Graphic novelist: Excuse me…you’ve got a copy of the “Protocols of Zion” there! …Why? - Will Eisner

Research desk: In 1992, a Mexican edition of the “Protocols"’’’ was listed in a few Catholic schools as required reading! And that same year in Turkey, a newspaper carried a 40-page insert that linked Freemasonry to Jewish world power headed by 70 elders! Again in 1992 a Russian edition of the “Protocols of Zion” appeared. Well, that’s the whole story, sir.

The most extraordinary aspect of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not so much the history of its inception as that of its reception. That this fake was produced by a number of secret services and police of at least three countries, assembled from a collage of different texts, is by now a well-known fact-and Will Eisner tells it in full, taking into account the most recent research. In one of my essays I identify other sources that scholars had not taken into account: for example, the Protocols “Jewish plan” for conquering the world follows, almost literally at times, the Jesuit plan as told by Eugene Sue first in Le juif errant, (1844-45) and later in Les myst’eres du people (1849-57)-the similarities are so great that one is tempted to conclude that Maurice Joly himself (the French satirist whose pamphlet Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, published in 1864, is considered to be the direct predecessor of the Protocols, and who is a figure in Eisner’s The Plot) had been inspired by Sue’s novels.

Mathieu Golovinski was born in the Simbirsk region of Russia in 1865 during the reign of the Romanov dynasty. His family, a part of the fading Russian aristocracy, provided him with a fragile social standing. He grew up in a leisured environment typical of families of that class. His father, Basil Golobinski, died,however, when Mathieu was 10 years old.