In Umberto Eco's new novel The Prague Cemetery, the high-ranking tsarist police agent Peter Rachkovsky explains why he commissioned The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from a forger named Simone Simonini:

Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal . . . You don't love someone for your whole life . . . but you can hate someone for your whole life-provided he's always there to keep your hatred alive . . . Hatred warms the heart.

Today, few people in Europe and America have ever heard of The Protocols, but when the French scholar Henri Rollin studied it in 1939, he deemed it the world's most widely circulated book after the Bible. First published in full in 1905, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purports to be a transcript of a secret meeting of rabbis plotting to control the world. It begins with a chief rabbi's cynical avowals:

Having set aside all fine phrases, we will speak of the meaning of every thought; by comparisons and deductions, we will illuminate circumstances. And so I will formulate our system from our point of view and that of the goyim.

People want the illusion of freedom, so the Jews will use liberal impulses to undermine all present authority. Then they will exploit the very same impulses to establish Jewish rule by calling it true freedom. "The idea of freedom," the rabbi explains, "cannot be realized because no one knows how to make reasonable use of it." Accordingly, Jews must use . . .

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