The Protocols of Zion is a forged text, created in Russia, that purports to be evidence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. In this 1921 article, The Times (London) scrutinised and debunks the authenticity of the Protocols of Zion:

“The so-called ‘Protocols of the Elders of Sion’ (sic) were published in London in 1920 under the title of ‘The Jewish Peril’. This book is a translation of a book published in Russia in 1905 by Sergei Nilus, a government official who professed to have received from a friend a copy of a summary of the minutes of a secret meeting, held in Paris by a Jewish organisation that was plotting to overthrow civilisation in order to establish a Jewish world state.

The Protocols attracted little attention until after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the appearance of the Bolshevists, among whom were many Jews professing and practising political doctrines that in some points resembled those advocated in the Protocols, led many to believe that Nilus’s alleged discovery was genuine.

The Protocols were widely discussed and translated into several European languages. Their authenticity has been frequently attacked and many arguments have been adduced for the theory that they are a forgery…

The following conclusions are forced upon any reader of the two books who has studied Nilus’ account of the origin of the Protocols and has some acquaintance with Russian history in the years preceding the revolution of 1905-6:

The Protocols are largely a paraphrase of the book here provisionally called the ‘Geneva Dialogues’. They were designed to foster the belief among Russian conservatives, and especially in court circles, that the prime cause of discontent among the politically minded elements in Russia was not the repressive policy of the bureaucracy but a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. They thus served as a weapon against the Russian liberals who urged the Tsar to make certain concessions to the intelligentsia.

The Protocols were paraphrased very hastily and carelessly. Such portions of the Protocols as were not derived from the Geneva Dialogues were probably supplied by the Okhrana [tsarist secret police] which very possibly obtained them from the many Jews it employed to spy on their co-religionists.

So much for the Protocols. They have done harm not so much, in the writer’s opinion, by arousing anti-Jewish feeling, which is older than the Protocols and will persist in all countries where there is a Jewish problem until that problem is solved. Rather, they have done harm by persuading all sorts of mostly well-to-do people that every recent manifestation of discontent on the part of the poor is an unnatural phenomenon, a factitious agitation caused by a secret society of Jews.”