In spite of the urgency of impartial and exhaustive criticism, the pamphlet has been allowed, so far, to pass almost unchallenged. The Jewish Press announced, it is true, that the anti-Semitism of the “Jewish Peril” was going to be exposed. But save for an unsatisfactory article in the March 5 issue of the Jewish Guardian, and for an almost equally unsatisfactory contribution to the Nation of March 27, this exposure is yet to come. The article of the Jewish Guardian is unsatisfactory, because it deals mainly with the personality of the author of the book in which the pamphlet is embodied, with Russian reactionary propaganda, and the Russian secret police. It does not touch the substance of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” The purely Russian side of the book and its fervid “Orthodoxy” is not its most interesting feature. Its author, Professor S. Nilus, who was a minor official in the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, had, in all likelihood, opportunities of access to many archives and unpublished documents. On the other hand, the world-wide issue raised by the “Protocols” which he incorporated in his book and are now translated into English as “The Jewish Peril,” cannot fail not only to interest, but to preoccupy. What are the theses of the “Protocols” with which, in the absence of public criticism, British readers have to grapple alone and unaided? They are, roughly:—
(1) There is, and has been for centuries, a secret international political organization of the Jews.
(2) The spirit of this organization appears to be an undying traditional hatred of the Christian world, and a titanic ambition for world domination.
(3) The goal relentlessly pursued through centuries is the destruction of the Christian national States, and the substitution for them of an international Jewish dominion.
(4) The method adopted for first weakening and then destroying existing bodies politic is the infusion of disintegrating political ideas of carefully measured progressive disruptive force, from liberalism to radicalism, and socialism to communism, culminating in anarchy as a reductio ad absurdum of egalitarian principles. Meanwhile Jewry remains immune from these corrosive doctrines. “We preach Liberalism to the Gentiles, but on the other hand we keep our own nation in entire subjection” (page 55). Out of the welter of world anarchy, in response to the desperate clamour of distraught humanity, the stern, logical, wise, pitiless rule of “the King of the Seed of David” is to arise.
(5) Political dogmas evolved by Christian Europe, democratic statesmanship and politics, are all equally contemptible to the Elders of Zion. To them statesmanship is an exalted secret art, acquired only by traditional training, and imparted to a select few in the secrecy of some occult sanctuary. “Political problems are not meant to be understood by ordinary people; they can only be comprehended, as I have said before, by rulers who have been directing affairs for many centuries.”
(6) To this conception of statesmanship the masses are contemptible cattle, and the political leaders of the Gentiles, “upstarts from its midst as rulers, are likewise blind in politics.” They are puppets, pulled by the hidden hand of the “Elders,” puppets mostly corrupt, always inefficient; easily coaxed, or bullied, or blackmailed into submission, unconsciously furthering the advent of Jewish dominion.
(7) The Press, the theatre, stock exchange speculations, science, law itself, are, in the hands that hold all the gold, so many means of procuring a deliberate confusion and bewilderment of public opinion, demoralization of the young, and encouragement of the vices of the adult, eventually substituting, in the minds of the Gentiles, for the idealistic aspiration of Christian culture the “cash basis” and a neutrality of materialistic scepticism, or cynical lust for pleasure.
Such are the main theses of the “Protocols.” They are not altogether new, and can be found scattered throughout anti-Semitic literature. The condensed form in which they are now presented lends them a new and weird force.
Incidentally, some of the features of the would-be Jewish programme bear an uncanny resemblance to situations and events now developing under our eyes. Professor Nilus’s book was, undoubtedly, published in Russia in 1905. The copy of the original at the British Museum bears the stamp of August 10, 1906. This being so, some of the passages assume the aspect of fulfilled prophecies, unless one is inclined to attribute the prescience of the “Elders of Zion” to the fact that they really are the hidden instigators of these events. When one reads (page 8) that “it is indispensable for our plans that wars should not produce any territorial alterations,” one is most forcibly reminded of the cry, “peace without annexations” raised by all the radical parties of the world, and especially in revolutionary Russia. And again:—