Jewish Bolshevism

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

Jewish Bolshevism, Judeo-Bolshevism, Judeo-Communism, and known as Żydokomuna in Poland, is a pejorative stereotype ^[1] based on the notion that Jews are the driving force behind the modern Communist movement, specifically the Russian Bolsheviks.

The expression was the title of a pamphlet, The Jewish Bolshevism, and became current after the October Revolution (1917) 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."^[2] James Webb writes: 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."^[3]

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.^[4] 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. The allegation still sees use in antisemitic publications and websites today.

Nazi Germany

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

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. The term was popularized in print by German journalist Dietrich Eckhart, who authored the pamphlet "Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin" ("Bolshevism from Moses to 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".^[5] 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.^[6]

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

United States and Great Britain, 1920s

The American ambassador to Russia, David R. Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish.^[7] A report by British Intelligence, "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", states in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.^[8] Capt. Montgomery Schuyler, a military intelligence officer in Russia, reported regularly to the chief of staff of U.S. Army Intelligence, who relayed the reports to the US president. In one of these reports, 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..."^[9] In another report on June 9, 1919, Schuyler wrote the following, which the historical record shows to be inaccurate:^{[citation needed]}

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.^[9]

Lucien Wolf, one of the voices of the period who took issue with the propagation of the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion hoax concurrently being spread in the West, writes in The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs (1921):

"...I find a notorious German anti-Semitic book quoting... Wilton, of the Times, as its authority for the statement that 'of 384 People's Commissars who constitute the Government only 13 are Russians, while 300 are Jews.' What are the facts? The only officials in Soviet Russia who are authorised to hold the rank of People's Commissars are the members of the Cabinet. These number 17, and of them 16 are indisputably Gentiles, while only one – Trotsky – is Jewish by birth... The other so-called Jewish Commissars are all men of the second and lower ranks of officials belonging exclusively either to the Civil Service or the Soviet analogue of our municipal life. They are probably fairly numerous, but in what may be called the second rank they do not number more than ten at the outside. The others may or may not be convinced Bolsheviks. They are servants of the State who may have many other motives for serving the Soviets than an enthusiasm for Lenin's politics...Trotsky has in his War Office and Corps of Officers probably as many ex-Tsarist officers – including sixteen Generals – as there are 'Jewish Commissars' in the whole Soviet Administration. And yet nobody dreams of describing the Red Legions as a Tsarist Army. These officers are probably not even Bolsheviks. If we could know their motives we should probably find that they were not very widely different from those which actuate the 'Jewish Commissars.'

"All this is not to say that there are no professing Jews in the Bolshevist ranks, or that the number of indifferent and apostate Jews who have thrown in their lot with the Soviets is quite negligible. What is contended is that normally the Jew is intensely antipathetic to Bolshevism, and that at the beginning of the Revolution relatively very few Jews – even of those who were Jews by race only – rallied to the call of Lenin. That this situation has changed during the last year is not improbable. But with whom does the blame rest? If Jews have reluctantly turned toward Bolshevism, it is because they have been forced into it by the anti-Bolsheviks. They cannot but be alarmed by the persistancy and passion with which the charge of Bolshevism is levelled against them, and the threats which come from all sides to avenge in their persons the sins of Lenin and Trotsky."^[10]

In an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920, Winston 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.^[5][11]

Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle."^[12] However, according to Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill had been sent a copy of The Protocols a few weeks prior to the publishing of this article.^[13]

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 the Jewish nationalist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky with a Labor Zionist party, Poale Zion, which the court called "a definite Bolshevist institution."^[14] In reality, Jabotinsky was a staunch anti-socialist^[14] who had fought with the Jewish Legion of the British Army in World War I and was already emerging as a leader of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist opposition to the Labour Zionist movement.^[15]

In the early 1920s, a leading British antisemite, Henry Hamilton Beamish, announced that "Bolshevism was Judaism."^[16]

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."^[17]

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

Further reading

• Mikhail Agursky: The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR, 1987, Westview Press, ISBN 08133-0139-4
• Frank L. Britton: Behind Communism, 1952, Author, Los Angeles
• Dennis Fahey: Rulers of Russia, 1940, 3rd American edition, revised and enlarged, Condon Printing Co., Detroit
• 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
• 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

Footnotes

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)