It is a common adage among those who pour scorn on the Protocols of Zion that the Protocols just won't stay dead or as one fairly recent writer - in the long tradition of self-styled Protocols debunkers - Hadassah Ben-Itto put it: it was 'The Lie That Wouldn't Die'. In fact, it is largely not the proponents of the Protocols who haven't 'let it die', but rather the self-styled debunkers.
There has been a recent surge of books about the Protocols not the least of which is Umberto Eco's novel 'The Prague Cemetery', (1) which recalls the famous chapter of the novel 'Biarritz' penned by Hermann Goedsche (writing under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe).
Now despite initial appearances I don't mean to treat this novel here in part because I am yet to get through all of it as it is execrable to read if you have any kind of knowledge of the scholarly debates around the Protocols of Zion and a conception of what anti-jewish thinkers actually believe and argue. The reason I say that is - much as Robert Moore commented on Eco's most famous novel 'The Name of the Rose' - (2) the mistakes in the presentation are voluminous and desperately awful to read if you know something of what Eco is writing about.
I must confess I have never been a particular fan of Eco's novels (although he is very readable and interesting literary theorist) even before I began looking into the Protocols of Zion, but 'The Prague Cemetery' is turgid to say the least and the peons of praise it has garnered seem to be more because it reinforces basic liberal and left-wing prejudices about supposed 'bigots' than due its innovative written style or story line.
However, the intellectual origins of 'The Prague Cemetery' can be traced to a book Eco published nearly two decades earlier called 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods'. The book itself isn't commonly cited outside of those who have engaged with the literature on the Protocols of Zion as it really serves as an appendix to one of Eco's main contributions to literary theory: 'The Open Work'. (4)
This - as the title suggests - focuses on the idea of the 'open tradition' of literature in that a piece of literature like the folklore of old is modified by different writers and editors of a period of time to suit their particular ideas and intellectual biases. The book largely focuses on novelists, but then in the last chapter 'The Fictional Protocols' Eco suddenly changes course and spends some time discussing the Protocols of Zion as an example of a fictional open work which was taken to be fact.
It is Eco's ideas on this point that are worth discussing in more detail because they are so often cited when the subject of the authenticity of the Protocols is raised.
Despite its name - or perhaps even in spite of it - Eco's chapter 'The Fictional Protocols' spends less than a third of its pages on the Protocols and the bulk of the chapter is actually spent discussing the issue of the contrast between natural (= true) and artificial (= false) narrative and the indicators of them. (5)
Eco's argument on this score I largely agree with as he asserts that we cannot actually tell what is supposed to be fiction and what is supposed to be fact unless we notice various different indicators and cues that tell us how we are intended to view a particular written, viewed or spoken narrative which we are consuming. Eco rightly shows how lacking these indicators or cues we have a tendency to take artificial (= fictional) narrative as being natural (= truthful) narrative.
Eco also rightly points out that when we believe an artificial narrative to be a natural narrative then we are quite capable of rationalizing it every which way because that is what we 'know' to be true as opposed to what is reasonably arguable to be true.
Eco even remarks - and quite rightly so - that our concept of 'history' is largely a case of trusting and cross-checking narrative sources (be they documents, photos, testimony, chronicles and so forth) in order to decide whether each individual source or even parts of sources are to be considered natural (= truthful), artificial (= fictional) or a combination of the two (i.e. an artificial narrative which seems to reflect or compliment the natural narrative). This of course means that history should be viewed - and in my opinion rightly so - as a completely subjective discipline that is based purely on interpretation with no boundary between 'fact' and 'fiction' that is easy to qualify.
Indeed such a view of history fits nicely in with Eco's views on the interchangeability of fictional worlds expressed in novels and the real world as expressed by tactile experiment. In essence Eco's view - as suggested by his ideas on 'truth' versus 'falsehood' - is one where there is no 'truth' only perceived reality which then defines the subject's ideas about the object.
This Eco brings out by using the example of linguistic scholarship which was dominated by the Creation Story told by Genesis, (6) which lead to the arguments (and belief) that Adam had created a number of definitive linguistic categories that then formed the basis of human languages.
These biblical theories are obviously wrong, but we should also point out that Eco could very easily have used another (less obviously anti-religious) example in Marr's theory that language has a class character which became the official intellectual orthodoxy of Soviet linguistics for some thirty years or so until Stalin officially censored it in the early 1950s.
This - similarly to Biblical theories about the origin of language - took a particular document or ideological system to be the unvarnished truth (i.e., the Bible in biblical origin linguistic theories and Engels' 'Anti-Duhring' in Marr's) but neither are these 'artificial narratives' per se, because they are believed to be truthful by their exponents based on the assumption that their foundation's are provable absolutes as opposed to documents or ideas like any other.
In essence Eco is forgetting an intellectual frame in his work, because while he talks about the indicators and cues of normal versus artificial narrative: he does not once consider that such indicators and cues can be derived externally about, and independently of, a work (reputation for example) or social/cultural/political norms associated with the subject or external indicators of the work in question.
For example if I were to write a book about the Protocols of Zion entitled 'The Truth of the International Jewish Conspiracy' then the indicators and cues as to whether it is a natural or artificial narrative can be assumed from the title in that it is either a natural narrative arguing for the reality of an international jewish conspiracy or it is an artificial narrative arguing against it.
There are however other factors operating for a potential consumer of said work in so far as said individuals are conditional by social/cultural/political norms to automatically regard the indicator that this work - because of the title - is likely to really be an untruthful (i.e. artificial) narrative trying to pretend it is a truthful (i.e. natural) narrative irrespective of the amount of evidence presented or how minutely detailed and tightly reasoned the argument in the book actually is due to its conclusions being contrary to those social/cultural/political norms.
If I were to title the same book 'The Protocols of Zion: A Critical Reappraisal' then we can immediately see that the social/cultural/political norms that created the indicators and cues - which informed potential consumers of the work that it was an untruthful (i.e. artificial) narrative trying to pretend it is a truthful (i.e. natural) narrative - now do precisely the opposite because the title has been reworded to take advantage of these same indicators and cues rather than work against them.
If we understand this then we can see that Eco's subjectivism in regards to narrative and history has not actually been taken far enough as he hasn't considered whether or not his own treasured beliefs are actually the result of his taking an artificial narrative as being a natural narrative then applying that artificial narrative to the real world (much like the readers of the Harry Potter novels who try and enrol themselves at Hogwarts).
In essence Eco's thought contradicts itself because he doesn't carry that train of thought far enough in relation to questioning his own assumptions and in doing so he commits precisely the same mistake as those scholars who theorized a biblical origin of language. In so far as Eco talks of the subjectivity of belief and the lack of border of viewpoints derived from fantasies with scholarly theories.
This is beautifully demonstrated when Eco suddenly discards everything he has spent the last dozen or so pages discussing and challenging his readers with by introducing something called 'true history' into the equation. (7) Eco doesn't define this 'true history' but he does imply that he has some kind of special knowledge that allows him to discern historical fantasies from historical realities, but unfortunately he doesn't tell us just what that is.
This is a shame really as through the next pages - where he focuses on the idea of a jewish conspiracy - Eco shows an almost laughable amount of reading and knowledge about the history of anti-jewish ideas where he implies that the idea of the 'plot against the state' by an international jewish conspiracy dates from Abbe Barruel's (largely unprovable) acceptance of the suggestion that Freemasonry and the Illuminati had jewish origins. (8)
Eco doesn't seem to realise that the literary idea of the world jewish conspiracy can be reasonably dated back to at least the Romans who had first had experience of just such conspiracy in the first, second and third jewish revolts while the idea of a jewish conspiracy was also a relatively common one in medieval Europe with ritual murder trials and accusations of poisoning wells having these ideas as an intellectual backdrop. Indeed we can see just such an ideas tacitly espoused by authors as intellectually distant as Chaucer and Shakespeare if we but care to think about they are necessarily suggesting with their jewish characters for a moment.
Eco focuses on Goedsche's 'Biarritz' and particularly on his chapter relating to the Prague cemetery in pointing out that this the scene is allegedly inspired by one from Alexandre Dumas' 'Joseph Balsamo'. (9) This is while claiming that Norman Cohn's conspiracy theory about the alleged anti-Semitic origins of the Protocols of Zion in the Paris office of the Okhrana (the Russian Secret Police) is the absolute truth even though with even a little research Eco would have known that Cohn's idea (while commonly accepted by popular writers) had been significantly criticized by other scholars specializing in the study of the Protocols of Zion such as Henri Rollin (10) as well as actively debunked as a deliberate (and plagiarised) falsehood that Cohn knew he was propagating by Michael Hagemeister. (11)
Indeed, we should note that Cohn's theory has been dealt a decisive blow by the study of the Protocols by Cesare de Michelis where he rightly points out that Cohn's theory about Rachkovsky's and Golovinsky's involvement in a conspiracy to 'write' the Protocols and blame the jews is completely unfounded as it studiously ignores the element of Russian interdepartmental struggles among many other things. (12)
These stinging scholarly debunks haven't dampened Eco's almost religious belief in Cohn's theory though as he all but restates the theory in 'The Prague Cemetery' (13) seemingly without having noticed that the natural narrative completely disagrees with his perceived natural (i.e., artificial claiming to be natural without indicators) narrative. After all if a natural (= truthful) narrative contradicts an individual's artificial (= untruthful/fantasy) narrative then what does Eco himself suggest happens?
That's right: the artificial narrative simply recasts itself as the natural narrative.
So what does Eco do?
Well just that as he claims that 'scholars have shown' that the Protocols deal with end of the nineteenth century French conservative preoccupations. (14) However this is categorically wrong as it in the first place there is no plural: Eco is only citing one scholar's highly controversial theory (i.e. Cohn's). Also, for example, Cohn's claim about French fears about Paris Metro being represented in the 'subterranean tunnels' comments in the Protocols text actually results - as de Michelis has shown - from a garbled translation of an original Russian verb and not from 'end of the nineteenth century French preoccupations' (15) since Cohn didn’t actually read or speak Russian. (16)
The latter is of course a rationalization to fit a particular theory, which in a delicious irony is simply an artificial (fictional) narrative trying to make out that it is actually a natural (truthful) narrative, which effectively means that Eco has spent the best part of a chapter talking about indicators and cues about interpretation and how they can be difficult to spot for the non-expert: only then to fall into just such a trap trying to prove his argument by using a subject he hasn't done very much reading on.
If this wasn't enough Eco makes some obvious misstatements of fact in that he repeatedly quotes claims that only appear in the later editions of the Protocols (particularly that of Sergei Nilus) (17) that - if he had read Cohn - he should know are almost certainly interpolations of later editors onto an original text that have nothing to do with the Protocols of Zion per se. This in spite having drawn a rather innovative (if limited) diagram of the evolution and influence of Goedsche's 'Biarritz' text in relation to the Protocols to illustrate just this on the next page! (18)
Eco simply forgets that he is dealing with an 'open text'/'open tradition' here as it suits his argument to do so and instead uses a text he has to know he is wrong to try and prove the truth of his contention as if it were the actual text of the Protocols of Zion.
It doesn't help his case that Eco evidently hasn't checked the slightly reworked republication of Goedsche's Prague cemetery chapter in the French magazine 'Le Contemporain' in 1881, which was intended to be fictional (as Bronner has implied) (19) but yet instructive. Yet Eco claims it was misinterpretation by the editors of 'Le Contemporain' as being a real transcript when in fact Goedsche reworked said chapter (as Eco doesn't seem to have noticed) because it had sold well independently as a fictional work in Russia (20) and would also fit nicely into the anti-jewish feeling gripping France at the time (thus ensuring good sales).
Essentially Eco is alleging that there were a series of misunderstandings of Goedsche's 'Biarritz' chapter based on shared assumptions about the existence of an international jewish plot and also because different European anti-jewish individuals thought that said chapter was actually a natural (= truthful) narrative as opposed to being an artificial (= fictional) narrative. This lead in Eco's view to the creation of the Protocols of Zion and then to the alleged 'Holocaust' of the jews during the Second World War. (19)
In fact it is only Eco getting confused as he has continuously made erroneous statements in relation to the Protocols text - in spite of the fact that he should know better - misrepresented the now-debunked opinion of one scholar as being the academic consensus, not studied the sources he is citing and most fundamentally made the same mistake he alleges others do in mistaking an artificial narrative as being a natural narrative and then constructing an intellectual position on the resultant mental Disneyland.
In short Eco exposes himself in 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods' to be not only flat out wrong about the Protocols, but also quite the hypocrite as well.
References
(1) Umberto Eco, 2011, 'The Prague Cemetery', 1st Edition, Vintage: London
(2) Robert Moore, 2012, 'The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe', 1st Edition, Profile: London, p. 345
(3) Umberto Eco, 1994, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge
(4) Umberto Eco, 1989, 'The Open Work', 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge
(5) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., pp. 117-131
(6) Ibid., p. 129
(7) Ibid., p. 131
(8) Ibid., pp. 133-135
(9) Ibid., p. 135
(10) Cf. Henri Rollin, 1991, 'L'Apocalypse de Notre Temps: Les Dessous de la Propagande Allemande d'apres les Documents Inedits', 2nd Edition, 2 Vols., Editions Allia: Paris
(11) Michael Hagemeister, 2022, ‘The Perennial Conspiracy Theory: Reflections on the History of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’, 1st Edition, Routledge: New York, pp. 33-34; 49-50
(12) Cesare de Michelis, 2004, 'The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion', 1st Edition, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, pp. 65-69; 122
(13) Eco, 'The Prague Cemetery', Op. Cit., pp. 529-54
(14) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., p. 137
(15) de Michelis, Op. Cit., pp. 92-93
(16) Hagemeister, Op. Cit., pp. 33-34
(17) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., p. 137
(18) Ibid., p. 138
(19) Stephen Eric Bronner, 2003, 'A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 82
(20) de Michelis, Op. Cit., pp. 49-50
(21) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., p. 137