The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (review)

Abstract

The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Will Eisner. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2005. 148 pp. $19.95. Graphic novels lend themselves well to dramatizing intrigue, mystery, and conspiracy. In T\k Plot, the grandfather of the graphic novel takes on the mother of all conspiracy theories. Will Eisner's final work - he died in 2005 - investigates the history of The Protocols of the Elders ofZion, the notorious fraud that has been used to demonize Jews across the world for the past one hundred years. Eisner announces in his preface that this work is matter of immense personal concern (p. 1). He knows that many academics already have investigated the Protocols, and TIk Plot is clearly indebted to this body of scholarship. Eisner proposes here, though, that the graphic novel provides opportunity to deal head-on with this propaganda in a more accessible language (p. 3). Some scholars may be unsatisfied either with a story that moves quickly through the tangled history of the Protocols, or with invented dialogue between protagonists, but that criticism would be shortsighted. In The Plot, Eisner effectively dramatizes the history of a fraud and, in so doing, successfully exposes the Protocols to a potentially wide readership. Eisner guides his reader from 1848 to 2004, while emphasizing two themes. The first, a story well known to anyone versed in the history of antisemitism, is that Jews have been a convenient enemy targeted by those who feel dispossessed by modernity. The Protocols works effectively as a propaganda tool because it has proven adaptable for blaming Jews for all the ills of the modern (and postmodern) world. Eisner's second theme is the naivete of believing that the repeated exposures of the Protocols as a fraud will somehow lessen its power to spread hatred of Jews. Like others who have exposed the Protocols, Eisner explores the sources from which the work was plagiarized. Seventeen pages of running text provide side-by-side comparisons of passages from Maurice Joly's Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) and the Protocols. Even in including this textual evidence, Eisner preserves a sense of drama, transporting his readers to 1921 and allowing us to sit with the journalist Philip Graves as he discovers that the Protocols is fabricated. Soon after Graves exposes the Protocols as fraudulent in a series of London Times articles, Graves's editot speculates that the expose will put an end to the Protocols. This fraud will soon be well known everywhere, the editor tells Graves, So, my boy, what harm can the 'Protocols' possibly do now? (p. 94). On the very next page, a young Adolf Hitler speaks of the Jews' strategy to undermine nations! (p. 95) The juxtaposition effectively communicates Eisner's message about the danger of underestimating propaganda's power. (Eisner latet tips his hat to propaganda in contemporary politics when he asks why, if everyone knows that the Protocols is fake, it is still published. …