http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mzionprotocol.html
From the report:
A few even managed to explain away the evidence of plagiarism. Segel relates that Lord Alfred Douglas, an anti-Semitic leader in London, said that Joly was actually a Jew originally named Moses Joel, who interwove the real Jewish plan for world conquest into his satire. This meant that showing the Protocols were extremely similar to his satire proved nothing–of course they were, because they both were talking about the same real event!
Was that the Lord Alfred Douglas who was Oscar Wilde’s special friend?
I’m not sure this statement from Wikipedia is strictly accurate. Going by accounts like that in Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide and elsewhere, Douglas never translated the Protocols - and 1919 is borderline early for someone in England to have heard of them. What he did do, during 1920-1, was edit a fiercely anti-Semitic weekly magazine called Plain English. It really wouldn’t surprise me if he printed the Protocols in it, either in part or in full, since that was very much the sort of nonsense they were propagating, but that didn’t necessarily make him a translator of it.
The point made in the Staff Report about his theory that Maurice Joly was actually Moses Joël derives from an article he wrote for the magazine in August 1921, in the immediate aftermath of The Times doing their famous expose of the hoax. Clearly a case of an established anti-Semite and endorsor of the Protocols having to explain away the demolition job on the document’s credibility.
I’ve recommended it multiple times on the Dope before, but Philip Hoare’s book Wilde’s Last Stand is very good on the conspiracy theory and anti-Semitic circles that Douglas was part of in the years immediately before this.