Adas Library Reviews

The Peculiar Protocols

Nicholas Meyer’s fourth Sherlock Holmes adventure reunites the famous detective and his loyal assistant and chronicler, Dr. John Watson. In an elegant London restaurant in January 1905, Sherlock and Watson are celebrating Sherlock’s birthday when Sherlock’s brother Mycroft arrives with a mission. Mycroft, a mainstay of Britain’s Foreign Office, has come into possession of a shocking document entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Protocols purports to be the minutes of a secret meeting of powerful Jews plotting to take over the world. Quickly ascertaining that the document is a forgery, Sherlock and Watson embark for Tsarist Russia to unmask the forger and try to halt further dissemination of the scurrilous Protocols.

The novel draws on the real history of the Protocols. First published in a St. Petersburg newspaper in 1903, the Protocols appeared to expose a sinister Jewish conspiracy to manipulate the economy, media, and other institutions. The inflammatory text was used to justify a recent bloody pogrom in Kishinev; the implication was that the Jewish victims got what they deserved. Pavel Krushevan, a far-right journalist, is the probable author of the Protocols, which was largely plagiarized from an 1864 French pamphlet demonizing, not Jews, but Napoleon III and his government.

Denounced as fraudulent by multiple authorities on multiple occasions, the insidious Protocols persisted, embraced by Hitler, Hamas, and entities hostile to Jews and Israel. Today, the Protocols continue to vilify Jews on numerous websites across the internet. For more of the history underlying Meyer’s novel, see Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History by Steven Zipperstein (2018).