Now-editorial Notes

In connection with the trial of the “Protocols” at Berne, the readers of the Jewish Daily Bulletin may be interested in the foreword to “The History of a Lie,” which I wrote in 1921 on the basis of Russian documents discovered in the Congressional Library in Washington. The foreword read as follows:

This is the history of a lie—of a cruel and terrible lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people. Given out as fiction, by a German anti-Semitic writer involved in the Waldeck forgery case, who concealed his identity under the pen-name of an Englishman, it was gradually changed and elaborated, and finally groomed as fact. Agents of the Russian police department and of the unscrupulous “Black Hundreds” then utilized this fiction as the framework for the “Protocols” through which they sought to crush the Jews and prop up the tottering Russian dynasty.

Tsarism destroyed itself, but the agents of Tsarism, still dreaming of their past glory and of the restoration of their privileges, are at work again, both here and abroad.

Out of the scrapheap of Russian autocracy, they have exhumed their old weapons and are striking at the Jews again. Upon the structure of the old myths they are striving to erect new falsehoods in order to intensify everywhere chaos and confusion and dissatisfaction so that they may attain their dastardly and selfish ends.

In the war’s aftermath the Jews are being blamed by the minions of autocracy and reaction for all the ills that have befallen mankind. Some blame them for the war, and others for the peace. Some attack them for the defeat of the German military machine, and others for the victory of the allies. In Germany they are attacked by the Junkers for having opposed the submarine warfare and thus assured Germany’s defeat; while in some of the allied countries the Jews are denounced for constituting the “brains of Germany.” All the revolutionary leaders of Germany are credited to the Jews, and Bolshevism, which has as little in common with Judaism as it has with Christianity, is branded as a Jewish movement; and there are Jew-baiters who in their blind madness have gone so far as to declare that exKaiser Wilhelm was not only influenced by the Jews but is himself of Jewish descent, and for this reason did not defend Germany as loyally as he should have done. He conspired against the Hohenzollern dynasty and undermined it. He destroyed his own throne because he was serving the secret Jewish world organization.

On such absurdities have people been fed, since the Armistice, in civilized countries by anti-Semitic agitators and their dupes, while the Jews have been slaughtered in the Ukraine, in Poland and in Hungary.

I submit in this little book the documentary evidence showing how the socalled “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” on which this new crusade is predicated, were forged.

This was written more than thirteen years ago. The work of the Prussian and Russian reactionaries was afterward taken up with increased intensity and fury by the Nazis, who have made the “Protocols” their hand-book.