The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or
The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an
antisemitic hoax purporting to describe a
Jewish plan for global domination. It was first published in
Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century.
Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the US in the 1920s.
Adolf Hitler and the
Nazis publicized the text as if it were a valid document, although it had already been exposed as fraudulent. After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, it ordered the text to be studied in
German classrooms. The historian
Norman Cohn suggested that Hitler used the
Protocols as his primary justification for initiating the
Holocaust—his "warrant for genocide".
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The
Protocols purports to document the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting of Jewish leaders discussing their goal of global Jewish
hegemony by subverting the morals of
Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world's economies. It is still widely available today and even now sometimes presented as a genuine document, whether on the Internet or in print in numerous languages.