To begin, I wanted to touch base on the origins of this text. It was originally written in Russian and published in 1903. It was translated into English in 1921, but determined a fraudulent text by a British newspaper at the time.
This text has 24 protocols, and its idea was that these protocols were written in order to “take over the world,” and this was a text that tried to publicize the idea that Jews were a terrible group of people that had the intent of hurting others. These view don’t line up with the actual ideas of Judaism which bring a lot of doubt to this text’s authenticity. During many points of reading this text, there are things written that further prove this text to be fraudulent and just not in line with Judaism views. Firstly, the use of the word “God” isn’t a traditional word that is used or approved of, which can help the reader to doubt the fact that a Jewish person truly wrote this text.
One idea that came to mind while reading this text was straight up Hitler. This text comes before his time, but it represents a ton of similar or identical viewpoints that are shared. A quote from the article on page 6 severely caught my eye and reminded me of Hitler’s viewpoints. The quote states,
“It also demonstrates that the Jews are now a world menace, and that the Aryan races will have to domicile them permanently out of Europe..”
In my opinion, this quote sounded just like Hitler, which made me think of the fact that this text had a great impact on people at the times ideas. Many people believe that this text is a “handbook” for believers of antisemitism and I can definitely see that correlation. To conclude, I wasn’t very interested in this text and I didn’t like the fact that the introduction was not very scholarly. It could be an interesting topic to dive into, but the protocols themselves also seemed fraudulent which made it less interesting to me.