The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first appeared in abbreviated form in a Russian newspaper and was later circulated internationally. The fabricated text claimed to record a Jewish conspiracy for world domination and plagiarised earlier political satire. Despite repeated exposure as a forgery, it became a powerful instrument of antisemitic propaganda.

The forgery demonstrated how stolen literary material could be repackaged as documentary truth. Its circulation poisoned European print culture and helped create the persecutory world confronted by Jewish poets and writers, including Osip Mandelstam and later Holocaust authors.