Exhibition- 90 Years Since the Berne Trials
The Berne Trials took place between 1933 and 1935 in the city of Bern, Switzerland. Representatives of the Jewish communities in Switzerland filed a civil lawsuit against the National Front, a far-right party, for distributing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a text describing a “Jewish conspiracy” to overthrow all the world’s governments and replace them with a centralized Jewish rule. The Protocols originated in the early twentieth century, during the first Russian Revolution (1905), when monarchists sought a common enemy against whom to unify the divided Russian people.
Justice Hadassa Ben-Itto, who retired from the Israeli judiciary to devote her time to researching The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, describes in her book The Lie That Wouldn’t Die (1998) how, despite the victory in the Berne Trials, and although more than a century has passed since the Protocols first appeared, the lie whose forgery was proven continues to circulate to this day—and continues to incite hatred of Jews.
