Symposium on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: 120 years of Propaganda, Conspiracy, and Hate

Hosted by the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University on April 24th and 25th 2023, the symposium will mark the 120th anniversary of the first printing of The Protocols. For the first time in history, students, policymakers, practitioners, scholars, and concerned citizens will come together in a two-day conference to discuss not just The Protocols, but also the specific role of antisemitic propaganda and conspiracy narratives within the ideologies and actions of violent extremist movements around the world. It will also be the first cross-disciplinary, cross-generational meeting of scholars of The Protocols in more than a decade. 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is arguably the modern era’s most propagated and enduring conspiracy narrative. From Russia and Germany to North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, The Protocols has transcended continents and cultures, time periods, and contexts. 

In Germany in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler incorporated The Protocols into his infamous antisemitic text, Mein Kampf, and later, in the 1930s, his National Socialist Party used The Protocols as propaganda to mobilize supporters, indoctrinate school children, and justify the Holocaust. In America, the powerful industrialist and carmaker Henry Ford spread the poison of The Protocols in a series of newspaper articles titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” which he later published as a four-volume book. 

In Japan in the 1980s, public intellectuals lauded and studied The Protocols as a blueprint for world domination, while in the 1990s in Egypt, the authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarak ran a 41-part documentary on the Jewish conspiracy on national television. 

A decade later in Iran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei employed the themes of The Protocols in radio and television broadcasts. 

The text has been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Farsi — at least 20 languages all told. It is not surprising then that scholar Norman Cohn called the The Protocols "probably the most widely distributed book in the world after the Bible.”