The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Between History and Fiction

After five years of research in formerly inaccessible and secret Russian archives, he named Matvei Golovinskii, a reactionary journalist and writer, author of the notorious "document" that pretends to describe the secret plan of a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination.1 Golovinskii had, according to Lepekhin, composed the Protocols at the turn of the twentieth century on the orders of Piotr Rachkovskii, head of the foreign branch of the Russian secret police, the infamous Okhrana, in Paris. Eisner, the brilliant cartoonist, is not to blame for the gaps in his historical knowledge, for instance, that his czars reside in Moscow, not in Saint Petersburg; or that he presents Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the powerful procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, as a stupid, fat chainsmoker, when in fact he was a skinny, highly intelligent ascetic (and not a doctrinaire antisémite); or that the Reichstag Fire plotted by [his] followers brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, when chronologically just the opposite happened.8 As the Chicago Sun-Times writes, Authenticity is not at issue.