16. A Jewish Plot to Rule the World?
One of history’s most insidious hoaxes was kicked off in Russia in 1903. That year, a conservative Russian newspaper published what it claimed were the minutes of a late nineteenth-century secretive conference between Jewish leaders. In it, they discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony. It would be brought about by the strategic infiltration of Jews into positions from which they could dominate the global media and economy. From such positions of influence and power, they would act as agents saboteur, and subvert the morals of the Gentiles in order to undermine the foundations of their societies.
That birthed a myth of an underhanded Jewish plot to rule the world, which is still bandied about to this day. In reality, the minutes, which came to be known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, were crude forgeries that first made the rounds in Russian right-wing circles. A Russian Tsarist official, Sergei Nilus, edited several versions of the Protocols, each time with a different account of how he came by them. In 1911, for example, he claimed that his source had stolen them from a (nonexistent) Zionist headquarters in France. As seen below, the fact that they were fake, or that they were easily shown to be fake, mattered little to those who wanted to believe the myth.
