Language:
English
Year of publication:
2014
Titel der Quelle:
Nexus; Essays in German Jewish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
2 (2014) 43-61
Keywords:
Protocols of the wise men of Zion
;
Antisemitism History 20th century
Abstract:
Argues that the story of the origin of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" has been distorted, and its historical significance has been greatly inflated by those who, in the 1920s-30s, tried to debunk this forgery. Many post-World War II historians, and first of all Norman Cohn, uncritically repeated the mistakes that had been made by the interwar debunkers. However noble motives of those who tried to destroy the credibility of the "Protocols" and to stop its dissemination, it was they who launched several erroneous myths concerning this text: that the "Protocols" possessed power to galvanize masses to anti-Jewish violence; that it motivated the pogroms in Russia in 1903-06 and in the war years of 1914-20; and that it helped to form Hitler's ideology and was a "warrant for genocide" for the Nazis. Dismisses these myths as ahistorical: the "Protocols" were addressed to an audience with some intellectual pretensions rather than to unlettered pogromists, it is scarcely present in Hitler's writing or speaking, and in no sense did it warrant mass murder.
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