That “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious anti-Semitic tract about a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, still has currency in parts of the world today was no deterrent for writer Umberto Eco.
If there was anyone who could get away with a novel about the forged document’s creation, it was Eco. A towering member of Italy’s intellectual elite, he is as famed for his works on philosophy as he is for his best-selling novels.
But why, given the sensitivity, create a whole book around such a vicious piece of bigotry? Simple, Eco said in an interview from Italy: “I’m always fascinated by stupidity and credulity.”
He added, “If you sort through the Internet, you find [conspiracies] all the time. Not only about Jews, but that the twin towers were not taken down by bin Laden or al Qaida, for instance. … Conspiracies are a way for people to say, ‘It’s not my fault. There’s someone else to blame.’”
A lapsed Catholic, Eco, 79, knew he was wading in perilous waters. Before he even published the book, he showed a manuscript to Jewish friends, and even to the chief rabbi of Rome. Most gave him their approval, especially since the main character, Simone Simonini, the one who forges “The Protocols,” is so clearly repellent.
But once “The Prague Cemetery” came out in Italy — it’s now available in an English translation in the United States — Rome’s chief rabbi publicly questioned the book’s conclusion. In a conversation with Eco published in a national magazine, the rabbi said: “At the end the reader asks: These Jews, do they or don’t they want to overthrow society and rule the world?”
A literary scholar reviewing the book in another Italian paper was more blunt: “It can’t be denied … that the continuous description of Jewish villainy brings about a whiff of ambiguity, certainly not intended by Eco but permeating every page of the book.”
The criticism has failed to impugn Eco’s integrity. But it has put him on the defensive. His response comes down to this: He made Simonini as repugnant a villain as possible to make clear that no sensible person, not least he, could have sympathy for such a man.
Perhaps to pre-empt criticism in America, Eco’s U.S. publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, had a backcover blurb written by Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, known for her biting rebukes of anti-Semitism. And in an email, Bruce Nichols, Harcourt’s senior vice president, offered his own defense of Eco.
“Any reasonable reader — every reasonable reader — will understand immediately that Eco is no proponent of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” Nichols wrote. “The book portrays this kind of thinking as delusional and paranoid. The narrator, who ultimately crafts ‘The Protocols,’ is the most hateful narrator in literature.”
The novel is set in 19th-century Europe, when revolutions are threatening, if not entirely upending, the established order. There are appearances by Garibaldi, the unifier of Italy, as well as the novelist Alexander Dumas and Sigmund Freud. All these historical figures somehow work their way into the diary of Simonini, who serves as a narrator.
Like the reactionary grandfather who raised him, Simonini — the only fictional character in the book — seeks an explanation for all the social upheaval. Given his ingrained hatred of Jews, he finds it easy to blame them for all the recent tumult.
“The fundamental feelings animating the talmudic spirit,” Simonini writes, as he begins to forge “The Protocols,” “are an overweening ambition to dominate the world, an insatiable lust to possess all the riches of those who are not Jewish and a grudge against Jesus Christ.”
This is not the first time Eco has written about “The Protocols.” His 1988 novel, “Foucalt’s Pendulum,” also had a chapter on the forgery, though it was just one among many other conspiracies included in the book. Eco has shown an interest in other realms of Jewish history as well — Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism chief among them.
Despite his acute knowledge of “The Protocols,” Eco is aware there are still gaps in our knowledge about the document’s origin. No one has, for instance, pinned down exactly who wrote the document — only that its contents are undeniably false. That unsolved mystery was critical for his writing of the novel, he said, for it allowed him to create the fictitious Simonini.
“That’s why I could write a book like this,” he said of the document’s unknown origins. “I could play a bit.”
“The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco (464 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade, $27)