Lie and a Libel

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a potent forgery alleging a Jewish plot to run the world, has proved durable since its turn-of-the-century fabrication by Russian police; this book offers welcome background, context and refutation. The main section is the 1926 effort by Segel, a German Jewish journalist, to expose the fraud; he shows how the infamous text was plagiarized from trash fiction, Machiavelli's speeches and a political satire...Levy adds much in his comprehensive introduction. Unlike most anti-Semitic works, he notes, this has no national context or identity. Thus it has served multiple purposes for different audiences; it was not only publicized by the Nazis, but it also remains influential in the Arab world and eastern Europe and among American right-wingers and black nationalists."--Publishers Weekly. A strange and repugnant mystery of the twentieth century is the durability of the Protocols, despite repeated exposure as a forgery. Binjamin W. Segel's work was the first full explanation of the shadowy sources for this virulent group libel. Richard S. Levy now adds an examination of the history of the Protocols since its original publication and describes its continuing psychological appeal and political function in the modern world. Richard S. Levy is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the editor of Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts.