The actual origin of the Protocols comes from the Kishinev pogrom that happened in April of 1903 when it was discovered that a Gentile child had been ritually murdered by the Jewish community. Remember the case in the Russian Empire of the Rabbi, Mendel Beiliss, for the ritual murder of a ten-year-old child, Andrei Youshchinsky? Beilss admitted it was part of a black magic ritual against the Czar in which the entire Jewish community was involved. Witnesses identified Beilss as the culprit who led the gang of Jews who kidnapped Andrei.
This was the type of horror that generated the natural outrage of the Gentile populations against the Jewish communities and sparked uprisings against them, and from England to Russia was the number one listed reason for the pogroms and expulsion of the Jews. The document was actually found by one of those involved and delivered to a local publisher, Krushevan, who published them.
As Dr. Radl shows:
"Thus we can see that if we remove the myths and legends surrounding the Protocols and then place them in their historical context using what we know about them, we can actually narrow down what the source for the Protocols originally was. Namely a Jewish document recovered from Kishinev by pogromists and then given to Krushevan, who then published it outside the jurisdiction of the court of Odessa, which was looking for a way to prosecute him (and for which the Protocols would have been suitable ammunition), and which is the reason why de Michelis rightly suspects the document to have come from pogromist circles...."
Now we know quite a lot about the Kishinev pogrom and that it was close to a major center of Zionist activity; Odessa (95), where Vladimir Jabotinsky gives his first lecture on his extreme Zionist variant, Revisionist Zionism, on the 7th of April after hearing about the pogrom. (96) We know that, for example, a large number of Jewish Torah scrolls were desecrated and that the pogromists took a large quantity of money, goods, and objects from the Jews during the pogrom itself. (97)
Now with a direct connection to the first editor of the Protocols, a major center of the Zionist movement in the Russian Empire (where extreme variants, like Revisionist Zionism, were forming), we know objects of importance to Jews were either damaged or taken. We can make a rather revolutionary suggestion: the source document that the Krushevan edition was based on was actually taken from the Khisinev pogrom and that it was some kind of Zionist document or local plan.
Krushevan published the documents to protect himself from persecution and arrest for having any connection to the pogrom in which people were arrested and put on trial. However, the second and most widely published copy of the Protocols is by the Christian mystic Nilus. In his book "The Great And The Small," published in 1905, references to the Torah [old testament] are removed, the references to Jews being against Christ put in, references to Free Masons put in, along with statements about Nietzsche and Darwin, with more added in general. The 1914 edition of Nilus's publishing was again heavily edited and altered. This is where the major increase in plagiarized material emerged. The Nilus editions are the ones the "debunkers" like to use, and most of the confusion around them arises from this. The Jewish Soviet system even went to their own extreme to further create anti-propaganda against the Protocols in the early 1920's because this document is a major threat to them. In the nineties and early millennium, Russian academics and scholars have also published works showing that the Protocols are authentic.