From The Archives: Umberto Eco's "The Prague Cemetery"

The Plot Surrounding Hateful Political Propaganda Is Still Fresh

Author’s Note: The great writer Umberto Eco passed away in 2016. His penultimate novel, “The Prague Cemetery” (2011) featured one of the most ancient and insidious propaganda tracts (we now call it “disinformation”), “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

I wrote a review for the Harvard Law and Policy Review over a decade ago when I was regular columnist; a server crash (I thought) condemned it to oblivion. To my delight, I recently found it in a backup and revised it for re-publication.

Eco’s novel still resonates almost a decade and half later. Anti-semitism and disinformation have lost none of their power to confuse, frighten, and control.

To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. . . the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.  -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  -Joseph Goebbels

Umberto Eco’s novel The Prague Cemetery is centered around the infamous historical document known asThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols is a bizarre, anti-semitic literary forgery which purports to reveal a shadowy Zionist conspiracy to enslave the world. 

That the Protocols is a hateful forgery is beyond doubt; indeed within the larger genre of literary forgeries, it is a particularly crude fake. Although it purports to be an eyewitness account of a secret, occult meeting of rabbis at a Jewish Cemetery in Prague, it is actually just a patchwork of previously published anti-Jewish books and pamphlets. 

Indeed, the conspiracy accounts the Protocols plagiarized were often not originally about Jewish people. During the nadir of the ancién regimes in 19th Century Western Europe, paranoid conspiracy theories featured the Masons and the Jesuits either in league and in opposition. 

Following the republican revolutions of 1848, the Protocols merely inserted the Jews into the featured role previously played by Napoleon and Garibaldi.

InThe Prague Cemetery, master storyteller Umberto Eco tells of the creation of the Protocols with remarkable historical accuracy. The world he conjures for us, filled with spies and revolutionaries, idealism and betrayal, was quite real. Eco explains in a postlude that save for the insertion and amalgamation of characters to aid the plot, the characters in his novel “actually existed, and said and did what they are described as saying and doing.”

To my mind, The Prague Cemetery forces us to debate the following question presented: are we still capable of being manipulated by cloddish fabrication? After eight long years of Donald Trump, the din of Fox News and the copious media attention still being devoted to debunked conspiracies, vaccine skepticism, stolen elections, and a litany of other madness I regret that affirmative wins the day.

One of our greatest writers waded through the sewers of history and told a brilliant, cautionary tale. We should listen and beware.