Jerusalem: The Biography

* It was around this time that one of the tsar’s top secret policemen, the Okhrana director in Paris, Piotr Rachkovsky, ordered the forging of a book claiming to be a secret record of Herzl’s Congress in Basle in 1897: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was adapted (and much of it lifted directly) from an 1844 French satire against Emperor Napoleon III and an 1868 anti-Semitic German novel by Hermann Goedsche. The Protocols was a preposterous though diabolical plan for Jews to infiltrate governments, churches and the media and incite wars and revolution, in order to create a world empire ruled by a Davidic autocrat. Published in 1903, it was designed to provoke anti-Semitism within Russia where tsardom was threatened by Jewish revolutionaries.