Cesare G. De Michelis

Cesare G. De Michelis (born 20 April 1944 in Rome) is a scholar and professor of Russian literature at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy.

He is also an authority on the notorious plagiarism, hoax, and literary forgery known as . According to de Michelis, "twenty-odd editions had appeared in Russia between 1903 and 1912". He gives the text the acronymous name, "PSM", from its Russian title (romanized) Protocoly sionskikh mudretsov (Cyrillic: Протоколы сионских мудрецов). He also informs us that in 1919 PSM entered the "world at large" in "German, Swedish, Polish, English, Hungarian, and French editions." The first edition in Italian appeared in 1921. Arguably this is the most important English language work on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion since the publication of Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide in 1967/1970.

Pages 183-395 are a reconstruction of the original Russian manuscript as it hypothetically existed. The transliterated three-word title of the tract is Protocols [of the] Zionist Elders (the source of the acronym "PSM"). The rest of the book (pages 1–182 and 396-419) is the scholarly textual, philological, and bibliographical study of the antisemitic text. The author claims that he has identified and authenticated nine distinct printings of five editions of this single text, which may be reduced to three redactions.

The full list of printings and editions are as follows.

Michelis was able to get his hands on a rare 1903 edition of the daily newspaper Znamya (Banner). He does not explain where he found this newspaper which does not appear in Russian library catalogs. He writes that the paper published the forgery as an authentic reproduction of a document, under the headline "Programa zavoevanija mira evrejami", which he translates into English as "The Jewish Programme for the Conquest of the World". According to de Michelis, the actual title of the purported authentic document is given to it by the translator. In Russian, the title of the document published by the newspaper is as follows: Protokoly zasedanij "vsemirnogo sojuza franmasonov i sionskix mudrecov." This de Michelis translates into English as "The protocols of the sessions of the 'World Alliance of Freemasons and of the Sages of Zion'".

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