The History of a Myth

In the early XX century a fake document titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion rose from the depths of the Russian secret police. This falsification was spread by the White emigres and greatly affected Hitler's ideas and the Nazi practices. Although European sources, which are included in the body of the fake and which date back to the XIX century, had been found, it remained unclear why The Protocols surfaced in Russia of all places. In this book an Israeli historian and culturologist Savely Dudakov (1939-2017) conducts a detailed research of this issue. He was the first to dig out the branches of Russian religious, anti-Judaic, and anti-Masonic literature and a wide range of pulp fiction of the mid- and late-XIX century from under the boulders of time. He brought to light the main mythologems of the fake in the form of a "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory." Dudakov's work provides a long list of publications, many of which are included into historical literature and scholarship for the first time. The propaganda of The Protocols ideas lives on as anti-Semitism, "fight against Zionism," and Islamic fundamentalism. This makes The History of a Myth a work of current interest.