Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant: The Antisemitic
Activities of Boris L’vovich Brasol, 1910-1960
Part I: Beilis, the Protocols, and Henry Ford
Richard Spence*
No doubt Boris Brasol would be disappointed that his name is largely
unknown today. Certainly, he was a man of some legitimate and significant
accomplishments: author, international legal expert, criminologist, and
authority on Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde. But the
accomplishment that he probably was the most proud of, or at least the most
committed to, was his career as an antisemitic conspiracy theorist and
agitator.
Brasol once proudly boasted that his writings had “done the Jews more
injury than would have been done to them by ten pogroms.” 1 He cut his
teeth in this line of endeavor as an investigator assigned to the infamous
Beilis ritual murder case in pre-revolutionary Russia. A few years later, he
would abet the translation and publication of the work most commonly
known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in the United States
and simultaneously finesse his way into being an operative of American
War Trade Intelligence and then the Army’s Military Intelligence Division
(MID). This, in turn, opened doors to him and his ideas on Wall Street and,
perhaps most notably, in the offices of the Ford Motor Company. That, in
turn, would yield more connections in business, in Washington, and even to
1. Norman Hapgood, “The Inside Story of Henry Ford’s Jew-Mania,” Hearst’s
International, Part I, 14, 18, June 1922.
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