Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion herausgegeben von Gottfried zur Beek 1. Auflage

Folio. pp. 238. Original printed boards. Contains illustrations, some colored.

The first German, and the first non-Russian edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, the deadly formulation of the myth of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to control all civilization. Based in part on 19th-century French rogue-and-spy fiction, and in part on the entirely non-partisan work of Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu; ou La politique de Machiavel au XIXe siècle (Brussels, 1864, see Bib# 4103105/Fr# 1494 in this collection), it first surfaced, in its present form, in Russian in 1903-05, becoming the bible of the pogroms, and spread to Europe and America in the 1920s in countless editions in every imaginable language, gaining admirers in Henry Ford (temporarily) and Hitler (unreservedly), as what Norman Cohn has called a ‘warrant for genocide’ (Warrant for genocide: the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967).

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