Hagemeister Michael, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Between History and Fiction.pdf

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The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
Between History and Fiction
Michael Hagemeister
In the autumn of 1999 a sensation swept through the international press: “Author
of ‘Zion Protocols’ identified.” Finally—so tell us the French weeklies
Le Figaro
Magazine
and
L’express—Mikhail
Lepekhin had discovered who was behind
the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
After
fi
ve years of research in formerly inac-
cessible and secret Russian archives, he named Matvei Golovinskii, a reaction-
ary journalist and writer, author of the notorious “document” that pretends to
describe the secret plan of a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination.
1
Golovinskii had, according to Lepekhin, composed the
Protocols
at the
turn of the twentieth century on the orders of Piotr Rachkovskii, head of the
foreign branch of the Russian secret police, the infamous Okhrana, in Paris.
The revelation spread like wildfire. Articles appeared in all major newspapers
and on the Internet. The Saint Petersburg historian’s “discovery” could justifi-
ably be considered a “sensation,” heralded the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
since it
solved, in the
Washington Times’
words, “the last remaining mystery sur-
rounding the ‘Protocols.’”
2
1. Victor Loupan, “L’affaire des ‘Protocoles des sages de Sion’: Le faussaire du siècle démasqué,”
Le Figaro Magazine,
August 7, 1999, 20–24; Eric Conan, “Les secrets d’une manipulation antisémite:
L’auteur des
Protocoles des Sages de Sion
enfin identifié,”
L’express,
November 18–24, 1999, 58–63.
2. Felix Philipp Ingold, “Fabrikation eines Mythos: Neues zur Entstehung der ‘Protokolle der
Weisen von Zion,’”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
December 17, 1999; Patrick Bishop, “Author of ‘Zion
Protocols’ Forgery Identified as Russian Propagandist,”
Washington Times,
November 21, 1999.
New German Critique
103, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2008
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2007-020 © 2008 by New German Critique, Inc.
83
84
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Golovinskii and his boss Rachkovskii in Paris are seen preparing the
forgery in images from the “graphic history”
The Plot: The Secret Story of
the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,”
created by comics legend Will Eisner.
This book, published posthumously in New York in 2005, was enormously
successful. The critics loved it, and it has been translated into many languages.
The German edition,
Das Komplott,
has the subtitle
Die wahre Geschichte
der “Protokolle der Weisen von Zion”
(The
True Story of the “Protocols of the
Elders of Zion”).
Extensive commentaries followed in all serious German
newspapers. They repeatedly stressed that this “masterpiece” was a “nonfic-
tion work,” a “study,” carefully researched, based on the most recent scholarly
literature, with ample reference notes and an extensive bibliography (fig. 1).
3
In another image from Eisner’s book, we meet Sergei Nilus, the most
prominent publisher and commentator of the
Protocols.
Eisner shows him as a
gray-haired mystic who is often invited to court, a competitor to Rasputin, a
professor, and a wildly gesticulating fanatical anti-Semite (fig. 2). We also learn
that Nilus had three wives and also a daughter, whom he used as a medium in
séances.
4
According to Umberto Eco, however, who wrote the introduction to
Eisner’s book, Nilus was not a professor but an “itinerant monk, . . . half
prophet and half scoundrel.”
5
Nilus the monk began his wanderings as early
as 1988, namely, in chapter 92 of Eco’s novel
Foucault’s Pendulum,
a book
that can be seen as a
fi
ctionalized encyclopedia of occult teachings and con-
spiracy theories. Eco was probably influenced by the Serbian author Danilo
Kiš. In Kiš’s
Book of Kings and Fools
Nilus appears as a “strange hermit,”
“for insiders simply father Sergius.” Likewise, Nilus appears in books whose
basis in
fi
ction or fact is hard to determine, for example, the occult conspir-
acy story
The Spear of Destiny,
by Trevor Ravenscroft, or the international
best seller
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
In the latter the publisher of
the
Protocols
is described as “a rather contemptible individual known to
posterity under the pseudonym of Sergei Nilus.”
6
In that book, which inspired
3. See, e.g., Fritz Göttler, “Schreibtischtäter: ‘Das Komplott,’ Will Eisners beklemmender
Comic-Roman über die Weisen von Zion,”
Süddeutsche Zeitung,
September 12, 2005; and Dietmar
Dath, “Mit der Zeichnerhand die Lüge töten: ‘Das Komplott,’ Will Eisners meisterhafter Comic
über die ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,’”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
October 8, 2005.
4. Will Eisner,
The Plot: The Secret Story of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”
(New York:
Norton, 2005), 134.
5. Umberto Eco,
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994), 137; Eco,
Serendipities: Language and Lunacy
(San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1999), 17.
6. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln,
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,
16th ed. (London: Corgi, 1990), 198–99.
Figure 1. The “forging” of the
Protocols.
From Eisner,
Plot,
59. Copyright 2005 by the
Estate of Will Eisner. Reproduced with kind permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton
and Company, Inc.
Figure 2. Sergei Nilus, caricatured. From Eisner,
Plot,
61. Copyright 2005 by the Estate of Will
Eisner. Reproduced with kind permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.
Michael Hagemeister
87
Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel
The Da Vinci Code,
Nilus and the
Protocols
are part of the global conspiracy of a secret order, the Prieuré de Sion, whose
prominent members (including Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy)
are attempting to bring the Merovingian dynasty—descendants of Jesus and
Mary Magdalene—back to power.
The scholarly literature on the
Protocols
confuses the picture even fur-
ther. The enigmatic Nilus turns out to be a surprisingly versatile
fi
gure. He
appears not only as a professor or a monk but also as a priest of the Russian
Orthodox Church, an orientalist, a court nobleman, a journalist, a half-crazy
pseudomystic, a zoologist, a mediocre lawyer, a religious philosopher, an
agent of the secret police, an Orthodox theologian, and even a former play-
boy. Some believe that Nilus was not his real name; some consider him the
actual author of the
Protocols.
None of this is accurate.
In reality, Nilus was neither monk nor professor.
7
There is not the slight-
est evidence that he was ever invited to court. He was also no “competitor to
Rasputin.” At the time that Rasputin was consorting with the imperial court,
from 1906 to 1916, Nilus was far away from Saint Petersburg in the provinces.
He had neither three wives nor a daughter, although he did have a son. Nilus
was a deeply devout Orthodox Christian and an opponent of spiritism; he never
conducted séances. The
Protocols
was
fi
rst published not in 1905 but in 1903.
And the
real
Nilus shortly before he published the
Protocols
looked rather dif-
ferent (fig. 3).
Eisner, the brilliant cartoonist, is not to blame for the gaps in his histori-
cal knowledge, for instance, that his czars reside in Moscow, not in Saint
Petersburg; or that he presents Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the powerful procu-
rator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, as a stupid, fat chain-
smoker, when in fact he was a skinny, highly intelligent ascetic (and “not a
doctrinaire antisemite”); or that “the Reichstag Fire plotted by [his] followers”
brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, when chronologically just the
opposite happened.
8
As the
Chicago Sun-Times
writes, “Authenticity is not at
issue.”
9
But it is necessary to criticize Eisner’s advisers, like Stephen E. Bronner,
7. For Nilus’s biography see my article in
Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon,
vol.
21 (Nordhausen: Bautz, 2003), 1063–67, available at www.bautz.de/bbkl/n/nilus_s_a.shtml. For a
shorter version see Michael Hagemeister, “Nilus, Sergei,” in
Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclo-
pedia of Prejudice and Persecution,
ed. Richard E. Levy, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO,
2005), 508–10.
8. John Klier, “Pobedonostsev, Konstantin,” in Levy,
Antisemitism,
551; Eisner,
Plot,
99.
9. Carlo Wolff, “Eisner’s ‘The Plot’ Speaks to History,”
Chicago Sun-Times,
May 1, 2005,
www.suntimes.com/output/books/sho-sunday-eisner01.html (accessed May 25, 2005).

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