A Protocol of 1919

A Protocol of 1919 is a fabricated text^[1] appearing in the appendices of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purportedly found on 9 December 1919 among the documents of a Jewish Red battalion commander killed in the Estonian War of Independence. The document's supposed authors, the "Israelite International League", gloat over their success at reducing the Russian people to "helpless slaves", and urge their fellow Jews to "excite hatred" and "buy up Government loans and gold", in order to grow in "political and economic power and influence". The text has been cited, as with other antisemitic canards, as evidence for the antisemitic belief that the Jews are conspiring to take over the world.

History

A Protocol of 1919 was first published in the Estonian newspaper Postimees (morning edition) on 31 December 1919. Postimees detailed how the text was found from Shunderev, battalion commander in the 11th Rifle Regiment who had been killed in action on the night before December 9.^[2]

The text was later reproduced in the appendix of a greatly expanded English-language edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1934 by the Patriotic Publishing Co., operating from a post office box in Chicago, Illinois. An introduction to the appendix claims that on 5 February 1920, a Russian newspaper in Berlin, Prizyv, published "an interesting document" dated December 1919. It was allegedly in Hebrew, and "was found in the pocket of the dead Jew Zunder, the Bolsheciv Commander of the 11th Sharp-shooter Battalion".^[3]

Walter Laqueur, an American historian, states that "the German right-wing extremist press was supplied for years with information first published in Prizyv during its nine months of existence", and points to A Protocol of 1919 as a "typical" example.^[4]

Content

The document consists of eleven short paragraphs of vague antisemitic generalizations, with eight admonitions to be "careful" or "cautious", and is signed by "The Central Committee of the Petersburg Branch of the Israelite International League".

References

1. Handwerk, Brian (September 11, 2006). "Anti-Semitic "Protocols of Zion" Endure, Despite Debunking". National Geographic News. Retrieved November 2015.
2. "Vene enamlust juhib juutide üleilmne salaliit". Postimees. 31 December 1919. Issue 290. p.1 - Digitalized Estonian Newspapers
3. The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion – with Preface and Explanatory Notes (trans. Victor E. Marsden). Chicago: The Patriotic Publishing Co. 1934. Hosted online by David Dickerson, Institute for Global Communications.
4. Laqueur, Walter (1965). Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict. Transaction Publishers. p. 131. ISBN 0887383491.