The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Iranian political and cultural discourse

It is unclear when the Protocols were first translated into Persian, possibly by a certain Mustafa Farhang toward the end of the 1930s/beginning of the 1940s, when Nazi propaganda abounded in Iran.¹ Secular European antisemitic motifs had already begun infiltrating Iranian society at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of developing relations between Iran and western countries.² Some fifty years later, at the end of the 1940s/early 1950s, chapters of the Protocols were rendered into Persian by the well-known translator of religious books Sayyed Gholām Rezā Sa’īdī and published in 'Ā yīn-e Islam (The Islamic religion), probably the most influential Islamist weekly in Iran in the 1940s, and in Nedā-ye Haqq (The voice of truth), another important Islamic weekly.