Somewhere along the way the Jews lost their horns.

Jewish people also ceased to be seen as consorting with the devil or slaughtering Christian children for their blood to make Passover matzos, or to simultaneously embody the menacing Bolshevik and capitalist. The centuries have put to rest many rumors about the Jews.

And yet there's the endurance of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a short book concocted by czarist secret police in the 1890s and presented as minutes of a secret meeting during which Jews plotted world domination.

A century after it first appeared in a Russian newspaper, generations after historians concluded it was a fraud, Protocols surfaces still as a way to blame Jews for whatever seems wrong with the world - most recently in a series on Egyptian TV.

Timed to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Horse Without a Horseman was televised in 41 episodes this fall, offering a history of the Middle East from 1855 through 1917.

As seen through the perspective of an Egyptian who fought British occupation and the Zionist movement, the series cites the protocols as part of a blueprint for a conspiracy to control Arab lands. It's the first production of Dream TV, one of Egypt's first two private stations, and was also being shown on Egyptian state television and other Arab channels.

According to wire service reports, officials of the U.S. embassy and Israel have conveyed their concerns to the Egyptian government. In a letter, Israeli President Moshe Katsav told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that he considered the series anti-Semitic. Mubarak denied the charge and insisted the Egyptian government would not allow such a program.

While the Egyptian government has defended the show as an example of free expression, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights has protested. It says such expression "should not be abused to propagate events that might incite hatred" and says it should be made clear that Protocols was a forgery.

Apparently at the urging of this group, since episode 18 the series has been introduced with a line saying that the program is "not out to prove the validity of the so-called Protocols of Zion."

The chief writer and star of the program, Egyptian actor Mohammed Sobhi, has said he knows Protocols was forged, but he says the Israelis "implemented them."

Less than 100 pages in all, Protocols can reportedly be purchased in some five-star hotels in the Arab world. The book has turned up in Nation of Islam literature and, of course, on the Internet.

The "Jew Watch" Web site, for example, says that whether Protocols was written by Jews or not is beside the point. The site calls the tract a prophecy fulfilled "word-for-word."

Protocols makes fine material for studying myths and their power to live on and to influence historic events. Protocols was required reading for the Hitler Youth of the 1930s, despite the fact that Hitler himself is said to have acknowledged that the pamphlet could be a fake.

Protocols was first published in excerpts in a Russian newspaper in 1903, then in book form in 1905 by Sergei A. Nilus. Variously described as a Russian scholar and religious mystic, Nilus published Protocols as an appendix to the second edition of his book, The Great and the Small, or the Advent of the Antichrist and the Approaching Rule of the Devil on Earth.

In his introduction, Nilus claims to have obtained a copy of minutes of a secret meeting in which Jews discuss an elaborate plan to join forces with Freemasons to incite global revolution and take control of the world. The initial publication did not say where this meeting occurred, nor did the first or subsequent editions ever identify the alleged Jewish leaders who were quoted.

The "voice" of the text conveys the dark grandiosity one might imagine of "elders" supposedly engaged in an evil global conspiracy:

"We have in our service persons of all opinions, of all doctrines, monarchists, demagogues, socialists, communists, utopian dreamers of every kind," says an "elder" in Protocol 9. "We have harnessed them all to the task: each one of them on his own account is boring away at the last remnants of authority, is striving to overthrow all established forms of order."

In 24 "protocols" in one version, 27 in another, the "elders" describe their plan to foment revolution by controlling the press and overturning the established order through liberal reforms.

Anti-Semites today point to the prominence of Jews in the media, commerce and politics as evidence of the credibility of Protocols. The document goes well beyond this, however, essentially presenting the Western Enlightenment and much of the content of modern thought as elements of a Jewish plot.

Historians' accounts based on trial transcripts and interviews with those closest to the origins of Protocols conclude that the document was created by the Russian secret police under Czar Nicholas II.

Specifically, the pamphlet - much of which was lifted from two 19th-century books - was devised in the late 1890s to discredit a high-ranking Russian official who was instituting economic reforms. By associating such liberal programs with Jews, by presenting Jews as the enemies of monarchical rule, the intention was apparently to discredit the ideas that would crest in the Revolution of 1905 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 that brought down the czar.

In his book on Protocols published in 2000, A Rumor About the Jews, political scientist Stephen E. Bronner calls anti-Semitism "the stupid answer to a serious question: How does history operate behind our backs?"

The staying power of the tract testifies to the appeal of simple answers.

In his 1934 expose on the Protocols forgery, the Rev. Elias Newman wrote, "If there were no Jews, they would have to be invented. ... They are indispensable - the antithesis of a panacea; guaranteed to cause all evils."

David Friedman, director of the Washington regional office of the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith, says Protocols seems to draw much of its enduring power from the fact that it is presented as revealed secret, a kind of "smoking gun."

For the anti-Semite, or the person disinclined to question appearances, says Friedman, this is evidence, "the equivalent of finding the missing 18 minutes of [Watergate] tape or photographs from the grassy knoll."

(In an effort to show how the myth endures today, the ADL publishes a selection of current anti-Semitic cartoons in the Arab press on its Web site at http://www.adl.org/anti_semitism/arab/cartoon_arab_press_061802.asp.)

The emergence of the tract in the Middle East is not new. Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt between 1956 and 1970, used it in the context of his struggles with Israel, as have such nations as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. In 1984, sections of Protocols appeared in the Iranian journal Imam.

This is understandable, says Bronner in an e-mail response, "especially among those who have borne the brunt of Israeli power." Israel's military might and its alliance with a superpower "makes nonsense like the Protocols seem, superficially at least, more plausible."

Among Islamic fundamentalists, hostile to the Western Enlightenment values associated in the tract with Jews, "it only makes sense that the Protocols should hold a certain appeal," says Bronner, who teaches at Rutgers University.

As Hala Sarhan, Dream TV's vice president, told The New York Times: "In a way, don't they dominate? Of course, what we read from the Protocols, it says it's a kind of conspiracy. They want to control; they want to dominate. I represent everybody in the street. We will see whether this happened throughout history or not."

With respect to Protocols, anti-Semites today argue less for it as an authentic historical record than for its conceptual truth. This tactical shift only affirms a point made by political theorist Hannah Arendt in 1958, who noted that if a "patent forgery" can so influence a political movement such as Nazism, the historian's most vital work might not be to discover forgeries but to examine "the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the forgery is being believed."