PURELY COMMENTARY
Protocols: Fiction In Origin, Poisoned Immorality
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor Emeritus
No matter how often the ugly and
always-condemned-as-a-great-fake "Pro-
tocols of the Elders of Zion" are shown
to be the vilest printed words on record,
they keep reappearing. The guiltiest in
spreading the libel are the Russians.
"Protocols" still find frequent
distributors in the Soviet Union and
never, if ever, a word of regret for
popularizing them. The Jew-baiting,
anti-Israeli Arabs in several Middle
East countries follow the anti-Semitic
line of adherence to the "Protocols" and
of circulating the "Blood Libel."
A renewed trend by bigoted Russian
groups to popularize the "Protocols"
was revealed in the New York Times
Week in Review Section on July 26. It
revealed the actions of the Pamyat ele-
ment that is using the exposed fakes as
its guides. The revelations were by
George Johnson who wrote under the
title "The Infamous 'Protocols of Zion'
endures — Jews and Masons As
Targets":
Members of an organization of
Russian traditionalists called
Pamyat are motivated in part by
a conspiracy theory that was in-
vented in France almost a cen-
tury ago. Like many reac-
tionaries in the United States,
followers of Pamyat equate
satanism with rock music and
A Conditioned
Freedom to
Read Newspapers
In an article on this page, July 17,
on "extremism" in some Israeli ranks,
Thomas Friedman was describing
restrictions imposed on newspaper
readers in B'nei B'rak. The comments
in the New York Times aroused
resentment.
As a follow up to the Friedman
front-page article in the New York
Times, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
has just issued a similar article by one
of its leading Israeli correspondents,
Hugh Orgel. Under the title "B'nei
B'rak: Home of Many Babies, Few
Newspapers,", Orgel wrote in part:
A new phenomenon has late-
ly appeared on the B'nei B'rak
scene — the Orthodox assault
literally on the secular press.
Kiosks and stationery shops
which used to sell the many
Hebrew and other-language
dailies in Israel have lately been
warned to halt the sale of the
"immodest," "scurrilous" and
"loathsome" Zionist press.
Several of them have been
fire-bombed by religious zealots.
There is now reported to be but
one 80-year-old owner of a kiosk
who dares to continue to sell the
morning and afternoon
2
FRIDAY, AUG. 21, 1987
relativism with evil, and they
believe that Zionists are schem-
ing with, of all people,
Freemasons to take over the
world.
Pamyat's conspiracy theory,
like those circulated in the
United States by such right-
wing groups as the Order, the
Aryan Nations Church, Posse
Comitatus and the Ku Klux
Klan, is based on the "Protocols
of the Elders of Zion." This
classic of paranoid literature is
taken by the gullible as the
minutes of a council of rabbis
who secretly run the world.
Since it was concocted around
the turn of the century by anti-
Semitic Russians in Paris, the
"Protocols" has spread across
the world like a virus that roots
itself in troubled, frightened
minds.
Pamyat glorifies the grand,
ornate churches and places, the
czars, saints, poets and icons of
the Russian past. But tradi-
tional values are being eroded,
the group's members believe, by
Jewish conspirators and their
Masoc dupes who have in-
filtrated the Soviet Government.
As part of the plot, Pamyat's
literature explains, the enemy is
scheming to use the Moscow
subway system "to blow up
government establishments?'
Such fantasies have been cir-
culating in the Soviet Union for
newspapers — but without
displaying them openly.
David Green says he has
been selling papers in B'nei
B'rak for 30 years, and despite
an explosion on his roof and
bomb threats against his near-
by house, he will go on selling
them — although in fear.
The assault on the secular
press began to come to a head
two years ago, when a group
calling itself the Committee for
the Sanctity of Our Camp issued
a pamphlet in which the locally-
based Kleusenberg Rebbe
explained:
"The trouble is that Jews
buy impure things and bring
them into their houses. By doing
so they strengthen the impurity,
heaven forbid. Had they been
boycotted and ostracized, we
would not be in our present
situation:'
Within days, vigilante
groups calling themselves
variously the Sanctity Commit-
tee, Modesty Brigade and
Keshet claimed the "honor" of
having smeared slogans on
kiosks and the doors of shops
selling general newspapers such
as: "If you don't stop selling
secular newspapers, your shop
and house will be burnt. We'll
harm your family. This is the
last warning:'
years. In the mid-1970s, a Soviet
academic named Valery
Nikolaevich Emelyanov
ominously warned of a plot in-
volving a "Judaic-Masonic
pyramid" including the
dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenit-
syn and Andrei D. Sakharov
and Amnesty International.
These enemies, he wrote, "have
gone over to acts of bloody ter-
ror against the civilian popula-
tion in metro passages:'
This curious preoccupation
with subways comes directly
from the "Protocols," a literary
hoax that has its origins not on-
ly in Anti-Semitism but also in a
fear of science, technology, ra-
tionality — of the modern world.
According to the "Protocols,"
Jewish conspirators not only
create wars and depressions
and control the press but they
also invented Darwinism and
Marxism and use "the
sovereignty of reason" to under-
mine traditional values.
At the time the "Protocols"
was forged in Paris, possibly by
agents of the Czarist secret
police, equally out-landish
charges were being made
against Freemasonry, an inter-
national fraternal organization
that is described in the "Pro-
tocols" as a front for the Jewish
conspiracy.
Because of their penchant
for secrecy and esoteric rituals
newspapers
However,
published by the Orthodox
Agudat Israel and other Or-
thodox groups continue to be
sold.
But many B'nei B'rak
residents will tell you privately
that while they do not buy
"secular daily papers like
Haaretz, Maarive or Yediot
Aharonot, they still read them —
secretly — on their business
trips to Tel Aviv. But they would
not dare take a copy home with
them.
Maariv recently quoted a
B'nei B'rak rabbi (who asked
that his name not be used) ex-
plaining the rationale: "The
secular and we do not see eye to
eye. What we consider impure
they view as kosher. I'll never
bring a newspaper home know-
ing that it deals with matters
which for us are taboo, such as
relations between the sexes, so
that it does not get to the
children, heaven forbid. But
most of us buy newspapers in
Tel Aviv, read the items that in-
terest us and then throw the
papers away."
Meanwhile, yeshivah heads
and their modesty brigades con-
tinue to distribute pamphlets
reading: "Dear Jew, if you desire
a good year for yourself, your
family, your children and the en-
and symbols, the Freemansons
had long been the subject of
paranoid literature. In the
1790's, John Robinson's best-
selling "Proofs of a Conspiracy"
blamed Freemasons and other
secret societies for plotting the
French Revolution. The
Freemasons also were feared
because they were seen as pro-
moters of Enlightenment ideas:
rationality, tolerance,
cosmopolitanism — a world
view referred to by the guar-
dians of tradition as illuminism,
then, and secular humanism
today.
In more than a half-page article in
the NYTimes, George Johnson exposed
the nefarious USSR Pamyat and the
credence again given to the notorious-
ly faked anti-Semitic brochure. The in-
terest again aroused in the "Protocols"
invited another factor in the widely-
publicized matter, a calling attention to
the origin of the immense distortion. In
a letter published in the NYTimes Aug.
7, Professor of German Jeffery L. Sam-
mons of Yale University presented facts
indicating that the "Protocols" stemm-
ed from fiction. In his letter, Prof. Sam-
mons stated:
It is true, as you say in "The
Infamous 'Protocols of Zion' En-
dures" (Week in Review, July 26),
that the "Protocols" emerged,
perhaps as a forgery of the Im-
perial Russian secret police,
Continued on Page 30
tire Jewish people, do what is in-
cumbent upon you. Don't
behave like Ham (Noah's son),
who disgraced himself by im-
morality, and stay a bowshot
distance from his spiritual suc-
cessors — namely the scurrilous
secular newspapers:'
Perhaps B'nei B'rak and their
related communities in Israel will
assert that they reserve the right to
read what they wish and dictate
reading material to their residents — as
they wish. The rest of Israel and the
Diaspora Jewries also have an obliga-
tion to pass judgement on what is
transpiring in a limited Jewish area.
The moral-ethical and democratic
principles that motivate the sanctity of
Israel's life will never sanction biased
interference.
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Continued on Page 30