The historical fact of a forgery’s belief outweighs its falsity.

Evidence

The point for the historian is that the Jews, before becoming the main victims of modern terror, were the center of Nad ideology. And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily. In other words, if a patent forgery like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is forgery. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 72

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-shifting methodological move: the historian of ideology must take widespread belief in a ‘forgery’ as primary political fact, not debunk it. This reframes the entire study of antisemitic propaganda and has broad implications.
• QUESTION: How does this methodological stance apply to examining other ‘forged’ ideological texts today — and where does credulity become its own error?
• SEED: Article angle: debunking as a category error in studying belief systems — when the historian’s job stops being exposure of fraud and becomes accounting for the fact of belief.