The holy writ of anti-Semites in the West is a nefarious 19th-century document known as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It is a hate-filled pamphlet with a mangy intellectual pedigree that has, nonetheless, captured the imagination of mad dogs and rug chewers from Czar Nicholas II to Henry Ford to Louis Farrakhan.

	Click illustration for larger version. "THE PLOT: THE SECRET STORY OF THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION" Written and illustrated by Will Eisner. Introduction by Umberto Eco Knopf ($19.95)

If anti-Semitism is the "socialism of fools," as August Bebel suggested more than a century ago, then the "Protocols" is its "Das Kapital."

Exposing the hoax was the final project of legendary cartoonist Will Eisner, who died this year at 87. Few works of so-called history have been discredited as thoroughly as Eisner has done here.

"Protocols" is the source of much of the "blood libel" at the heart of fevered speculation about the "machinations of the Jews" in anti-Semitic thought and literature. The tract ties the theories together in an incoherent but persuasive narrative for the simple-minded.

The book was originally a piece of French anti-monarchist propaganda directed at the despotic regime of Napoleon III in the latter part of the 19th century.

A French dissident named Maurice Joly penned a satirical essay called "The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" that took the politically inept emperor to task. For his trouble, Joly ended up with a bullet in his brain.

A few years later, two schemers in the imperial Russian court concocted a scheme to use the anti-Semitism that permeated Czar Nicholas' circle to prod the dithering leader into rejecting modernization as part of a Jewish plot. A Russian agent living in Paris named Mathieu Golovinski was commissioned to create a literary trail of lies that implicated the Jews in a world-spanning scheme of Satanic complexity.

At the urging of his editor, Golovinski cribbed liberally from Joly's book with the intention of making the Jews the greatest and most malignant actors in history. That was in 1898.

By 1905, the first edition was published in Russia and distributed widely. The document has been in print in one form or another since, despite exposes in newspapers every step of the way.

Eisner brilliantly illustrates the twisted journey of this infamous text, from the shadows of European anti-Semitism and the Russian court to the front pages of Western newspapers owned by Ford.

The section on its cynical appropriation by the National Socialists in Germany in 1921 is particularly chilling. Adolf Hitler referred to "Protocols" in "Mein Kampf" and recommended every word as gospel to his followers.

Eisner is no stranger to fans of sequential art and narrative, since his career began in the golden age of comics more than a half-century ago. His stories were visually dynamic at a time when the profession was dominated by primitive hacks.

He experimented with unconventional storytelling in "The Spirit," his comic strip about a masked detective. Even the panels of the strip defied the conventions then enshrined in mainstream comics.

It's not an overstatement to say that Eisner single-handedly transformed comics into a cinematic medium.

Being the creator of "The Spirit" would have been a sufficient enough contribution, but Eisner couldn't stop innovating. He's widely credited with writing the first graphic novel, "Contract With God," in 1978.

More than a quarter of a century later, Eisner's final illustrated work shines a light into the historical niche of anti-Semitism like no other before it.

That "Protocols" has zero credibility is a no-brainer for most thinking people, though it is very much a theory still in play with those who see vast conspiracies in history.

Extremists on the left and right have embraced its dubious claim to be a blueprint of a Jewish cabal to come to power.

It took an artist of the caliber and genius of Will Eisner to bring this fascinating tale to life for a generation that may have forgotten how this lie first began to circulate.

With the "Protocols of Zion" more popular than ever in Europe and in the Arab world, Eisner's book has emerged at a propitious time. It is, indeed, his crowning achievement.