A few weeks ago I published a long article on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, reviewing the available evidence on that notorious document of the very early twentieth century and attempting to evaluate its credibility and provenance.
My ultimate verdict was rather hum-drum. I concluded that the work was likely fictional, but probably reflected a widespread quiet understanding of the enormous hidden influence of Jewish groups across Europe, whether as bankers, political advisors, or revolutionaries.
A couple of generations earlier, the popular novels of Benjamin Disraeli, the very influential Jewish-born British Prime Minister, had made exactly that sort of claim, with a character representing Lord Rothschild explaining that a network of Jews operating from behind the scenes secretly dominated most of Europe’s major governments. These notions probably served as an important inspiration for the Protocols.
Around the time that the Protocols came to light, similar sentiments were widespread in even the most reputable circles. For example, Dr. David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University and one of America’s foremost public intellectuals, published Unseen Empire in 1913. In that work, favorably reviewed in the influential Literary Digest, he argued that a network of intermarried Jewish banking families had quietly gained financial control over all of Europe’s major countries and therefore exercised greater real influence over their government policies than did any of their various elected legislatures, kings, or emperors.
Indeed, the Protocols only began to attract widespread international attention after the top leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution was recognized as being overwhelmingly Jewish. That radical movement had seized control of the mighty Russian Empire in 1917, and then unsuccessfully attempted to do the same in the rest of Europe, with failed uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and other locations.
Although I thought that the Protocols had probably been fabricated, I noted that many very highly regarded contemporaneous sources had at least initially regarded it as the factual record of a Jewish conspiracy seeking to overthrow all of Europe’s Christian governments and ultimately seize control of the world. For example, I passed along the account of Douglas Reed, a leading Times of London correspondent of that era:
As Reed told the story, the Protocols first gained attention in 1920 when the document was translated into English by one of Britain’s top Russia correspondents, who died soon afterward. His employer, the Morning Post, was one of the oldest and most sober British newspapers, and its editor then drew upon his entire staff to publish twenty-three articles on the document, calling for a thorough investigation. The Times of London then ranked as the world’s most influential media outlet and it took a similar position in a long May 8, 1920 article, while Lord Sydenham, a foremost authority of that day, later did the same in the pages of the Spectator.
The series of Morning Post articles was entitled “The Jewish Peril,” and later that same year it was collected together and published as The Cause of World Unrest. This book was released in both Britain and America and included a very lengthy introduction by the editor, with the contents now easily available online. As I explained:
These articles repeatedly cited the works of Nesta Webster, a British writer who had published a lengthy historical analysis of the French Revolution a year earlier, and two of her personal contributions to the Morning Post series on the Protocols were also included at the end of the volume, while she may have more heavily contributed to the entire anonymous series…
The following year, Webster published World Revolution, her own much longer work on closely-related themes, describing the appearance and growth of secret, conspiratorial movements aimed at overthrowing all of Europe’s established Christian monarchies and replacing them with radical, socialistic governments. The author traced all of this back to the 18th century Illuminati movement of Adam Weishaupt, claiming that this project had gradually subverted the existing Masonic lodges of France and the rest of Continental Europe, then afterward used Freemasonry as the vehicle for its dangerous revolutionary plotting.
Although Webster argued that Jews had only been an insignificant early element of this conspiratorial movement, by the mid-nineteenth century they deployed their huge wealth to gain enormous influence in that project, probably becoming its leading force. She devoted much of the last chapter of her book to the Protocols, regarding its contents as an excellent summary of the secret plans of those subversive movements, whether or not the document itself was actually what it purported to be.
Based upon my own very mainstream historical reading, I’d always regarded talk of secret revolutionary plotting by the Illuminati, Freemasons, or any such similar groups as almost the epitome of crackpot lunacy, and I’d scarcely even heard of Webster, who had been the leading writer on such matters. However, I discovered that some of Webster’s prominent contemporaries had been very impressed with her scholarship and had reached somewhat similar conclusions.
The most notable example of such support for Webster’s research came from British Cabinet Minister Winston Churchill. Around the same time that the Morning Post was beginning its long series on the Protocols, Churchill published a major article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald that seemed to take a similar position on the dangerous plots of subversive international Jews, while singling out Webster for praise, especially noting her important research on the French Revolution.
Although I’d barely heard of Webster, during the early decades of the twentieth century she seemed to have been a far more influential figure than I’d ever imagined, with her research apparently becoming an important source for the views and writing of Winston Churchill, Douglas Reed, and others. I also discovered that she came from a very elite background, given that her father had been a top figure at Barclays Bank, one of Britain’s leading financial institutions.
In 1924 she published Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, apparently summarizing her accumulated research on that controversial subject, and it included an Appendix sharply disputing the allegations of plagiarism in the Protocols that had appeared in the media during the previous couple of years. According to her Wikipedia entry, by then Hilaire Belloc, a leading British literary figure himself widely accused of antisemitism, had begun privately denouncing her as “antisemitic” and her work as “lunatic,” and she later became an active supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
I carefully read her 1924 book and found many of its theories to be outlandish and very doubtful. She argued for the existence of a centuries old conspiratorial movement dedicated to the destruction of Christian civilization, with its earliest roots stretching back to the infamous Order of Assassins of the Middle East. According to Webster, some of the doctrines of that notorious Muslim cult had been absorbed by the Knights Templar, the very wealthy and powerful organization founded during the Crusades.
In 1307 King Philip IV of France had suppressed the Templars, arresting many of their top leaders, torturing them into confessions of Satanism, and then burning them at the stake, with the Pope officially disbanding the order a few years later. My history books had always claimed that Philip’s motive had probably been to cancel the large financial debts he owed to that organization while also eliminating a powerful political rival. But Webster argued that the charges of the French king were true, and the top leadership of the Templars had indeed become secret worshippers of Satan.
Furthermore, following the killing of its leaders and its general suppression, the surviving secret society had eventually become a founding element of the later Freemasonry movement in Continental Europe, retaining a distorted legend of the betrayal and murder of its top leader and a bitter antipathy towards both the Catholic Church and the French monarchy.
According to Webster, another very important strand in these secret societies dedicated to subverting established European order was Jewish Cabalism, which was a major root of the support for magic and supernatural rituals often found in those organizations.
Webster’s book included nearly 900 footnotes referencing various Medieval texts and scholarly histories of that era written in English, French, and German, as well as works on the origins of Freemasonry. But I lacked the knowledge and inclination to investigate any of that material. And although the Masonic movement was indeed quite influential during the 18th and 19th centuries, its 16,000 word Wikipedia article only contained a single brief reference to Webster as an anti-Masonic writer. There were also related articles on Masonic conspiracy theories and Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory that covered such topics in greater detail, but these failed to include any mention of Webster or her works.
So based upon present-day evidence, Webster came across as very much a fringe crackpot, someone whose research would hardly be taken seriously in respectable circles, with the favorable if very brief mention by Churchill being merely a puzzling anomaly. However, I discovered that this was actually not the case.
During the early 2000s, I’d spent a number of years building a content-archiving system that contained the near-complete archives of a couple of hundred of our leading publications of the last 150 years, and it proved very useful in obtaining a much more balanced evaluation of Webster and her works.
I discovered that a long list of her books were in that system, together with their contemporaneous reviews, and the latter demonstrated that although quite controversial, she had hardly been regarded as a fringe figure at that point. The New York Times, the Nation, and Commonweal had reviewed her books, as had such very influential publications of that era as the Saturday Review of Literature, the Bookman, and the Outlook. Leading academic journals such as the American Historical Review and Political Science Quarterly had done the same, while Foreign Affairs had noted and briefly described a couple of her books.
Some of these reviews, especially those appearing in liberal or leftist periodicals, had been sharply critical, challenging her “conspiratorial” reading of historical events in much the same way that modern day writers almost uniformly did. But she had also had her strong defenders as well.
For example, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History of Harvard University, published a long and highly favorable 1920 review of her book on the French Revolution, which he characterized as “extraordinarily interesting” in his very first sentence. Although he went on to admit that her thesis was “not wholly new,” he emphasized that it had never “been worked out in such detail,” nor with such completeness. As a result, he said that the book must “be reckoned with by anyone who wishes to recognize and understand the springs of popular movements, then or now.” The long review in the New York Times also certainly accepted all of her research on the true history of that event as important and correct.
Academic periodicals were similarly mixed. The fairly brief review in Political Science Quarterly emphasized the “immense amount of contemporary material” she had brought to bear in support of her “most novel and astonishing interpretation of the great event of the eighteenth century. ” And although the discussion in the American Historical Review was rather negative, it still admitted that English publications had been “much impressed” by her book, explaining that the Spectator had declared it “a veritable revelation.”
This very wide divergence of verdicts on Webster and her works was emphasized several years later by Prof. Abbott, who opened his 1925 review on her Secret Societies book in the prestigious Saturday Review by declaring:
There is no person now engaged in writing history concerning whose work there is such sharp divergence of opinion as there is in regard to Mrs. Webster…she has been the object of more praise and of much more attack than almost any one since Macaulay. That circumstance is due alike to her choice of subject, her point of view, and her method of approach. Revolution is always an extraordinarily difficult topic for historical treatment. Its passions long outlive its events…the publisher who warned Mrs. Webster of the probable results of her labors observed to her, “Remember that if you take an anti-revolutionary line you will have the whole literary world against you.”
Thus, one hundred years ago a top Harvard historian writing in one of America’s most influential publications had repeatedly praised Webster’s research. But a century of relentless ideological pressure had subsequently marginalized her and her books to such an extent that they had become dismissed and almost forgotten as the conspiracy-nonsense of a fringe crackpot. This remarkable transformation has probably gone unrecognized by almost all of today’s mainstream academics , for whom Webster remained invisible.
Taken together, these appraisals by leading past scholars persuaded me to take her work seriously, especially her lengthy volume on the French Revolution that had so impressed Churchill.
