Book Review: Umberto Eco's 'The Prague Cemetery'
Its Political Disinformation Theme Is Disturbingly Fresh
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
-Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
Author’s Note: The great Umberto Eco passed away nine years ago, on February 19, 2016. His penultimate novel, “The Prague Cemetery” (2011) featured one of the most ancient and insidious propaganda tracts, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
I wrote a review for the Harvard Law and Policy Review on its release fourteen years ago when I was regular columnist; a server crash (I thought) condemned it to oblivion. In July 2024 I found it and revised it for re-publication.
“The Prague Cemetery” chronicles the origin of one of human history’s most pernicious lies and it is important reading right now, as fabrication and disinformation justify a radical restructuring of American public policy.
Days ago, our president publicly humiliated the leader of Ukraine while spouting Kremlin propaganda. A rogue, Nazi billionaire is gutting the federal government of its scientists, and federal agencies are shredding diversity policies in allegiance to a discredited “race science”rooted in white supremacy.
I recall Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil.” She said, “evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
We must speak the truth when assaulted by lies. No one is coming to save us from ourselves.
To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. . . the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. -Joseph Goebbels.
Umberto Eco’s novel The Prague Cemetery is centered around the infamous historical document known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols is a bizarre, anti-semitic literary forgery which purports to reveal a shadowy Zionist conspiracy to enslave the world.
That the Protocols is a hateful forgery is beyond doubt; indeed within the larger genre of literary forgeries, it is a particularly crude fake. Although it purports to be an eyewitness account of a secret, occult meeting of rabbis at a Jewish Cemetery in Prague, it is actually just a patchwork of previously published anti-Jewish books and pamphlets.
Indeed, the conspiracy accounts the Protocols plagiarized were often not originally about Jewish people. During the nadir of the ancién regimes in 19th Century Western Europe, paranoid conspiracy theories featured the Masons and the Jesuits either in league and in opposition.
Following the republican revolutions of 1848, the Protocols merely inserted the Jews into the featured role previously played by Napoleon and Garibaldi.

A lie is a faster way of accomplishing things than the truth.
-Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
In The Prague Cemetery, master storyteller Umberto Eco tells of the creation of the Protocols with remarkable historical accuracy. The world he conjures for us, filled with spies and revolutionaries, idealism and betrayal, was quite real.
Eco explains in a postlude that save for the insertion and amalgamation of characters to aid the plot, the characters in his novel “actually existed, and said and did what they are described as saying and doing.”
To my mind, The Prague Cemetery forces us to debate the following question presented: are we still capable of being manipulated by cloddish fabrication? After eight long years of Donald Trump, the din of Fox News and the copious media attention still being devoted to debunked conspiracies, vaccine skepticism, stolen elections, and a litany of other madness I regret that affirmative wins the day.
One of our greatest writers waded through the sewers of history and told a brilliant, cautionary tale. We should listen and beware.
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