Umberto Eco’s protagonist is a spy (who is not particular about which state police he serves), a forger, an agent provocateur and a stool pigeon.
In other words, Simone Simonini is the worst kind of low life, and as revolting a fictional character as you will ever encounter. Simonini is an invention. Every other character in Eco’s book is real. All the events — whether as backdrop or integral to the plot — really happened. As the text is sometimes a pastiche of 19th-century adventure story it doesn’t read like history.
We meet Simonini in the late 1890s. Old, physically failing and suffering from memory loss he lives in the upstairs apartment of a junk shop, situated in one of the smelliest districts of Paris.
Simonini’s only passions in life are hatred of all other human beings and haute cuisine. No greater hatred does he have than hatred for Jews.
Ironic then that he finds himself following the advice of a Jewish psychiatrist and is writing down his life history in order to “recall” the trauma which has seemingly destroyed his memory.
As a reader you will find yourself wishing that Simonini had given in to blissful ignorance of his past and had not bothered to take you through the revolting sewers (literally, at times) of his life led at the edges of bourgeois existence.
Simonini’s journal (with interpolations from a doppelganger!) form the basis of Eco’s retelling of a historical story — how many individuals, events and political circumstances shaped modern anti-semitism.
From Italian unification to the Dreyfus Affair this is a rambling and sometimes bewildering retelling. But the point is to show how Simonini — the spreader of lies — operates. How lies themselves operate in constructing percieved “reality”.
As he gains experience as a forger of documents to implicate individuals and groups (Masons and Jews) in conspiracies and crimes Simonini begins to plot the forging of a document which he thinks will bring together All The Best Lies Ever Told About The Jews — this will become The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. A document which, as we know, spreads lies about a comprehensive plan for world domination by Jewish leaders.
The Protocols are in fact a forgery put together in 1897 by Mathieu Golovinski, an agent of the Tsarist police working in France (who later went over to the Bolsheviks) and republished later in Russia. In 1905 it was used as state diversion to working-class unrest.
The Protocols were literally “put together” — big chunks of the forgery were taken almost word for word from an obscure book by the French satirist Maurice Joly. That book — The Dialogue Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu was itself an attack on Napoleon III. Its anatomisation of political dictatorship lent itself to the Protocols “storyline” of Jewish world domination. Other ideas in the Protocols were stolen from 19th-century fictional sources.
The Prague cemetery of Eco’s title is a scene from a novel by a German anti-semite, Hermann Goedsche. The cemetery is where representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel come together to plot taking over the world. But the scene (not in an anti-semitic form) was copied from an earlier novel by Alexandre Dumas! Yet “the Prague cemetery meeting” is reported as fact in subsequent anti-semitic pamphlets.
Somehow this utter rubbish, based on the flotsam and jetsam of swashbuckling novels and recycled, obscure political tracts, became a vital propaganda tool for anti-semites, most notably for the Nazis in their war on European Jews. The fact that this forgery really happened makes Umberto Eco’s dramatic fictional presentation of the story very important.
The Chief Rabbi of Rome criticised Eco for writing The Prague Cemetery and potentially giving new life to the Protocols. But people need to know.
Last November we were shocked to see the book on the Morning Star stall at the Labour Representation Committee event. It was, it turned out, an inadvertent inclusion by the stall holder who had never heard of the Protocols.
Understandable? No, not really. As Will Eisner describes so well in his graphic history The Plot, the Protocols have been used time and again throughout the 20th century and into the next by powerful groups, governments and reactionary movements at key moments when they wanted a scapegoat.
In 1930s Argentina... as quotations in USSR anti-Israel propaganda... around the rise of the NF in 1970s England... in 1988 by Hamas... as required reading in some Mexican Catholic schools... in 2002 in an Egyptian state-sponsored serialised souped-up TV version... cited approvingly in an article on the website of Iranian propaganda channel Press TV in 2011...
All despite the Protocols being proved beyond any doubt over and over again to be a forgery, in a Swiss court case, by the US Senate, and many academic accounts (including by Eco himself).
What helps keep the Protocols alive is the continuing power of conspiracy theories — on both the right and the so-called left in politics. If people want to believe made-up rubbish they will, even when it flies in the face of all available (and easily verifiable evidence). Those who try to demolish the conspiracy theory, point out the evidence, etc, will be assumed to be part of the conspiracy. That, as Umberto Eco points, out is the horrendously a priori logic which has been used to assess the Protocols: “The Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.”
People not only have enemies but also need Enemies with a capital E. Unfortunately that drive and need infects the left — why else do they love those that hate our enemies? Chavez against the US ruling class. Ahmedinejad against the world.
And in that kind of storyline, the truth goes out of the window.
