WHEN HADASSA BEN-ITTO told her colleagues she was giving up her career as one of Israel’s most senior judges to expose the deadliest forgery of the 20th century, they thought she was crazy. The forgery — perhaps more accurately a plagiarism — was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it had been used to justify the murders of millions of Jews in Russia and Nazi Germany. But, they said, it was nonsense. It was a fairy story. Surely, no one believed this rubbish any more . . . did they?

That was in 1991. Ben-Itto subsequently embarked, at the age of 64, on an odyssey that took her thousands of miles from home and more than 100 years back in time to pre-revolutionary Russia and a Europe in anti-Semitic ferment. And, by the time she had completed her epic journey, no one thought she was crazy any more.

Next week Ben-Itto publishes the findings of her work in the UK as The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is a forensic deconstruction of a vicious piece of propaganda that paved the way for the Holocaust and which continues to poison minds against worldwide Jewry to this day. The book combines meticulous research with a previously forgotten — but immensely important — courtroom drama to trace the history of the lie to the hand that penned it.

But first, what are The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? They first appeared in 1905 as an appendix to The Great and the Small by the Russian writer Sergei Nilus. Purporting to be the minutes of a great meeting of Jewish leaders, they chronicle the devious methods by which Jews will cause global economic and political collapse to facilitate their complete domination of the world.

The reasoning behind the Protocols was first used as a means of justifying the massacres — or pogroms — that left thousands of Jews dead in Russia, the message being: “If we don’t kill them, they will kill us.” It was a similar message to that used by Hitler 30 years later.

Divided into 24 tracts on such subjects as Ruthless Suppression, Despotism and Modern Progress and Assault on Religion, its use of language is chillingly matter-of-fact. For example, in Instilling Obedience, Protocol XXIII reads: “Subjects . . . give blind obedience only to the strong hand which is absolutely independent of them, for in it they feel the sword of defence and support against social scourges . . .

“What do they want with an angelic spirit in a king? What they have to see in him is the personification of force and power.”

And so on.

Like many Jews, Ben-Itto had heard of the Protocols but had neither read them nor taken them seriously. Her parents, David, a labourer, and Deborah, fled to Palestine before the war and despaired as news came of the Holocaust in their homeland. When it was over, she had lost two grandparents, six aunts, an uncle and several cousins to the Nazis.

After graduating in law, she was admitted to the Israeli Bar in 1955 and practised for five years before being appointed a judge. In the intervening years she enjoyed a remarkable career, serving twice as a member of Israel’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly and holding the temporary rank of ambassador. By the time she took early retirement to investigate the Protocols, she was an Acting Justice of the Supreme Court.

She had had five encounters with the Protocols — once when she was warned about them by a delegate at the UN in 1965; twice when she attended trials tackling racism in Paris in 1972 and Stockholm in 1989; in 1985 when a Filipino judge spoke of them as if they were a given truth; and in a 1988 newspaper article — before she actually sat down to read them.

“As I read on,” she writes, “phrases and paragraphs leapt to the eye, totally devoid of reason, absolutely opposed to any Jewish tradition and teaching.” It was time, she decided, to do something about it.

We meet at the Hilton London Metropole. Ben-Itto, wearing a smart green jacket, is now 78 but she is a bundle of energy who looks ten years younger. She has flown in from Tel Aviv as she wants The Times to carry the first news of her book in the UK (it has already been published in Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Russia and Bulgaria) because this newspaper had a special role in first exposing the Protocols as a fake in 1921.