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THE HISTORY OF A LIE

_“The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion”_

_“Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.”_
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

A STUDY
BY
HERMAN BERNSTEIN

AUTHOR OF “WITH MASTER MINDS,” ETC.

NEW YORK

J.В S. OGILVIE PUBLISHING COMPANY
57 ROSE STREET

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY J.В S. OGILVIE PUBLISHING COMPANY




_FOREWORD_


_This is the history of a Lie—of a cruel and terrible Lie invented for
the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people. Given out as fiction,
by a German anti-Semitic writer, involved in the Waldeck forgery case,
who concealed his identity under the pen-name of an Englishman, it was
gradually changed and elaborated, and finally groomed as fact. Agents of
the Russian secret police department and of the unscrupulous “Black
Hundreds” then utilized this fiction as the framework for the
“protocols” through which they sought to crush the Jews and prop up the
tottering Russian dynasty.

Tsarism destroyed itself, but the agents of Tsarism, still dreaming of
their past glory and of a restoration of their privileges, are at work
again, both here and abroad.

Out of the scrapheap of Russian autocracy, they have exhumed their old
weapons and are striking at the Jews again. Upon the structure of the
old myths they are striving to erect new falsehoods in order to
intensify everywhere chaos and confusion and dissatisfaction so that
they may attain their own dastardly and selfish ends.

In the war’s aftermath the Jews are being blamed by the minions of
autocracy and reaction for all the ills that have befallen mankind. Some
blame them for the war, and others for the peace. Some attack them for
the defeat of the German military machine, and others for the victory of
the allies. In Germany they are attacked by the Junkers for having
opposed the submarine warfare and thus assured Germany’s defeat; while
in some of the allied countries the Jews are denounced for constituting
“the brains of Germany.” All the revolutionary leaders of Germany are
credited to the Jews, and bolshevism, which has as little in common with
Judaism as it has with Christianity, is branded as a Jewish movement;
and there are Jew-baiters who in their blind madness have gone so far as
to declare that ex-Kaiser Wilhelm was not only influenced by the Jews
but is himself of Jewish descent, and for this reason did not defend
Germany as loyally as he should have done. He conspired against the
Hohenzollern dynasty and undermined it. He destroyed his own throne
because he was serving the secret Jewish world organization.

On such absurdities have people been fed, since the armistice, in
civilized countries by antisemitic agitators and their dupes, while Jews
have been slaughtered in the Ukraine, in Poland and in Hungary.

I submit in this little book the documentary evidence showing how the
so-called “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” on which this new crusade
is predicated, were forged._

HERMAN BERNSTEIN.

_New York, February, 1921._




CONTENTS


PAGE
FOREWORD 3


CHAPTER ONE
THE MYSTERIOUS PROTOCOLS

The