We are in the presence of a typical Borges invention: the invention of an invention. Still Borges readers know that Borges has never invented anything: his most paradoxical stories are born from a rereading of history. In fact, at one point Borges says that one of his sources is a work of Johann Valentin Andrae (but Borges draws the information secondhand, from De Quincey), who “described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis—the community that was later founded by others in imitation of the one he had preconceived” (20).
In fact, the Rosicrucian story produced historical developments of no small significance. The symbolic masonry, a transformation of the operative masonry represented by actual confraternities of artisans that had retained over centuries terminology and ceremonies of the ancient builders of cathedrals, was born in the eighteenth century, thanks to certain English gentlemen. With the Constitutions of Anderson, the symbolic masonry tried to become legitimate by insisting on the antiquity of its origins, which the Masons dated back to the builders of the Temple of Solomon. In subsequent years, through the work of Ramsay, from whom the so-called Scottish Rite derived, the myth of the origins is enriched by the imagined relationship between the builders of the Temple and the Templars, whose secret tradition was to arrive at modern masonry through the mediation of the confraternity of the Rosicrucians.
The Rosicrucian theme with its mystical and occultist elements was used by the original Freemasons to compete with the throne and the altar, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Rosicrucian and Templar myth was revived in defense of throne and altar, to combat the spirit of the Enlightenment.
The myth of the secret societies and the existence of Superior Unknowns who directed the fate of the world already were debated before the French Revolution. In 1789 the marquis de Luchet (in his Essai sur la secte des illuminés) warned that “amid the deepest shadows a society has been formed of new beings who know one another without ever having seen one another. … This society takes from the Jesuit rule blind obedience; from the masonry, the tests and the external ceremonies; from the Templars, the underground evocations and the incredible audacity.”
Between 1797 and 1798, in reaction to the French Revolution, the abbé Barruel wrote his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, apparently a work of history, though it can be read as a serialized novel. After their destruction by Philip the Fair, the Templars transformed themselves into a secret society to destroy the monarchy and the papacy. In the eighteenth century they took over the Masons and created a kind of academy whose diabolical members were Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert. From this little group originated the Jacobins, themselves controlled by an even more secret society, that of the Illuminati of Bavaria, regicides by vocation.
The French Revolution was the final outcome of this conspiracy. Never mind that there were profound differences between secular and enlightened masonry and the masonry of the “Illuminati,” which was occultist and Templar; never mind that the myth of the Templars had already been exploded by a fellow traveler, who then traveled in a different direction, namely, Joseph de Maistre. The story was too fascinating to be derailed by fact.
Barruel’s book contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806 Barruel received a letter from a Captain Simonini, who reminded him how both Mani and the Old Man of the Mountain of Moslem memory (with whom the Templars had been suspected of connivance) were Jews (and you see that here the game of occult ancestries becomes head-spinning). The masonry had been founded by the Jews, who had infiltrated all the secret societies.
Barruel did not openly refer to this rumor, which for that matter produced no interesting effects until the middle of the century, when the Jesuits began to worry about the anticlerical inspirers of the Risorgimento, men like Garibaldi, affiliated with the masonry. The idea of demonstrating that the Carbonari were emissaries of a Jewish-masonic plot seemed polemically fertile.
The same anticlericals, still in the nineteenth century, tried to defame the Jesuits, demonstrating that they did nothing but conspire against the welfare of humanity. It was less the few “serious” writers (from Michelet and Quinet to Garibaldi and Gioberti) who made the subject popular than the novelist Eugène Sue. In his Juif errant, the wicked Monsieur Rodin, the quintessence of Jesuitical conspiracy, clearly appears as a replica of the Higher Unknowns of both masonic and clerical memory. Monsieur Rodin returns in Sue’s last novel, Les Mystères du peuple, in which the evil Jesuit plot is revealed down to the least detail. Rodolphe de Gerolstein, who has migrated into this novel from Les Mystères de Paris, denounces the Jesuits’ plan, revealing “with what shrewdness this infernal plot was organized, what frightful disasters, what horrendous enslavement, what future despotism it would mean for Europe.”
After the appearance of Sue’s novels, in 1864 Maurice Joly wrote a pamphlet, inspired by liberalism, against Napoleon III, in which Machiavelli, who represents the dictator’s cynicism, talks with Montesquieu. The Jesuit plot described by Sue is then attributed by Joly to Napoleon III.
In 1868 Hermann Goedsche, who had already published some clearly slanderous opuscules, wrote a popular novel, Biarritz, under the psuedonym of Sir John Retcliffe, in which he described an occult ritual in the cemetery of Prague. Goedsche simply copied a scene from Dumas’s Giuseppe Balsamo (1849), which described an encounter between Cagliostro, head of the Higher Unknowns, and other Illuminati, when, together, they plot the affair of the queen’s necklace. But instead of Cagliostro and Co., Goedsche brings on the representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel, who meet to prepare the conquest of the world. Five years later, the same story appeared in a Russian pamphlet (the title of which translates as “The Jews, Masters of the World”) as if it were factual reportage. In 1881 Le Contemporain republished the story, asserting that it came from an unimpeachable source, the English diplomat Sir John Readcliff. In 1806 François Bournand again used the speech of the Grand Rabbi (this time he is called John Readclif) in his book Les Juifs, nos contemporains. From this point on, the masonic meeting invented by Dumas, blended with the Jesuit plan invented by Sue and attributed by Joly to Napoleon III, becomes the authentic speech of the Grand Rabbi and reappears in various forms and various places.
Now Pyotr Ivanovich Rachovskij appears on the stage, a Russian formerly suspected of contacts with revolutionary groups and nihilists and later (duly repentant) a friend of the Black Centuria, an extreme-right terrorist organization. First informer and then chief of the czarist political police, the Okhrana, Rachovskij, to help his political protector Count Sergej Witte, who is worried about a rival, Elie de Cyon, had had Cyon’s house searched and had found a pamphlet in which Cyon had copied Joly’s text against Napoleon III but ascribing Machiavelli’s ideas to Witte. Fiercely anti-Semitic (these events took place at the time of the Dreyfus case), Rachovskij took the text, deleted every reference to Witte, and attributed those ideas to the Jews. A man cannot bear the name of Cyon (even with a c) without suggesting a Jewish conspiracy.
The text revised by Rachovskij probably represented the primary source of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Rachovskij’s version reveals its novelistic source because it is scarcely credible, except in a novel of Sue, that the bad guys should express so openly, so shamelessly, their evil plans. The Elders freely declare that they possess “boundless ambition, devouring greed, a pitiless desire for vengeance and an intense hatred.” They want to abolish freedom of the press, but they encourage libertarianism. They criticize liberalism but support the idea of capitalist multinationals. To provoke revolution in every country they mean to exacerbate social inequality. They want to build subways the better to mine the big cities. They want to abolish study of the classics and ancient history; they mean to encourage sport and visual communication in order to make the working class stupid.
It is easy to recognize the Protocols as stemming from a document produced in nineteenth century France: they are filled with references to problems of French society at the time. But it is also easy to recognize, among the sources, many well-known popular novels. Alas, the story—once again—was so convincingly narrated that it was easy to take it seriously.
The rest of this story is history. An itinerant Russian monk, Sergej Nilus, obsessed by the idea of the Antichrist, published, in order to foster his own “Rasputinian” ambitions, the text of the Protocols, with his commentary. After that the text traveled throughout Europe and even fell into the hands of Hitler.9
Falsehood and Verisimilitude
What do all the stories I have mentioned have in common? And what made them so persuasive and credible?
The Donation of Constantine was probably not created as an explicit fake but as a rhetorical exercise, which only later began to be taken seriously. The Rosicrucian manifestos were, at least according to their supposed authors, an erudite game, if not a joke, then a literary exercise that could be ascribed to the utopist genre. The letter of Prester John was certainly a deliberate fake, but just as certainly it was not meant to produce the effects it produced. Cosmas Indicopleustes committed the sin of fundamentalism, a forgivable weakness given the period in which he lived, but, as we have seen, no one really took him seriously, and
