The myth of the Jewish world conspiracy represents a more modern adaptation of an ancient demonological tradition in which Jews were accused of various monstrosities, such as; worshipping the devil; being masters of black magic; murdering Christian children; poisoning water supplies; torturing the consecrated wafer; and forming a secret Jewish government- a council of Rabbi's (originally located in Moslem Spain), which was supposed to be directing an underground war against Christendom and employing sorcery as its principal weapon.

The propagation of such views, century after century, gradually but decisively influenced the attitude of the laity. Christian teaching and preaching during the Middle Ages ensured that Jews would be treated as dangerous enemies, were almost wholly without legal rights and were frequently massacred by the mob. Jews were believed to be a wholly alien people, compulsorily restricted to the most sordid trades. The established church did little to counter these views; in fact there are numerous sources which prove the opposite - priests (particularly those catholic priests preaching in eastern Europe, but also those active during the period of the Spanish Inquisition and later, pre- and post- French Revolution) actively promoted the perception of Jews as the racial embodiment of secretive, satanic evil.

The history of anti-semitic Christian teaching from the middle ages to the 18th century was based purely on superstition and folk-myth, with no tangible or documented proof behind the anti-semitic claims; such teaching was reliant purely on oral traditions for dissemination. One of the most persistent stories throughout this period concerned the use of the blood of a Christian child in the consecration of Passover bread, although other victims were also mentioned according to the vogue of the time (or, perhaps, the particular tastes of the teller and his audience); these include noviciate catholic priests, young, fair-haired women, orphans, and of course, virgins. Toward the end of the 18th century, however, as the populations of Europe became increasingly literate, actual tangible written proof of the complicity of the Jews became increasingly necessary and the propagators of anti-Semitism found themselves in the unfortunate position of lacking documentary proof to their claims. Even more unfortunate - such proof simply did not exist. Thus the stage was set for the creation of a series of forgeries which, in the climate of the 19th century, were eagerly accepted by a Christian European population seeking a devil to blame for their ills.

In its modern form I think that the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy can be traced back to a French cleric, the Abbé Barruel. As early as 1797 Barruel, in his five-volume Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme, argued that the French Revolution represented the culmination of an age-old conspiracy of the most secret of secret societies. As he saw it, the trouble began with the medieval Order of Templars, which had not really been exterminated in 1314 but had survived as a secret society, pledged to abolish all monarchies, to overthrow the Papacy, to preach unrestricted liberty to all peoples and to found a world-republic under its own control. In 1776 it had created a secret literary academy, consisting of Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and d'Alembert, which met regularly in the house of the Baron d'Holbach; by its publications this body had undermined all morality and true religion among the French. From 1776 onwards Condorcet and the Abbé Sicyès had built up a vast revolutionary organisation of half a million Frenchmen, who were the Jacobins of the revolution. But the heart of the conspiracy, the true leaders of the revolution, were the Bavarian Illuminati under Adam Weishaupt - 'enemies of the human race, sons of Satan.' To this handful of Germans all the Freemasons and Jacobins of France already owed blind allegiance; and it was Barruel's view that unless it was stopped, this handful would soon dominate the world.

No time need be wasted on the claim that the French Revolution was produced by a conspiracy reaching back to the 14th century as this obviously flies in the face of the facts and is clearly ridiculous. As for the obscure German group known as the Illuminati, they were not Freemasons at all but were, in fact, rivals of the Freemasons and had in any case been dissolved in 1786. Furthermore, the role of the Freemasons was also fantastically over-simplified and exaggerated. It is true that the Freemasons shared that concern for humanitarian reform which is commonly associated with the Enlightenment - for instance, they contributed to the abolition of judicial torture and of witchcraft trials, and to the improvement of schools. On the other hand, at the time of the revolution most Freemasons were Catholic and monarchist - indeed King Louis XVI and his brothers were all Freemasons; while during the Terror Freemasons were guillotined by the hundred and their organisation, the Grand Orient, was suppressed.

The fact is that Barruel himself never noticed any Masonic influence at work while the revolution was in progress. The idea was presented to him some years later, in London, by the Scottish mathematician John Robison, who was himself preparing a book called 'Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies.' Barruel felt inspired to produce a book on the very same subject, if possible before Robison - and he succeeded; his Mémoire forestalled Robison's by a year, was translated into English, Polish, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, and made its author a rich man.

Nevertheless at the time when he wrote his five volumes Barruel still imposed certain limits on his imagination. Though he was more than willing to blame the revolution on the Freemasons, he scarcely mentioned the Jews - understandably enough, since no Jew played any significant part either in the revolution itself or in the philosophical revolution that preceded it. Others, however, were less inhibited than Barruel. In 1806 he received a document which seems to be the earliest in the series of anti-semitic forgeries that was to culminate in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This was a letter from Florence ostensibly written by an army officer called J. B. Simonini (Note 1), of whom nothing else is known and with whom Barruel himself failed to establish contact. After congratulating Barruel for having 'unmasked the hellish sects which are preparing the way for Antichrist' he draws his attention to 'the Judaic sect' - surely 'the most formidable power, if one considers its great wealth and the protection it enjoys in almost all European countries.' The mysterious Simonini goes on to reveal some extraordinary information which he claims to have obtained by a ruse. He once pretended to some Piedmontese Jews that he himself had been born a Jew and, though separated from the Jewish community in early childhood, had always retained his love of his 'nation.' Thereupon the Jews showed him 'sums of gold and silver for distribution to those who embraced their cause' ; promised to make him a general if only he would become a Freemason; presented him with three weapons bearing Masonic symbols; and revealed their greatest secrets.

These were indeed surprising. Simonini learned, for instance, that Mani (Note 2) and the Old Man of the Mountain (Note 3) were both Jews (though in reality neither of them was); and that the Order of Freemasons and the Illuminati were both founded by Jews (though their founders are known, and were not Jews). More surprising still, he discovered that in Italy alone more than 800 ecclesiastics were Jews; these included bishops and cardinals and would shortly, it was hoped, include a pope. Simonini was told that much the same situation existed in Spain; indeed everywhere Jews were disguising themselves as Christians. Equally menacing were their political and economic stratagems. Already certain countries had granted full civil rights to the Jews and soon the remaining countries, harassed by plots and seduced by money, would do likewise. That accomplished, the Jews would buy up all lands and houses, until the Christians were completely dispossessed. Then the last stage of the plot would be carried out: the Jews 'promised themselves that in less than a century they would be masters of the world, that they would abolish all other sects, that they would turn Christian churches into so many synagogues and reduce the remaining Christians to a state of absolute slavery.' Only one serious obstacle remained - the House of Bourbon, which was the Jews' worst enemy; and the Jews would annihilate that.

Barruel once remarked that if the Simonini letter were published it might provoke a massacre of the Jews, and on that occasion he was talking sense; for in embryo the letter does indeed contain the whole myth of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. But the letter also points very clearly to the circumstances which gave birth to that myth. Needless to say it had nothing to do with the real relationship between Jewry and Freemasonry, which was tenuous. In the 18th century the Freemasons were on the whole hostile to the Jews (and so, incidentally, were the Bavarian Illuminati). At the time of the Simonini letter many lodges were reluctant to accept Jewish members. At no time have Jews, or persons of Jewish descent, played a disproportionate part in Freemasonry. These are the sober facts; but facts such as these have never deterred anyone who wished to believe in a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. Had not Barruel shown that the French Revolution was the work of a conspiracy of Freemasons? No more was required to establish that Freemasons and Jews were closely associated, in fact practically identical.

It is true that the French Revolution, like the American Revolution before it, really did help the Jews. Since it proclaimed 'the rights of man' and championed the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, it was logically bound to grant rights to French Jews. And not only this - wherever Napoleon's power extended the Jews were emancipated; in the Simonini letter one can hear the crash of the Italian ghettos as they fell before the French armies. This was quite enough to convince reactionaries that Napoleon was the ally of Jewry, if not a Jew himself. Those who identified themselves with the ancien régime had to account somehow for the collapse of a social order which they regarded as ordained by God. The myth of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy supplied the explanation they craved.

Then, in 1806, Napoleon summoned an assembly of prominent French Jews - mostly rabbis and scholars - at Paris. The Emperor's motives were purely political and administrative; he was interested in stamping out the money-lending which, as a legacy from pre-emancipation days, was still practised by Jews in Alsace, and he also wanted to satisfy himself that the Jewish population was as submissive as the rest of France. But he called the assembly 'the Great Sanhedrin,' after the supreme Jewish court of antiquity - and this automatically suggested that a Jewish government had been secretly in existence down the centuries. Above all, in the eyes of many of Napoleon's enemies the calling of a 'Sanhedrin' established him once and for all as that Antichrist who, in the last days of the earth, is to appear as the Messiah of the Jews. The journal of the French émigrés in London, L'Ambigu (20th October, 1806), commented: 'Does he hope to form, from these children of Jacob, a legion of tyrannicides? … Time will show. It remains for us only to watch this Antichrist fight against the eternal decrees of God; that must be the last act of his diabolic existence.' In Moscow, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church asserted: 'Today he proposes to reunite the Jews whom God's wrath had scattered over the face of the earth, to urge them on to overthrow the Church of Christ and to proclaim a false messiah in his person.' The Simonini letter, with its mention of Antichrist and its prophetic tone, fitted perfectly into such an atmosphere. Barruel duly passed it round in influential circles in France, with the express object 'of forestalling the effect which might be produced by the "Sanhedrin".'

The Simonini letter seems in fact to have given a new direction to Barruel's own thinking. Just before his death in 1820, at the age of seventy-nine, Barruel opened his mind to a certain Father Grivel - and what emerged was the myth of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, elaborated far beyond the hints of the Simonini letter. He had written a vast manuscript, which he destroyed two days before his death, to show how a revolutionary conspiracy had existed down the ages, from Mani to the medieval Templars and thence to the Freemasons. As for the Jews, he believed them to have made common cause with the Templars and to have occupied commanding positions in the conspiracy ever since.

At that moment Europe was covered by a network of Masonic lodges, penetrating into every village in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany; and the whole organisation was rigidly controlled by a supreme council of twenty-one, which included no less than nine Jews. This council had no fixed residence, but wherever the statesmen of the great powers met in congress it was to be found somewhere in the background; in addition, its individual members travelled a great deal, under the pretext of pursuing business interests or attending learned conferences but in reality to direct the activities of the organisation: The supreme council was not, however, the ultimate authority in Freemasonry; it appointed an inner council of three, which in turn elected a Grand Master, who was the secret head of this secret International organisation.

Around the figure of the Grand Master, Barruel weaves a truly lurid tale. The Grand Master takes all decisions, and he takes them 'as despotically, as irrevocably, as the Old Man of the Mountain'. Disobedience to his orders is punished by death; every Freemason is bound by oath to assassinate any member of the order, even the members of the inner council, if the Grand Master so ordains. This is the explanation of almost every apparently inexplicable assassination. And of course the sole true aim of Freemasonry is to produce revolutions. Orders to this end are sent out by the Grand Master in code, and are carried across Europe by relays of Freemasons, all of them on foot. 'And so,' concludes Barruel, 'from neighbour to neighbour and from hand to hand the orders are transmitted with incomparable speed, for these pedestrians arc delayed neither by bad weather, nor by the mishaps that normally befall horsemen or carriages; a man on foot can always get along when he knows the country, and that is the case here. They stop neither to eat nor to sleep, for each one covers only two leagues.'

The mail-coach takes ten hours from Paris to Orleans, stopping for an hour; the distance is thirty leagues. Fifteen pedestrians, replacing one another, can reach Orleans from Paris in nine hours, using short-cuts and above all never stopping. Clearly the supreme council, even though only partly Jewish, already possessed that superhuman capacity for organising vast and invisible manoeuvres that later generations were to attribute to the Elders of Zion.

Barruel's fantasies and the Simonini letter found little echo in the first half of the nineteenth century. anti-semitic propaganda, though it existed, was neither abundant nor influential at that time, and the myth of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy in particular passed into oblivion even among anti-semites.

The first important reference to the idea appears not in anti-semitic propaganda but, in the form of a rather naughty joke, in Disraeli s novel Coningsby, which was published in 1844. In chapter fifteen of book III there is a passage where the rich and aristocratic Jew, Sidonia, describes how, when raising a loan for the Russian Government, he travelled from country to country - Russia, Spain, France, Prussia - and in each capital found that the minister concerned was a Jew. And he ends his tale with the comment: 'So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.' It is a passage which was later to be quoted by innumerable anti-semitic writers - for did it not after all come from a famous Jew who was later himself to be prime minister? What was not mentioned, and was perhaps seldom realised, is that the various ministers named - who include Napoleon's marshal, Soult, and the Prussian Count Arnim - were not in fact Jews.

It was around 1850 that the myth of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy reappeared - this time in Germany - as a weapon of the extreme right in its struggle against the growing forces of nationalism, liberalism, democracy, and secularism. Writing under the immediate impact of the risings of 1848, the publicist E. E. Eckert describes how the Freemasons are organising not only all revolutionary movements but also the situations that produce revolutionary movements - how they deliberately plunge the masses into moral barbarism and religious despair and finally into economic desperation. This points forward unmistakably to the Protocols, save that Eckert makes no mention of Jews. The gap was filled by the Catholic periodical Historisch-politische Blatter, of Munich, which in 1862 published a protest signed 'A Berlin Freemason' but which was manifestly not written by a Freemason at all.

After complaining of the growing influence of Jews in public and political life in Prussia, the anonymous correspondent describes an (entirely imaginary) association in Germany which, while employing the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry, in reality pursues secret aims - aims that have nothing to do with Freemasonry and that threaten the security of all states. This association is governed by 'unknown superiors' and consists mostly of Jews. Nor are such machinations confined to Germany. In London 'the Grand Master' Palmerston presides over the forces of revolution in Europe - but behind Palmerston are two pseudo-Masonic lodges consisting entirely of Jews, and whose threshold no gentile can ever cross. Another such Jewish centre is in Rome - the struggle for the national unity of Italy is nothing but a Jewish plot in which Mazzini and his colleagues are puppets in the hands of 'unknown superiors.' During the annual fair at Leipzig an exclusively Jewish lodge functions uninterruptedly, though in deadly secret. German Freemasons feel themselves being impelled hither and thither by unknown forces, although the oath of secrecy prevents them from comparing notes and thus penetrating the fearsome secrets.

A few years after this extravaganza there appeared, also in Germany, a document which in due course was to become the model for the Protocols themselves. The author of this prototype of the most famous of all anti-semitic forgeries was one Hermann Goedsche, who had formerly been a minor official in the Prussian postal service.

In the reaction following the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 this man had made an unfortunate miscalculation. In order to incriminate the democratic leader Benedic Waldeck, whose politics were proving inconvenient to the King of Prussia, Goedsche produced letters which if they had been genuine would have unmasked Waldeck as conspiring to overthrow the constitution and assassinate the King. In the event it was quickly proved not only that the letters were forgeries but that Goedsche knew them to be so: His career in the postal service being at an end, Goedsche joined the staff of the newspaper Neue preussische Zeitung, popularly known as the Preussische Kreuzzeitung, which was much favoured by conservative landowners; he also began to write novels, the more sensational under the pseudonym of Sir John Retcliffe.

One of these novels, Biarritz, contained a chapter called 'In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague': It is a piece of straight fiction of the most romantically sensational kind, but it was nevertheless to become the basis for a very influential anti-semitic forgery. The chapter describes a secret nocturnal meeting which is supposed to have been held in the cemetery during the Feast of Tabernacles: At eleven o'clock the gates of the cemetery creak softly and the rustling of long coats is heard, as they touch against the stones and shrubbery: A vague white figure passes like a shadow through the cemetery until it reaches a certain tombstone; here it kneels down, touches the tombstone three times with its forehead and whispers a prayer. Another figure approaches, it is that of an old man, bent and limping; he coughs and sighs as he moves. The figure takes its place next to its predecessor and it too kneels down and whispers a prayer. A third figure appears - a tall, impressive figure, clad in a white mantle; as though unwillingly, he too kneels down at the tombstone: Thirteen times this procedure is repeated. When the thirteenth and last figure has taken its place a clock strikes midnight. From the grave there comes a sharp, metallic sound. A blue flame appears and fights up the thirteen kneeling figures. A hollow voice says, 'I greet you, heads of the twelve tribes of Israel.' And the figures dutifully reply: 'We greet you, son of the accursed.'

The assembled figures are in fact meant to represent the twelve tribes of Israel. The additional member of the party represents 'the unfortunates and the exiles.' Under the chairmanship of the representative of the house of Aaron, these various personages report on their activities during the century which has elapsed since the last meeting. The Levite announces that after centuries of oppression and striving, Israel is rising again, thanks to the gold which has fallen into her hands. The Jews can now look forward to a future, not far off, when the whole earth will belong to them. The representative of Reuben reports that through the stock exchanges the Jews have managed to place all the princes and governments of Europe in their debt and are thereby able to control them. Simeon outlines a scheme for breaking up the great estates and getting all land into Jewish hands, so that the workers on the land will become workers for the Jews. Judah shows how independent artisans are being reduced by Jewish machinations to the status of factory-workers, who can then be controlled and directed for political purposes. The Aaronic Levite is concerned with undermining the Christian Church, by fostering free thought, scepticism, and anti-clericalism. Issachar thinks that the military class, being the defender of the throne and the exponent of patriotism, has to be discredited in the eyes of the masses. Zebulon maintains that, though the Jewish people is by nature intensely conservative, Jews must now appear to side with forces of progress; for unrest and revolutions can be so directed that they bring no real benefits to the poor but merely increase the power of the Jews. Dan, 'a Jew of the lower order,' has more modest ambitions; he is concerned that Jews should monopolise the trade in liquor, butter, wool, and bread. Naphtali demands that government positions should be thrown open to Jews, particularly those which carry great influence, such as justice and education. Benjamin makes a similar demand with respect to the liberal professions. Asher considers that marriage with Christian women can only serve the purpose of the Jews, and that a Jew desiring the pleasures of fornication or adultery should always seek them with Christian and not with Jewish women. Manasseh concludes the series of speeches with an impassioned plea for capturing and controlling the press; in this way Jews will be able to decide what the masses shall believe, what they shall desire, what they shall reject.

After the assembled representatives have all had their say the presiding Levite gives his message of encouragement. What has been said will be as a sword with which Israel will strike down its enemies. If these prescriptions are faithfully followed, future generations of Jews will suffer no more oppression but, on the contrary, will enjoy happiness, wealth, and power. When the next meeting is held, a hundred years hence, the grand-children of those now present will be able to announce at that graveside that they have indeed become princes of the world and that all other nations are their slaves.

The Levite concludes with the command: 'Let us renew our oath, sons of the golden calf, and go out to all the lands of the earth.' Thereupon a blue flame appears above the tomb, while each of the thirteen throws a stone upon the tomb; and in the midst of the flame there appears a monstrous golden calf. So the meeting ends; but what none of the participants knows is that these clandestine proceedings have been observed throughout by two men, a German scholar and a baptised Jew, who now swear to spend all their strength in fighting this devilish Jewish plot.

The relevant volume of Biarritz was published in 1868, and the date is significant. In Germany the partial emancipation of the Jews during the years of Napoleon's sway had been followed by a violent anti-semitic reaction. With the slow growth of a middle class which was at least partly liberal, Jews again enjoyed greater freedom and acceptance, until this tiny fraction of the population -1.2 per cent, to be precise - was granted approximately the same civil rights as were enjoyed by the remaining 98.8 per cent. This came about in the North German states in 1869, and was extended to the whole of the new German Reich in 1871. Nevertheless, in a country which never accepted with any real conviction the ideals of liberalism and democracy, anti-Semitism remained a powerful factor. Moreover, precisely because German national unity was achieved extremely late, Germans became quite abnormally emphatic in their nationalism; and this too fostered anti-Semitism. It is therefore not surprising that the first comprehensive formulation of the modern myth of the Jewish conspiracy should have appeared in Germany at the very moment when the Jews were about to be granted full emancipation.

But this was only the beginning of the story - for soon this frankly fictional episode began to turn into a forged document. It was Russian anti-semites who first thought of treating the story as an authentic record; in 1872 the relevant chapter was published in St Petersburg as a pamphlet, with the sinister comment that, although the story was a piece of fiction, it had a basis in fact. In 1876 a similar pamphlet appeared in Moscow, with the title 'In The Jewish Cemetery in Czech Prague (the Jews sovereigns of the world.' In 1880 a second edition of this pamphlet was published; and similar pamphlets appeared in Odessa and Prague. Some years later the story appeared in France, in Le Contemporain for July 1881. Now it was no longer presented as a piece of fiction. All the various speeches made by the fictional Jews at Prague were consolidated into a single speech, which was supposed to have been made by a chief rabbi to a secret meeting of Jews. The authenticity of this speech was vouched for - in fact it was supposed to be extracted from a forthcoming work by an English diplomat, Annals of the Political and Historical Events of the Last Ten Years.

Goedsche, as we know, had written his novel under the nom de plume of Sir John Retcliffe; so it was only appropriate that the English diplomat should be called the same - or rather, carelessly, Sir John Readclif. This gentleman was to have a most adventurous career. When Francois Bournand printed the 'speech' in Les Juifs et nos contemporains (1896) he prefaced it with a startling revelation: 'We find the programme of Jewry, the real programme of the Jews expressed by the Chief Rabbi John Readclif. It is a speech made in 1880.'

Mercifully Sir John quickly recovered himself. Later editions of the 'speech' were often accompanied by touching tributes to that heroic anti-Semite, Sir John Readclif. The tributes were by no means unmerited, for when in 1933 the 'speech' appeared for the first time in Sweden, it was prefaced by a melancholy statement: Sir John Readclif had paid with his life for exposing the great Jewish conspiracy. It was a sad end for a man who, if he had been a German novelist, had also been an English diplomat and historian, and who if he had been a heroic anti-Semite had also been a chief rabbi.

This, then, is the origin of what came to be known as The Rabbi's Speech. But the ludicrousness of its origin did not prevent this 'speech' from having a most successful career. In 1887 Theodor Fritsch published it in his 'catechism' for anti-semitic agitators; in the same year, and again in 1891, it appeared in the famous anti-semitic anthology La Russie juive. In 1893 it was printed in an Austrian newspaper, the Deutsch-soziale Blatter. In 1896, as already indicated, it figured in Bournand's book Les Juifs et nos contevnporains. In 1901 a paraphrase of the speech in Czech was printed in Prague, under the title Speech of a Rabbi about the Goyim. The pamphlet was confiscated by the authorities; but this measure was circumvented by a Czech deputy, Brzenovski, who in a question in the Reichstag in Vienna quoted the entire pamphlet verbatim; whereupon it was promptly printed in two newspapers, Michel wach auf and the Wiener deutsche Zeitung, and so re-entered circulation.

In Russia, where the 'speech' had taken the first steps towards fame in the 1870s, it continued on its triumphant way. In 1891 it appeared in Russian translation in the Odessa news paper, Novorossiysky Telegraf. Now it was established that the 'speech' had been made by a rabbi to a 'secret Sanhedrin' in 1869 (presumably the reference is to the First Congress of Reform Judaism held in that year at Leipzig); and again its authenticity is guaranteed by the well-known English aristocrat, Sir John Readclif. Early in the new century the fabrication was used in Russia for the purpose of instigating pogroms. At this stage its history became intertwined with that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The professional anti-Semite P. A. Krushevan seems to have used a pamphlet containing The Rabbi's Speech as a help in provoking the pogrom at Kishinev in Bessarabia in 1903. A few months later he published the Protocols in his newspaper Znamya (the Banner); and on 22 January 1904 he published the 'speech' in the same newspaper. In 1906 Krushevan's friend Butmi included it in his edition of the Protocols; and in the same year it was published as a pamphlet in Kharkov. The Deutsch-soziale Blatter rejoiced that this powerful weapon from the ideological arsenal of German anti-Semitism was helping the Russian people to liberate itself from its 'mortal enemy,' the Jews.

Shortly afterwards the hitherto nameless rabbi who was supposed to have delivered the 'speech' was given a name, or rather two names: sometimes he is Rabbi Eichhorn and some times Rabbi Reichhorn. As such he figured at the non-existent congress at Lemberg in 1912. After the First World War the pronouncements of this imaginary gentleman, refurbished to suit the new conditions, shared in the triumphs of the Protocols; many editions include both works. By this time there were naturally several variants of the 'speech' in circulation , and these different versions were used to bolster up one another's authenticity. Indeed their resemblance was taken as proving not only that they were all genuine but that they were successive expressions of a long-established Jewish plot. The Rabbi's Speech was also, inevitably, constantly invoked as proof of the authenticity of the Protocols. It was in post-war Germany that this fabrication, like the Protocols, enjoyed the greatest vogue. Already in 1919 it made up the contents of two different pamphlets. One of these, entitled What is the Jewish Spirit? and published in Wurttemberg, announces in its preface that John Retcliffe's warning cry, addressed to the whole non-Jewish world (it must be forty or fifty years old) is today, in 1919, when Jewry has attained the greater part of its appointed aim, still sufficiently interesting to be presented anew to the German people.

The other edition, published in Berlin, bears the melodramatic title: The Secret of Jewish World Domination, from a work of the last century, which was bought up by Jews and so disappeared from circulation. In the early 1920s the 'speech' was also reprinted in several popular anti-semitic books; and when the Nazis came to power Johann von Leers produced yet another edition. Moreover by this time it had become a commonplace that 'the great knower and warner' Hermann Goedsche, alias Sir John Retcliffe, had himself witnessed the meeting in the cemetery in Prague - having been led there by the Jewish socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle.

Goedsche's fantasy was by no means the only German contribution to the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy. When, in the 1880s, anti-Semitism became an important political movement, Germany emerged as the leading producer of anti-semitic propaganda of every kind. Both French and Russian anti-semites borrowed heavily from German authors and journalists. Conversely, no anti-semitic idea or fable or slogan could appear anywhere in Europe without being promptly snapped up by some German writer. In the vast mass of German anti-semitic writing, the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the secret Jewish government became one of the more important themes. If, for instance, one examines Theodor Fritsch's 'anti-semitic catechism,' one finds a whole section devoted to 'Jewish secret societies.' Here all the fantasies which had been elaborated in Germany or France or Russia are refurbished for the benefit of the German public. And the book proved very popular. First published in 1887, later enlarged and dignified with the title Handbook of the Jewish Question, it had sold 100,000 copies by 1933. It eventually sold far more than that, for in the Third Reich it became - along with the Protocols themselves - one of the texts prescribed for compulsory study in schools.

Notes:

1. J. B. Simonini - I noticed the Simonini letter published in many anti-semitic works (such as Les sociétés secrètes et la Société - N. Deschamps and the July 1878 edition of Le Contemporain.) There is convincing evidence that the letter was actually written by the political police under Fouché with the object of influencing Napoleon against the Jews at the time of 'the Great Sanhedrin.' - an insider revealing awful truths about a secret conspiratorial Jewish society.

2. Mani - In the 3rd century of the Christian era the Persian sage Mani founded the religion of Manichaeism, which in one form or another competed with Christianity for a thousand years.

3. Old Man of the Mountain - The supreme ruler of the Moslem sect known as the Assassins, which was active from the 11th to the 13th centuries and had its headquarters in the mountain fortress of Alamut in Persia. The sect employed secret assassination against all enemies. Those required to kill were made obedient by means of hashish - whence the word 'assassin.' Crusaders from France came across the Assassins in Syria.

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