in those places where the so-called Jewish question is discussed, that they are the work of the well-known Zionist leader, Dr. Theodor Herzl. This is the theory which Nilus himself advances in the introduction to the edition of 1917. He says:

... 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 to the Councils of Elders by the "Prince of Exile," Theodor Herzl, during the first Zionist Congress, summoned by him in August, 1897, in Basle.

This is the first time Nilus has so much as hinted at the date of the alleged secret conclave of the Elders of Zion, at the close of which, according to the story of 1905 so elaborately contradicted in 1917, the protocols were stolen by a woman. It is perhaps as well to remark in passing that the first Zionist Congress was held in the open and its proceedings freely reported in the press. Now, Herzl stands among the foremost of the intellectual Jews of modern times. All his known work is characterized by clear, clean-cut reasoning and direct and forceful statement. All his known writings are characterized by these qualities. Whatever we may think about Zionism, it must be admitted that the great Austrian journalist and critic never lacked the courage of his convictions, as may be seen by anybody who will take the trouble to read his writings or the evidence delivered by him before the British Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, in 1902. If Herzl wrote these documents he adopted the disguise of the style and method of a much inferior mentality.

Unless we are to believe that he deliberately adopted a style of writing and method of reasoning entirely unfamiliar and unlike his publicly acknowledged work, for the express purpose of hiding his authorship of the protocols—which, if we credit the story that they were presented to a secret conference of the leaders of the alleged conspiracy, is an impossible hypothesis—we are warranted in saying that, whoever wrote them, it was not Theodor Herzl. It would be as reasonable to ascribe a Walt Whitman chant to Emerson, or a Bernard Shaw satire to Jonathan Edwards, as to ascribe these crude, meandering pages to the crystalline intellect of Theodor Herzl. I do not find in them any suggestion of the trained mind of a scholar and writer of Herzl's attainments; rather, they seem to me to belong in about the same intellectual category as the ordinary propaganda literature of the numerous sects, ancient and modern, based upon peculiar interpretations of Biblical prophecies. Since the outbreak of the World War in 1914, and throughout the whole chapter of revolutionary events following thereupon, there has been a steady flood of such literature. Even the much-discussed forecast of Bolshevism does not in any material respect differ from many similar "prophecies" that have appeared in recent years.