The Nineteenth Century (1801-1900) was the most fantastic, advanced, and tumultuous hundred years of human history, until the Twentieth Century surpassed it after a decade and a half with World War I, called the "Great War" before it was paired with World War II, which saw not only a tremendous loss of lives through the horrors of wars including new ones like poison gas weapons and armored motorized vehicles, but also the massive changes to the social and political structure. But the Century just before it saw a colossal change from the vestiges of feudalism to acknowledgement of basic human rights for all. In terms of time the Nineteenth was the bridge between the first great Enlightenment revolutions, in the United States (1775-1781) and France (1789-179?) which hailed the end of the Eighteenth Century, and those of the Twentieth. Between 1800 and 1900, we saw the United States rise from a backwater experiment in republican and democratic institutions just being established to a World Power under President Theodore Roosevelt. The rest of the world also looked quite different at the end of that hundred years than at its' beginning, having experienced multiple revolutions, wars, the consolidation of powerful nation-states, technological change like the development of railroads and telecommunications, and the beginnings of the emancipation of women and minorities.
Like every change in human history, though, the changes wrought by the Nineteenth Century had opposition. Often this is simplified as merely the desire of titled nobility to hold onto powers granted to them by the accidents of their births. That was certainly the prime opposition to the changes which were occurring, but most often it was men with no title of nobility at all - police prefects, civil servants, government hangers-on, and the occasional secret agents - who orchestrated much of the opposition to changes in society.
It was exactly such men who stoked the fires of anti-Semitism (opposition to and prejudice against Jews and Judaism) and anti-masonry in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, through the clever use of political propaganda in the form of printed pamphlets and books, which were in effect the Facebook and Twitter of the times.
Part of the strategies of the forces of reaction to change was to sow dissention among the people. In Europe and other parts of the world settled by Europeans - the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and so on, the areas identified as following "Western Culture," anti-Semitism had often been used as a tool to incite groups to develop conflicts.
The Jewish States of Israel and Judah, whose chronicles we read in the Old Testament of the Bible, had been absorbed into neighboring empires, first the Babylonians and the Persians, then the Greek-Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, and finally, the Roman Empire. At the time of Christ, a Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, had agreed to Jesus' crucifixion, urged by the religious authorities of the province. The Jewish people remained a conquered nation, but in the year 70 CE (or AD) a failed revolt by Jews resulted in a massacre of the rebels at Masada and what is called the Diaspora, or dispersion and exile, of the Jews from Palestine. Hellenistic Jews, or those communities of Jewish families primarily of the merchant class, already lived in various other areas in the Roman Empire, including parts of what is now Turkey, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, and Morocco. The Apostle Paul, the great missionary of what became Christianity, was one such Jew. The last exiles from Palestine tended to join relatives in primarily urban areas.
After the development of the Christian church, prejudice against Jews followed as the Jews were blamed for Jesus' horrible execution. The Jews are considered a Semitic race (descended from Noah's son Shem) as are the Arabs and Middle Eastern people of other faiths like Lebanon's Druse sect), thus, anti-Jewish prejudice came to be known as Anti-Semitism. It was whipped up at different times by those in power, just like witch hunts and other religious persecutions. These served as distractions to people in hard times and helped those holding power keep it. The different campaigns of Anti-Semitism came to be known as pogroms - Wikipedia begins its entry on pogroms with "A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews."
The movie and play "Fiddler on the Roof," based on the short stories of Sholom Alechiem, a Russian Jewish author, were set around 1905 in a small Jewish village in Russia. The story begins with the main character, Tevye the Dairyman, introducing the other villiagers, including "others," meaning Eastern Orthodox Russian Christians. Here, Tevye boldly asserts, "We don't bother them, and they don't bother us!" But the rabbi seemingly contradicts Tevye, at least as far as the Tsar [Russian Emperor prior to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, also spelled Czar]: another Jew asks the rabbi what is a proper blessing for the Tsar, and after a moment's contemplation, he says, "May God bless and keep the Tsar... away from us!"
That rabbi knew what he was talking about. There were pogroms elsewhere - in 1506 in Lisbon, Portugal, 500 Jews forcibly converted to Christianity were slaughtered and/or burned by a mob. And in 1921, less than a hundred years ago, 300 African-Americans were slaughtered by whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But it was in Russia and its non-Russian holdings like Ukraine, where the pogroms were the most brutal, frequent, and racked up body counts dwarfing those in the rest of Europe.
Because of modern sensibilities, the pogrom in "Fiddler," was a weak farce. The constable, a Russian Christian, was a friend of Tevye's and warned him it was coming. He said it was going to happen on orders from Moscow. And when it did it was limited to a handful of Russians riding horses through the reception hall where the wedding of Tevye's daughter was being celebrated, overturning tables and trashing the wedding gifts, reluctantly and half-heartedly. The attackers of the Jews were limited to the constable's posse, one of whom later married Tevye's younger daughter. Later the constable announced another order had come from Moscow that all Jews must leave the village in 24 hours, and Tevye and his family made their way to New York.
As the real pogroms were so much worse than those shown on the stage and screen in this popular show, we must wonder what would lead ordinary people to willingly and with enthusiasm, murder, beat, rob, rape, and burn their neighbors in a frenzy? For the answer to this, we must turn to the regime's efforts at propaganda (today we might call it "fake news") to create such atrocities, the crowning achievement of which was none other than the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
"Zion" is of course an analogy to Israel or "the promised land," and the term is used frequently in Christian imagery as well as in the hymn "We Are marching to Zion," and Utah's Zion National Park, a beautiful mountain vista. Psalm 133 in part refers to the rains from "the Mountains of Zion" which drained into the Jordan River and was the source of Israel's agricultural abundance in ancient times. As used here, it's merely a term for Jewish leaders, primarily rabbis or clergymen. The gist of the hoax was a conspiracy theory that a gathering of Jews from all over the world, or at least Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, met to conspire to conquer the world. Some editions said they met at midnight in a Jewish cemetery somewhere in Eastern Europe - no doubt the location was changed depending upon the audience.
The last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, considered taking steps to change Russia from a backward land just out of feudalism (the system which bound peasants to work the land under hereditary nobility who in turn were bound to the Tsar) to a more modern culture where everyone was free to pursue their own destiny. But Nicholas was a weak ruler and easily influenced by reactionary elements within the Russian civil service. Two Russian Secret Police Agents, Gormykine and Rachkovsky, came up with the "blame the Jews" strategy. They determined that if a document was produced showing evidence Jews were behind modernization, it would change the Tsar's opinion. They hired a writer named Mathieu Golovinski to produce the forgery.
Anti-Semitism was common throughout Europe and waxed and waned in its influence. sometimes clever manipulators used it to push an agenda. Just ten years before the publication of The Protocols, the French military establishment had stoked anti-Semitism by charging a Jewish French Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, with treason. Dreyfus was originally convicted and sent to the infamous French prison at Devil's Island, off the coast of French Guiana in South America. Dreyfus was convicted a second time in 1899 when evidence of his innocence was excluded from the trial. The Dreyfus affair revealed the pervasiveness of the cover-up of the evidence by the Army, public opinion arose and Dreyfus was pardoned.
As revolutionary forces simmered in the reign of the last Tsar, the government of Russia was desperate to defeat them. Golovinski's forgery claimed the Jews were behind the revolutionary movement. Golovinski pirated an old book by a Frenchman named Maurice Jolly called "Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" - Niccolo Machiavelli was a 15th Century Italian philosopher whose "The Prince" lauded unscrupulous politicians, to the extent his name was employed as a noun, "Machiavellianism," best summarized by his maxim, "The End Justifies The Means;" Charles-Louis Montesquieu, an 18th Century French writer, was one of several authors behind "The Enlightenment," the 18th Century movement toward freedom of thought and individual rights. Golovinski altered the dialogues and attributed the supposed plans to conquer the world to the Jews.
The central part of The Protocols stated the Jewish elders sought to gain control of businesses and governments "through Lodges" and secret societies, including primarily Masonic Lodges. Then, as now, many conspiracy theories abounded about Masons just as they did about Jews. World Revolution as a goal was presented through evidence of Jewish and Masonic connections to the American, French, other European, and Latin American revolutions. Minor facts, like how a Jewish financier in Boston provided credit to the new American Government, and how men like George Washington, the South American revolutionaries Jose San Martin and Simon Bolivar, and Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy were Masons, were used to scare people into believing Jews and Masons were conspiring to take over.
After Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, The Protocols was republished by the "White Russian" counterrevolutionaries in the Russian Civil War of 1981 to 1921. It was also reprinted in German and quoted by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle). It was translated into other languages as well. In 1920, Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company published it in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, though he later apologized and admitted it was a forgery. The Protocols was also published in Arabic and circulated throughout the Arab World to cultivate sentiment against Israel. A 1992 Turkish edition claimed seventy Jewish elders headed Freemasonry (Given that state and national bodies of the various Masonic organizations are entirely independent of one another, any claim Masonry is controlled by any group has to be taken with a large heap of salt). In 2002, a number of Arabic television networks aired a series called "Knight Without a Horse" which was based on The Protocols.
Today we see and hear much about "fake news," and the staying power of The Protocols shows combatting it seems to be to a great extent a futile exercise. However, that is certainly no reason to not fight falsehoods in the media. The Jewish Community does this through The Anti-Defamation League and similar organizations. Masons combat lies and disinformation about the fraternity through the North American Masonic Service Association. It is imperative that we continue to combat the falsehoods spread by unscrupulous actors.