Excerpt from PROTOCOLS: An Erasure

ABOUT THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is “the most influential work of antisemitism ever written” (Bronner). Though it is an abysmally written forgery whose authenticity has been debunked countless times throughout the past century, it has persisted as a key instrument of antisemitic propaganda since its first publication in 1903.

In twenty-four chapters, or “protocols,” the book presents itself as a record of a series of twenty-four meetings of a secret Jewish cabal called “The Elders of Zion” who, according to the book, convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. The first Zionist Congress actually did meet at that time and in that place, but The Protocols is not a record of those meetings. The text was probably actually written in 1902 or 1903. It was first serialized in a Russian newspaper in 1903 and published in its most well-known version in 1905. It claims to record the plans that the “Elders” made in Basel to subvert Christian civilization and erect in its place a despotic global state under their rule. They would infiltrate existing government structures with ideals of liberalism and socialism as a means of securing power and eventual domination. The free press, Darwin, and Nietzsche (to name just a few notable forces) were all pawns of this vast ideological Jewish conspiracy. If the intended covert cultural subversion were to fail, the Elders’ plan B involved infiltrating and sabotaging the governments of every capital city in Europe in other, more targeted ways. 

The book’s paranoid, hateful tropes (e.g., that Jews manipulate the economy, control the media, and foster interreligious conflict) form the backbone of enduring antisemitic beliefs evident in a devastatingly wide range of cultural spaces—alternative media on the left and the right, mainstream media, political groups across the political spectrum, pop culture, education, and art worlds of all sorts. The Protocols crystallized every common antisemitic sentiment into a unified conspiracy, making it the dominant progenitor of modern antisemitism. The most prevalent antisemitic beliefs of the past century can be traced back to its pages, usually very directly. It is an “atrocity producing narrative” unparalleled in its malignant global sway (Landes and Katz).

The book was first published the same year as the infamous Kishinev Pogrom, a harrowing turning point in Jewish history. The first pogrom of the twentieth century, it set off a wave of large-scale riots in the Russian Empire in which thousands of Jews were systematically murdered, raped, and terrorized. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, anti-Bolshevik émigrés brought The Protocols to the West. Soon after, editions circulated across Europe, the United States, South America, the Middle East, and Japan, finding a tenacious cultural foothold wherever they were distributed. During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols played an important part in Nazi propaganda. The Nazi party published at least twenty-three editions of The Protocols between 1919 and 1939. The book was consistently included in school curricula under Nazi control. In the United States, beginning in 1920, Henry Ford’s widely read newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published a series of articles based on The Protocols, citing it as evidence of a credible Jewish threat to American society and world order.

The Protocols remains available today in an array of languages, in print and online. It continues to be presented (and, too often, accepted) as a genuine account of an actual meeting at which powerful Jews met to solidify their plans for world domination. This credulity endures despite the fact that in 1921, the London Times presented conclusive proof that The Protocols was a “clumsy plagiarism,” confirming that it had been copied verbatim in large part from a French political satire that never mentions Jews—Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864). The Bern Trial,¹ held between 1933 and 1935, lent further evidence to the already-strong case that The Protocols was a forgery. The presiding justice at the trial declared The Protocols “libelous,” “obvious forgeries,” and “ridiculous nonsense.” The trial established that the book was actually commissioned by several officials of the Imperial Russian secret police, the Okhrana, as a way to manipulate the inept and fickle tsar at the time, Nicholas II. In commissioning The Protocols, the Okhrana sought to destroy the credibility of reformist and revolutionary movements by linking their goals to the master plan of a nefarious Jewish cabal. But not only did they aim to protect the tsar from dissent at the expense of a convenient Jewish scapegoat, they intended to discourage him from pursuing reformist policies or making concessions to his detractors. The Protocols’ exact origins are murky, but Okhrana officials likely commissioned Matvei Golovinski to write (plagiarize) the document. Golovinski had previously produced false evidence for trials, forgeries, and the like on their behalf, and The Protocols was yet another politically motivated fake. It’s not entirely clear whether Golovinski or the officials who commissioned him actually believed in a Jewish plot to collapse Western civilization, nor is it certain that they were all devout Christians seeking to proselytize or defend their faith from invented threats. Perhaps they simply understood the political value of a common enemy, and they identified Jews as an easy, extant target. 

Despite its repeatedly discredited premise, the book’s power persists. Countless political speeches, memes, editorials, and cartoons across the world have referenced or expanded upon The Protocols. In 1988, the original Hamas charter said that the “Zionist plan” was “embodied” in The Protocols.² In 2002, the book was promoted in an Egyptian satellite TV series. New editions have been republished around the world consistently over the past decades, including in India in 1974, in Iran in 1985, in Japan in 2004, and in Mexico in 2005. The book remains widely accessible online. It lives on, exerting considerable cultural and political power, owing, at least in part, to how consistently it has been disproved. For the conspiracy theorist, the more a document or idea has been debunked, the more secret truth it holds. The Protocols is a zombie, refusing to die. 

ERASING THE PROTOCOLS

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion exists in many languages and versions throughout the world, having been translated and retranslated into increasingly stilted, steadily demented prose. In choosing which version to use for this project, my original intention was to find a print copy in a public library, irreversibly alter it with the erasure process—lots of black marker, paint, notes, etc.—then return it to circulation. But (thankfully) I couldn’t find a public library anywhere near Portland, Oregon that had the book on its shelves, so I settled for a PDF of a 1920 English-language edition from the library at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.³

I found the PDF in a few seconds online, printed it, and over the course of a year, transformed it with circles, underlines, strikethroughs, arrows, drawings, and horrified, exasperated, and heartbroken errata. I then retyped each erased page in my word processing program, mimicking the original placement of the words in the 1920 edition. No words have been added; every word in the poem is drawn directly from the source text. For a few months, I followed the original formatting of the source text as accurately as possible. But the project proved so emotionally and psychologically challenging that I had to bargain with myself to continue working on it. I made myself an offer: I was allowed to alter the poem’s form, to not exactly replicate the placement of the words as they appear in the source text. The poem’s form became an expressive reprieve from the unrelenting abhorrence of the source text, allowing new formal meanings to be made.

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Protocol 1

Protocol 2

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Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her debut book, CHORUS, won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn Press’s 1st/2nd Book Award. Her paintings are created with pigments she makes from plants, bones, stones, rainwater, and glacial melt. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2028) and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves Press, 2026). Her book-length poem “Memory of a Larger Mind” accompanies photographs by Julian Stettler in The Glacier Is a Being (Sturm & Drang, 2023). Her work is anthologized in the forthcoming second volume of The Ecopoetry Anthology and in Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology from the Laurel Review. Molnar lives in Portland, Oregon and in the high deserts of the North American West.

www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar

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