The Eastward Turn

Why this Chapter exists

A European hatred, documented arriving in a new language.

The Unit to this point has traced the hatred inside Europe: the theology, the libels, the ghettos, the pseudoscience, and finally the Nazi synthesis. The previous Chapter set beside it the different system Jews lived under in the Islamic world, the dhimma, formally ended by Ottoman reform decrees by 1856. This Chapter is where the two stories meet: the European hatred crossing into that world. In the same decades that the hatred reached its European catastrophe, it was being translated, broadcast, and taught in a new region and a new language. Studied only through its European chapters, the story cannot explain where much of today’s antisemitic material comes from, or why it sounds so familiar.

So this Chapter asks one question: how did a hatred built in Europe take root in the Middle East? The answer is a paper trail: dated translations, a wartime radio schedule, a charter you can read online, television broadcasts preserved on film, and school materials reviewed by the very institutions that fund them.

This Chapter documents specific texts, broadcasters, charters, and school materials, each with a date and a document behind it. It makes no claim about a people, a religion, or a region. The Arabic-speaking world is more than four hundred million people; the record below concerns particular institutions that chose to translate, broadcast, and teach a European forgery.

What came before

Centuries of coexistence and subordination, without this text.

Jewish communities lived across the Middle East and North Africa for well over two thousand years, longer than almost anywhere in Europe. Their legal position under Islamic rule was second-class and is documented as such: special taxes, restrictions, and periodic anti-Jewish violence. The massacre of Granada’s Jews, in Muslim Spain, in 1066. The persecutions under the Almohads, a North African dynasty, in the 1100s. The sack of the Jewish quarter of Fez, in Morocco, as late as 1912. That record is the region’s own, and the previous Chapter, The Dhimma, documents it in full. But the specific European tradition this Unit has traced, the secret-conspiracy myth, the blood libel (the invented charge that Jews murder Christian children), the racial pseudoscience, was not native to the region. When the blood libel appeared in Damascus in 1840, the historical record shows European actors introducing it.

What arrived in the twentieth century was layered onto that older record, and it was different in kind. It was an import, and the import has a paper trail. The Departure from MENA Chapter (MENA: the Middle East and North Africa) documents this same import from the other side: what it eventually cost the region’s Jewish communities.

The 1920s

The Protocols changes languages.

The first Arabic translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared in the mid-1920s, made by Arab Christians working from French editions: the Protocols Chapter records the first published translation in Cairo in 1925, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records a translation available in Syria by the same year. In January 1926, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that a Catholic periodical in Jerusalem was serializing the text. The first translation by a Muslim scholar followed in Cairo in 1951. (USHMM; JTA archive, January 25, 1926.)

The forgery had been publicly demonstrated in 1921. The translations came anyway, in 1925 and 1926: before the State of Israel existed, before the 1948 war. The text did not follow the conflict into the region. It arrived first.

The story of the forgery itself, its Russian origin, its French source, and its exposure, is told in the Protocols Chapter. This Chapter follows what the region’s new publishers did with it.

1939–1945

The radio years.

From April 1939 until the end of the war in 1945, Nazi Germany broadcast daily Arabic-language radio programming to the Middle East and North Africa from its shortwave station at Zeesen, outside Berlin. The historian Jeffrey Herf, who reconstructed the broadcast record from surviving transcripts, documents programming that fused war news with the full European antisemitic repertoire, night after night, for six years, to a region where radio was the newest and most powerful medium.

The broadcasts had a prominent voice: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem (the city’s highest Muslim religious official), who had fled British-ruled Palestine during the crackdown on the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s and made his way to Germany. On November 28, 1941, Hitler received him in Berlin; the German Foreign Ministry’s own record of the meeting survives and is published in the standard documentary series. Al-Husseini spent the rest of the war in Berlin, broadcasting to the Arab world in Arabic. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents his wartime propaganda role in detail. (USHMM, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Wartime Propagandist”; the meeting record is Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D, Volume XIII, Document 515.)

What the war years meant inside the region itself, including for its Jewish communities, is the subject of the Holocaust in North Africa & the Middle East Chapter, where the photograph of the 1941 meeting also appears. For six years, European antisemitism had a daily Arabic-language broadcast schedule.

1988

A forgery becomes a founding document.

The region’s politics were transformed after 1945 by the founding of Israel in 1948 and the wars that followed; the imported material survived every transformation. In August 1988, Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist movement founded the year before in Gaza, published its founding covenant. Article 32 states: “Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.” Article 7 quotes a religious text calling for the killing of Jews as a condition of the end of days. The full document, in English translation, is preserved by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, and any student can read it. (Hamas Covenant 1988 · Avalon Project, Yale Law School.)

The Protocols was exposed as a forgery in 1921. Sixty-seven years later, a movement that would go on to govern Gaza wrote it into its founding charter as evidence.

In May 2017, Hamas released a new document of general principles at a press conference in Doha. Within days, a senior Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Zahar, told reporters the new document “does not contradict” the founding covenant, and the 1988 charter has never been annulled. Both documents, and both statements, are part of the record. (Reuters, May 10, 2017.)

2007

Broadcast to children.

On April 13, 2007, Al-Aqsa TV, the Hamas-run television station in Gaza, debuted a children’s program called Tomorrow’s Pioneers. Its host was Farfour, a costumed character openly modeled on Mickey Mouse, who taught children about armed struggle between skits and songs. In the final Farfour episode, aired June 29, 2007, the character was beaten to death on screen by an actor playing an Israeli official. The child presenter told viewers Farfour was “martyred while defending his land.” He was replaced by Nahoul the bee, who vowed to continue on Farfour’s path, and later by Assud the rabbit. The program ran until 2009.

The broadcasts were recorded, translated, and reported by international news organizations at the time, and the clips are preserved in the television archive of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, which records and translates the region’s broadcasts. (NBC News/AP, 2007; CBS News, 2007; MEMRI TV, clip and transcript.)

The classroom record

What the funders’ own reviews found.

In 2019 the European Union commissioned the Georg Eckert Institute, a German research institute that specializes in textbook analysis, to review the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority, the separate Palestinian government that administers parts of the West Bank (distinct from Hamas in Gaza). The study, published in June 2021, examined 156 textbooks and 16 teachers’ guides. In the institute’s own words, a religious-education textbook “contains cumulative stereotypes and accusations that can clearly be characterised as anti-Semitic,” Jews are “collectively portrayed as adversaries,” and conspiracy framings in the books repeat “classic anti-Semitic ideas.” (Georg Eckert Institute, in its own FAQ.)

On April 29, 2021, the European Parliament, which had condemned hate content in the textbooks in successive annual resolutions, went further and demanded its removal as a condition of European funding. (European Parliament, resolution of April 29, 2021.) IMPACT-se, an independent monitor that reviews the curriculum annually, documents the same pattern year over year, including martyrdom and jihad (holy war) material inserted across subjects as far from politics as mathematics. (IMPACT-se, annual reviews.)

The record extends into the United Nations’ own schools. UNRWA, the UN agency that runs schooling for Palestinian refugees, teaches the host curriculum; reviews in 2022 and 2023 documented UNRWA-branded study materials with the same content, including grammar exercises built on “jihad warriors” and a poem presenting martyrdom as a pastime. A United States government audit found that official reporting to Congress on the textbook problem was incomplete. And on August 5, 2024, the United Nations announced its own conclusion of a different kind: after an internal investigation, it fired nine UNRWA staff members because the evidence indicated they may have been involved in the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. (IMPACT-se, November 2023; GAO-19-448; UN statement, August 5, 2024.)

Object Spotlight

A document you can read yourself.

The object at the center of this Chapter is not in a museum case. It is a text: the 1988 Hamas covenant, preserved in English translation by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, the same scholarly archive that holds the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Versailles. Open it and find Article 32. The citation of the Protocols is not a paraphrase or an accusation; it is there, in the document, in one click.

The chain runs: a forgery published in Russia in 1903, exposed in London in 1921, translated in the 1920s, broadcast in the 1940s, and cited as evidence in a founding charter in 1988.

The analytical question

What a translation changes, and what it does not.

Unit 3 has shown the hatred changing costumes: theology in the ancient world, science in the nineteenth century, politics in the twentieth. The translation documented here is the same pattern in a new key. The conspiracy myth arrived in the 1920s; the regional conflict that followed gave it a local vocabulary and a daily subject. The costume changed. The text underneath, sometimes literally the same text, did not.

Political conflict between peoples is not, in itself, antisemitism; two national movements claiming one land is a subject with legitimate arguments on both sides, and this site does not adjudicate it. Writing a proven forgery into a founding charter, broadcasting the murder of a children’s character as martyrdom, and printing conspiracy claims in schoolbooks is a different category, and the difference is checkable: one is a position, the other is a documented technique this Unit has traced for two thousand years.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

The disciplines and courses this Chapter naturally supports, for any educator, anywhere.

• Modern Middle East: the documented arrival and institutionalization of European antisemitic material in the region, from the 1920s translations to the present curriculum record.
• Media & Information Literacy: propaganda across four media generations, print, radio, television, and textbooks, with the primary material preserved and checkable in each case.
• Holocaust & Genocide Studies: the Nazi Arabic-language broadcasting effort and the al-Husseini record as documented by the USHMM.
• Civics & International Institutions: how the EU, the European Parliament, the GAO, and the UN generated the oversight record this Chapter is built on.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: a complete chain-of-custody exercise, tracing one text from forgery to charter through dated, checkable documents.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 10.5 (the global conflicts of 1914–1945: the wartime propaganda apparatus) and 10.7 (the modern Middle East: the translations and their institutional afterlife).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.9–10.8 and RH.11–12.8 (evaluating claims against documentary evidence) and RH.11–12.7 (integrating evidence across print, broadcast, and institutional sources).

Further Teaching Resources

• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Wartime Propagandist”, the wartime broadcasting record.
• Georg Eckert Institute, the EU-commissioned textbook study, with the institute’s own FAQ on its findings.
• IMPACT-se annual curriculum reviews, the ongoing monitoring record.
• Films & Video: documentary material for this period is gathered in the full Films & Video collection.