How the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery spread

In 1921 a London newspaper proved that a famous antisemitic document was copied from a French satire that never mentions Jews. The proof was public, specific and easy to check. The document kept spreading for another century.

October 31, 2026 · 4 min read · TruthRanking

The first source

The text known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has two starting points. The older one is a French book that never mentions Jews. The lawyer Maurice Joly published Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a satire of Napoleon III's rule, in 1864. Joly put arguments for total political control into Machiavelli's mouth, and he was jailed over it. Accounts give the sentence as 15 or 18 months.

The second starting point is the forgery itself. In 1903, the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamya (The Banner) ran the text in installments, from August 28 to September 7 by the old Russian calendar. The paper's owner was Pavel Krushevan. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum says antisemitic articles in his newspapers helped incite the Kishinev pogrom in April of that year. The text presents itself as the secret minutes of a Jewish and Masonic leadership planning to control the world. Later versions claimed it recorded meetings at the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel. The museum says that claim is not true. The document was built to look like a leaked record.

How it spread

In 1905, the religious writer Sergei Nilus printed the full text as an appendix to a book about the Antichrist. The text is divided into 24 sections, called protocols. After the Russian Revolution, anti-communist emigres carried it west. A German edition appeared in 1919 or January 1920, depending on the source. In 1920, editions followed in France, England, the United States and Japan. The first English translation came from the London printer Eyre & Spottiswoode in January 1920.

Established outlets gave it room. On May 8, 1920, a Times of London editorial by Wickham Steed treated the pamphlet as an open question and called for an inquiry. In the United States, Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent ran a 91-part series beginning in 1920. Its paid circulation reached almost 270,000 copies in 1922. The series became the book The International Jew, which the museum says sold more than 500,000 copies in at least 16 languages.

The exposure came from Constantinople. Philip Graves, the Times correspondent there, got a copy of Joly's book from a Russian emigre, a former landowner who had bought books from an ex-member of the Tsarist secret police. Researcher Colin Holmes later found the man's name, Mikhail Raslovlev, in the Times archive. On August 16, 17 and 18, 1921, the paper printed Graves's side-by-side comparison, which it presented as proof that the text was "in the main a clumsy plagiarism." One later count found about 160 borrowed passages. Earlier, the London writer Lucien Wolf had traced some of its ideas to Hermann Goedsche's 1868 novel Biarritz.

What it became

The exposure did not end circulation. Alfred Rosenberg brought the text to Hitler's attention, and Hitler cited it in Mein Kampf in 1925. The museum reports that Goebbels privately called it a forgery while still endorsing what he saw as its inner truth. The Nazi Party's publisher issued 22 printings in Germany by 1938. In 1943, during the Holocaust, German authorities printed editions in occupied France, Belgium and Poland, and in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.

Ford apologized in 1927, but overseas publishers ignored his order to stop. An Arabic translation appeared in Damascus by 1925. The 1988 Hamas charter cited it in Article 32. Television series in Egypt in 2002 and Lebanon in 2003 drew on it. In November 2012, Russia added the text to its federal list of extremist materials. The museum says editions in dozens of languages are available in print and online, that references to it often appear on social media, and that some newer editions blame Jews for COVID-19 and the September 11 attacks.

What the record shows

That the text is a forgery is documented. Who wrote it is not settled. Britannica cites the Russian historian Vladimir Burtsev, whose investigation pointed to officials of the Russian secret police. Testimony at a 1930s Swiss trial said the same. Historians Charles Ruud and Sergei Stepanov later found no substantial evidence of secret police involvement. Princess Catherine Radziwill later named the journalist Matvei Golovinski as a compiler. Scholars including Cesare De Michelis and Michael Hagemeister call the Golovinski account historically unverifiable. The museum notes that some scholars believe Krushevan wrote it himself. De Michelis argues it was produced in the months after a September 1902 Russian Zionist congress.

The court record is also often simplified. A South African court ruled the text defamatory in 1934. In Bern in 1935, two defendants were convicted for distributing it and three were acquitted, and the judge called it "ridiculous nonsense," according to the museum. In 1937, a three-judge appeal panel acquitted the two convicted men. It held that the law they were charged under covered obscene writing, not political publications. The appeal court did not find the text authentic. The Times sits on both sides of the record: it first called for an inquiry in 1920, then published the exposure in 1921.

How to trace a claim like this

1. Find the first published version. The famous editions came from Nilus, Ford and the Nazi press. The earliest is the 1903 Znamya serial. Start there, as our guide on finding where a claim started explains.
2. Test the claimed origin. The text says it records meetings in Basel in 1897. Ask what record of those meetings exists outside the document itself. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum says the Basel claim is not true.
3. Compare the wording against older texts. Graves used a side-by-side comparison. He set Joly's passages next to the forgery's so readers could see the copying. Distinctive phrasing is a lead.
4. Count publishers, not copies. Twenty-two printings and 500,000 books are republication of one forged source. They add reach, never evidence. See republication vs corroboration.
5. Keep authorship and authenticity separate. The author is still unverified. The forgery is proven by the documented copying. Those are different findings, as explained in unverified vs false.