Jewish Bolshevism

A White propaganda poster depicting a demonic Leon Trotsky wearing a pentacle, sitting near a pile of skeletons. The caption reads "Peace and Freedom in Soviet Russia."

"Jewish Communism" redirects here. For the short-lived political party in Mandate Palestine and Israel, see Hebrew Communists.

Jewish Bolshevism, Judeo-Bolshevism, and known as Żydokomuna in Poland, is an antisemitic stereotype based on the claim that Jews have been the driving force behind or are disproportionately involved in the modern Communist movement, or sometimes more specifically Russian Bolshevism.

The expression was the title of a pamphlet, The Jewish Bolshevism, and became current after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, featuring prominently in the propaganda of the anti-communist "White" forces during the Russian Civil War. It spread worldwide in the 1920s with the publication and circulation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It made an issue out of the Jewishness of some leading Bolsheviks (most notably Leon Trotsky) during and after the October Revolution. Daniel Pipes says that "primarily through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Whites spread these charges to an international audience." James Webb wrote that it is rare to find an antisemitic source after 1917 that ..."does not stand in debt to the White Russian analysis of the Revolution."

The label "Judeo-Bolshevism" was used in Nazi Germany to equate Jews with communists, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests and/or that all Jews were communists. According to Hannah Arendt, it was "the most efficient fiction of Nazi Propaganda". In Poland before World War II, Żydokomuna was used in the same way to allege that the Jews were conspiring with the USSR to capture Poland. According to André Gerrits, "The myth of Jewish Communism was one of the most popular and widespread political prejudices in the first half of the 20th century, in Eastern Europe in particular." The allegation still sees use in antisemitic publications and websites today.

Jewish involvement in Russian Communism

Persecution of Jews in the late Russian Empire

Main article: History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union

Jews had been a persecuted minority in the Russian Empire. They had endured a form of racial segregation in the Pale of Settlement, as well as sporadic pogroms. In the period from 1881 to 1920, more than two million Jews left Russia.

According to Berel Wein:

Expulsions, deportations, arrests, and beatings became the daily lot of the Jews, not only of their lower class, but even of the middle class and the Jewish intelligentsia. The government of Alexander III waged a campaign of war against its Jewish [citizens]... The Jews were driven and hounded, and emigration appeared to be the only escape from the terrible tyranny of the Romanovs."

Jews in relatively large numbers joined various ideological currents favoring gradual or revolutionary changes within the Russian Empire. Those movements ranged from the far left (anarchists, Bundists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks) to moderate left (Trudoviks) and constitutionalist (Constitutional Democrats) parties. Monarchist parties, such as Union of the Russian People, expressed clearly antisemitic attudes, and included antisemitic paragraphs in their political program.

Jews in the Bolshevik party

On the eve of the February Revolution, in 1917, the Bolshevik party had about 10,000 members, of whom 364 were ethnic Jews. Between 1917 and 1919, Jewish party leaders included Grigory Zinoviev, Moisei Uritsky, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Leon Trotsky. Adolph Joffe was a Karaite and Lev Kamenev was of mixed ethnic Russian and Jewish parentage. Trotsky was also a member (or "Narkom") of the ruling Council of People's Commissars. Among the 23 Narkoms between 1923 and 1930, five were Jewish.

Conditions in Russia (1924) A Census - Bolsheviks by Ethnicity

According to the 1922 party census, there were 19,564 Jewish Bolsheviks, comprising 5.21% of the total. Jews made up 7.1% of members who had joined before October 1917.

Among members of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets in 1929, there were 402 ethnic Russians, 95 Ukrainians, 55 Jews, 26 Latvians, 13 Poles, and 12 Germans – Jewish representation had declined from 60 members in 1927.

In the 1920s, of the 417 members of the Central Executive Committee, the party Central Committee, the Presidium of the Executive of the Soviets of the USSR and the Russian Republic, the People's Commissars, 6% were ethnic Jews.

Between 1936 and 1940, during the Great Purge, Yezhovshchina and after the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, Stalin had largely eliminated Jews from senior party, government, diplomatic, security and military positions. In 1939, Stalin directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews". Although some scholars believe that this decision was taken for primarily domestic reasons, others argue it may have been a signal to Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.

According to historian Iakov Etinger, many Soviet state purges of the 1930s were antisemitic in nature, and a more intense antisemitic policy developed toward the end of World War II. Stalin in 1952 allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy for the United States".

Nazi Germany

Walter Laqueur traces the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theory to Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, for whom Bolshevism was "the revolt of the Jewish, Slavic and Mongolian races against the German (Aryan) element in Russia". Germans, according to Rosenberg, had been responsible for Russia's historic achievements and had been sidelined by the Bolsheviks, who did not represent the interests of the Russian people, but instead those of its ethnic Jewish and Chinese population.

In Nazi Germany, this concept of Jewish Bolshevism reflected a common perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its origin. The term was popularized in print in German journalist Dietrich Eckhart's 1924 pamphlet "Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin" ("Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin") which depicted Moses and Lenin as both being Communists and Jews. This was followed by Alfred Rosenberg's 1923 edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1924, which saw Bolshevism as "Jewry's twentieth century effort to take world dominion unto itself."

Caricatures of Bolshevik leaders from Alfred Rosenberg's The Jewish Bolshevism

According to French spymaster and writer Henri Rollin, "Hitlerism" was based on "anti-Soviet counter-revolution" promoting the "myth of a mysterious Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot", entailing that the First World War had been instigated by a vast Jewish-Masonic conspiracy to topple the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires and implement Bolshevism by fomenting liberal ideas.

A major source for propaganda about Jewish Bolshevism in the 1930s and early 1940s was the pro-Nazi and antisemitic international Welt-Dienst news agency founded in 1933 by Ulrich Fleischhauer.

Within the German Army, a tendency to see Soviet Communism as a Jewish conspiracy had grown since the First World War, something that became officialised under the Nazis. A 1932 pamphlet by Ewald Banse of the Government-financed German National Association for the Military Sciences described the Soviet leadership as mostly Jewish, dominating an apathetic and mindless Russian population.

1941 Nazi propaganda poster in the Lithuanian language, equating Stalinism with the Jews. The text reads "The Jew is our enemy forever".

Propaganda produced in 1935 by the psychological war laboratory of the German War Ministry described Soviet officials as "mostly filthy Jews" and called on Red Army soldiers to rise up and kill their "Jewish comissars". This material was not used at the time, but served as a basis for propaganda in the 1940s.

In his speech to the Reichstag justifying Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Hitler said:

“For more than two decades the Jewish Bolshevik regime in Moscow had tried to set fire not merely to Germany but to all of Europe…The Jewish Bolshevik rulers in Moscow have unswervingly undertaken to force their domination upon us and the other European nations and that is not merely spiritually, but also in terms of military power…Now the time has come to confront the plot of the Anglo-Saxon Jewish war-mongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik centre in Moscow!”

Nazi propaganda presented Barbarossa as an ideological-racial war between German National Socialism and “Judeo-Bolshevism”, dehumanising the Soviet enemy as a force of Slavic Untermensch (sub-humans) and “Asiatic” savages engaging in “barbaric Asiatic fighting methods” commanded by evil Jewish commissars whom German troops were to grant no mercy. The vast majority of the Wehrmacht officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as sub-human.

Outside Nazi Germany

Great Britain, 1920s

In the early 1920s, a leading British antisemite, Henry Hamilton Beamish, stated that Bolshevism was the same thing as Judaism. In the same decade, future wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill penned an editorial entitled "Zionism versus Bolshevism," which was published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald. In the article, he stated that Jewish involvement in the various recent worldwide revolutionary movements (namely Communism) was a function of their character:

{Bolshevism} among the Jews is nothing new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.

Author Gisela C. Lebzelter noted that Churchill's analysis failed to analyze the role that Russian oppression of Jews had played in their joining various revolutionary movements, but instead "to inherent inclinations rooted in Jewish character and religion."

Iran, 2006

In 2006, Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin, secretary-general of the new "World Foundation for Holocaust Studies" established at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, stated:

"The Bolshevik Soviet government in Lenin's time, and later, in Stalin's - both of whom were Jewish, though they presented themselves as Marxists and atheists... - was one of the forces that, until the Second World War, cooperated with Hitler in promoting the idea of establishing the State of Israel."

USA

Frank L. Britton, editor of The American Nationalist published a book, Behind Communism, in 1952 which disseminated the myth that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy originating in Palestine.

See also

• Żydokomuna
• Doctors' Plot
• Jewish Autonomous Oblast
  • Birobidzhan
• Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion)
• Jewish Communist Union (Poalei Zion)
• Jewish left
• History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union
• History of antisemitism
• Komzet
  • OZET
• Poale Zion
• Yevsektsiya
• Antisemitic canard

Further reading

• Mikhail Agursky: The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR, 1987, Westview Press, ISBN 08133-0139-4
• Dennis Fahey: Rulers of Russia, 1940, 3rd American edition, revised and enlarged, Condon Printing Co., Detroit
• Harry Defries, Conservative Party attitudes to Jews, 1900-1950 Jewish Bolshevism, p. 70, ISBN 07146-5221-0
• Jeffrey Herf: The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, 2006, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674021754, 9780674021754
• Michael Kellogg: The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945, 2005, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521845122
• Benjamin Pinkus. The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0521389267, 9780521389266
• Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein: '"Juedischer Bolschewismus". Mythos und Realität'. Dresden: Antaios 2003, ISBN 3-935063-14-8; 2.ed. Graz: Ares 2010.
• Yuri Slezkine: The Jewish Century, 2004, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-11995-3
• Alexandre Soljenitsyne: Deux Siecles Ensemble. Tome 2. 1917-1972. Juifs et Russes pendant la periode Sovietique.1917-1972, 2003, Fayard, Paris. ISBN 2-213-61518-7
• Arkady Vaksberg: Stalin against the Jews, 1994, Vintage Books (a division of Random House, New York), ISBN 0-679-42207-2
• Robert Wistrich: Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, 1976, Harrap, London, ISBN 0-245-52785-0
• Andre Gerrits: 'The myth of Jewish communism. A historical interpretation. Brussels 2009.

External links

• Jews,Communism,and the Jewish Communists
• Stalin and the Jews by Stephen Schwartz (weeklystandard.org)
• Stalin's Jewish affair by Israeli journalist Dmitri Prokofiev (ynetnews.com)
• From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism by Konstantin Azadovskii and Boris Egorov (www.fas.harvard.edu)
• War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews by Andreas Hillgruber