Part II
To advance their goal of world supremacy, the Jewish elders were said to employ the slogans of the French Revolution—“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—to spread socialism and liberalism. So said the fraudulent, antisemitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This would undermine people’s faith in God and authority. The Jews would then precipitate a financial crisis and manipulate gold in order to increase prices. Ultimately, it was written, “there should be in all the States of the world, besides ourselves, only the masses of the proletariat, a few millionaires devoted to our interests, police and soldiers.” (Protocol Number 7)
Once that was accomplished, the King of the Jews, who rules the world, would insist on total submission. Historian George Mosse reminds us that this conspiratorial myth played easily into the unease and anxiety of the 19th century, linking the “ancient antisemitic legend” with the Jews in a contemporary world of major transformation.
What would happen if the Gentiles uncovered this scheme and preemptively assaulted the Jews? In this situation, the Jewish elders would retaliate by blowing up a network of underground railway tunnels that was to be built in all capitals of the world, killing residents of these cities. Mosse notes that this terrifying scenario hints at the widespread fear of modern technology at the time and of the terrorizing tales and fantasies so prevalent during the same period.
The Russian and German editors of the Protocols felt obliged to elaborate on this “ultimate weapon option,” according to historian Walter Laqueur. The Russians added a footnote assuring their readers that there were no tunnels in the country at present, “but international committees were already at work to sponsor their building.” German political scientist Theodor Fritsch observed that although rationally this was a dreadful possibility, he wanted to stress that the Jews were quite capable of using such a horrific weapon to reach their objective.
Another major concern was that the Jews would annihilate the gentiles by infecting them with diseases. This idea became so much a part of mainstream racist beliefs that it ultimately led the Nazis to resist simple inoculations. The Nazi journal Wettkampf reported in 1935 that Jews had developed inoculations to weaken Aryan blood, and cited the Protocols as proof. Racism, Mosse opines, is a fundamental “nightmare of the Protocols, because Jews were viewed as “an evil race, coherent and well organized.”
Inadvertently, the Jews helped facilitate this belief in Jewish conspiracies through their organizations, asserts Paul W. Massing, which were perceived to have ominous functions. Jewish organizations in Russia, which had all been disbanded by Czar Nicholas I in 1844m, were allegedly still working secretly with a covert Jewish government connected to foreign entities. When French Jews established the Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860 to assist Jews in North Africa, the universal name of the organization suggested a conspiratorial mission.
In addition to the Alliance, the Masons—not a Jewish organization by any stretch of the imagination—were seen as another secret conspiratorial organization led by Jews. The Protocols had connected their two respective conspiracies. Massing notes that in 1892 Hermann Ahlwardt, a former member of the German parliament, accused the Jewish weapons manufacturing firm belonging to Ludwig and Isador Lowe of having sold defective rifles to the German military. This was not a typical example of Jewish greed, Ahlwardt claimed in “Judenflinten” (“Jewish Rifles”), but this was part of the Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany in cooperation with the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, “in which high German officials were criminally implicated.”
“International Jewry did not overlook anything that could contribute to the Germany’s defeat,” Ahlwardt asserted, in its “monstrous attempt to put a rifle in the hands of the German soldier which might be usable in peace time when subjected to modest wear but which must soon break down under battle conditions. This attempt succeeded beyond expectation. Today the army already had in its possession 425,000 rifles…”
A full-fledged scandal ensued. Twenty editions of “Judenflinten” were sold out within a few weeks, Massing said. The German War Ministry, which launched an investigation, found the charges to be completely false: “a figment of his imagination from beginning to end.” The authorities confiscated the pamphlet and arrested Ahlwardt.
He was sentenced to five months in jail, after being exposed in court “as a reckless, malicious, and dishonest slanderer.” In the meantime, he had been elected to the Reichstag, which bestowed upon him parliamentary immunity and a suspended sentence.
From 1895 until World War I “when German imperialism was at its height,” the idea of the Jewish conspiracy did not gain much traction, except in Russia. Efforts to provoke concern in Paris and Germany proved futile. That would have to wait until Adolph Hitler and others, who believed in the Protocols enough to propagate its lies themselves, came to power, Massing explained.
For Hitler, the Protocols appealed to his belief in conspiracies. Being written in the form of meeting protocols further conferred upon them a considerable level of importance, according to Hitler biographer Konrad Heiden. Hitler used the Protocols in “Mein Kampf” to explain his theory of how Marxism had created a weapon by which international Jewish financiers could manipulate the world’s banks in order to “destroy Germany” and enslave “free peoples” in service of their worldwide monetary goals.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
