(Reviewer: David Scher, Vol. 71, No. 1, Pesach 2016)
Some years ago Rodney Mazinter, vice-chairman of the Zionist Federation, Cape Council, and a frequent contributor to the press in defense of Israel, was attending a conference in Israel on the topic of antisemitism. He happened to sit next to a small, grey-haired lady and remarked that the role of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion was often overlooked as a prime generator of antisemitism. The lady concurred. It turned out that she was Judge Hadassah Ben-Itto, an internationally renowned legal authority, who had served as president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. After her retirement in 1991, she had researched and written an authoritative book on the Protocols, entitled, The Lie That Wouldn’t Die – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Addressing the Cape Town Jewish community in April 2001, Judge Ben-Itto noted that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a document that had been translated into every known language, even dialects, though never in Hebrew. It continued to be published around the world in millions of copies – “in the 20thCentury, in more numbers even than the Bible”. Yet, she added, “we Jews never read it – and therefore never took the trouble to confront it …. The Protocols is indescribable – such a terrible document. And it is convincing!”
The Protocols is purported to be the actual record of secret meetings of an international Jewish government, which conspires to dominate the whole world. It first made its appearance in Western Europe in 1920, brought by refugees from Russia.
Bizarre though it now seems, The Protocolswas examined seriously by newspapers likeThe Times, accepted by others, such as the Morning Post and by Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. It was lapped up by swarms of antisemites and crackpots, some of whom were able to do immense harm. Its vicious message reached to the highest levels of government. According to Ben-Itto, after her execution the book was found on Tsarina Alexandra of Russia’s bedside table, together with War and Peace and the Bible!
Norman Cohn, author of Warrant for Genocide, a study of the Protocols (1967), stated: “Very many people who were neither demented nor illiterate were convinced that everything that happened in the political, social and economic fields – from minor diplomatic appointments to slumps, revolutions and wars – were ordained by a secret organization of the Jews”.
Fortunately, a series of exposures and court cases effectively destroyed the myth of The Protocols. In August 1921 Philip Graves, then correspondent of The Times in Constantinople, revealed that it was largely adapted from a pamphlet attacking Napoleon III of France. Published in 1865, it took the form of 25 dialogues between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, the two protagonists discussing how best a ruler might enforce his authority under contemporary circumstances. Montesquieu presented the case for liberalism, Machiavelli the case for cynical despotism. The parallels between Machiavelli’s policy and that of Napoleon III were viewed as so explicit that a French lawyer, Maurice Joly, author of the dialogue, was sentenced to 15-months imprisonment.
In the event, the publication fell into the hands of the Russian security police, who had accreditation at the Russian embassy in Paris. They had a special department that invented alleged anti-government plots and forgeries, and it was one of the employees of this organization, Sergei Nilus, who doctored the work of Joly so that it morphed into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Russians saw it as a means of whipping up antisemitism, so as to distract its subject peoples from the calamities in their own empire.
In 1933 the Swiss Jewish community, shaken by the wave of antisemitic propaganda then seeping into the country from Germany, began a long drawn-out legal battle against the Swiss Nazi National Front, which ended, four years later, in the complete collapse of any pretence that The Protocols was a genuine document.
Interestingly, around the time of the Berne trial, in a libel action instituted by the Rev. Levy of Port Elizabeth (with the support of the South African Board of Deputies) against three members of the pro-Nazi Greyshirt movement, Judge President Sir Thomas Graham, with Mr. Justice Gutsche concurring, declared on 24 August 1934 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be “an impudent forgery, obviously published for the purpose of anti-Jewish propaganda.”
It is against the background of the malicious spread of The Protocols that Mazinter has crafted a sweeping novel that crisscrosses the European continent as it closely examines the lives of a cluster of individuals and families.
This novel is ‘faction’ at its best. The author has woven into his text a set of real and fictional characters that blend seamlessly into his narrative. He has superbly recreated the European world of our Jewish people in the first half of the twentieth century – a world of unimaginable hardship and hatred, culminating in the Holocaust.
Central to the novel are the tribulations of the Berg family. Some of their story is based on the experiences of the author’s own family in Lithuania. For South African Jews, this will resonate deeply. Apart from family memories, Mazinter has clearly engaged in a great deal of historical research to buttress his narrative.
The novel begins and ends with The Protocols. I have always been struck by how much the Jews have suffered over the centuries from words – spoken and written. Words can kill. The Protocols is a prime example of this.
Writing in Commentary in June 1999, the historian Richard Pipes points out that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion “laid the basis for the later Nazi assault against the Jews just as surely as Communist literature targeting the bourgeoisie laid the groundwork for the terror-to-come of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, or the anti-Kurd spouting’s of Saddam Hussein’s regime prepared the way for the genocide in the north of Iraq. If conspiracist tracts of this nature cannot be entirely discredited, it is nevertheless of critical importance that they be exposed and denounced. At the very least, one can thereby hope to minimize the damage they are likely to do!!!”
Pipes’ comments – and indeed Mazinter’s novel – have a direct relevance to us in South Africa today. Tuning in to Radio 786, a Muslim community radio in Cape Town, on 29 September 2014, what should this reviewer hear quoted by Magboeba Davids, spokesperson of the Islamic Unity Convention? Why, of course, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion!The danger is, in truth, ever present.
Summing up, I do not exaggerate when I say that I found this novel extremely engaging – and unsettling. For an excellent ‘feel’ of the European world of our forebears, and for a disturbing look at the destructive power of the Protocols, I recommend this book most strongly.
By a Mighty Hand by Rodney Mazinter is available from the author/publisher in hard copy and on Kindle (Cell: (082) 436-8678; mavrod@iafrica.com).
Dr. David Scher is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of the Western Cape.
