The Jewish Peril

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Cover of first book edition, The Great within the Minuscule and Antichrist
Author	Unknown. Plagiarised from Hermann Goedsche and Maurice Joly, plagiarized in turn from Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas, père
Original title	Програма завоевания мира евреями (Programa zavoevaniya mira evreyami, "The Jewish Programme to Conquer the World")
Country	Russian Empire
Language	Russian, with plagiarism from German and French texts
Subject	Antisemitic conspiracy theory
Genre	Propaganda
Publisher	Znamya
Publication date	August–September 1903
Published in English	1919
Pages	417 (1905 edition)

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an antisemitic fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The forgery was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world's economies.

Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the U.S. in the 1920s. The Nazis sometimes used the Protocols as propaganda against Jews; it was assigned by some German teachers, as if factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London in 1921. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by some proponents as a genuine document.

The Protocols is a fabricated document purporting to be factual. Textual evidence shows that it could not have been produced prior to 1901. It is notable that the title of Sergei Nilus's widely distributed edition contains the dates "1902–1903", and it is likely that the document was actually written at this time in Russia, despite Nilus' attempt to cover this up by inserting French-sounding words into his edition.Cesare G. De Michelis argues that it was manufactured in the months after a Russian Zionist congress in September 1902, and that it was originally a parody of Jewish idealism meant for internal circulation among antisemites until it was decided to clean it up and publish it as if it were real. Self-contradictions in various testimonies show that the individuals involved—including the text's initial publisher, Pavel Krushevan—purposefully obscured the origins of the text and lied about it in the decades afterwards.