Daily Beast - Nov 12, 2011
Umberto Eco dives deep into the weird, twisted story of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and risks raising old hates anew. Daniel Levin reviews.
“Beware of faking,” Umberto Eco warned in his 1988 novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, “people will believe you.”
Unless he forgot his own advice, Mr. Eco should have expected the storm of controversy surrounding the release of his new novel, The Prague Cemetery. After all, the central character offers up a 444-page anti-Semitic variety show, ranting against “the Jew” in every dark alleyway of 19th-century Europe. Unsurprisingly, the Chief Rabbi of Rome had a few questions for Eco. So did the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano, whose scathing review, went so far as to say readers may be persuaded by the book’s anti-Jewish vitriol.
Thinking this book isn’t the perfect holiday gift? Not so fast.
Because The Prague Cemetery uses its despicable cast of forgers, scavengers, and anti-Semites to help Eco chase down the origin of the deadliest hoax in modern history.
The hoax was a so-called “historical” document, an apparent transcription of old rabbis (“The Elders of Zion”) secretly meeting at midnight in a cemetery in Prague to discuss their plans for worldwide domination via finance, politics, and medicine.
The document, known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, surfaced in Russia in 1905 and was quickly proven a blatant forgery. But it didn’t matter. Henry Ford funded the printing of 500,000 copies in the United States. The German translation was an instant bestseller. By 1936, Adolf Hitler called The Protocols his “warrant for genocide.”
But if The Protocols was a historical forgery, who wrote it?
Full review at The Daily Beast.