Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch Read Free Book Online Page B

professions; Asher (from London) wants free marriage between Jews and Christians, and has been enjoying “the forbidden pleasure with the women of our enemies.” Naphtali wants to seize government bureaucracies; Dan is after monopolies on bread, butter, liquor, and wool. Zebulon argues for siding with liberals to foment revolution, while Issachar is interested in discrediting the military classes in the eyes of the people and Aaron sees the advantages in undermining the Church. The board meeting of Evil Jews Inc. over, they depart with the words “Let us renew our oath, sons of the golden calf, and go out to all the lands of the earth!”
    After Biarritz ’s forgotten publication, the chapter titled “In the Jewish Cemetery at Prague” underwent some curious metamorphoses. In 1872, it turned up as a pamphlet in Russia, with a foreword arguing that, though the meeting was fiction, it nevertheless revealed a truth. In 1881, it was published in France in the magazine Le Contemporain . This time, however, it was called the “Rabbi’s Speech,” and consolidated all the various wicked claims into one address, whose speaker talked of “Our sole aim—world domination, as was promised to our father Abraham.” By now it had mutated from fiction to fact, a speech supposedly delivered at a real gathering around the tomb of the “Grand Master Caleb.” Furthermore, it was held to have been recounted by an observer—that most irreproachable of characters, an English diplomat by the name of Sir John Readclif! 18
    In 1891, in Odessa on the Russian Black Sea, the “Rabbi’s Speech” was published in a local newspaper but was said to have been given at a secret Sanhedrin eight years earlier—there had been a congress of Reform Judaism that year, held in Leipzig. It was reprinted again in France in 1896, in a book by François Bournand, Les Juifs et Nos Contemporains , and now the sinister speechifier was named as Chief Rabbi John Readclif. And so it went, with the rabbi subsequently becoming Rabbi Eichorn or Reichhorn, and sometimes speaking to a congress of Jews in Lemberg in Austria in 1912. In October 1920, La Vieille France published a Russian document recognizing the similarity between the Reichhorn speech and the Protocols but seeing this as evidence of the authenticity of both, the one backing up the other. In any case, hadn’t the speech been vouched for by that valiant English diplomat Sir John Readcliffe, “who paid with his life for the divulgation”? 19 So fiction had become fact, and a German forger and author of pfennig dreadfuls had gradually turned into a power-hungry rabbi and a martyred English nobleman.

    Enter Machiavelli
    Dr. J. Stanjek’s hypothesis of a fictional source for the Protocols wasn’t enough, however, to discredit them. Even if there was a structural and philosophical similarity with the “Rabbi’s Speech,” this could have been coincidental. Just because Goedsche had imagined a ghastly get-together in which the world was subverted, that didn’t mean that no such gatherings had ever happened. And the Protocols were, after all, a record, word for word, of what was said at a very particular time and place: Basel 1897. It took another journalist to unearth another strange similarity before people began to sit up and listen.
    When the Times editorial worrying about a “Pax Judaeica” was written in May 1920, the newspaper’s correspondent in Constantinople, Philip Graves, had worked for the paper for well over a decade. Sometime probably in the summer of 1921, he was approached by a Russian exile whom he calls “Mr. X”—“a landowner with English connections. Orthodox by religion, by political opinion, a Constitutional Monarchist.”
    Mr. X, Graves later wrote, had long been interested in the Jewish question and in Freemasonry, and had studied the Protocols . He was therefore intrigued when he was offered a number of old books for purchase by a former officer of the tsar’s