Franklin Prophecy

The Franklin Prophecy is an anti-semitic forgery falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, the noted American politician, diplomat and Founding Father. It is claimed to be a speech delivered by Franklin during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and was first published in 1934 by William Dudley Pelley, an American spiritualist and founder of the Silver Legion of America, a white supremacist paramilitary organization modeled after Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (“Brownshirts”). No evidence exists for its publication previous to its 1934 appearance in the Silver Legion’s weekly magazine, Liberation.

Text
The text is sometimes accompanied by a claim that the original document is in the Franklin Library in Philadelphia, a claim which the Franklin Institute has rejected.

Contemporary use
The text was circulated by a number of different Nazi publications in Germany and Switzerland in the years between its publication by Pelley in 1934 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It has proven to be remarkably durable, and continues to be widely disseminated online in Usenet newsgroups and in the Arab world, having been referenced as genuine in 1998 by a member of Fatah, the Islamist party which governs portions of the West Bank, and by Osama Bin Laden in 2002.

Authenticity
In reality, Benjamin Franklin was sympathetic to the Jews in 18th century North America, and contributed money to the construction of Philadelphia's first permanent synagogue, Mikveh Israel.