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CHAPTER TWO

THE STORY FROM WHICH THE PROTOCOLS WERE FABRICATED

Essence of “Protocols” Was German Fiction of “Sir John Retcliffe”—Who Was “Retcliffe”?—His Infamous Record—His Bloodcurdling Story—The Meeting in the Cemetery—An Avowed Myth—Meeting Every Hundred Years Attended by “Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel”—The “Son of the Accursed” Also Attends and Provides Comic Interludes.

The query now naturally arises, what is the origin of these much heralded “Protocols” which were published in Russia by Sergius Nilus in 1905, and a copy of which, it is triumphantly announced, is now in the British Museum?

The anti-Jewish propagandists everywhere content themselves with the “history” of the origin of the “Protocols” as given by the “Russian mystic” Sergius Nilus. But fortunately “murder will out,” and the criminals who perpetrated the stupendous forgery for the purpose of slandering the Jews have left behind clues that enable one to visualize the very process that they pursued in the perpetration of their crime.

In 1866–1870 there appeared in Berlin a series of novels entitled “Biarritz—Rome” purporting to have been written by “Sir John Retcliffe,” the pseudonym of Herman Goedsche, a German novelist with an unsavory past. To conceal his identity and to convey the impression that the antisemitism with which his writings abounded emanated from English sources, he selected “Sir John Retcliffe” as his pen-name.

According to Meyer’s Konversations Lexikon (Sixth