ABSTRACT
Students of modern history have reached a consensus that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a product of late nineteenth-century east European ideological battles, and reflected the mentality and language of conservative Russian thinkers. In the 1920s European historians and journalists discovered textual parallels and proved direct links between mid-nineteenth-century pamphlets targeting Napoleon III and the imagery of the Protocols.2 Slavicists further contextualized these affinities, arguing that the Russian compilers of the Protocols deliberately appealed to strong anti-Napoleon tendencies firmly embedded in Russian cultural memory. Vadim Skuratovskii (Vadym Skuratovs’kyi), for example, pointed out a direct association between the Protocols and the negative perception of Napoleon in Russian culture. He also advanced a detailed linguistic and stylistic reconstruction of the Protocols, tracing them back to an anti-French, anti-liberal motif deeply rooted in conservative Russian political thought.3 Although Cesare De Michelis’s stylistic analysis of various versions of the Protocols and of the parallels between this tract and Maurice Joly’s anti-Napoleonic pamphlet Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (The dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, 1864) has not been surpassed by any other philological study of this subject, scholars today are more inclined to search for the specifically Russian roots of this powerful blueprint for twentieth-century conspiracy theories.4
