32. The Protocols of Zion

Lucifer Unmasked

Robert Cecil (1864 – 1958)—the cousin of Lord Arthur Balfour (1848 –1930), a member of the Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table and the author of the Balfour Declaration—who became Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, wrote to his colleagues: “I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews.”[1] Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1863 – 1945), however, though a Christian Zionist, once described his colleague Herbert Samuel (1870 – 1963), a British Cabinet member and a secular Zionist as “a greedy, ambitious and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race.”[2] Chaim Weizmann was aware of the full extent of Lord Balfour’s anti-Semitism, as Weizmann wrote of Balfour that, “He told me how he had once had a long talk with Cosima Wagner [wife of Richard Wagner] at Bayreuth and that he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.”[3] “Many [gentiles] have a residual belief in the power and the unity of Jewry,” one of Weizmann’s followers observed many years later. “We suffer for it, but it is not wholly without its compensations.… To exploit it delicately and deftly belongs to the art of the Jewish diplomat.”[4]

The Protocols of Zion emerged at a time of a flurry of anti-Masonic activity, as represented by Là-bas (1891) by Joris-Karl Huysmann and Lucifer Unmasked (1895), a collaborative work by the notorious Leo Taxil and Jules Doinel (1842 – 1902), who was initiated Master Mason in 1885 with “congratulations and encouragement” from Albert Pike.[5] In 1890, Doinel founded l'Église Catholique Gnostique, the official church of the Martinist Order. Doinel had for some years frequented occult circles, where he encountered the teachings of the Johannite Church of Fabré-Palaprat and Eugène Vintras (1807 – 1875), who claimed to be the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah and founded the Church of Carmel. Vintras was alleged to have incorporated forms of sex magic in his rituals, which included naked celebrations of the Mass, homosexuality, and magical prayers accompanied by masturbation.[6] In 1888, the “Eon Jesus” appeared to him in a vision and charged him with the work of establishing a new church, spiritually consecrating him as “Bishop of Montségur and Primate of the Albigenses.” After his vision, Doinel began attempting to contact Cathar and Gnostic spirits during seances in the salon of Lady Caithness, Duchesse de Medina Pomar. Lady Caithness was approached around 1882 by Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott, and Annie Besant, to establish the French branch of the Theosophic Society. She married, as his second wife, James Sinclair, 14th Earl of Caithness (1821 – 1881), a respected scientist and inventor and was a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Lady Caithness’ Theosophical Society of the East and West included the widowed Comtesse de Mnizech, Balzac’s stepdaughter, whose husband had been Éliphas Lévi’s heir. Her salons attracted Papus, Stanislas de Guaita and Oswald Wirth (1860 – 1943), another founding member of the OKR+C. Also belonging to the secret group were Edouard Schuré—a close friend of Richard Wagner, soon to be famous for his Les Grands Inities (1888)—and the Christian socialist Albert Jounet, a friend of the journalist Jules Bois (1868 – 1943), a notorious Satanist. Bois published a series of exposes on satanism, including Les petites religions de Paris (“The Small Religions of Paris”) and Le Satanisme et la magie (“Satanism and Magic”). It was likely at Lady Caithness’ salon that Bois met the famous actress and singer Emma Calvé (1858 – 1942), who would eventually become his lover.[7] At the end of 1890, Doinel joined the Martinist Order and also became a member of its Supreme Council. Doinel started to consecrate a number of Bishops and Sophias, among the first who was Papus, as Tau Vincent, Bishop of Toulouse, in 1892, along with other leaders from the Martinist Order, OKR+C and the HBofL[8]

After Oswald Wirth conveyed to Guaita some papers of Vintras’ successor Abbé Boullan (1824 – 1893), a friend of Bois, Guaita embarked on a “magical war,” known as the Boullan Affair. Boullan, an ordained priest with a doctorate from Rome, became the lover of a nun, Adèle Chevalier, who together traveled about dispensing cures compounded of feces and consecrated hosts. When Adèle gave birth to their bastard child, they sacrificed it as a mass on December 8, 1860. Although the murder remained undiscovered until much later, from 1861 to 1864 Boullan was sent to prison for selling fake medicines. In 1869, he was imprisoned again by the Holy Office in Rome, and composed his journal, the Cabier rose, which confirmed all the rumors about his Satanic crimes.  Enough of the truth was revealed that he was finally defrocked by the archbishop of Paris in 1875.[9]

Bois’ friend, J.K. Huysmans, who was associated with the Symbolists, began an affair with Berthe Cour­tière, a friend of Boullan. Courtière put him in touch with Boullan, sent Huysmans extensive materials on magic, incubi, and the black mass, which he attributed to Stanislas de Guaita and the OKR+C. Guaita and other occultists tried in vain to convince Huysmans that Bollan was lying. Boullan inspired the character of Dr. Johannès in Huysmans’s Là-bas. The plot of Là Bas concerns the novelist Durtal, who seeks relief from the banality of the modern world and studies the life of Gilles de Rais, the notorious fifteenth-century satanist. Through his contacts in Paris, notably Dr. Johannès, Durtal finds out that Satanism is also alive in turn of the nineteenth-century France. The novel ends with what would become the standard literary depiction of a Black Mass, based on combined material Huysmans had received from Courrière, Bois, and Boullan. Huysmans and Bois both went public with their accusations of satanism in 1893 following the mysterious death of Boullan, whom Huysmans and Bois both accused Guaita of murdering through the use of black magic, after which Guaita summoned him to a gun duel. Both come out unscathed.

Là Bas would also be used by the notorious Léo Taxil, who denounced Albert Pike as the head of a Luciferian body over Freemasonry called the Palladium Rite. Taxil, if he was in fact Dr. Bataille, the author of Le Diable au XIXe siècle (“The Devil in the Nineteenth Century”), also devoted a considerable part of the book to denouncing the satanism of Papus, Guaita and the Gnostic Church. Doinel was also a member of a small occult circle, L’Institut d’études Cabalistiques (“Institute for Kabbalistic Studies”), which included Taxil. In 1895, Doinel suddenly converted to Roman Catholicism, abdicated as Patriarch of the Gnostic Church, resigned from his Masonic Lodge, and the pseudonym “Jean Kostka,” Doinel collaborated with Taxil a book called Lucifer Unmasked, denouncing the organizations he had formerly been a part of. Doinel describes satanic rituals at the private chapel of a “Madame X,” who was thought to be the Lady Caithness.[10] However, in 1900, three years after Taxil confessed to his hoax, Doinel recanted and requested his readmission as a Bishop in the Gnostic Church.[11]

Protocols of Zion

The influential Russian mystic, H.P. Blavatsky, who would inspire the Aryan fantasies of the Nazis, was a first cousin of Count Sergei Witte (1849 – 1915), a Russian statesman who served as the first prime minister of the Russian Empire, replacing the tsar as head of the government. Witte recalled in his memoirs conversations he had in Paris in 1903 with Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, who observed: “great events, especially of an internal nature, were everywhere preceded by the prevalence of a bizarre mysticism at the court of the ruler.”[12] What the Baron Rothschild was referring to was a hub of activity in St. Petersburg, consisting of theosophists and synarchists headed by Papus, and including Witte, a patron of the theosophist Esper Ukhtomsky (1861 – 1921), who envisioned Nicholas II was the “White Tsar of Shambhala.”[13] Nicholas II would become the last of the Romanov Tsars, when he was overthrown in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and he and the entire royal family, including his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children, were executed the following year.

To Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, the rapprochement between the Russia and England was a precondition for the synarchic union of the European rulers with the “university temple of Agarttha.”[14] Saint-Yves was able to promote the idea of synarchism thanks to his excellent social connections among the ruling dynasties of Western Europe, Scandinavia and Russia through Nicholas II’s father, Tsar Alexander III.[15] It was from these same circles—intersecting with the Theosophical Society, and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s main disciple, Papus—from which emerged the first example of the notorious The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purporting to detail a Jewish and Masonic plot for global domination. The Protocols were first published in Russian, in 1905, by Sergei Nilus, a pious extremist of the Russian Orthodox Church, and were reportedly the product of a secret meeting of leaders at the First Zionist Congress, the inaugural congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), held in Basel on August 29–31, 1897, and convened by Theodor Herzl.

According to his biographer Peter Grose, Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, who was in Constantinople at the time, discovered “the source” of the forgery which he then provided to The Times.[16] In the first article of Peter Graves’ series, titled “A Literary Forgery,” the editors of The Times claimed to have proven that the Protocols were plagiarized from the work of Maurice Joly, The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Joly, however, has been reported to having been a Jew and a protégé of Adolphe Crémieux, founder of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and Grand Master of the Masonic Rite of Misraïm and Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of France, responsible for managing the high degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite within the Grand Orient of France.[17] According to Norman Cohn’s analysis of the text, in Warrant for Genocide:

In all, over 160 passages in the Protocols, totaling two fifths of the entire text, are clearly based on passages in Joly; in nine of the chapters the borrowings amount to more than half of the text, in some they amount to three quarters, in one (Protocol VII) to almost the entire text. Moreover with less than a dozen exceptions the order of the borrowed passages remains the same as it was in Joly, as though the adaptor had worked through the Dialogue mechanically, page by page copying straight into his ‘protocols’ as he proceeded. Even the arrangement in chapters is much the same - the twenty-four chapters of the Protocols corresponding roughly with the twenty-five of the Dialogue. Only towards the end, where the prophecy of the Messianic Age predominates, does the adaptor allow himself any real independence of his model. It is in fact as clear a case of plagiarism - and of faking - as one could well desire.[18]

In 1884, according to Victor Marsden, who produced the first English translation, a woman named Yuliana Glinka, a disciple of H.P. Blavatsky, hired Joseph Schorst-Shapiro, a member of Joly’s Misraïm Lodge, to obtain sensitive information, and purchased from him a copy of the Protocols, and subsequently gave them to a friend who passed them on to Sergei Nilus.[19] The Protocols were first mentioned in the Russian press in April 1902 by the Saint Petersburg newspaper Novoye Vremya, written by a famous conservative publicist Mikhail Menshikov, who reported “how the lady of fashion [Glinka] had invited him to her house to see the document of vast importance. Seated in an elegant apartment and speaking perfect French, the lady informed him that she was in direct contact with the world beyond the grave and proceeded to induct him into the mysteries of Theosophy… Finally, she initiated him into the mysteries of the Protocols.”[20]

W.T. Stead was connected to the Protocols through his friendship with the journalist and writer Juliette Adam another associate of Blavatsky and very close friend of Glinka. Adam joined the lodge La Clémente Amitié, at that time the most important lodge of the Grand Orient de France. In 1877, the lodge had about 250 members, including Gambetta and Maurice Joly, author of the Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a satire in protest against the regime of Napoleon III, enemy of the Carbonari. Juliette’s salon in Paris, where Gambetta played a leading role, was an active center of opposition to Napoleon III and became one of the most prominent republican circles. There, met Wagner’s mother-in-law Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, Louis Blanc, Georges Clemenceau, Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Hugo, which overlapped with the network around Joseph Cowen. She also encouraged the literary beginnings of Alexandre Dumas fils. Papus mentioned Adam as early as 1891/92 as a member of his Groupe Independant d’Études Ésoteriques, which he founded after leaving Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, and always spoke full of praise for her work.[21]

Glinka was also an agent of Piotr Rachkovsky (1853 – 1910), Paris head of the Okhrana, the Russian secret service.[22] Glinka was the granddaughter of a colonel whose Masonic affiliations had led to his arrest for involvement in the Carbonari-inspired Decembrists’ plot of 1825 against Tsar Nicholas I.[23] In Paris, Glinka involved herself in the circles around Papus, became a close friend of Blavatsky and belonged to the Paris branch of her society, the Theosophical Society of East and West, headed by Lady Caithness.[24]

According to Webb, in The Occult Establishment, Vsevolod Solovyov (1849 – 1903), who was also part of Adam’s circle, probably met Saint-Yves d’Alveydre personally in the year that he published The Mission of the Jews (1884).[25] Vsevolod visited Paris in 1884 where he met Blavatsky, and came into contact with Master Morya, and collaborated with Blavatsky’s sister Vera Jelikovsky and her two daughters. By 1886, however, he became disillusioned and abandoned his plans to promote theosophy in Russia and denounced Blavatsky as a spy of the Okhrana. Of his later novels, the best known are The Magi (1889) and The Great Rosicrucian (1890), dealing with occultists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

It is generally believed that Vsevolod’s brother, Vladimir Solovyov (1853 – 1900), who was influenced by the Russian Rosicrucian tradition, was the first Russian philosopher to show a serious interest in Jewish Kabbalah.[26] Paradoxically, Solovyov and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881) had inspired far-rightists of Imperial Russia to propagate the notion of Orthodox Christian superiority and warn of an impending apocalyptic battle between Russia at the head of all Slavs and conspiratorial international Jewry, where Russians would assume the role of Christ, and Jews would take the part of the Antichrist. Dostoevsky warned: “Their kingdom is approaching, their entire kingdom! The triumph of ideas is coming before which feelings of philanthropy, thirst for the truth, Christian feelings, national and even folk pride of the European peoples will flag” in the face of “materialism, the blind, lustful craving for personal material security.” Dostoevsky claimed that this collapse stood “‘near, in the doorway,’” in reference to Revelation 3:20, which foretells the destruction of the sinful world in great upheaval and chaos, after which the Kingdom of God will appear on earth.[27]

The theme mentioned in Solovyov’s 1900 “A Short Tale of the Anti-Christ” was part of his Three Conversations. Solovyov discussed the “man of the future,” the Anti-Christ, in order “to reveal in advance the deceptive mask behind which the abyss of evil is hiding.” According to Solovyov, the Anti-Christ gains power with the help of Freemasons and the Comite permanent universel (Standing Universal Committee), referring to the Alliance israelite universelle.[28] Solovyov’s interpretation of the Anti-Christ story deeply impressed Russian mystic Sergei Nilus, who became famous for disseminating the Protocols, which he received from Glinka, who was an agent of Piotr Rachkovsky.[29]

It was purported forgers in Rachkovsky’s circle who were said to have made use of an earlier version of the Protocols discovered by Papus.[30] As noted by James Webb, “All authorities on the Protocols have united in the opinion that the forgery emanated from the circle of Juliette Adam and the Nouvelle Revue,” which was ardently opposed to Count Sergei Witte and his policies.[31] Adam was accused by the anti-Masons of also entertaining Fabre des Essarts, who succeeded Jules Doinel as head of the Église Catholique Gnostique. Doinel was also a disciple of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, from whom the author of The Secret of the Jews drew a considerable amount of material. Webb speculated that the author of The Secret of the Jews was Glinka, who may have turned against Saint-Yves and Papus, or left the Theosophical Society because it was anti-Christian.

The book’s premise follows the beliefs of Egyptian Rite Freemasonry, where Moses adapted the teachings of the Emerald Table of Hermes, which were inherited by the Essenes. The secret Jewish plot to undermine Christianity began during the First Crusade and the founding of the Templars, for the mystic mission of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon. Since that time, the Jewish secret cabal has been operating, under various names, including Gnostics, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, Martinist, and so on. The conspiracy was responsible for Humanism, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, the unification of Italy, and the 1848 International. According to the book, by 1895 the conspiracy was focused on encouraging liberalism, secularism, capitalism and the destruction of the aristocracy, and it called for the publication of a summary to expose the Jewish plot against the whole Christian world and against Russia in particular. Glinka handed the book to General Orzheyevsky, who was to pass it on to General Cherevin.

Two other women belonged to the occult community of Juliette Adam and Papus. The first was the Russian journalist and propagandist agent of Blavatsky’s publisher Mikhail Katkov, Olga Alekseevna Novikova (c. 1842 – 1925), a friend of William T. Stead. Stead dedicated an extensive biographical portrait to Novikova, highlighting her contributions to the realization of the British-Russian rapprochement.[32] Novikova was one of the friends of Russian to provide a critique of the exaggerated claims published in The Times about the Russian pogroms of 1881–1882. The hatred of the “Talmudic Jew,” she proposed, arose not from religious bigotry, but as a response to the Jews’ insatiable greed, and their economic role as middlemen. Their behavior could be contrasted with that of the small Jewish Karaite sect, which, though Jewish, did not display these negative characteristics and were thus left untouched by the raging mobs. In effect, she summarized, “the Karaites are Russian citizens of the Hebrew faith. The Talmudists are aliens settled on Russian soil.”[33]

Through Novikova, Stead also developed a friendship with Blavatsky in 1888, and claimed responsibility for having introduced her to Annie Besant, whom he referred to as “one of my most intimate friends,” leading to her conversion to Theosophy and eventual leadership of the movement.[34] In the 1890s, Stead became increasingly interested in spiritualism. In 1893, Stead published the quarterly Borderland, whose focus was on spiritualism and psychical research, and which was regularly announced and specially reviewed in Papus’ Le Voile d’Isis. For his part, Papus compiled an address list of the circles established by Borderland and their members, which he grouped according to their occult abilities such as “clairvoyance, telepathy, occultism, automatic writing, etc.”[35] In 1909, Stead invited Papus to consult a spirit in London.[36]

The other person in this web was Princess Catherine Radziwill, born Catherine Rzewuska, niece of Ewelina Hańska, the famous wife of Honoré de Balzac and a disciple of Éliphas Lévi and a relative of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s wife, the Comtesse de Keller. Ewelina was the sister of the writer Henryk Rzewuski and Russian spy Karolina Rzewuska, who was a friend of Alexander Pushkin and the Frankist poet Adam Mickiewicz, though some claim that she was his mistress.[37] At the age of nine, Catherine was sent by her father Adam Rzewuski to Paris to live with his sisters Ewelina and Carolina Lacroix. When she was working as a prostitute at the age of sixteen, Delacroix met Leopold II of Belgium, then aged 65, and embarked on a relationship that was to last until his death in 1909. Through Ewelina and Carolina, Catherine gained access to the Paris salons, where she met the cultural and literary celebrities of the day, including Juliette Adam, with whom Catherine had worked since 1882, when she returned to Paris from St. Petersburg. It was in the circle around Adam in Paris, that Catherine also met her great cousin Comtesse de Keller.[38] In 1888, Catherine moved to St. Petersburg where she held a prominent position at the Russian court and began an affair with Cherevin.[39]

Anna de Wolska, a militant feminist of Polish descent and Papus’ lover since 1888, had succeeded in convincing Adam in the early 1890s to attend séances and to contribute to the journal L’Initiation.[40] Anna was the daughter of Polish author, Kalikst Wolski (1816 – 1885). After his death, Kalikst name was usurped by the Okhrana, in order to publish anti-Semitic publications under his name. Rachkovsky had his name changed to “Kalixt de Wolski,” and made him the author of an anti-Jewish pamphlet, La Russie Juive (“Jewish Russia”), published in 1887 by the publisher Albert Savine, who had just published La France juive (“Jewish France”) by Édouard Drumont. La Russie juive was written during the pogroms of the 1880s, in which Kalikst accused the Jews of ultimately bringing the persecutions upon themselves. Referring to the writings Kniga kagala. Materialy dlja izučenija evreiskogo byta (“The Book of the Kahal. Materials for the Study of Jewish Life,” 1869) and Kniga kagala. Vsemirnyj evreiskij vopros (“The Book of the Kahal. The Global Jewish Question,” 1879) by Jacob Brafman, Wolski referred to the administrative establishment of the Kahal which he claimed revealed the conspiratorial aims of the Jews. As an example, using Goedsche’s chapter The Jewish Cemetery in Prague from Biarritz, he employed the fictitious speech delivered: “When we have become the sole owners of all the gold of the earth, the true power will pass into our hands, and then the promises made to Abraham will be fulfilled.”

Rhodes Round Table

In 1896, Stead arranged for Catherine Radziwill to meet with Cecil Rhodes. The Round Table was founded by Rhodes, an ardent believer in British imperialism, with Stead and Alfred Milner. Nathan Rothschild also funded Cecil Rhodes in the development of the British South Africa Company, and the De Beers diamond conglomerate. Rothschild administered Rhodes’ estate after his death in 1902, and helped to set up the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. While studying at Oxford, Rhodes became a member of the regular Apollo Lodge No. 357, Orient of Oxford, where he was elevated to Master Mason in 1877, at the age of 24. In that same year, Rhodes wrote down in a “Confession of Faith”:

I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. [...] the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars. [...] I look into history and read the story of the Jesuits. I see what they were able to do in a bad cause and I might say under bad leaders. In the present day I become the member of a Masonic Order. I see the wealth and power they possess, the influence they hold [...]. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object—the furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. [...] To forward such a scheme, what a splendid help a secret society would be, a society not openly acknowledged, but who [sic!] would work in secret for such an object. [...] Let us form the same kind of society which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object, and one idea, who should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands. [...] The Society should inspire and even own portions of the press, for the press rules the mind of other people.[41]

To that end, in 1891, Rhodes met with three other men to discuss his plans for the creation of a secret society to advance his goals. One was Reginald Baliol Brett, later known as Lord Esher, friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and who would become the most influential adviser of kings Edward VII and George V. The other was William T. Stead. As Stead had explained to his wife in 1889:

Mr. Rhodes is my man! I have just had three hours talk with him. He is full of a far more gorgeous idea in connection with the paper than even I have had. I cannot tell you his scheme because it is too secret… His ideas are federation, expansion, and consolidation of the Empire... He took to me. Told me some things he has told no other man —save Lord Rothschild…[42]

Shortly after the meeting, Stead added Alfred Milner to the society. An ardent imperialist, Milner in 1897 became high commissioner in South Africa and governor of the Cape Colony and helped to bring about the South African War (1899–1902). When Britain annexed the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1901 during the war, Milner left his post as governor of the Cape and took over as administrator of those two Boer territories. Retaining the office of high commissioner, he and the military commander, Lord Kitchener, negotiated the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 that ended both the war and the independence of the two Boer republics.

Stead also held ambitions for the creation of a one-world government. Stead’s younger brother, Herbert, was a Christian mystic, who claimed to have experienced a vision of Christ. In early 1894, while praying for peace, Herbert heard what he believed was a divine voice, telling him to “Approach the Emperor of Russia: Through Him Deliverance will come.”[43] Stead believed the voice Herbert had heard was a divine revelation and took up the cause of peace, calling in The Review of Reviews for a general European reduction of armaments and appealing for leadership to the Nicholas II, as “the peace-keeper of Europe.” On 24 August 1898, Nicholas II issued a rescript, calling for an international conference to for that very purpose. A month later, Stead left London to embark on a “Pilgrimage of Peace’ across Europe, and met a number of political leaders, among the Nicholas II. Stead’s pilgrimage included a visit to Rome, where he hoped to convince the Pope Leo XIII to join with the Tsar in helping lead his Peace Crusade, but he was not granted an interview.

Returning to London in November, Stead spearheaded a campaign to mobilize British public opinion in support of the Nicholas II’s rescript, though some denounced his scheme overly idealistic or as serving the interests of the Tsar. Nevertheless, in response to the Tsar’s rescript, representatives from twenty-six states, including the United Kingdom, accepted the invitation of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to meet as an international conference in her capital, The Hague, to discuss peace, arbitration, the limitation of armaments, and the laws that should govern warfare. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the body of secular international law.

As explained by Stewart J. Brown, “Stead believed that he had been God’s principal agent in bringing about the conference.”[44] Though the Conference did not achieve all he had hoped for, Stead hailed the convention as “the meeting of a Parliament of Man laying the foundations of the federation of the world.”[45] “The work of the Twentieth Century,” he proclaimed, would be “the destruction of Nationalism Militant, the death-knell of which was sounded at the Conference of the Hague” and the spread of internationalism. As his brother Herbert described, Stead’s “culminating life-work was for ‘the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’.” After the Hague Conference, Herbert suggested to his brother a new motto for The Review of Reviews: “One World, One People, One Destiny.”[46]

Radziwill left her husband in 1899 for an adventurous life which led her successively to England, then to South Africa, where she asked Rhodes to marry her. They initially became friends, but Rhodes, who some historians have suggested was homosexual, turned her down.[47] Nevertheless, Rhodes paid her debts and sent her back to London. She took advantage of her trip to forge her signature on checks for 600,000 francs which she managed to cash.[48] Prosecuted for forgery, she was sentenced to two years in prison in Cape Town in 1902, but was released after sixteen months, before returning to London in August 1903.[49] But in Milner’s eyes, Catherine was “the most repulsive animal imaginable” and warned in capital letters, “She is Dangerous!” On another occasion, he remarked: “Strange how sex enters into these great matters of State. It always has. It always will. It is never recorded, therefore history will never be intelligible...” Milner also accused Radziwill of sowing discord between him and Rhodes, “by telling either party lies as to what the other had said about him.” She was a schemer in the service of hostile powers. As Markus Osterrieder remarked:

 

Whether Catherine Radziwill, who eventually stole confidential papers and forged Rhodes’s signature on checks and bills of exchange in Cape Town, really passed on information to Paris before her imprisonment in November, which was then incorporated into Papus’ “Niet” pamphlet, or whether Papus had learned details of Rhodes’ far-flung plans through Stead, remains unclear.[50]

In October 1901, Papus collaborated with an anti-Semitic journalist Jean Carrère in producing a series of articles in the Echo de Paris under the pseudonym Niet (“no” in Russian). They described a “hidden conspiracy” which had been responsible for the French Revolution and again the Unification of Italy, concluding that, “Now, today, supremacy is ensured by the possession of gold. It is the financial syndicates who hold at this moment the secret threads of European politics.”[51] Papus’ articles insinuated that behind the cabal there was a secret Anglo-German, but by reference to the House of Rothschild implicitly primarily “Jewish” conspiracy in Russia, in the form of an all-powerful financial cartel: “A few years ago, therefore, a financial syndicate was founded in Europe, which is now all-powerful, whose supreme aim is to monopolize all the markets of the world, and which, in order to facilitate its means of action, must fatally conquer political influence. [...] the center is in London, and ... the most important branches are in Vienna and Germany.” The most recent act of this cartel, he said, was the monopolization of gold mines with the help of the war in Transvaal. As noted by Markus Osterrieder, the naming of the Transvaal, annexed by the British Empire at the end of the Second Boer War, makes it clear whom Papus had in mind as organizers of the “cartel” in addition to Blavatsky’s cousin, Sergei Witte: the prime minister of the Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes, his friend, the governor of the Cape Colony, Alfred Milner, and the banking complex of the Jewish Rothschild family associated with them, and their co-conspirator Count Sergei Witte, who was sponsored by Rachkovsky.[52]

In August 1903, Vyacheslav Plehve (1846 – 1904), Minister of the Interior, passed on documents to Tsar Nicholas II that suggested Witte was part of a Jewish conspiracy. In that same month, Herzl visited St. Petersburg and was received by Witte and Plehve, to discuss a proposition that the Russian government request from the Turks a charter for Jewish colonization of Palestine. Witte assured Herzl that he was “a friend of the Jews.”[53] As a result, Witte was removed as Minister of Finance.[54] Plehve had organized the Kishinev pogroms of April of the same year, which focused worldwide condemnation of the persecution of Jews in Russia. The Kishinev pogrom led Herzl to advance a scheme proposed by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for a Jewish Colony in what is now Kenya, which became known as the “Uganda Project.” The plan was endorsed by the majority at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August, 1903, but faced strong opposition from the Russian delegation particularly, who stormed out of the meeting. In 1905, the Seventh Zionist Congress declined the offer and committed itself to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

A story printed in 1920, in the “Organ of the Democratic Idea,” asserted that Papus compiled a report for the Russian Tzar—part of which included the Protocols of the sittings of the secret Masonic Lodges—which detailed a conspiracy against the Tsar on the part of Maître Philippe. This story goes on to say that Rachkovsky “spiced up this sensational report so as to guarantee the desired effect.” Papus and Rachkovsky were also apparently assisted in this endeavor by Adjutant General P.P. Gesse, and the Dowager Empress, Marija Federovna, as spouse of Emperor Alexander III.[55] Many authors maintain that it was Matvei Golovinski, the agent of Rachkovsky, who in Paris in the early 1900s authored the first edition of the Protocols.[56] Matvei’s father, Vasili Golovinski was a friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. According to Radziwill, the original forgery was part of an endeavor to convince Tsar Alexander III that the assassination of his father was part of a Jewish conspiracy. The first draft was produced in 1884, under the inspiration of General Orgewski, then head of the Third Section of Police. The draft was then enlarged by Rachkovski, Manasewitch-Maniuloff and Golovinski, who brought it to Princess Radziwill and her friends, including Henrietta Hurlburt, an anti-Semite who corroborated Radziwill’s story in an interview for The American Hebrew, published by Philip Cowen, who was involved in B’nai B’rith.

 

Hotel Astor 

During a lecture she delivered in 1921 at Hotel Astor in New York, when members in the audience were offended when the authenticity of her claimed pedigree was questioned by an unnamed interrogator, Radziwill responded by saying: “I expect this attack. I expected someone would say that the Jews had bought me for doing what I believe to be my duty in making known the origin of these protocols.”[57] Hotel Astor was a hotel on Times Square in Midtown Manhattan owned by William Waldorf Astor (1848 – 1919), of the famous Astor family, descended from German-born American businessman, John Jacob Astor (1763 – 1848), one of the wealthiest people in history. Astor made his fortune mainly in a fur trade monopoly, by smuggling opium into China, and by investing in real estate in or around New York City. Washington Irving’s Astoria (1836), describes an expedition sponsored by Astor to the mouth of the Columbia River and the ultimate failure of attempts to establish a trading post for his Pacific Fur Company at Fort Astoria. Times Square became one of the prized possessions of John Jacob Astor, who made a second fortune in real estate as the city rapidly spread uptown.[58] Formerly known as Longacre Square, Times Square was renamed in 1904 after The New York Times moved its headquarters to the then newly-erected Times Building, now One Times Square. John Jacob’s son, William Backhouse Astor Sr. (1792 – 1875), William Waldorf Astor’s grandfather, was a friend of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.[59] William Waldorf Astor made several business acquisitions while he lived in London. In 1892, he purchased the Pall Mall Gazette, and in 1893 established the Pall Mall Magazine. In 1911, he acquired The Observer. In 1912, he sold the Magazine, and in 1914 gifted the Gazette and The Observer to his son Waldorf Astor (1879 – 1952), a member of the Round Table.[60]

Prior to the incident, Radziwill had already written a book about Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes, man and empire-maker (1918), defending his beliefs and policies. Stead was invited to speak at a Peace Congress at Carnegie Hall in 1912, having reputedly been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that year, but he died with the sinking of the Titanic. He was last spotted alongside American tycoon John Jacob Astor IV (1864 – 1912), a cousin of William Waldorf Astor, clinging to a raft and his body was never recovered. Even After his death, through the medium Mrs. Foster Turner, Stead purportedly predicted the horrors of World War I, six months before its outbreak. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes murder mysteries, also heard from Stead, who told Doyle that he and Cecil Rhodes had looked into Christ’s eyes and that Christ had told Stead to tell Arthur his work was holy, and that Doyle’s message was His.[61]

The London Times

In 1923, Wickham Steed (1871 – 1956) became editor of Stead’s Review of Reviews. From 1919 to 1922, Steed had been editor of The Times. In 1920, Steed had endorsed The Protocols as genuine, writing in an editorial in which he blamed the Jews for World War I and the Bolshevik regime and called them the greatest threat to the British Empire. However, he retracted his view on The Protocols in 1921, when Philip Graves, the Istanbul correspondent of The Times, based on a clue provided to him by Allen Dulles, future head of the CIA, exposed The Protocols as a forgery, largely plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Times were owned by Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865 – 1922), an admirer of Cecil Rhodes, who in 1911 had met Geoffrey Dawson (1874 – 1944), who had worked very closely with Alfred Milner in establishing the Round Table, who became editor the newspaper from 1912 to 1919.

Dawson was editor of The Times again after it was purchased by John Jacob Astor (1912 – 2001), brother of William Waldorf Astor, in 1922, following the death of its owner, Alfred Harmsworth. Waldorf Astor, who with his wife Nancy was a member of the Round Table, held regular weekend parties at their home Cliveden, a large estate in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames, whose members were known as the Cliveden Set. Guests of the Astors at Cliveden included Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, von Ribbentrop, Mahatma Gandhi, Amy Johnson, F.D. Roosevelt, H.H. Asquith, T.E. Lawrence, Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, Henry Ford, the Duke of Windsor and the writers Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Wharton.[62] Those specifically associated with the Cliveden Set were mostly members of the Round Table, and included Lothian, Lord Halifax, Geoffrey Dawson, Samuel Hoare, Lionel Curtis, Nevile Henderson, Robert Brand and Edward Algernon Fitzroy, who was Speaker of the Commons. Nancy Astor and Philip Graves shared a friendship in T.E. Lawrence of Arabia.


[1] Jonathan Schneer. “How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel.” (September 8, 2010). Retrieved from https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/09/08/how-anti-semitism-helped-create-israel-2/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Meyer Weisgal (ed.). The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol. VII, p. 81; cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.

[4] Schneer. “How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel.”

[5] Ladislaus Toth. “Gnostic Church.” Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006), p. 402.

[6] Joanne Pearson. Wicca and the Christian Heritage (Taylor and Francis, 2007), p. 45.

[7] Massimo Introvigne. Satanism: A Social History (Brill, 2016), p. 130.

[8] “L’Église Gnostique Apostolique – Gnostic Apostolic Church.” Retrieved from https://www.apostolicgnosis.org/jules-doinel.html

[9] Russell. Mephistopheles, p. 221.

[10] Peter F. Anson. Bishops at Large (London: Faber & Faber, 1965).

[11] “L’Église Gnostique Apostolique – Gnostic Apostolic Church.”

[12] 'Abraham Yarmolinsky, éd.. The Memoirs of Count Witte (Garden City, N.Y., 1921), pp. 198–99; cited in Robert D. Warth. “Before Rasputin: Piety and the Occult at the Court of Nicholas II.” The Historian, Vol. 47, No. 3 (May 1985), p. 323

[13] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao. Volume Three, Chapter 1: Synarchy.

[14] Mission de l’Inde; cited in Markus Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” in Die Fiktion von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Wallstein Verlag. 2012), p. 115.

[15] Markus Osterrieder. “From Synarchy to Shambhala: The Role of Political Occultism and Social Messianism in the Activities of Nicholas Roerich” Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed. The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe, Volume 17), p. 113 n. 42.

[16] Peter Grose. Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

[17] Lord Alfred Douglas. Plain English (1921); Kerry Bolton, The Protocols of Zion in Context.

[18] Cohn. Warrant For Genocide, p. 82.

[19] Marsden. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, p. 100.

[20] “1884: One Hot Number,” Joseph Trainor, ed. UFO Roundup. Volume 8. Number 40 (October 22, 2003).

[21] Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” p. 108.

[22] James Webb. The Occult Establishment (A Library Press Book, Open Court Pub. Co, LaSalle, Ill: 1976), p. 217.

[23] Alex Butterworth. The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (London: Vintage Books, 2011) p. 182.

[24] Ibid, p. 244.

[25] Ibid., p. 238.

[26] Paul Allen. Vladimir Soloviev: Russian Mystic (Steiner Books, 2008).

[27] Dostoevskii. Dnevnik pisatelia, vol. XI, 94, 98, 114, 495.

[28] Michael Hagemeister. “Vladimir Solov’¨ev: Reconciler and Polemicist,” Eastern Christian Studies 2: Selected Papers of the International Vladimir Solov’¨ev Conference held at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in September 1998 (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), pp. 287, 289, 290.

[29] James Webb. The Occult Establishment (A Library Press Book, Open Court Pub. Co, LaSalle, Ill: 1976), p. 217.

[30] Cesare G. De Michelis. The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, trans. Richard Newhouse (Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004) p. 115.

[31] Webb. The Occult Establishment, p. 244.

[32] “Stead, William T.” Occult World. Retrieved from https://occult-world.com/stead-william-t/

[33] “The Jews in Rusia.” The Times, No. 30,406 (January 18, 1882). Cited in John Klier. “The Times of London, The Russian Press, and the Pogrom of 1881–1881.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (1984), p. 10.

[34] W. T. Stead. The M. P. for Russia: Reminiscences & Correspondence of Madame Olga Novikoff (London, A. Melrose, 1909) volume I, pp. 130-133; W. T. Stead. The Review of Reviews, vol. IV, (October, 1891), pp. 349-367.

[35] Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” p. 123.

[36] Marie-Sophie André & Christophe Beaufils. Papus: biographie : la Belle Epoque de l'occultisme (Berg international, 1995), p. 288.

[37] Neal Ascherson. Black Sea (1995), pp. 150-165.

[38] Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” p. 112.

[39] Catherine Radziwill. Behind the Veil at the Russian Court (Echo Library, 2020).

[40] Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” p. 108.

[41] Cecil Rhodes: Confession of Faith (1877). Bodleian Library, Oxford.

[42] Carroll Quigley. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Books in Focus, 1961), p. 37.

[43] Stewart J. Brown. W.T. Stead: Non-Conformist and Newspaper Prophet (Oxford University Press: 2019), p. 165.

[44] Ibid., p. 176.

[45] William Stead. La chronique de la Conference de la Haye; cited in Jirí Toman. “The Hague Convention: a decisive step taken by the international community.” Museum international, LVII(57), 4 / 228, p. 33..

[46] Stewart J. Brown. W.T. Stead: Non-Conformist and Newspaper Prophet (Oxford University Press: 2019), p. 178.

[47] Robert Aldrich & Garry Wotherspoon. Who’s who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II, Volume 1 (Psychology Press, 2001), pp. 370–371.

[48] Jean Frollo. “Aventurières,” Le Petit Parisien, no 9342, (mai 27, 1902).

[49] Brian Roberts. Cecil Rhodes and the princess.

[50] Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” p. 128.

[51] Webb. The Occult Establishment, p. 249.

[52] Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” p. 122.

[53] Theodor Herzl. Complete Diaries, Vol 4, p. 1528-30.

[54] Nicholas V. Riasanovsky. A History of Russia (Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 446.

[55] De Michelis. The Non-Existent Manuscript, p. 116.

[56] Martin J. Manning & Herbert Romerstein. Historical Dictionary of American Propaganda, p. 227; Eliza Slavet. Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question, p. 244; Bat Yeʼor. Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, p. 149; Michael Streeter. Behind Closed Doors: The Power and Influence of Secret Societies, p. 148; Avner Falk. Anti-Semitism: A History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred, p. 147.

[57] “Princess Radziwill Quizzed at Lecture–Stranger Questions Her Title After She Had Told of Forgery of ‘Jewish Protocols’–Creates Stir at Astor–Leaves Without Giving His Name–Mrs. Hurlburt Corroborates the Princess.” The New York Times (March 4, 1921), p. 13.

[58] Alex Ulam. “John Jacob Astor: The making of a hardnosed speculator.” The Real Deal (June 2, 2008). Retrieved from https://archive.today/20100215005443/http://therealdeal.com/newyork/articles/john-jacob-astor-the-making-of-a-hardnosed-speculator

[59] Cartwright. Schopenhauer, p. 151.

[60] A. M. Gollin. Proconsul in politics: A Study of Lord Milner in Opposition and in Power (London: A. Blond, 1964), p. 164.

[61] “Stead, William T.” Occult World. Retrieved from https://occult-world.com/stead-william-t/

[62] James Crathorne. Cliveden: The Place and the People (London, 1995), p. 213.

Zionism