To the Editor:

Credit for a remarkable feat of detection in tracing the literary origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion should not be given, as Mr. Mordecai Richler suggests [“James Bond Unmasked,” July 1968], to Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide. That it was a forgery based on a French satire against Napoleon III, only five or six copies of which escaped destruction, had been proved in exact detail by my brother Philip Percival Graves, the London Times Balkan correspondent, a year or two before the outbreak of the First World War. He named both the forger and his employer.

Full recognition of my brother’s discovery was made in the Jewish press, in London at least, when he died a few years ago. But the Nazi anti-Semites, preferring to disregard facts, had meanwhile used the Protocols in their propaganda; so naturally President Nasser has followed suit.

The man mainly responsible for discovering the political and journalistic use of such forgeries in modern times was, it seems, the celebrated Benjamin Franklin. He published a document purporting to prove that the British government had offered their Indian allies of the Six Nations a fixed price for American scalps.

Robert Graves
Mallorca, Spain