The
extensive research of the late Pacquitta DeShishmareff, an American-born
woman married into the Russian aristocracy, refutes the hackneyed
old saw (heard and seen in one form or another almost daily in the
mainstream media) that what we know today as the Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion were some sort of "forgery."
Nothing could be further from the truth.
DeShishmareffs
seminal work, Waters Flowing Eastward (written under the
pen name "L. Fry") remains the first -- and last -- word
on the history of the Protocols. She firmly identified a Jew born
in Russia, Asher Ginsberg (1856 to 1926), as the philosophical godfather
of the infamous "Protocols."
Ginsberg
-- best known as "Ahad Ha'am" (which means "One of
the People") -- held the view that Jews needed to come together
to make agricultural settlements in Palestine which would serve
as what has been described as "a Hebrew-speaking cultural center
for world Jewry -- an elite cultural center for world Jewry."
An
Orthodox Jew, educated in rabbinical studies, Ginsberg said Jews
were a "super nation" whose "ethnic genius must guarantee
their right to world domination." He said, "the Land of
Israel must encompass all the countries of the earth in order to
improve the world through God's Kingdom."
In
the view of Jewish writer Moshe Menuhin, Ginsberg's Zionist philosophy
was "a spiritual Zionism -- an aspiration for the fulfillment
of Judaism and not political Zionism" -- that is, the gathering
of the entirety of the Jewish people in a single state, isolated
from the rest of the planet, thriving only among their own people
therein.
Ginsberg
took issue with what he considered preeminent Zionist leader Theodore
Herzl's concept that Zionism was economic in nature and should be
directed toward the establishment of a political and geographic
state. In the view of Menuhin, Ginsberg regarded the Jews as "a
unique sort of nation, a homogeneous body apart from the other nations"
and that "a Jewish spiritual center in Palestine" would
become "a light to the Diaspora" (the scattered Jews around
the Earth) and eventually enable the Jewish people to become "a
light to the nations." This so-called "spiritual Zionism"
of Ginsberg was thus synonymous with classical, prophetic Judaism,
no different from the teachings of the Talmud that guided Judaism
down through the centuries.
In
short, the commonly-held theory advanced by many people today that
"Zionism is not Judaism and Judaism is not Zionism" is
wrong-simply wrong.
We
learn that, in 1889, Ginsberg formulated a small group known as
the Sons of Moses and it was before this group that Ginsberg first
introduced the Protocols. While he may have indeed borrowed from
previously published geopolitical works -- lending to the oft-stated
claim that the Protocols were "forgeries" that were lifted
from other volumes -- what we do know as the Protocols were Ginsberg's
product, reflecting his global Jewish agenda.
During
the years that followed, Hebrew-language translations of the Protocols
were circulated within the Zionist movement by Ginsberg and his
followers, now banded together as the Sons of Zion (or "B'nai
Zion").
And
in 1897, when the Zionist Congress met in Switzerland, Zionism emerged
as an official movement, the Protocols were effectively incorporated
into the Zionist (that is, Jewish) agenda.
While
the non-Jewish world perceived Zionism to be strictly devoted to
the establishment of a Jewish state, Ginsberg's so-called "secret
Zionism" was very much recognized, within elite Jewish circles,
as the real agenda, an international agenda, in effect masked in
a strictly nationalist agenda focused on a single Jewish state in
Palestine.
Although
there are anti-Zionist Jews who -- for a variety of reasons -- do
oppose Zionism, there are also those anti-Zionist Jews who are actually
advocates of the establishment of the Jewish Utopia, which is, in
fact, the New World Order about which we hear so much. (See article
beginning on page 41 of this issue of TBR [Editor's Note: "Utopia...for
Some"].)
at
the Battle of Cowpens, S. Carolina, 1781