THE PRAGUE CEMETERY. Why do so many people in the modern West hate the Jews?

Did you know? French and Russian fascists created a panic that caused WWII and the Shoa (Holocaust)

Francisco Gil-White | MOR | Jun 02, 2025

Why do so many people in the modern West hate the Jews? In The Prague Cemetery, the late Umberto Eco gave his answer.

This remarkable Italian polymath—“medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator”—was smart, erudite, and a good observer. And a good writer. You may know him from The Name of the Rose—a whodunit set in the Middle Ages. But my special affections go to The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco’s historical novel about the birth of modern ‘political’ antisemitism in the nineteenth century.

Historical novels blend fact and fiction. But is Eco a ‘rigorist’ or a ‘libertine’? Does he invent only where the record is silent (reconstructive historical fiction—as in Mary Renault’s novels) or merely to deepen our grasp of fact (non-fiction novel—as in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood)? Or is he perhaps inventing freely (historical romance—as in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers) or even imposing a frankly alternate reality (historiographic metafiction—as in Octavia Butler’s Kindred)?

What in Eco’s novel is fact and what is fiction? I’ll tell you further below, but try to guess…

The Prague Cemetery

Written in a daring style, The Prague Cemetery is narrated in the first-person voice of a madman, Simone Simonini, a paranoid racist foaming at the mouth—gripped by dissociation and megalomania—who composes a literary fraud depicting the Jewish people as a horde of monstrous, powerful psychopaths. In Simonini’s deranged account, the Jews have organized themselves as a grand international conspiracy that plots in secret how to corrupt and dominate every last Western institution. The plan is to destroy Western Civilization. Because they are mean.

To create his fraud, Simonini plagiarizes from another book, The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written by a Frenchman, Maurice Joly. This book has nothing to do with Jews. Published in 1864, it exposes the camouflaged, proto-totalitarian schemes and intrigues of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s secret police in the French Second Republic and the so-called ‘Liberal Empire’—a period lasting from 1848 to 1870.

Ever mindful of Louis Napoleon’s thought police, Joly never refers to him by name; instead, The Dialogue takes an indirect approach: a fictional (and dead) ‘Machiavelli’—the great theorist of the cynical use of power—explains to a fictional (and dead) ‘Montesquieu’—the great architect of democratic power-balancing—how, despite all of Montesquieu’s careful engineering and design, democracy will be destroyed.

All will be lost, says ‘Machiavelli,’ the minute the citizens allow the Prince—he never says ‘Louis Napoleon’—to spend citizen monies in secret, that is, to create a clandestine intelligence service or secret police. For with such clandestine power, a pretend-democratic Prince can and will corrupt every relevant institution, gutting it from within whilst preserving the facade, recruited now to the Grand Simulacrum of democracy, where the hidden puppet masters pull on the institutional strings—and especially those attached to the controlled press—to create and manage a ‘consensus reality’ that steers the citizens to demand what the Prince already wants. The bulk of Joly’s book consists of ‘Machiavelli’ patiently detailing for an increasingly horrified ‘Montesquieu’ the secret methods that a democratic-seeming but totalitarian Prince will employ.

To the madman Simonini, who means to paint a tableau of an international Jewish conspiracy, Joly’s material is pure gold. It already describes a giant secret conspiracy and its methods, so the work of imagining all that cloak-and-dagger stuff is done. Moreover, by 1897, when a stray copy of Joly’s book falls into Simonini’s hands, nobody remembers that it ever existed, because Louis Napoleon’s cops had of course right away found Joly and thrown him in jail, confiscating thereafter all copies of The Dialogue. So Simonini can, with impunity, simply plagiarize the discourses of Joly’s ‘Machiavelli.’

With minor changes courtesy of Simonini’s pen, Joly’s Machiavellian discourses become speeches uttered in a council of ‘Jewish Elders’ whose world-domination meetings Simonini sets, most dramatically, in the Prague Cemetery. There, among the flickering shadows and graves, his ‘Jewish Elders’ conspire to perfect the clandestine methods by which they corrupt every Western institution. Soon, they will destroy Western Civilization. Because they are mean.

As Simonini works away at his fraud in his Paris apartment, out on the streets a great political scandal is unfolding. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French Army, has been falsely accused of sharing military secrets with the enemy: Germany. The antisemites who dominate the French officer corps make a great show of trying this (quite obviously) innocent Jew for treason, and that show helps to mobilize onto the streets the anti-Dreyfusards, the antisemites, thousands of them shouting ‘Death to the Jews.’ Their opponents, the Dreyfusards, led by the famous French author Émile Zola, march to defend Dreyfus and the Jews, though they are less numerous.

The leading French antisemite, Édouard Drumont, quite involved in the false accusations against Dreyfus and the ensuing antisemitic agitation in France, reads Simonini’s text and sees great value in it. He takes it to the Paris office of the Okhrana, the Tsarist Empire’s secret police, where it is recognized as a useful propaganda tool for stirring up anti-Jewish mob violence in Russia. The Tsarist bosses worry that the Russian slaves, the serfs, will rise in revolution to depose the Tsar, so the plan is to make everyone paranoid about the supposed Jewish conspiracy and “drown the revolution in Jewish blood,” as the Tsar’s chief policeman, Vyacheslav von Plehve, is (plausibly) alleged to have said.1

Accordingly, the Okhrana employs Simonini’s document to produce an anti-Jewish panic among the Tsar’s subjects that results in pogroms: mass killings, rapes, and pillaging of Jews. Never mind that the humble villages (shtetls) of these downtrodden and oppressed ‘Russian’ Jews might have won a prize for Least Likely Meeting Place for World-Domination Planning—never mind that: they are robbed, raped, and murdered anyway. All across what we now call Eastern Europe, and during the long years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jews are robbed, raped, and murdered. And all because Simonini’s mind virus has spread his deranged ideas to entire populations of Eastern Europeans, driving them completely insane.

Erudite readers of The Prague Cemetery know that Umberto Eco is writing about the nineteenth-century roots of the ‘world-domination’ slanders against the Jews, which were recycled by the German Nazis in the twentieth century to cause another European anti-Jewish panic and another bout of murderous insanity: the Shoa or Holocaust. (Simonini’s fraud is a truly powerful mind virus!)

Okay, so what in this is fact and what is fiction? A lot is fact.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte

Louis Napoleon was the nephew of the famous French revolutionary, either the conqueror or the liberator of Europe (depending on your ideological stance): Napoleon Bonaparte.

After his uncle’s defeat in 1815, Louis Napoleon’s mother, Hortense de Beauharnais, former Queen of Holland during the Napoleonic Empire, went into Swiss exile with her two children in tow. Her older son, Napoleon Louis (you read correctly) later became involved with the Italian nationalist-revolutionaries, the carbonari, and died of disease in 1831 while fleeing in Italy the Austrian troops of the autocratic Habsburgs, formerly the rulers of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire that Napoleon Bonaparte had abolished. That left the younger Louis Napoleon as the only surviving male of the Bonaparte line and hence as the pretender to the Bonapartist throne.

That mystique, and Louis Napoleon’s increasingly public political profile, made him popular in France, which alarmed the Orléanist monarchy—the junior branch of the restored Bourbon monarchy then ruling France under Louis-Philippe. So the Bourbons pressured the Swiss to expel him. To avoid conflict, Louis Napoleon left Switzerland in the same year of 1831 and went to Italy. From that point forward he would move a lot.

This Louis Napoleon, who wrote republican and pro-worker texts from British exile, thereby enhancing the revolutionary prestige of his name, seemed like he might carry forward the torch of liberation. That impression positioned him well to benefit politically from the astonishing phenomenon: the 1848 revolution that deposed the restored French monarchy, followed by the establishment of universal male suffrage, which elected Louis Napoleon president of the French Second Republic.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Image credit: Wikipedia.

The 1848 revolution—or, more properly, revolutions—proved that, while European hopes for freedom and equality had been dashed in 1815, they had not been extinguished. For in 1848 almost all the peoples of Europe rose in revolution—in the same year! It was a social and political cataclysm never before seen or even imagined.

And yet, as I have found, the year 1848 is now barely mentioned in Western schooling systems. It has consequently disappeared utterly from the historical consciousness of modern Westerners—as if it never happened. That is quite interesting, because the year 1848 is perhaps the most important year in all of our history. On that year, the modern world was ushered in, setting the European peoples, and then the entire planet, on a gradual slope of liberal-democratic transformation.

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June 5, 2025 | 18 Comments »

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  3. Jaffa riots

    The Jaffa riots were a series of violent riots in Mandatory Palestine on May 1–7, 1921, which began as a confrontation between two Jewish groups but developed into an attack by Arabs on Jews and then reprisal attacks by Jews on Arabs. The rioting began in Jaffa and spread to other parts of the country

    One was Bolshevik and the other socialist. This is where Jewish disunity leads and the result was Samuel and then Churchill restricting Jewish immigration to appease the Arabs.

  4. @Peloni

    The impact of Brafman’s work took on an international aspect when it was translated into English, French, German and other languages.

    This sentence verbatim is in both, for example. No quotation marks, no citation. Same exact wording, as if one of them was copied and pasted.

  5. @Peloni Good idea. Here is something important in the Wikipedia article the other lacks:

    The Protocols is a fabricated document purporting to be factual. Textual evidence shows that it could not have been produced prior to 1901: the document alludes to the assassinations of Umberto I (d. 1900) and William McKinley (d. 1901), for example, as though these events were plotted out in advance.[3]

    Except the first sentence of this quote which is reproduced verbatim in both.

  9. There is only one historical time, or if you prefer historical event, when Antisemitism was roundly defeated:

    The events of the Russian Civil War when the horrific Pogroms were defeated in the period 1919 to 1921 by the Bolshevism under the clear leadership opposing Antisemitism by Lenin and Trotsky

    That’s simply a fact.

    Noone here can deny that

    • @Sebastien
      It isn’t plagiarizing if they cite the source and note that they are using it under a Creative Commons license with a link to both the source and the license. If you want to combine the two we can post it here with you as the author with the relative links included, unless you prefer one or the other of the two articles. Let me know.

      • @fquigley

        On the night of 30 April 1921, the Jewish Communist Party (precursor of the Palestine Communist Party) distributed Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish fliers calling for the toppling of British rule and the establishment of a “Soviet Palestine.”[3] The party announced its intention to parade from Jaffa to neighbouring Tel Aviv to commemorate May Day. On the morning of the parade, despite a warning to the 60 members present from one of Jaffa’s most senior police officers, Toufiq Bey al-Said, who visited the party’s headquarters, the march headed from Jaffa to Tel Aviv through the mixed Jewish–Arab border neighbourhood of Manshiyya.[4]
        Another large May Day parade had also been organized for Tel Aviv by the rival socialist Ahdut HaAvoda group, with official authorization. When the two processions met, a fistfight erupted.[4] Police attempted to disperse the about 50 communist protestors. A general disturbance quickly ensued and spread to the southern part of town.[5]
        Dozens of British, Arab, and Jewish witnesses all reported that Arab men bearing clubs, knives, swords, and some pistols broke into Jewish buildings and murdered their inhabitants, while women followed to loot. They attacked Jewish pedestrians and destroyed Jewish homes and stores. They beat and killed Jews in their homes, including children, and in some cases split open the victims’ skulls.[4]

        Wikipedia/Jaffa Riots

  11. @Peloni Despite the current problems with Wikipedia anti-Israel distortions of fact, in recent articles, I think this piece deserves to be reposted in its entirety wih a disclaimer. I have seen this information nowhere else. It has bearing on the problem of Jews who become anti-Jewish. It seems to have begun with Brafman. Note the dates. It all starts in 1868. (like now, when it all starts at once, like switching on a light. 2023) Every country in which versions of this myth was published accused Jews of whatever they were afraid of, including, Russia, Germany, and the Turkish Ottoman empire.

    Truly, there is no rational explanation for antisemitism. In every age, it morphs to become the bete noir of that time and place., even simultaneously accusing Jews of opposite things.

    “In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.” – pretty much says it all, all that can be known.

    • @Sebastien
      How about this instead:
      The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
      It is a close approximation, really really close approximation, to the Wiki article, but it is from Justapedia.org, which is reported to be the antisemism free alternative to the anti-Israel infection which has taken over much of Wiki.

      Let me know what you think.

  12. Hermann Goedsche was a spy for the Prussian Secret Police who was fired from his job as a postal clerk for helping to forge evidence against the democratic leader Benedict Waldeck in 1849.[citation needed] Following his dismissal, Goedsche began a career as a conservative columnist, and wrote literary fiction under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe.[21] His 1868 novel Biarritz (To Sedan) contains a chapter called “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.” In it, Goedsche (who was unaware that only two of the original twelve Biblical “tribes” remained) depicts a clandestine nocturnal meeting of members of a mysterious rabbinical cabal that is planning a diabolical “Jewish conspiracy.” At midnight, the Devil appears to contribute his opinions and insight. The chapter closely resembles a scene in Alexandre Dumas’ Giuseppe Balsamo (1848), in which Joseph Balsamo a.k.a. Alessandro Cagliostro and company plot the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.[22]
    In 1872, a Russian translation of “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague” appeared in Saint Petersburg as a separate pamphlet of purported non-fiction. François Bournand, in his Les Juifs et nos Contemporains (1896), reproduced the soliloquy at the end of the chapter, in which the character Levit expresses as factual the wish that Jews be “kings of the world in 100 years”—crediting a “Chief Rabbi John Readcliff.” Perpetuation of the myth of the authenticity of Goedsche’s story, in particular the “Rabbi’s speech”, facilitated later accounts of the equally mythical authenticity of the Protocols.[21] Like the Protocols, many asserted that the fictional “rabbi’s speech” had a ring of authenticity, regardless of its origin: “This speech was published in our time, eighteen years ago,” read an 1898 report in La Croix, “and all the events occurring before our eyes were anticipated in it with truly frightening accuracy.”[23]
    Fictional events in Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, which appeared four years before Biarritz, may well have been the inspiration for Goedsche’s fictional midnight meeting, and details of the outcome of the supposed plot. Goedsche’s chapter may have been an outright plagiarism of Joly, Dumas père, or both.[24][e]
    Structure and content
    The Protocols purports to document the minutes of a late-19th-century meeting attended by world Jewish leaders, the “Elders of Zion”, who are conspiring to control the world.[25][26] The forgery places in the mouths of the Jewish leaders a variety of plans, most of which derive from older antisemitic canards.[25][26] For example, the Protocols includes plans to subvert the morals of the non-Jewish world, plans for Jewish bankers to control the world’s economies, plans for Jewish control of the press, and – ultimately – plans for the destruction of civilization.[25][26] The document consists of 24 “protocols”, which have been analyzed by Steven Jacobs and Mark Weitzman, who documented several recurrent themes that appear repeatedly in the 24 protocols,[f] as shown in the following table:[27]…

    ibid

  13. …Resentment towards Jews, for the aforementioned reasons, existed in Russian society, but the idea of a Protocols-esque international Jewish conspiracy for world domination was minted in the 1860s. Jacob Brafman, a Lithuanian Jew from Minsk, had a falling out with agents of the local qahal and consequently converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and authored polemics against the Talmud and the qahal.[6] Brafman claimed in his books The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods (1868) and The Book of the Kahal (1869), published in Vilna, that the qahal continued to exist in secret and that its principal aim was undermining Orthodox Christian entrepreneurs, taking over their property and ultimately seizing political power. He also claimed that it was an international conspiratorial network, under the central control of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which was based in Paris and then under the leadership of Adolphe Crémieux, a prominent freemason.[6] The Vilna Talmudist, Jacob Barit, attempted to refute Brafman’s claim.
    The impact of Brafman’s work took on an international aspect when it was translated into English, French, German and other languages. The image of the “qahal” as a secret international Jewish shadow government working as a state within a state was picked up by anti-Jewish publications in Russia and was taken seriously by some Russian officials such as P. A. Cherevin and Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev who in the 1880s urged governors-general of provinces to seek out the supposed qahal. This was around the time of the Nihilist Narodnaya Volya’s assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia by bombing and the subsequent pogroms. In France, it was translated by Monsignor Ernest Jouin in 1925, who later supported the Protocols. In 1928, Siegfried Passarge, a Far Right geographer who later gave his support to the Nazis, translated it into German.
    Aside from Brafman, there were other early writings which posited a similar concept to the Protocols. This includes The Conquest of the World by the Jews (1873),[7] published in Basel and authored by Osman Bey (born Frederick van Millingen). Millingen was a British subject and son of English physician Julius Michael Millingen, but served as an officer in the army of the Ottoman Empire where he was born. He converted to Islam, but later became a Russian Orthodox Christian. Bey’s work was followed up by Hippolytus Lutostansky’s The Talmud and the Jews (1879) which claimed that Jews wanted to divide Russia among themselves.[8]…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion

    Comprehensive article from before Wikipedia’s turn towards antisemitism.