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a homeland for the dispersed Jewish people, there were twenty-four secret sessions. At these sessions, Dr. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, presided, and it was he who delivered the Protocols —a distillation of the wisdom of ages—much as Moses delivered the Commandments.
    Of course, the very last thing that such a clandestine meeting would have wanted was the publication of a record of its deliberations. Unfortunately, some men have a price. After the congress finished, an emissary of the elders, en route to God knows where, took a manuscript of the lectures to a Masonic lodge in Frankfurt am Main. Waiting at the lodge was an agent of the Russian secret police and a crack team of transcribers. In return for payment, the emissary gave the agent one night to copy the Protocols in their original language, presumably Hebrew. In the morning, he collected his sensational cargo and disappeared from history. The copied manuscript itself was taken back to Russia, where it was recopied and given to scholars for translation and study.
    For some reason—and oddly, given the extraordinary contents of the manuscript—this process took an inordinate amount of time. It was only in 1905, according to zur Beek, that a certain Sergei Nilus, described as a scholar from Moscow, published a book, The Great in the Small , that consisted mostly of the views of a pious Orthodox conservative on the imminence of the coming of the Antichrist. The Protocols were to be found as one of its appendices. As the book went through subsequent editions in 1911, 1912, and 1917, the protocols became more prominent. Zur Beek’s book claimed to be based on the 1911 Nilus edition, brought to Germany after the Russian Revolution by anti-Bolshevik exiles.
    One reason for the slow burn before the book came to widespread attention might be that it wasn’t until after the Russian Revolution that it could be seen as prophetic. Nilus himself, though, had always understood the connection between the writings and real life. In the introduction to the 1911 edition, he anticipated: “The educated non-Jewish reader will see in his daily life and in the lightning-like events that have struck Russia and all of Europe a fullness of evidence for the authenticity of the Protocols .” By 1919, he was right. Zur Beek’s edition was followed by the publication of a Polish version in Warsaw, three French translations, an English version, three separate publications in America, and more in Scandinavia, Italy, and Japan. In 1925, following the publication of an Arabic version, the Latin patriarch in Jerusalem praised the work and called upon Christians to buy it. c What had been discovered appeared to be, in the words of the American academic Richard S. Levy, who has made a study of the Protocols , “the veritable Rosetta Stone of history.” 6 It suddenly explained everything.

    The Protocols on the Move
    Nowhere had they been more anxious for that explanation than in Germany. Within weeks of zur Beek’s publication, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was circulating in the highest echelons of the old Reich. Prince Otto zu Salm-Horstmar, who in July 1918 had already called attention to the links between the Jews and the Freemasons in the German parliament, was an influential sponsor, as was the chairman of the Conservative Party in the Prussian upper house, Count Behr. Prince Joachim Albrecht of Prussia, youngest son of the abdicated kaiser, would strew the restaurants and luxury hotels that he visited with copies of zur Beek’s book. And when Lady Norah Bentinck visited Wilhelm II in exile in Doorn in the Netherlands, she found the former emperor recommending it to his guests and reading individual chapters out loud after dinner. 7 It must have been a relief to the kaiser to discover that, contrary to Allied propaganda, it was not he who had started the First World War but somebody else.
    If Wilhelm had reasons for wanting the blame shifted, the same could hardly be