so many stories about a minority group surely has some meat in it;

A few weeks ago I published a long article on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, reviewing the available evidence on that notorious document of the very early twentieth century and attempting to evaluate its credibility and provenance.

My ultimate verdict was rather hum-drum. I concluded that the work was likely fictional, but probably reflected a widespread quiet understanding of the enormous hidden influence of Jewish groups across Europe, whether as bankers, political advisors, or revolutionaries.

A couple of generations earlier, the popular novels of Benjamin Disraeli, the very influential Jewish-born British Prime Minister, had made exactly that sort of claim, with a character representing Lord Rothschild explaining that a network of Jews operating from behind the scenes secretly dominated most of Europe’s major governments. These notions probably served as an important inspiration for the Protocols.

Around the time that the Protocols came to light, similar sentiments were widespread in even the most reputable circles. For example, Dr. David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University and one of America’s foremost public intellectuals, published Unseen Empire in 1913. In that work, favorably reviewed in the influential Literary Digest, he argued that a network of intermarried Jewish banking families had quietly gained financial control over all of Europe’s major countries and therefore exercised greater real influence over their government policies than did any of their various elected legislatures, kings, or emperors.

Indeed, the Protocols only began to attract widespread international attention after the top leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution was recognized as being overwhelmingly Jewish. That radical movement had seized control of the mighty Russian Empire in 1917, and then unsuccessfully attempted to do the same in the rest of Europe, with failed uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and other locations.

Although I thought that the Protocols had probably been fabricated, I noted that many very highly regarded contemporaneous sources had at least initially regarded it as the factual record of a Jewish conspiracy seeking to overthrow all of Europe’s Christian governments and ultimately seize control of the world. For example, I passed along the account of Douglas Reed, a leading Times of London correspondent of that era:..........more..........