History of a lie: Museum exhibits copies of ''Protocols''

washington | Arthur Berger remembers hosting a group of foreign clerics in New York in the mid-1990s when his then-employer, the American Jewish Committee, had been asked by the State Department to help convey to the guests the American ethos of tolerance and mutual understanding.

So it was a bit of a shock when one of the visitors, a Muslim cleric from the Middle East, mentioned over lunch that he had picked up an "incredible book about the Jews" at the Cairo Book Fair: "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Berger now is director of communications at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is currently hosting "Anti-Semitism: Protocols of the Elders of Zion," an exhibition on one of the most notorious forgeries in history.

The modest exhibit includes copies of the book that Hitler looked to for inspiration and Henry Ford disseminated for general consumption.

Berger said that the book seems to have "a new life."

"It confounds people," he said. "I can't explain it."

The book outlines a plan for world domination supposedly compiled by a gathering of Jewish leaders held during the First Zionist Conference in 1897. In the account, the characters lay out a step-by-step strategy to fool non-Jews — referred to as "goyim" — into doing their bidding.

Plans range from the replacement of the pope to the establishment of a global Jewish government and the appointment of a "king of the Jews."

The exhibit includes copies of the book from Finland (1924), India (1974) and Japan (2004). The 20 covers are adorned with classic anti-Semitic images, including representations of globes trapped in the clutches of massive "Jewish" snakes, arachnids, squid-like creatures and conniving, hook-nosed faces.

A German-language copy from 1920 Berlin looks remarkably like a Jewish prayerbook or an early Zionist manual, complete with a blue-and-white Star of David flag and golden type.

The language that appears most prominently among the artifacts is Arabic.

Last year, Wal-Mart was found selling an English-language edition of "Protocols" on its Web site. The company made a "business decision" to remove the book from the site after widespread criticism.

According to Kenneth Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, the persistence of the phenomenon is simple: The book satisfies virtually every manifestation of contemporary anti-Semitism.

From Holocaust denial to conspiracy theories surrounding Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, the themes present in "Protocols" permeate modern Jew-hatred. "'The Protocols' are representative of the pernicious and insidious nature of anti-Semitism," he said. "They portray the Jews as secretive, conspiratorial, alien, all-powerful."

Of particular note is the resurgence of those themes in bookstores and television screens around the Islamic world, Jacobson said. "'The Protocols' never died. They've never gone away. They're at the core of historic anti-Semitism."

Though the origins of "Protocols" remain uncertain, scholars believe much of the work was plagiarized from an 1864 pamphlet written by French satirist Maurice Joly lampooning Napoleon III's political ambitions, and had nothing to do with the Jews.

Hermann Goedsche, a German spy, swiped Joly's pamphlet and excerpts from a novel by Alexandre Dumas in his book "Biarritz," written under a pseudonym. Goedsche depicted a secret rabbinical council which met in the cemetery at midnight every 100 years to plan the agenda for the Jewish conspiracy.

The Holocaust Museum collection contains a copy of the first edition of "Protocols" published in Nazi Germany in 1933.

The collection is on display through the end of the year.