Protocols of the Elders of Zion deemed “educational” in Russia

Russia’s Public Chamber is urging the Prosecutor General’s office to overturn a decision that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a propagandistic pamphlet detailing a supposed Jewish plot to rule the world, is “politically and historically educational.”

A lower chamber of the Prosecutor General’s office ruled in March that the Protocols were not extremist and did not fan ethnic hatred, according to The Moscow Times. The Public Chamber is an oversight committee with few concrete powers, unlike the all-influential procuracy so we’ll see where this request goes.

The Protocols can be easily bought in many Moscow street-side kiosks. First published in Tsarist-era Russia in 1903, it was revealed (duh) as a forgery shortly after. But that’s not the view often taken here.

For a crude comparison, let’s look at the Wikipedia entries for the Protocols in English and in Russian. The English entry begins: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fraudulent, antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for achieving global domination.” Russian Wikipedia states: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a collection of texts appearing at the beginning of the 20th century, represented by the publishers as documents of a global Jewish conspiracy; several of them, including S.A. Nilus, claimed that these protocols were reports from participants in a Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.” You have to read on until the second paragraph to get to questions on its origin: “There exist many pieces of evidence (in the press, the courts and independent studies) that the Protocols are plagiarized and a hoax. At the same time, there exist many supporters of the position that the contents of the Protocols are true.”