Page:The History of a Lie (1921).djvu/47

CHAPTER THREE

FICTION FORGED INTO “FACT”

The Lie in its Second Stage—The Tale Becomes “Fact”—The “Rabbi’s” Speech—Its Authenticity Vouched for by “Retcliffe’—An Illuminating Footnote—A Dedication to the Russian “Black Hundreds”—The Imaginary “Speech” Bears Witness to Authenticity of “Protocols,” Themselves Based on “Speech”—Three Stages of the Lie.

A number of years after this Russian translation of the Goedsche-Retcliffe story appeared, Sir John Retcliffe, alias Goedsche, deeming it important for his purpose of adding fuel to the flame of anti-semitism that had been lighted in Germany, undertook to convert this work of fiction, this offspring of his imagination, into a statement of fact. This led him to adopt the simple device of consolidating into one continuous speech the dialogue contained in his shilling shocker, and putting the speech into the mouth of an imaginary Rabbi in such a way as to make it appear to be an address delivered by him to a secret convocation of Jews. And the very man who had invented the speeches set down in his work of fiction twenty years before, now vouched for the authenticity of the obviously fabricated speech which he attributed to a Rabbi who had his birth in the contorted mind of this notorious forger.

A translation from the Russian of the apocryphal “Rabbi’s Speech,” with the introductory note as published in Russia by G. Butmi, in 1907, in a book entitled “The Enemy of the Human Race,” dedicated by the author to the Black Hundreds, will now be laid before the reader.