Fakes That Have Skewed History

By Paul Gray

By rewriting the record, some forgeries have set complex forces dancing

"The tenth muse," Critic Andrew Lang called the spirit of forgery. She may be busier and more inventive than any of her nine sisters. Under her sway, the 19th century Frenchman Denis Vrain-Lucas fabricated more than 27,000 documents purportedly from the hands of Archimedes, Sappho, Judas Iscariot, Caesar, Charlemagne and others, overplaying his own hand only when he forged a letter in which Pascal took credit for discovering the law of gravity, rather than Newton. Joseph Cosey, the most prolific of American forgers, displayed meticulous attention to detail while adding to the extant records of U.S. history from Aaron Burr through Abraham Lincoln. Britain's William Henry Ireland successfully duplicated Shakespeare, passing off manuscripts of Hamlet and King Lear, until his own addition to the canon, Vortigern and Rowena, proved his undoing.

Such hoaxes were outrageous enough to make their perpetrators seem almost dignified in their raffishness. But forgeries have regularly caused more than empty pockets and red faces. One cut short a poetic career full of brilliant promise. In the 1760s, Thomas Chatterton, a teen-ager from Bristol, England, invented a 15th century monk called Thomas Rowley and wrote medieval-looking manuscripts of inspired poetry under the name. He had hoped to demonstrate his skills under a false identity and then reveal himself as the author when the public's attention was won. Before that could happen, the ruse was detected and the merits of the poems buried in the ensuing uproar. Chatterton committed suicide at age 17.

Fakes have set complex historical forces dancing. Anti-Semitic officers high in the French military fabricated evidence that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, passed sensitive information to the Germans and Italians. Convicted of treason in 1894 and sentenced to Devil's Island for life, Dreyfus had to endure a ceremony in which his sword was broken and the insignia stripped from his uniform. One shocked witness was Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist covering the trial for a Vienna newspaper. Herzl embarked on a train of thought that would result in the writing of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), a book that led to the founding of the modern Zionist movement and, ultimately, the state of Israel.

A forgery hastened war and the unification of Germany. In 1870, King William I of Prussia met with the French ambassador at Ems and sent a report of what took place to Premier Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck edited this account to make the King appear insulting toward the diplomat and then released his version to the press. As he had hoped, the outraged French attacked Germany, enabling Bismarck to embark on the Franco-Prussian War, which he decisively won. Governmental forgery goes on, in many guises and places. The practices of the Soviet Union's KGB have made the term disinformation familiar to millions. During the late 1960s, the FBI'S attempts to sow dissent among radical and antiwar groups in the U.S. involved some flat-out fakery.

Among countless deceptions over the ages, a few have gained transcendence, not only affecting history but achieving a vigor of their own. Three of the sturdiest and most influential:

They first seeped up in a St. Petersburg newspaper in 1903 and were included two years later in a Russian book about the coming of the Antichrist. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion made chilling reading, a description of a conspiracy at the highest levels of Judaism to dominate the world by stealth. Where and when they met is not made clear. But according to the document, the elders carefully laid out a perverse plan: "Corrupt the young generation by subversive education, dominate people through their vices, destroy family life, undermine respect for religion, encourage luxury, amuse people to prevent them from thinking. Poison the spirit by destructive theories, weaken human bodies by inoculation with microbes, foment international hatreds and prepare for universal bankruptcy and concentration of gold in the hands of the Jews." Once launched, the Protocols were to prove as virulent as they were false.

The person or persons who assembled them may never be identified, but they were almost certainly connected in some way to the secret police of Tsar Nicholas II. The apparent motive was to discredit radical and progressive groups within Russia by making them appear dupes of alien Jewish machinations. In 1921, a reporter for the London Times found the sources from which the Protocols had been lifted. The notion of Jewish leaders plotting secretly came from a novel called Biarritz (1868) by Hermann Goedsche, a German who used the pen name Sir John Retcliffe. Most of the language and ideas in the Protocols, however, were taken directly from a French satire published in 1864, Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel (Dialogue in Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli). The conversation reveals Machiavelli (a thinly disguised stand-in for Napoleon III) as a cynical mastermind of corrupt power and how to attain it. The Russian forgers simply adapted his sentiments to fit the imaginary elders.

To his credit, Nicholas refused to authorize propaganda use of the Protocols once he learned they were phony. But they circulated surreptitiously in Russia and translations proliferated. In the early 1920s, Henry Ford's weekly paper, the Dearborn Independent, incorporated the Protocols in a series of anti-Semitic articles. These, including the Protocols, were published as a book (The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem) that eventually sold half a million copies. The Rev. Charles Coughlin, the radio priest, harangued his listeners about the Jewish plot in the '30s.

By the time Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, one of several German translations of the Protocols had run through 33 editions. An industrialist who later broke with the Nazis quoted Hitler's response to the subject: "The stealthiness of the enemy, and his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it--in our own way, of course."

The hoax has been exposed and re-exposed. In 1964, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security called the Protocols "crude and vicious nonsense." But they will not go away, especially in the Middle East. Before his assassination in 1975, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia routinely had free copies distributed to visiting Western tourists. In Europe and South America, wherever there are fringe resurgences of Nazism or fascism, the Protocols seem sure to follow. Given the tragedies they have abetted and their poisonous potential for more, the Protocols may be the most successful and insidious forgery in history.

It was the 8th century, and the politics of the Byzantine Empire were growing byzantine indeed. Imperial legislation coming out of Constantinople threatened to reduce the importance of Rome and of the papacy. Church faced the likelihood of being swallowed up by state. Miraculously, Pope Stephen II in 754 produced a document that would help protect him, his successors and Roman Catholicism for 700 years.

The Constitutum Constantini (Donation of Constantine) ostensibly came from the hand of the revered Emperor who had converted to Christianity in 312. Constantine decided to leave Rome in 324 because, one legend has it, he thought it improper to exercise his earthly rule in the same city as the successor to St. Peter.

He moved to Byzantium, which became Constantinople, and the empire's new center of power. But before he left, according to the evidence of the Donation, Constantine offered to relinquish his crown and imperial authority to Pope Sylvester I; the Emperor also gave the papacy rulership over Rome and "all provinces, localities and towns in Italy and the Western hemisphere." The implications of this document were vast. Although Sylvester had declined Constantine's invitation to become Emperor, the Donation posited a debt that any Pope could call in whenever he wanted; legally, it was Rome that allowed Constantinople to thrive, not vice versa.

It was not until the 15th century that two scholars, Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla, independently demonstrated that the Constitutum Constantini was a forgery, probably executed by someone in the papal chancery during the reign of Stephen II. Essential to the unmasking was the discovery of linguistic turns in the document that did not jibe with the Latin of the 4th century. The chief source of the Donation proved to be a colorful 5th century account of the conversion of Constantine known as the Legenda s. Silvestri. Whatever the ethics of the matter, the adaptor(s) bought precious centuries for the church to protect, extend and consolidate its influence. In 1517--the year of Martin Luther's 95 Theses--Valla's damning research, which had circulated for decades in manuscript, appeared in Germany in the comparatively new medium of print. By then the Donation was no longer crucial to the survival of the church. But its spirit lingered on in papal dreams of temporal dominion. These ended finally in 1870, when the Papal States were incorporated into the new Kingdom of Italy.

In London in 1760, a burly young Scotsman named James Macpherson ushered into print some curiosities with a self-explanatory title: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language. Some admirers of this book, including Macpherson's countryman James Boswell, put up money to send the translator off in search of more old songs. He obliged them the following year with Fingal, an epic in six books attributed to Ossian, a Gaelic bard who lived in the 3rd century. Further Macpherson translations of Ossian appeared in 1763 to a swelling chorus of praise and controversy.

The Scots were delighted to find that they owned a literary heritage far older and grander than that of the English. The Irish fumed to see their Gaelic thunder stolen by the Caledonians. Beyond chauvinist concerns, the Ossian sagas fed a tide of antirationalism that was rising across England and Europe. These relics from the misty midregions of history elevated feeling over thought and instinct over education; they proved that lofty talk could come from primitive, humble folk. Poet Thomas Gray, who had already elegized a "mute inglorious Milton" buried in a country churchyard, wrote: "Imagination dwelt many hundred years ago in all her pomp on the cold and barren mountains of Scotland. She reigns in all nascent societies of Men, where the necessities of life force everyone to think and act for himself."

So ripe were the times for the Ossianic poems that if they had not existed, someone would have had to invent them. And Macpherson chiefly had. Samuel Johnson, the leading literary figure of the age, decided the moment he read them that the translations were fakes; they clearly were the work of a contemporary mind mooning over remnants of authentic legends, in the mimed cadences of the King James Bible: "Pleasant is thy song in Ossian's ear, daughter of streamy Lutha! Thou hast heard the music of departed bards in the dreams of thy rest, when sleep fell on thine eyes, at the murmur of Moruth."

When asked by a defender of Macpherson "whether he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems," Johnson replied, "Yes, sir, many men, many women and many children." Macpherson claimed to have the original manuscripts but turned away all requests to display them. When Johnson denounced this "stubborn audacity" as "the last refuge of guilt," Macpherson sent him a threatening letter. The doctor, then 65, armed himself with a long oak staff and kept it beside his bed at night.

An attack never came. Macpherson went on maintaining the provenance of his work. He eventually produced as evidence some Gaelic passages that later proved to be inept translations of his own English. But the question was growing ever more academic. Macpherson's inventions had inspired a passion in readers that was not to abate for nearly a century. On the Continent, Goethe praised the works. Napoleon decorated the ceiling of his study with paintings of scenes from Ossian and carried a translation of the poems on his military campaigns. When Macpherson died in 1796, at 59, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from Dr. Johnson. --By Paul Gray This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.