Conspiracy theories and literary ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and The Protocols of Zion

Comparative Literature, Spring 1999 by Boym, Svetlana

The forgery of the Protocols was publicly disclosed and meticulously documented during two trials of 1934-1935-in Grahamstown, South Africa and in Berne, Switzerland. Both denounced the Protocols as defamatory anti-Semitic propaganda. Yet this did not stop the book from remaining a best-seller within right-wing popular culture; since 1935, it has been republished, rewritten, and translated all over the world, from Japan to Argentina. Nesta Webster, one of the literary predecessors of Pat Robertson, completed her book when the truth about the Protocols' forgery was revealed. Defenders of the Protocols have even claimed that Joly himself was a part of the conspiracy, that his real name was not Joly but Joe Levi. Popular etymology thus becomes a means to reveal "tricks of the devil" that hide the truth of this conspiracy from the people.

This kind of logic persists in post-Soviet right-wing popular culture. The Protocols of Zion (an un-critical edition) is widely sold on the streets alongside Yeltsin dolls, Easter eggs with portraits of Nicholas II, Dale Carnegie's How to Succeed in Business, and the most up-to-date Buddhist manuals. It can be spotted even in the bookstore at Moscow University. "We have freedom of speech now," the student salesman proudly said when I questioned him about the presence of the Protocols in a university bookstore. Paradoxical as it may appear, the "freedom of speech" that in the Protocols was presented as part of a Jewish-liberal plot, now allows for a new edition and dissemination of the Protocols throughout Russia.

The conspiratorial circles continue to generate new ripples. There is now a claim that another book besides The Protocols of Zion has been hidden from the Russian people by an international conspiracy. The Book of Was, which supposedly dates back to about 1000 BC and appears to be a chronicle or a protocol by pre-Christian pagan Slavic priests,'2 reveals that the proto-Russians were truly the chosen people, descendants of Atlantis and surely of the Aryans and Phoenicians, Trojans and Sumerians. Among other discoveries, it reveals that Mount Zion was originally Slavic and that its name derives from the Slavic word "to shine" (sat'). So much for the love of etymologies.

One last, grotesque embodiment of paranoiac projection in contemporary Russia is a story about Valery Emelyanov, one of the founders of the nationalist group Pamiat' and a convicted murderer. An orientalist by training, Emelyanov's book De-zionization, in a special gift edition in Damascus, claims that Jesus Christ himself was an agent of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. In 1980 Emelyanov murdered his wife Tamara in a moment of extreme anger, cut her to pieces, and put the body into a large suitcase. Then he asked his associate Bakirov to burn the heavy suitcase, saying that it contained "the worst kind of Zionist propaganda." This particular burden of "Zionist propaganda" was used as evidence to convict the conspiracy theorist. "

2. Umberto Eco and the Poetics of Paranoia