Category: Context & Analysis

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first emerged in 1903, published by a Russian newspaper. The text, which was originally published by an antisemitic man named Pavel Krushevan, was originally published with the goal of tricking the public into believing the fabricated text was real. 

The text itself, which accuses Jewish people of plotting to take over and destroy the world, was created with the intent to spread an antisemitic agenda. After its publication, similarities between ‘The Protocols’ and an 1864 french satire titled “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu” were spotted, and the text was revealed to be a forgery.

Despite being proven false, ‘The Protocols’ made a resurgence in 1917 when the Bolshevik Party, now known as the Communist Party, seized power in Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, many Europeans were afraid of similar revolutions spreading throughout the continent, and Jews were soon used as a scapegoat and blamed for Communism when Henry Ford published an English translation of ‘The Protocols.’

In the 1920’s, Adolf Hitler was introduced to the text by Alfred Rosenberg, a leading thinking of the Nazi party. Hitler, who already had strong antisemitic views that Germany lost World War I due to the Jews, used the text in order to spread his agenda. He referred to it in his early political speeches and even discussed it in his autobiography, ‘Mein Kampf’. ‘The Protocols’ acted as fuel for him to continue spreading his antisemitic agenda, and even in his later speeches, while he doesn’t outright mention it, his beliefs about Jewish people had clear influence from the contents of the text. 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were, and still are, a major contributor to antisemitic beliefs and conspiracies. Even in recent years, the text has been republished and continues to circulate in antisemetic circles.

When I started looking to find information on Marquis De Sade, the first sentence I saw was that “for much of his adult life he was confined in prisons and insane asylums.” That says pretty much all you need to know about De Sade– aside from being a writer, he was a criminal and a disturbed man. From what we know, his crimes began after his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy, high ranking family, with whom De Sade had 3 children. He started an affair quickly after the marriage began, and soon began to hire prostitutes as well. It seems like a typical story of adultery, but what De Sade was actually doing was far from typical.

De Sade hired these prostitutes not just for sex, but to play out some of his morbid fantasies as well. He subjected these women to various kinds of abuse, ranging from sexual abuse to straight up torture. He was initially imprisoned on orders of the king, but was let free a few weeks later, continuing his acts of torment until his first big scandal in 1768, where a young prostitute who De Sade had kidnapped and sexually abused escaped and received help. He was then arrested again for his offenses. I won’t go into all of the details of De Sade’s history, but it’s also important to mention his imprisonment in 1785, where he wrote ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ from his cell. In 1789, however, he was transferred from his prison in Bastille to an insane asylum, forcing him to abandon his work (and probably for the best.) 

Now, the history behind ‘120 Days of Sodom’. The novel, despite its disturbing contents, was De Sade’s way of denouncing the elite in France before the revolution. The 4 masters are all representative of different corrupt branches of power– the court, the church, the bank (or the economy as whole), and the nobles. De Sade depicts the men representing these as heartless, cruel individuals committing the most inhumane acts upon others. It’s not subtle, and it’s not sugar coated. Given his history, though, it’s hard to believe that ‘120 Days of Sodom’ was truly just a work of satire. While some of the acts committed in the novel are far more extreme than anything De Sade ever did, it’s very likely that his personal crimes and actions were an inspiration for the events of the novel, and that his writings were just a fantasy of what he would have done if he hadn’t been confined to a prison cell.