The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

"Nineteenth-century Europe - from Turin to Prague to Paris - abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document? Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. Eco at his most exciting, a book immediately hailed as a masterpiece." By Google Books

"It's a story of Simone Simonini, an unscrupulous Italian forger, who hates Jews
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the more justly reviled literary forgeries in history. Dated around the turn of the twentieth century, it recounts an imaginary meeting between said evil Elders as they casually discuss the economic and religious subjugation of the earth by a global Jewish conspiracy. It has since fed the hate dreams of anti-Semites like Hitler . Its authorship has never been conclusively revealed, but novelist Umberto Eco has a few ideas about this. In his new book, Eco tells the story of Simone Simonini, an unscrupulous Italian forger who hates just about everyone – this includes, of course, the Jews. Simonini is one of the more repulsive characters you will ever meet, and as the novel moves forward, he becomes the force behind the insidiousProtocols and their desired “final solution”. Hannah Arendt’s notion regarding the “banality of evil” is apt when regarding Eco’s Simonini. Neither an evil genius nor a slavering maniac, Simonini is more concerned with the seasoning of his duck confit than he is with the fact that his work ruins lives. Of course, banality doesn’t always make for the best fiction, and The Prague Cemetery is uneven at best. Simonini’s apparent schizophrenia and the resulting multiple narratives is a puzzling contrivance, and for all its conspiracies, the book is surprisingly dull. Eco takes a cheap shot at Dan Brown, but in trying to teach the reader a history lesson and also show how virulent hate and hysteria can be, a bit more Brown might have helped." By Timeout