The Jewish Bolshevism
 | It has been suggested that Jewish Bolshevism be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since October 2007. |
| Part of a series on |
| Antisemitism |
|---|
 |
 Category |
The Jewish Bolshevism, is the title of an antisemitic pamphlet, or booklet, published in London in 1922 and 1923 by the Britons Publishing Society with a forward by German Nazi, Alfred Rosenberg.
It is the source of the antisemitic political epithets: Jewish Bolshevism, Judeo-Bolshevism, Judeo-Communism, and in Polish, Żydokomuna.
The two juxtaposed pair of cognates form the corresponding antisemitic political epithet and name the antisemitic conspiracy theory which blames Jews for Bolshevism.
Most Bolsheviks were ethnic Russians or Ukrainians, while communism rejected religion.
Scholarship on the subject of Bolshevism does not include the study of the role of Jews, as such, played in it. For example, The Bolshevik Tradition (1963, 1975), by Robert H. McNeal, gives only one listing under "Jews" in its index, making a reference to a single page, p. [116]-117; this reference discusses the Leningrad case, "a murky episode in 1949-1950" regarding the secret execution of Politburo member N. A. Voznesensky. In that context McNeal immediately discusses the 1953 Stalinist uncovering of the alleged (Jewish) doctors' plot involving the death of Zhdanov.
Origins
This 31 or 32 page pamphlet is a virtually identical reprint of the The Grave Diggers of Russia pamphlet, published in 1921 inGermany, by Dr. E. Boepple. In 1922, historian Gisela C. Lebzelter wrote: "The Britons published a brochure entitled Jewish Bolshevism, which featured drawings of Russian leaders supplemented by brief comments on their Jewish descent and affiliation. This booklet, which was prefaced by Alfred Rosenberg, had previously been published in English by völkisch Deutscher Volksverlag." [1]
The idea of linking Jewishnes with Bolshevism originates with the Nazis in Nazi Germany. The claim was that Jewishness and Bolshevism are one (whatever that means) [2] Says Laqueur:
Hitler and Rosenberg had decided, once and forever, that Communism was the revolt of the underlings; a racial, not an ideological movement. Ideological discussions with Marxists, they said, were not merely senseless and absurd but positively harmful; it would imply that National Socialism accepted the Communists as more or less equal partners; that the Communists had an ideology which deserved to be taken seriously; what was important was to analyse the true (racial) sources of Communism. As a Communist one could win an argument simply by provingthat one's ideas conformed to those of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. As a Nazi any connection with Marx or Marxism was a priori evil, for Marx had been born a Jew. --Lawqueur, Russia and Germany (1965), p. 177
Laqueur further asserts that the identification of Bolshevism with Jewry was perhaps the only truly original contribution which Nazism made to the study of Bolshevism or Communism:
If Nazisn made any original contribution to this field of study,
it was the identification of world Jewry and Bolshevism;
a dogma it repeated time and gain on every level of sophistication
from the quasi-scientific to the most vulgar.
From the factual angle it was an uphill struggle;
true, a fairly large percentage of the early Bolshevik leaders
had been Jewish by origin. But what the Nazis chose to ignore
was the inconvenient fact that these Jewish Bolsheviks
had turned against their own religion and people
and wanted nothing to do with them;
The expression "Jewish Bolshevism" became popular - especially among White Russians and Antisemites - after the Russian Revolution.
Victor E. Marsden, whose name is associated with a posthumous imprint of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a translator of the original Russian version by Serge Nilus into English, is also credited with another posthumous Antisemitic "work", entitled Jews in Russia, and published in 1921. The complete title of this 23 page pamphlet is Jews in Russia. With Half-Jews and "Damped" Jews. The Bibliographer, Robert Singerman, identifies this imprint as item "0123" in his authoritative work entitled Antisemitic Propaganda.
According to Singerman, The Jewish Bolshevism (1921), which he dubs as item "0121" in his Bibliography, is "Identical in content to item "0120," namely The Grave Diggers of Russia.
The expression spread worldwide in the 1920s with the publication and circulation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Jewishness and Bolshevism were juxtaposed. Notably Leon Trotsky was said to be a Bolshevik because he was Jewish.
According to Daniel Pipes, The White Russian movement spread these charges to an international audience, with the book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[3] Historian James Webb wrote: "it is rare to find an anti-Semitic source after 1917 which does not stand in debt to the White Russian analysis of the Revolution."[4]
Background
Walter Laqueur, in his seminal work, Russia and Germany, A Century of Conflict, traces this conspiracy theory to the most important Nazi ideologue and Baltic German, Arthur Rosenberg. Says Laqueur (Ibid., pp. 21-22):
Rosenberg's obiter dicta about Russia and Communism
are found in the Mythos and in countless brochures and booklets: Bolshevism is the revolt of the Jewish and Mongolian races against the German (aryan) element in Russia; it is the revolt of the steppe, the hatred of the nomads of everything great, heroic, racially healthy; all big things in Russian history had been achieved by Germans or those of German blood, but the revolution of 1917 had exterminated the aryan element. . . ., nor did the Jewish-Soviet Government represent the Russian people. To the Nazi ideologists, all leading Soviet statesmen were Jews: Lenin and Trotsky, Lunacharsky and Rakovsky, Kuibyshev and Krasin, Beria and Manuilsky among them. Whoever was not a Jew was a Chinese. Rosenberg developed an elaborate theory about the leading role of Chinese silk merchants in the Russian revolution. While other observers of the Soviet scene engaged in political speculation and social analysis, the Nazis' Russian experts were preoccupied with another kind of scientific investigation which hardly left them time for anything else. They tracked down the 'real' (Jewish) names of all Soviet leaders; Lunacharsky, for instance, became Mondschein - for who did not know that 'luna' was 'moon' in Latin? This, by and large, was the level of Nazi Sovietology.
— Laqueur, Ibid., pp. 21-22.
Jews had been a persecuted minority in the Russian Empire. They had endured a form of physical segregation in the Pale of Settlement, as well as sporadic persecutions supported by Tsarist governments. Russian Jews emigrated (in the period from 1881 to 1920, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire[5]). Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and other ethnic minorities engage in political activism. However, only Jews were singled out to be studied and counted. For example, antisemitic sources would emphasise that on the eve of the February Revolution, the Bolshevik party had about 10,000 members[6], of which 364 were ethnic Jews.[5] Such a source would then infer that the number of Jews in leadership positions was excessively weighted towards the Jewish side. A modern version of this phenomena in the West is to count the number of Jewish doctors or lawyers. But this phenomena is designated philosemitism. What emerged was a Conspiracy theory in which Jews are the protagonists. In support of this view was simply to point and say, "He's a Jew," or look at the number of Jews engaged in this or that activity, with an assumed scale beyond which the number was deemed excessive. The particular antisemitic conspiracy theory here involved an exploration of how many Jews were Bolsheviks, and if that number was deemed excessive, the conclusion was drawn that Bolshevism was a Jewish phenomena.
Jewish Bolsheviks
Antisemitic analysis typically involved counting the number of ethnic Jews in the population and comparing that number to the total population, or to the total non-Jewish population. The next step was to do the same number of Jews who were Bolsheviks. The two ratios were then compared. If the appropriate fraction was larger, ethnic Jews were deemed to be "disproportionate" in comparison to non-Jewish population. This kind of analysis was done, for example, with respect to the number of ethnic Jews who served in the Russian revolutionary leadership, both before the revolution, as well as years after. Though such Jews were typically hostile to traditional Jewish culture and Jewish political parties, and were eager to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party's atheism and proletarian internationalism, and committed to stamp out any sign of "Jewish cultural particularism". Such facts were typically ignored (presumably because the underlying conspiracy theory implies that Jews were deemed to infiltrate every movement).
In particular, of the nine members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party in April 1917, three were Jewish (Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov). Of the twelve committee members (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Sverdlov, Yakovleva, Oppokov, Zinoviev, Kamenev) who, during a historic meeting on October 10, 1917, agreed for the necessity of armed revolution (leading to the October Revolution), six were Jewish (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Uritsky, Sverdlov, and Sokolnikov, although Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed the revolution).[8]
Out of Lenin's fifteen Peoples' Commissars (Narkoms) in 1919, six were Jewish (Trotsky, Uritsky, Isaac Steinberg, I. A. Teodorovich, Semyon Dimanstein and Sokolnikov). Among the 23 Narkoms between 1923–1930, there were twelve Russians, five Jews, two Georgians (Stalin and Ordzhonikidze), one Pole, one Moldavian, one Latvian, and one Ukrainian. The situation had clearly evolved, within a relatively short time, to the advantage of the Russian majority. In the 1930s, there was one person of Jewish descent in the Politburo (Lazar Kaganovich).
In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them) 7.1% were Jewish (65% were Russian).
The number of Jews in top administrative positions began to decline soon after 1917. It continued to shrink heavily in the 1930s when Stalin had his old comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev executed while in prison, after a rigged trial in 1936. Kamenev and Zinoviev had previously been expelled, in 1926 and 1927, from the top positions they shared with Stalin in the Soviet ruling elite. Leon Trotsky had concurrently been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1927 and was then assassinated in Mexico City in 1940, by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader. Thus by the year 1940, and after his rapprochement with Hitler's Germany, Stalin had eliminated virtually all Jews from very high level government positions inside the Soviet Union.
Walter Laqueur states in his book The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day:
To what extent did the presence of many Jews among the Communist leadership contribute to antisemitism? It certainly played an important role in antisemitic propaganda, and it is certainly true that during the 1920s Jews were heavily overrepresented in the ranks of party and state officials. With the rise of Stalin, Jews were removed from key positions and very often "liquidated." The fact that other minorities were also disproportionately highly represented did not greatly matter - there was no tradition of anti-Latvianism in Russia, nor were Latvians found in the very top positions. Nor did it matter that Jews were equally strongly represented among other anti-Communist parties of the left such as the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, or that the anti-Stalinist opposition was to a considerable extent of Jewish extraction.[9]
In his 1938 book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery, based on his testimony at the Berne Trial, Vladimir Burtsev wrote:
"Antisemites... refused to acknowledge the important and indisputable fact that the Jews who participated in the Socialist and Anarchist movements around the world, including the Russian Jews in particular, were renegades of the Jewish nation who had no connection with Jewish history nor with Jewish religion nor with Jewish masses, but were rather exclusively internationalists, promoting the ideas shared by Socialists of other ethnicities, and were hostile to the Jewish nation in general."[10]
Cheka
There are also claims that Jews were highly prominent among the members of the Soviet secret police. Indeed, of the 12 members of the Cheka Counter-revolutionary department in 1918, 6 were Jewish. However, of the 42 Cheka prosecutors in September, 1918, at the height of Red Terror, only 8 were Jewish. The rest were 14 Latvians, 13 Russians and 7 Poles. Only 3.7% of the rank-and-file Cheka agents were Jewish at that time.[citation needed]
In the mid-1930s, under the leadership of Genrikh Yagoda (who was Jewish), the Jewish presence in the secret police became predominant: of the people surrounding Yagoda, 39% were Jewish and only 30% Russian.[dubious – discuss])[citation needed] The immediate predecessors to Yagoda in that same position were also Jewish: Iosif Unschlicht and Meier Trilisser.[dubious – discuss][citation needed] Genrikh Yagoda's secret police oversaw the execution of both Zinoviev and Kamenev, but fell victim to Stalin's next round of purges: Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who was not of Jewish descent,[citation needed] in September 1936, then Yezhov too was arrested and executed in March 1937. Under Yezhov, the number of Jews fell precipitously (to just 6 people) while the number of ethnic Russians among the leadership of the secret police, the NKVD, rose to 102 people (67%)[citation needed] and the purges, at Stalin's instigation, entered their bloodiest period (1937–1938) (see Great Purge).
Yevsektsiya
Yevsektsiya (Russian: ЕвСекция) was the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party. It was created rally support for Soviet power amongst the Jewish populations. It soon developed a relationship of rivalry with the Bund and Zionist parties. The first conference of Yevsektsiya took place in October 1918. For most of its existence, the Yevsektsya was headed by Semyon Dimanstein.
The Yevsektsia was disbanded in 1929, after the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Many of its members perished in the Great Purge. Dimanstein was executed in 1938 and was rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, 2 years after the death of Stalin.
Reactions and allegations
"The great majority of non-Jews reacted negatively to the intensification of Jewish political activity, and it became one of the important factors in the exacerbation of differences between Jews and their surroundings that cast its shadow over the two inter-war decades. ... It was apparently the emigrants who fled the Russian Revolution who brought to the West the claim that Bolshevism was a Jewish affair (the old anti-Semitic argument regarding 'Jewish domination' in new guise)."[11]
Nazi Germany
In Nazi Germany, this term expressed the common perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its very origin: Karl Marx. The term was popularized in print by German journalist Dietrich Eckhart, who authored the pamphlet "Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin" in the early 1920s, thereby tying Moses and Lenin as both Communists and Jews. Alfred Rosenberg's 1923 edition of the Protocols "gave a forgery a huge boost".[12] This was followed by Hitler's highly inflammatory statement in "Mein Kampf" (1924): "In Russian Bolshevism we must see Jewry's twentieth century effort to take world dominion unto itself".
According to Michael Kellogg, the author of The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945:
In his groundbreaking 1939 book, L’Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de la propagande allemande d’après des documents inédits (The Apocalypse of Our Times: The Hidden Side of German Propaganda According to Unpublished Documents), Henri Rollin stressed that “Hitlerism” represented a form of “anti-Soviet counter-revolution” which employed the “myth of a mysterious Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot.” Rollin investigated the National Socialist belief, which was taken primarily from White émigré views, that a vast Jewish-Masonic conspiracy had provoked World War Ⅰ, toppled the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and unleashed Bolshevism after undermining the existing order through the insidious spread of liberal ideas. German forces promptly destroyed Rollin’s work in 1940 after they occupied France, and the book has remained in obscurity ever since.[13]
United States and Great Britain, 1920s
The American Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish.[14] Also, in a report to the United States and other governments from British Intelligence, entitled "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", it is stated in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.[15]
Captain Montgomery Schuyler, a military intelligence officer in Russia, reported regularly to the chief of staff of U.S. Army Intelligence (the Army handled intelligence before the CIA was established), who relayed the reports to the President. In one of these, declassified in 1958, Schuyler states:
It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States, but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning, guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type …[16]
In another report on June 9, 1919, Schuyler cites Robert Wilton, who was then the chief correspondent in Russia for The Times of London. He writes the following, which the historical record shows[citation needed], incidentally, to be mostly inaccurate:
A table made up in 1918, by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia, shows at that time there were 384 commissars including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number, 264 had come from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.[16]
"Even Winston Churchill briefly joined this bandwagon, blaming the Russian Revolution on Jews."[12] In his article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920 titled Zionism versus Bolshevism, Churchill asserted:
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. [17]
Churchill also declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle".[18] Such attitudes were not uncommon in the UK at the time of the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The British court of inquiry, appointed to investigate the Arab 1920 Palestine riots, associated Zionism with Bolshevism and identified Ze'ev Jabotinsky with a Labor Zionist party Poale Zion, which the court called "a definite Bolshevist institution."[19] In reality he was a right-wing leader. "The association of the fiercely antisocialist Jabotinsky with a Marxist party was not the only nonsense in the report."[19]
In the early 1920s, a leading British antisemite Henry Hamilton Beamish announced that "Bolshevism was Judaism."[20]
Iran, 2006
The allegation was revived in a December 28, 2006 interview by Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin who was appointed secretary-general of the new "World Foundation for Holocaust Studies" established at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust:
"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."[21]
External links
- Stalin's Jews by Israeli journalist Sever Plocker (ynetnews.com)
Bibliography
| The Protocols |
|---|
 |
| First publication of The Protocols |
| Writers, editors, and publishers associated with The Protocols |
| Debunkers of The Protocols |
| Commentaries on The Protocols |
- Jews in Russia. With Half-Jews and "Damped" Jews
- by Victor E. Marsden; (posthumously)
- (London: Issued by "The Britons", Printed by The Judaic Publishing Co., [1921])
- Title The Jewish Bolshevism
- Imprint London: Britons Pub. Society, 1922; but Singerman (1921)
- Descr. 31 p. : chiefly ports.
- Gen. note Forward by Alfred Rosenberg
- Cover missing
- Top.Subj. - LCSH Communism
- Antisemitism -- 20th century
- Jewish communists -- Russia
- Add. Rosenberg, Alfred
- Holding Lib TAU Tel Aviv U.
- Link to library: TAU01
- ULI Sysno. 000719660
- Pers. Main Entry Rosenberg, Alfred, 1893-1946
- Title The Jewish bolshevism / Alfred Rosenberg
- Imprint London : Britons Pub. Society, 1923
- Descr. 30 p. : photocopy; ports.
- Gen. note In box with book sysno. 1982012
- Top.Subj. - LCSH Communism -- Russia
- Communist leadership -- Russia
- Propaganda, Anti-communist -- Germany
- Antisemitism -- Germany -- 1918-1933
- Fascism -- Great Britain -- 20th century
- HoldingLib TAU Tel Aviv U.
- Link to library: TAU01
- ULI Sysno. 006615087
- LC Control No.: 24026547
- Type of Material: Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.)
- Personal Name: King, William Henry, 1863-
- Main Title: Conditions in Russia. Speech of Hon. William H. King, a senator from the state of Utah, delivered in the Senate, January 22 and April 24, 1924.
- Published/Created: Washington, Govt. print. off., 1924.
- Related Names: Lodge, Henry Cabot, 1850-1924.
- Description: 1 p. l., 127 p. 24 cm.
- Notes: Presented by Mr. Lodge. Ordered printed May 26, 1924.
- Subjects: Soviet Union--Economic conditions--1917-1945.
- Soviet Union--Politics and government--1917-1936.
- Series: [United States] 68th Cong., 1st sess. Senate. Doc. 126
- LC Classification: DK265 .K44
- Other System No.: (OCoLC)5193684
- Political Anti-Semitism in England, 1918,-1939
- (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978)
- ISBN 084190426X
- Antisemitic Propaganda
- (New York: Garland, 1982)
- Bolsheviks and British Jews
- (London & Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992)
- 305.8924041
- DS135:E5K33 1992
- 941'.004924-dc20
- 91-18896
- ISBN 0-7146-3371-2
Footnotes
- ^ Political Anti-Semitism in England, 1918-1939, p. 64
- ^ Walter Laqueur (1965): Russia and Germany (Boston: Little, Brown and Company)
- ^ Daniel Pipes (1997): Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (The Free Press - Simon & Shuster) p.93. ISBN 0-684-83131-7
- '^ James Webb (1976): Occult Establishment: The Dawn of the New Age and The Occult Establishment', (Open Court Publishing), p.295. ISBN 0-87548-434-4
- ^ a b Political Activity and Emigration. Beyond the Pale. The History of Jews in Russia. (Exhibition by Friends and Partners Project)
- ^ Sergey Kara-Murza, Soviet Civilization, vol. 1 (The chapter about the growth of Russian political parties during February-October 1917 online) Template:Ru icon
- ^ Religions attacked in the USSR (Beyond the Pale)
- ^ http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/10a.htm
- ^ Walter Laqueur. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. Oxford University Press, 2006 ISBN 0-19-530429-2 p.105
- ^ Template:Ru icon The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery (Ch. 3) by Vladimir Burtsev
- ^ Ben-Sasson, H.H., ed. (1976): A History of the Jewish People. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge). ISBN 0-674-39730-4, p.944
- ^ a b Daniel Pipes (1997): Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (The Free Press - Simon & Shuster) p.95. ISBN 0-684-83131-7
- ^ The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 by Michael Kellogg (excerpt)
- ^ Francis, David R. Russia From the American Embassy. New York: C. Scribner's & Sons, 1921. p. 214.
- ^ U.S. National Archives. Dept. of State Decimal File, 1910–1929, file 861.00/5067.
- ^ a b U.S. National Archives. Record group 120: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces, June 9, 1919.
- ^ Churchill, Winston. "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People." Illustrated Sunday Herald. 8 February 1920.
- ^ Cover Story: Churchill's Greatness. Interview with Jeffrey Wallin. (The Churchill Centre)
- ^ a b Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, Metropolitan Books, 1999. p.141
- ^ James Webb (1976): Occult Establishment: The Dawn of the New Age and The Occult Establishment, (Open Court Publishing), p.130. ISBN 0-87548-434-4
- ^ Mohammad Ali Ramin, Advisor to Iranian President Ahmadinejad: 'Hitler Was Jewish' (MEMRI Special Dispatch Series No.1408) January 3, 2007
See also
- Anti-Komintern
- History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union
- Communist Party of the Soviet Union
- Bolshevik
- Yevsektsiya
- History of antisemitism
- Komzet
- Red Latvian Riflemen
- Jewish Autonomous Oblast
- Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion)
- Jewish Communist Union (Poalei Zion)
- Jewish left
Further reading
- Arkady Vaksberg: Stalin against the Jews, 1994, Vintage Books (a division of Random House, New York), ISBN 0-679-42207-2
- Yuri Slezkine: The Jewish Century, 2004, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-11995-3
- Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime, 1993, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, ISBN 0-394-50242-6
- Mikhail Agursky: The Third Rome.National Bolshevism in the USSR,1987,Westview Press, ISBN 08133-0139-4
- Robert Wistrich: Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, 1976, Harrap, London, ISBN 0-245-52785-0