1920s Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-semitic forgery purporting to be the secret minutes of a group of Jewish conspirators plotting to take over the world by destroying Christian civilization was first widely circulated in Russian in the 1890s. The English and
other translations appeared in the 1920s and started making the rounds in Europe and America.

When Henry Ford serialized them in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, in the early 1920s, many people believed what they read. From then on, American anti-Semites made The Protocols "exhibit A" in their propaganda campaign. In 1921, James M. Gray, president of Moody Bible Institute, called The Protocols "a clinching argument for premillennialism and another sign of the possible nearness of the end of the age." Arno Gaebelein also believed that the plan outlined in The Protocols was consistent with Bible prophecy.

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See Also: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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1933 Gerald Winrod, Defenders of the Christian Faith

Most dispensationalists paid little attention to The Protocols until Gerald Winrod gave them a new lease on life. In 1933, Winrod, founder of the Defenders of the Christian Faith in Wichita, Kansas, published an elaborate exposé to show that Jews were in charge of the world's banking system and responsible for World War I, the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and just about everything else.

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1934 William Bell Riley, Anti-Semitism and the Protocols

In 1934, William Bell Riley, who presided over a fundamentalist empire in the upper Midwest, published The Protocols and Communism to show that the same conspiracy that turned Russia communist was at work in Roosevelt's New Deal. "Today in our land many of the biggest trusts, banks, and manufacturing interests are controlled by Jews. . . . Most of our department stores they own. . . . The motion pictures, the most vicious of all immoral, educational and communistic influences, is their creation." Riley preached such views regularly from his pulpit at the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, which some Jewish leaders considered a major center of anti-Semitism.

Gray, Winrod, Gaebelein, and Riley strenuously denied that they were anti-Semites. They were simply explaining events in light of biblical prophecy. But most dispensationalists quickly figured out that using such arguments put them in very bad company. By the thirties, The Protocols were identified with the peddlers of virulent anti-Semitism, which dispensationalists said was a horrible sin against God.

See Also: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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