Who authored the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Question

Who authored the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Answer 1

It is falsely claimed that the Protocols are the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders at the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, in which Jews allegedly plotted to take over the world.  

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a forgery.  It appears that the first forgery was made in Russia for the Okhrana (secret police), which blamed the Jews for the country's ills. It was first privately printed in 1897 and was made public in 1905.

There is some argument about who originally forged the text for that printing.  Some historians suggest that the Protocols were actually forged in Paris sometime between 1895 and 1897 by an agent of the Russian secret police, Pytor Ivanovich Rachovsky, who is known to have forged other documents for the various intrigues in which he took part.

There is little doubt that the basic story was stolen by Goedsche, a German novelist and anti-Semite, who used the pseudonym of Sir John Retcliffe.  Goedsche stole the main story from another writer, Maurice Joly, whose 1864 "Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel" ("Dialogues in h**l Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu") involved a Hellish plot aimed at opposing Napoleon III.

The first English language edition of the Protocols was published in 1920 in London. The full title was "The Jewish Peril. Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"; the translator has been subsequently discovered to be George Shanks.

The Protocols were exposed as a forgery by Lucien Wolf in "The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" (London: Press Committee of the Jewish Board of Deputies, 1920).  In 1921, Philip Graves, a correspondent for the London Times, publicized the forgery.

Herman Bernstein in "The Truth About 'The Protocols of Zion': A Complete Exposure" (1935) also makes a persuasive case that the work is a complete forgery.

In 1920, The Protocols were published in a Michigan newspaper started by Henry Ford mainly to attack Jews and Communists. Even after they were exposed as a forgery, Ford's paper continued to cite the document.  Adolf Hitler later used the Protocols to help justify his attempt to exterminate Jews during World War II.

The text of the Protocols and several articles about the forgery can be read at: http://www.igc.org/ddickerson/protocols....

Answer 2

You will not get a satisfying answer like this. You will have to research the subject yourself to come to a conclusion.

Henry Ford tried to publish a book about Jews called the International Jew but it was sold out in a very short period of time and its price skyrocketed before the public could get to read it.

Answer 3

Henry Ford publicized them.

The documents were a fraud.

Ford was later sorry he publicized them.