by Dreams End » Thu Sep 29, 2005 5:12 pm
Why I'm bothering...I don't know. But there are probably a lot of lurkers out there, so just in case...<br><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>The actual origin of the Protocols can be clearly traced back to its beginnings and associated with known historical events. There is no actual connection with any Jewish conspiracy.<br><br>The origin of most of what make up the Protocols lies in an 1864 pamphlet titled Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu or Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by the French satirist Maurice Joly, which attacks the political ambitions of Napoleon III by using the device of diabolical plotters in Hell. In turn, Joly appears to have plagiarized a good amount of the material from a popular novel by Eugene Sue, The Mysteries of the People. In Sue's work, the plotters were Jesuits, and the Jews do not appear in the pamphlet. There seems to be some confusion here, because the Jesuit plotters were in Sue's book The Wandering Jew, which wasn't in fact about Jews.<br><br>It being illegal to criticize the monarchy, Joly had the pamphlet printed in Belgium, and then attempted to have it smuggled over the French border. It was seized by the police, who confiscated as many copies as they could, then banned the book. The police traced the book to Joly, who was then tried on April 25, 1865, and sentenced to fifteen months in prison.<br>[edit]<br><br>The forger<br><br>Hermann Goedsche, a German anti-Semite and a spy for the Prussian secret police who had been removed from his job as a postal clerk after forging evidence for the prosecution of political reformer Benedict Waldeck in 1849, included Joly's Dialogues in his 1868 book Biarritz, written under the name Sir John Retcliffe. In the chapter "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel", he invented a secret rabbinical cabal which meets in the cemetery at midnight every hundred years to plan the agenda for the Jewish Conspiracy. To portray the meeting, he borrowed heavily from the scene in the novel Joseph Balsamo by Alexandre Dumas where Cagliostro and company plot the affair of the diamond necklace, and likewise borrowed Joly's Dialogues as the outcome of the meeting.<br><br>Goedsche's book was translated into Russian language in 1872, and in 1891 an extract of the chapter containing the meeting of the fictional centennial rabbinical "council of representatives", including the plagiarized Joly's Dialogues was circulating in Russia; whether they originated it or not, the Russian secret police found the work useful in their fight to discredit liberal reformers and revolutionaries who were rapidly gaining support among the populace. During the Dreyfus affair in France in 1893–1895, when polarization of European attitudes towards the Jews was at a maximum, the Dialogues were edited into their final form, which appeared in Russia in 1895 and began to be privately published starting in 1897 as the Protocols.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The...rs_of_Zion</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br> <p></p><i></i>