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Since they're back in the news thanks to the FBI's ham-fisted release of the full-text today on one of their twitter feeds, here's a little thread on the origins of the literary forgery that's known today as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"
The document claims to be a plan for Jewish world domination, written as if it were the minutes of a meeting by world Jewish leaders taken some time in the late 19th century, though the document itself references events having taken place as recently as 1902.
It's basically a collection of ancient antisemitic tropes raised to the level of grand world-wide conspiracy. It was first published in Znamya, an antisemitic newspaper in St. Petersburg in 1903. Znamya, which means "banner" in Russian, was owned by Pavel Krushevan.
Krushevan is an interesting, if highly troubling figure. He got his start in Bessarabia, a region of the Russian Empire within modern day Moldova and Ukraine. He wrote the first travel book about the region and was an aspiring novelist.
His bread and butter though was Russian nationalism and antisemitism, things which went hand-in-hand in turn-of-the-century Russia. His paper in Kushinev, The Bessarabian, was largely responsible for spreading the blood libel rumors that lead to the deadly pogrom there in 1903
Krushevan had left Kushinev before the pogrom started, decamping for St. Petersburg, where he founded Znamya. The international backlash against Russia from the Kushinev pogrom, and the outpouring of support for Russian Jews in the aftermath rankled him and other antisemites
It was believed by Kushevan and others that Jews had either overplayed or fabricated the atrocities of the pogrom and their success indicated a control of the media. Within three months of the Kushinev pogrom, Krushevan published the first edition of the "Protocols"
The work itself barely contains original material. Much of it is plagiarized from Maurice Joly's "Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu," a satire published in 1864 critiquing the regime of Napoleon III that contains no significant antisemitism.
The first printing of the "Protocols" contains a few expressions unique to Bessarabia, strong evidence Krushevan was either the author or collaborated on its creation, though ultimately the authorship is unknown (the problem with conspirators is they don't leave good records)
