Unit 15 · Forgeries and Fakes

In 1864 a French lawyer named Maurice Joly published a book in Brussels, Belgium. He did not put his name on it. The title page said only that it was written by a contemporary, meaning someone living at the time. Its title in English is Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

The book is a satire. A satire uses humor, irony or exaggeration to criticize real people or real power. Joly’s target was Napoleon III, the emperor of France. Joly believed the emperor kept a free-looking government on the surface while controlling it underneath. He could not safely say that openly, because France had strict censorship, meaning government control over what could be printed.

So Joly wrote a dialogue, a text written as a conversation. Two dead thinkers argue in the afterlife. Montesquieu defends laws, liberty and a free press. Machiavelli explains, coldly and cleverly, how a modern ruler could control newspapers, courts and voters while pretending to respect them. Readers were meant to recognize Napoleon III in Machiavelli’s plans.

The French government did recognize him. Joly was identified, tried and sentenced in April 1865 to 18 months in prison. His book was seized and soon forgotten. Keep one fact in mind for the rest of this chapter: Joly’s satire is about a French emperor. It does not mention Jews at all.

Nearly forty years after Joly’s book, a new text appeared in the Russian Empire. In August and September of 1903, a St. Petersburg newspaper called Znamya, meaning The Banner, printed it in parts. The paper’s editor was Pavel Krushevan, a writer known for his hostility toward Jews. The text later became known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

A protocol here means the official minutes of a meeting. The text claims to be the secret minutes of Jewish leaders planning to take over the world. It is a forgery: a document made to look like something it is not, in order to deceive. No such meeting took place, and no such leaders existed.

In 1905 a religious writer named Sergei Nilus printed a fuller version as the last chapter of a book of his. Nilus’s edition became the one most often translated. The timing matters. The Russian Empire was a place of deep antisemitism, meaning hatred of or prejudice against Jews. In those years mobs carried out deadly attacks on Jewish communities, called pogroms. A forgery like this did not create hatred from nothing. It fed on fears that already existed and gave them the look of proof. That is why historians study not only who wrote a false document, but also who wanted to believe it.

Students often ask who wrote the Protocols. The honest answer is that historians are not sure. There is a difference between two questions. Is the text a forgery? That question is settled. Who forged it? That question is still open, and historians argue about it using evidence.

The traditional view points to the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian tsar, and its office in Paris. The historian Norman Cohn, in his 1967 book Warrant for Genocide, followed this view, which rests partly on witnesses who spoke at a trial in the 1930s. In 1999 a Russian scholar, Mikhail Lepekhin, named a writer called Mathieu Golovinski as the author. That claim is disputed.

Other historians look elsewhere. Cesare De Michelis, in a 2004 study, argued that the text came from Russian nationalist circles around 1902 and 1903. Scholars also agree that the forger borrowed from more than one source. One was an 1868 German novel by Hermann Goedsche, which included an invented scene of a secret meeting in a Prague cemetery.

This is a good example of how a historian works. A historian studies the past using evidence and says how sure each claim is. We can hold two ideas at once. We know the Protocols is fake because of what it copies. We do not yet know for certain whose hands did the copying. An open question about the author does not reopen the question of the forgery.

Philip Graves was a careful British journalist based in Constantinople. After Mr. X gave him Joly’s book, Graves compared it with the Protocols line by line. He found that the Protocols had borrowed Joly’s arguments, images and order of ideas. The forger had changed the speaker. In Joly, it is Machiavelli advising a ruler. In the Protocols, it is the supposed Jewish elders.

The Times printed Graves’s findings in three articles on 16, 17 and 18 August 1921. The paper then reissued them as a pamphlet with a plain title: The Truth About the Protocols: A Literary Forgery. A literary forgery is a fake that is built by copying and changing someone else’s writing.

This mattered because of who was speaking. The Times was one of the most respected newspapers in the world. The year before, some voices in Britain had asked whether the Protocols might be genuine. Now the same paper laid out the evidence for readers to judge. Evidence is the facts or documents that show whether a claim is true. Graves did not ask readers to trust him. He showed them the two texts together. That choice turned a debate about opinions into a test anyone could check with their own eyes.

Graves used a simple tool: parallel columns. He printed a passage from Joly on one side and the matching passage from the Protocols on the other. Readers could move their eyes back and forth. They did not need to know French or Russian history. They only needed to compare.

What should a reader look for? First, the order of ideas. Two authors writing on their own might share one idea, but they will rarely share twenty ideas in the same order. Second, distinctive images, such as an unusual comparison or example. Third, small leftovers: details that made sense in the original but look odd in the copy.

This lesson uses an invented, harmless example so the method is clear. In the practice below, one text is an original school newsletter and the other copies it. You will not read the Protocols itself. That text was written to spread hatred. Historians who teach it show only short matching lines, and only to prove the copying. When a match is long, detailed and in the same order, chance is not a reasonable explanation. The newer text depends on the older one. That is called textual dependence. It is one of the strongest kinds of proof a historian can offer.

Proof of copying leads to a clear conclusion. Suppose the Protocols were real minutes of a secret meeting. Then the speakers’ words would be their own. But the words are Joly’s, written in 1864 to mock Napoleon III. A real meeting could not have produced a speech that already existed, word for word in places, in a French satire.

The copy also carries odd leftovers. Some are an anachronism, something placed in the wrong time. Scholars have noted passages that fit France under Napoleon III better than the world of 1903, because that is what Joly was writing about. A forger working fast did not clean every trace.

The deeper point is about blame. Joly’s satire was a warning about how any ruler could abuse power. The forger took that warning and pinned it on a whole people who had nothing to do with it. That is what made the forgery so dangerous. It turned a general fear of power into hatred of a specific group. Notice what the proof does not need. It does not depend on who the forger was or on anyone’s opinion of Jews. It rests on the texts themselves. Anyone can check it. That is why historians call the question closed.

In the 1930s, pro-Nazi groups in Switzerland handed out copies of the Protocols. Swiss Jewish organizations went to court in Bern, the Swiss capital. They argued that the pamphlets broke a Bern law against trashy literature. The trial ran from October 1934 to May 1935, and witnesses testified about where the text came from.

On 14 May 1935, Judge Walter Meyer gave his ruling. He found the Protocols to be forgeries and called them trashy literature. Two of the five men charged, named Fischer and Schnell, were convicted. The other three were acquitted, meaning found not guilty.

The defendants made an appeal, asking a higher court to review the case. On 1 November 1937 the appeals court overturned the convictions. Its reason was a point of law: it held that the trashy literature statute did not fit a political text like this one. The appeals court did not rule that the Protocols were genuine. Later promoters of the Protocols sometimes say the Bern verdict was overturned, as if that proved the text real. That is a misreading. A verdict can be reversed because a law does not apply, while the facts found about a document still stand.

Henry Ford was one of the most admired men in America. His Model T put millions of families on the road. He also owned a weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, based in Dearborn, Michigan. On 22 May 1920 the paper began a series of attacks on Jews, and it kept them up in 91 more issues.

The series leaned heavily on the Protocols. It presented the forgery as a key to world events. The articles were then collected into books under the title The International Jew. The first volume appeared in November 1920. Ford’s fame gave the old Russian forgery an American voice and a huge new audience.

This is a lesson about propaganda, meaning information spread on purpose to shape what people believe, often by misleading them. Propaganda works better when a trusted figure spreads it. Many readers reasoned that a man as successful as Ford must know what he was talking about. His success in business had nothing to do with whether the Protocols were true. The International Jew was translated into at least 16 languages, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It traveled far beyond Michigan, including to Germany, where Nazi leaders praised it.

In the 1920s the Dearborn Independent also attacked Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer who organized farmers’ cooperatives. Sapiro sued Ford for libel, meaning printing false statements that damage someone’s reputation. The trial in 1927 ended in a mistrial. Before a new trial could begin, Ford decided to settle the matter.

Ford signed a public statement dated 30 June 1927. It was drafted by Louis Marshall, a leader of the American Jewish Committee, and Ford accepted it without changes. In it Ford apologized to Jewish people, said he withdrew the attacks, and said he had not known the details of what his paper printed. At the end of 1927 the paper stopped publishing.

Historians debate how sincere the apology was. Ford owned the paper, and many doubt he did not know what it said. Also, copies of The International Jew kept circulating abroad, especially in Germany. In 1938, on his 75th birthday, Ford accepted a high honor from Nazi Germany, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

A retraction is a public statement taking back something said or printed. Ford’s retraction shows both the power and the limits of correcting the record. It was real and public. It did not recall the books already printed or the ideas already planted.

In Germany after World War I, the Protocols found eager readers among people looking for someone to blame for defeat and hard times. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazi writer Alfred Rosenberg introduced Adolf Hitler to the text in the early 1920s. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of it between 1919 and 1939.

Some German newspapers fought back. In 1924 the Frankfurter Zeitung, a respected paper, exposed the Protocols as a fraud. But after the Nazis took power in 1933, independent voices were silenced. The Protocols was even used in some German schools. Once they took power, they could print it with the full weight of the state behind it.

The forgery gave Nazi ideology a false story of a hidden enemy. An ideology is a set of ideas that a movement uses to explain the world and justify its actions. The Nazi state used that story to justify taking away Jewish people’s rights, property and safety.

The end of that road was the Holocaust, the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. A forged document did not cause the Holocaust by itself. But historians see it as one of the lies that prepared many people to accept persecution. The people harmed, not the forgers, are the center of this history.

In 1964 a subcommittee of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee printed a report on the Protocols. Its title called the text a fabricated historic document. Even at the height of the Cold War, members of Congress put on record that the Protocols was fake and traced how it had spread.

Yet the text never went away. It is still printed and still shared online in many languages today. Human rights groups and Holocaust museums continue to track it. A lie that has been disproved can keep moving if people pass it on without checking where it came from. That is called misinformation when it is shared by mistake, and disinformation when it is spread on purpose.

Sometimes the Protocols returns in a new costume. Some writers keep the text but say it is really about a different secret group, such as the Illuminati. The writer Bill Cooper reprinted it in his 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, a case this course studies in Unit 17. Many of Cooper’s readers care about real government secrets, and some of those secrets are documented.

But renaming the villain does not change the text’s history. It is still Joly’s satire, rewritten by a forger to target Jews, and still the document the Nazis used. A reader can take real questions about secrecy seriously and still refuse to pass on a known forgery.

Graves, the Bern witnesses and the Frankfurter Zeitung reporters all did the same basic thing. They asked where the text came from and showed the answer. That is the heart of source criticism, the historian’s habit of asking who made a document, when, where, how and why, before trusting it.

Careful people also avoid spreading the harm. Teachers who study the Protocols show only short matching lines next to Joly, and only to prove the copying. They do not hand out the full text. Repeating a hateful claim, even to argue with it, can plant it in new minds. Pointing to the evidence is safer than repeating the lie.

Center the people who were harmed. Jewish families in Russia, Germany and elsewhere lived with the fear and violence this text helped stir up. Honor also the people who stood up: Graves and his source, the Swiss Jewish groups who went to court, Louis Marshall and Aaron Sapiro in America, and the German reporters of 1924.

Finally, learn the pattern. Many forgeries follow the same shape: a secret meeting, a hidden group, a plan to rule the world, and no way to check the source. When you meet that shape, you can slow down, ask the source questions, and look for the original. That is a skill, and it grows with practice.

The Dossiers Secrets d’Henri Lobineau entered the Bibliothèque nationale de France on 27 April 1967. A national library is the main library of a country. In France, publishers must send it copies of what they print. That rule is called legal deposit, and it means almost anyone can get a printed item onto the library’s shelves.

The pages claimed that a secret society called the Priory of Sion had existed since the Middle Ages. They linked it to the Knights Templar and listed a line of grand masters, including Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. The file offered no medieval originals, no archive references and no way to check its claims.

The trick was about authority, the power to be believed because of who or what stands behind a claim. The library’s catalog number made the pages look official. But a library records what it receives. It does not certify that the contents are true. The file had been planted: placed where it would later be found, so that finding it would seem like discovery. Historians call this a problem of provenance, the known history of where a document came from and who has held it. The Dossiers Secrets had a very short provenance. It began in 1967, with the people who deposited it.

The Priory of Sion was real in only one sense. In the 1950s a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard registered a small club by that name. It had no connection to the Middle Ages. Plantard, working with his friend Philippe de Chérisey, then produced documents to give the club an ancient past, with Plantard himself as a descendant of old French kings.

The Dossiers Secrets were part of that effort. So were parchments that were said to be medieval. De Chérisey later admitted that he had made the parchments himself. Like the Dossiers, they were hoaxes: tricks meant to make people believe something false.

The strongest evidence came from Plantard. In 1993 a French judge was investigating a separate matter in which Plantard’s name came up. Under oath, Plantard admitted that his Priory claims had been invented. A confession is a person’s own statement that they did something. A confession under oath, made to a judge, carries special weight in history as well as in law. So the Priory of Sion is a rare case in which the makers of a hoax told us, on the record, that they made it. Historians did not need to rely on guesswork. The claim that a medieval Priory guided the Templars is shown false.

A hoax needs an audience to grow. In 1982 three British authors, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, published The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. They built a large theory on the Priory of Sion papers. The book sold widely and made the Priory famous across the English-speaking world.

In 2003 Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code used the Priory as a central part of its plot. A novel is fiction, and readers know that. But the book’s opening pages presented the Priory as real, and many readers took it that way. Tourists began visiting sites linked to the story.

This is how a legend can grow from a hoax. A legend is a popular story about the past that is told as if true but cannot be proven. Each retelling cites the one before. After a while, people can point to many books that mention the Priory. None of them leads back to anything older than 1967. Historians call this circular sourcing. The sources seem many, but they all rest on the same weak foundation. The test is to follow each claim back, step by step, to its first appearance.

In December 1984 a television producer named Jaime Shandera received a package. It held a roll of undeveloped 35 mm film and had a New Mexico postmark. There was no return address. When the film was developed, it showed pages of what looked like a top secret government briefing.

The main paper was labeled as a briefing for President-elect Dwight Eisenhower, dated 18 November 1952. It claimed that in 1947 President Harry Truman had set up a secret committee of twelve officials, called Majestic-12 or MJ-12, to handle a crashed flying saucer. The pages looked official, with stamps, code words and signatures.

The papers became public in 1987. A British author, Timothy Good, published them in May of that year, and American researchers William Moore and Shandera released them in the United States. They caused a sensation among people interested in UFOs. Stamps and signatures are easy to copy onto a page.

Notice the provenance. An anonymous source, meaning one with no name, mailed a copy of a copy. There was no original paper to examine, no archive file, and no one who admitted sending it. A document with no traceable history is unauthenticated: it has not been shown to be what it claims to be.

Copies of the MJ-12 papers were marked top secret, so the FBI took notice. A document marked classified might mean a real leak of national secrets. The Bureau’s file shows that an agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations contacted the FBI’s Dallas office on 15 September 1988.

The FBI asked the Air Force to check. On 30 November 1988 the Air Force investigators reported back. No such committee, they said, had ever been authorized or formed. A document said to be classified is one officially kept secret. This one, the Air Force concluded, was not a real government document at all.

The file also shows the FBI’s own reaction. An FBI official wrote that the document was bogus, and the word bogus was written across a copy in the file. Today the FBI posts this file publicly in its online reading room, called the Vault. It was an FBI verdict on a paper, not a secret.

This record is a good example of a primary source, a document created at the time by people directly involved. It lets students watch a government agency test a secret document the way a historian would, by asking the office that would have created it.

Fairness means hearing the defense. The nuclear physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman spent years arguing that the MJ-12 papers might be real. In his 1996 book Top Secret/Majic, he argued that the people named in the papers were real officials and that the details fit their schedules and positions.

Critics answered with several problems. The papers had no provenance: an anonymous roll of film is not an archive. Critics also pointed to features they argued were wrong for real government papers of that time, such as the way dates and markings were written, and a signature they argued had been copied from a genuine letter. And the agency that would have run the committee said it never existed.

Later official reviews found no support either. In March 2024 the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, called AARO, reported on the historical record of government UFO programs. It found no evidence that the government had recovered alien technology. The consensus, meaning the broad agreement among experts, is that the MJ-12 papers are forgeries. Using real names does not make a document real. Forgers often borrow real people, because real names make a fake easier to believe.

On 20 June 1977, viewers in Britain watched a program from Anglia Television called Alternative 3. It looked like a serious science documentary. Reporters investigated missing scientists and uncovered a secret plan. The world’s powers, it claimed, were preparing to move a chosen few to colonies in space, because Earth was becoming unlivable.

The program was a spoof, a humorous imitation of a serious form. It was written by the screenwriter David Ambrose and directed by Christopher Miles. The people on screen were actors playing roles. It had been made to air on 1 April, April Fools’ Day, but a labor dispute delayed the broadcast until June.

Moving it from April Fools’ Day took away its biggest clue. Some viewers believed what they saw. The program ended with credits listing the writer and the cast, the kind of detail real documentaries also have. But people who missed the ending, or heard about it later, had no way to know. The program is an example of a mockumentary, a fictional film made in the style of a documentary. Mockumentaries are a real art form. The problem begins when one is cut loose from its context and passed on as fact.

In 1978 a writer named Leslie Watkins published a book version of Alternative 3. The book kept the documentary style. On a shelf, it looked like nonfiction. Each new form carried the story further from its first context as an April Fools’ spoof. Its readers did not see a cast list.

Over the next years, the story’s claims appeared in conspiracy books and talks as evidence of a real secret plan. Bill Cooper, whose 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse this course studies in Unit 17, was one of the writers who repeated Alternative 3 as if it described real events. The show’s credits and its writer’s name did not travel with the claims.

This is sometimes called context collapse. A piece of content is removed from the setting that explained it, and a new audience reads it without the clues. A joke, a novel or a drama can then look like a leak. The claim has not become stronger. It has only lost its label.

The fix is to trace the claim upstream, meaning back toward its first source. Follow Alternative 3 back through the books and talks, and it ends at a television studio, a script and a cast list. That first appearance is its origin, and it answers the question.

Historians use a set of tests on any document that seems too good to be true. The first is provenance. Where did this come from, and who has held it? A letter kept in a family’s papers for 150 years, then given to an archive, has strong provenance. A roll of film from an unknown sender has almost none.

The second test is the material itself. Paper, parchment, ink and typewriter type all change over time. Experts can often date a page by what it is made of and how its letters were printed. Checking whether a document is genuine is called authentication. The MJ-12 papers could not be tested this way, because only photographs existed.

The third test looks for an anachronism, something placed in the wrong time. A word, a title, a date format or an object that did not yet exist can expose a forgery at once. Forgers know the big facts of the past, but they often slip on the small ones.

The fourth test asks who gains. Who benefits if people believe this? Plantard gained a royal family tree. Promoters gained sales and attention. A benefit does not prove a document false, but it tells you where to look harder. Together, these tests turn a feeling of doubt into evidence.

Not every surprising document is fake. In September 2001 an Italian scholar, Barbara Frale, was working in the Vatican archives. She identified a parchment that had been misfiled for centuries. A catalog entry from 1628 had mentioned it, but too vaguely for anyone to find it. It recorded questioning of the Knights Templar at Chinon, in France.

The parchment is dated 17 to 20 August 1308. It records that three cardinals, sent by Pope Clement V, questioned the Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and other leaders. The cardinals absolved them, meaning they formally forgave them of sin and restored them to the Church’s sacraments.

Compare its tests with the planted papers. Its provenance is strong: it sat in the pope’s own archive for about seven centuries. Its material is a medieval parchment. Its contents fit other records of the Templar trials. It gave no one a throne or a fortune. In 2007 the Vatican published a facsimile, a careful exact copy, of the trial documents.

But a genuine document can still be overstated. Some headlines said the pope had declared the Templars innocent. The parchment does not say that. It did not end the case. The order was still suppressed in 1312, and Molay was burned in 1314. Reading carefully means claiming only what the document shows.

Now it is your turn to be the historian. Below is a practice document. It is invented for this lesson, so you can test it without harm. Your job is not to guess. Your job is to find evidence and explain it. Take your time; careful work matters more than speed. Read the whole document once before you begin testing it.

Work through the tests in order. For provenance, ask who found it and how it reached them. For material, ask what it is written on and how. For anachronism, read every date, word and object slowly. For who gains, ask who benefits if people believe it. Write one sentence of evidence for each test.

Then reach a verdict, a judgment based on evidence. Historians use three honest labels. A document can be authenticated, meaning shown to be genuine. It can be shown false, meaning evidence proves it is not what it claims. Or it can be unverified, meaning there is not yet enough evidence either way. Remember the lesson of Chinon. A strange document is not automatically fake, and a real document is not automatically proof of everything people claim. Good judgment stays close to the evidence, in both directions.