Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Read Online Free PDF

which promised an end to repression. In fact, the Bolsheviks had relatively few Jews in senior positions, in contrast to their allies the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were led by men and women from Jewish families. These few, however, caught the eye. There was Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) at the head of the Red Army; Grigory Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), boss of the revolution-spreading Comintern; and Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) at Lenin’s right hand.
    The supposed prominence of the Jews in Soviet Russia was remarked upon by the professional diplomats working for the British Foreign Office. In 1919, the British ambassador in Copenhagen, Lord Kilmarnock, wrote to Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon that most Bolsheviks, as far as he could see, were either Germans or Jews. In the same year, an official report published by the Foreign Office contained observations made in a dispatch by the Reverend B. S. Lombard, a naval chaplain serving in Russia. The revolutionary movement, Lombard claimed, “originated in German propaganda and was, and is being carried out by international Jews.” Lombard had also been ashore in Russia and seen the consequences of Red control over certain towns. “All business becomes paralyzed,” he wrote, “shops were closed, Jews became possessors of most of the business houses.” 1
    American diplomats were telling their bosses much the same thing. Documents from the State Department archives include a file dealing with the relationship between Jewish financial interests and the Russian Revolution. The main document, “Bolshevism and Judaism,” dated November 13, 1918, is a report stating that a Bolshevik takeover had been planned in early 1916, and listing ten or so Jewish companies whom the report’s author, an employee of the U.S. War Trade Board, believed to have been involved. Also in the file are a number of cables sent between the State Department and the American embassy in London. One, which illustrates how this perception was commonplace among Western diplomats, is worth quoting in full.
October 16, 1919 In Confidential File. Secret for Winslow from Wright. Financial aid to Bolshevism & Bolshevik Revolution in Russia from prominent Am. Jews: Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Otto Kahn, Mendell Schiff, Jerome Hanauer, Max Breitung & one of the Guggenheims. Document re—in possession of Brit. police authorities from French sources. 2
    The perception that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution informed the opinions of some of the most illustrious political figures of the time, even in phlegmatic Britain. On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill contributed an article to the Illustrated Sunday Herald . In it he addressed the threat from Bolshevism. “This worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstruction of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality has been steadily growing,” he warned readers. And as to who was behind it: “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.” 3
    In the minds of some, then, including a certain former corporal in the German army who, a thousand kilometers away in Munich, was saying similar things but with rather more venom, the notion that the Jews were behind the war and revolutions that had traumatized Europe began to take root. But this suspicion was as nothing compared to the conspiracy that others were suggesting might be at the heart of things.

    Enter the Protocols
    “Since the autumn of 1919,” wrote a commentator seven years later, “a remarkable book has been circulating in Germany, the civilized countries of Europe and America.” 4 This book was titled Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion— in English, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion —and it contained