The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation (Dieux, Hommes et Religions / Gods, Humans and Religions) [New ed.] 9789052014654, 9783035260458, 9052014655

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction 9
1. The Debate 15
1.1. A Controversial Issue 21
1.2. Shifting Paradigms of Jewish History 30
1.3. Anti-Semitism and Anti-communism 49
2. The Myth 57
2.1. The Anatomy of a Myth 57
2.2. The Force of Nationalism and the Rise of the Jews 74
2.3. Jews and Revolution: The Polish Case 86
2.4. The Jewish Response 93
2.5. The Non-Jewish Jew 107
3. The Party 117
3.1. Figures, Facts, and Interpretations 119
3.2. The “People’s Republics” 130
3.3. The Myth of Jewish Stalinism 154
3.4. Communist Anti-Semitism 173
3.5. Communists as Jews 183
4. Conclusion 191
Bibliography 201

Citation preview

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Seite 1

The connection of Jews with communism has always been an extremely sensitive issue, which cannot simply be dismissed as a fully irrational phenomenon. Jews were disproportionately present in the revolutionary movement. This does not make the myth of Jewish Communism less mythical, but it does imply that real interests and conflicts were involved.

André Gerrits

‘Jewish Communism’ was one of the most powerful and destructive political myths in 20th-century Europe. The cry of Jewish communist conspiracy turned traditional, often religiously inspired anti-Jewish sentiments into a murderous antiSemitic rampage.

This book presents the first full-length analysis of the identification of Jews with communism. It traces the myth of Jewish Communism from the traditional antiJewish prejudices on which it is built, to its crucial role in Eastern European Stalinist and post-Stalinist politics. It documents the painful controversies that the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movement has generated among Jewish observers, among communists, and also among historians.

ISBN 978-90-5201-465-4

P.I.E. Peter Lang Brussels

The Myth of Jewish Communism

André Gerrits is Associate Professor in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration, and Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael).

16

15.12.2008

Gods, Humans and Religions

16_Gerrits 484.qxd

The Myth of Jewish Communism A Historical Interpretation

André Gerrits

15.12.2008

13:20

Seite 1

‘Jewish Communism’ was one of the most powerful and destructive political myths in 20th-century Europe. The cry of Jewish communist conspiracy turned traditional, often religiously inspired anti-Jewish sentiments into a murderous antiSemitic rampage. The connection of Jews with communism has always been an extremely sensitive issue, which cannot simply be dismissed as a fully irrational phenomenon. Jews were disproportionately present in the revolutionary movement. This does not make the myth of Jewish Communism less mythical, but it does imply that real interests and conflicts were involved. This book presents the first full-length analysis of the identification of Jews with communism. It traces the myth of Jewish Communism from the traditional antiJewish prejudices on which it is built, to its crucial role in Eastern European Stalinist and post-Stalinist politics. It documents the painful controversies that the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movement has generated among Jewish observers, among communists, and also among historians.

André Gerrits is Associate Professor in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration, and Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael).

P.I.E. Peter Lang Brussels

16

16_Gerrits 484.qxd

The Myth of Jewish Communism A Historical Interpretation

P.I.E. Peter Lang Bruxelles · Bern · Berlin · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Wien

3

André GERRITS

The Myth of Jewish Communism A Historical Interpretation

“Gods, Humans and Religions” No.16

5

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy, microfilm or any other means, without prior written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

© P.I.E. PETER LANG S.A. Éditions scientifiques internationales

Brussels, 2009 1 avenue Maurice, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium [email protected]; www.peterlang.com ISSN 1377-8323 ISBN 978-3-0352-6045-8 D/2009/5678/06 Printed in Germany Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gerrits, André. The myth of Jewish communism : a historical interpretation / André Gerrits. p. cm. — (Éditions scientifiques internationales) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-0352-6045-8 1. Jewish communists—History. 2. Communism—History. I. Title. HX550.J4G36 2008 335.4089’924—dc22 2008047570 CIP also available from the British Library, GB

Bibliographic information published by “Die Deutsche Bibliothek”. “Die Deutsche Bibliothek” lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at .

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Table of Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................... 9 1. The Debate ...................................................................................... 15 1.1. A Controversial Issue............................................................... 21 1.2. Shifting Paradigms of Jewish History...................................... 30 1.3. Anti-Semitism and Anti-communism ...................................... 49 2. The Myth......................................................................................... 57 2.1. The Anatomy of a Myth........................................................... 57 2.2. The Force of Nationalism and the Rise of the Jews ................. 74 2.3. Jews and Revolution: The Polish Case .................................... 86 2.4. The Jewish Response ............................................................... 93 2.5. The Non-Jewish Jew .............................................................. 107 3. The Party ...................................................................................... 117 3.1. Figures, Facts, and Interpretations ......................................... 119 3.2. The “People’s Republics” ...................................................... 130 3.3. The Myth of Jewish Stalinism................................................ 154 3.4. Communist Anti-Semitism..................................................... 173 3.5. Communists as Jews .............................................................. 183 4. Conclusion..................................................................................... 191 Bibliography....................................................................................... 201

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Introduction Few historians would deny that “Jewish Communism”, a variant of the “Jewish World Conspiracy”, has been one of the most powerful and destructive political myths in early-20th century Europe. The myth would have a tremendous impact on European Jewry and, to a lesser extent, on communism. The cry of the Jewish communist conspiracy added new fuel to existing anti-Jewish sentiments. The identification of the corporate Jew with the two gravest political dangers of those times – communism and the Soviet Union – proved to be the “most potent weapon of inter-war official anti-Semitism” (Lendvai 1971: 46). It was the nucleus of Hitler’s Weltanschauung. The identification of Jews with communism coloured the perceptions of Jews in general and of the Jewish question in particular. It turned traditional, often religiously inspired anti-Jewish sentiments into a murderous, politically motivated rampage. Additionally, the myth of Jewish Communism was not only mobilised against the communist movement but, by a macabre twist of history, also became a prominent means of agitation and propaganda in the hands of communist regimes themselves, who used it against their enemies within and outside of the Party. After the death of Stalin, when bitter infighting marked the initial phase of de-Stalinisation, communist leaders in East Central Europe invented their own variant of “Judeo-Communism”: the myth of “Jewish Stalinism”. Communism was supposedly true, honest, and national; while Stalinism was imposed upon the nations of East Central Europe by outside forces, by “non- or anti-national” elements, in other words: by Jews! The rather pitiful traces of this once powerful idea can still be found at little bookstalls in some of Moscow’s metro stations. Old men and women, clearly not among the most privileged groups in Russia’s post-communist society, sell booklets with sinister titles like The Red Kabbalah, Wars by Dark Forces, or The Fifth Column in Russia (Klimov 1992; Markov 1993; Dyakonov 1995). The Bolshevik Revolution and communist rule were a Jewish conspiracy against the Russian people. Communism is Jewish. Harmless as these poor old street vendors are, they epitomise the remarkable durability of the Jewish Communist stereotype. The notion still serves its purpose: blame others for the communist disaster; externalise guilt. Jewish Communism was a powerful and persistent myth. Based on the attractive combination of two widespread political sentiments, 9

The Myth of Jewish Communism

namely anti-communism and anti-Semitism, it would attract a considerable number of supporters. The myth of Jewish Communism was not merely a fancy of the lunatic fringe, certainly not during times of revolutionary turmoil and communist expansion, as in the aftermath of the Great War, during the first decade of Bolshevik rule in Russia and revolutionary chaos in East Central Europe, and from the mid 1940s to the early 1950s, when communist dictatorships were established in most other countries in the eastern part of the continent. The “creative role” of the Jews in Bolshevism was the “burning topic of the day all over the world” (Bulaschow 1923: 2) wrote Bernard Segel, a Russian exile in interwar Germany with strong anti-communist leanings, under the pseudonym of Dimitri Boulaschow. Apart from Nazi-Germany, where Judeo-Bolshevism became the centrepiece of state ideology, the myth of Jewish communism achieved its greatest poignancy in the countries of East Central Europe. An awkward combination of tradition, modernity, and fortuitous contingency explains the vehemence of Jewish Communism in the region: strong national identities in insecure national states; conditions of rapid and dramatic political change culminating in communist dictatorship, a history of religiously inspired anti-Jewish prejudices; relatively large, mostly orthodox and isolated Jewish communities going through processes of change, and Jews entering non-Jewish society in increasing numbers. Given the historical impact of Jewish Communism, remarkably little research has been conducted on the subject. The issue is mentioned routinely in many histories of East European Jewry or anti-Semitism, but among the thousands of studies on the modern history of East European Jewry one searches in vain for a book-length analysis of Jewish Communism. Why? My argument is that the notion of Jewish Communism has been beset with too many political, emotional, ethical, and empirical questions for historians to blithely raise the subject. The myth of Jewish Communism has always been a highly controversial, contentious phenomenon. Apart from a lack of data on the precise role of people of Jewish heritage in the communist movement or on their ambitions and motivations, many historians have preferred not to deal with the uncomfortable, uneasy, and widely exploited “element of truth” it may have represented. A myth is a myth – an exaggerated and maliciously exploited prejudice. This does not necessarily imply, however, that it is void of any reality. Anti-Semitic narratives come in various forms. The sensitive nature of the notion of Jewish Communism seems at least partly related to the actual behaviour of Jews. Jews who were active in the communist movement in East Central Europe constituted only a tiny minority of the Jewish population at large, but these communists of Jewish origin formed a substantial part of the otherwise small 10

Introduction

and inconsequential early communist membership in the region. In addition, their significance within communist parties often notably outweighed their numbers within society at large. In other words, there may have been few communists among the Jews of East Central Europe, but Jews were overrepresented among the communists in the region and, initially at least, conspicuously so. Another reason why the notion of Jewish Communism has remained so contentious is the obvious difficulty historians faced in reconciling it with the “traditional” interpretation of Jewish history. “Leiden und Lernen”, suffering and learning, is how the 19th century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz once characterised the history of his people in the Diaspora (Graetz 1975: 136). It became a “model” of Jewish history and historiography. The participation of Jews in the (early) communist regimes of Eastern Europe, however, was an uneasy deviation from this pattern. It proved to be very difficult to reconcile with the dual paradigm of powerlessness and suffering of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and its admirable political and cultural vitality and creativity on the other. This book centres around three questions: first, how to explain the relative absence of the issue of Jewish Communism in both contemporary (Jewish) accounts and in the works of professional historians? Second, how to interpret the myth’s widespread appeal, especially in East Central Europe? And third, how did one of the two target groups of the stereotype of Jewish Communism, namely the communists, deal with this issue? Although the answers are mainly structured in three chapters, my analysis floats relatively freely throughout the book. The focus in the first two chapters is on the controversy, which a seemingly disproportionate number of Jews (in relation to their share of the general population and the total number of communists) sparked among their contemporaries and later historians. The historians’ debate on the identification of Jews with communism took place within the context of a much wider discussion on the specific nature of East European Jewish history. To structure my analysis, I distinguish between a “traditional” approach (epitomised by Graetz’ paradigm of “suffering and learning”) and a “revisionist” model. This is an ideal-typical distinction and in this specific case it only serves to explain the notable discrepancy between the actual historic relevance of the myth of Jewish Communism and the fact that so few historians were concerned with it. In simple dichotomous terms: the ambiguous relationship between Jews and political radicalism can be neither discussed nor understood within the context of a traditional approach to Jewish history. Most contemporary Jewish publicists preferred to ignore the myth too, whether or not they were aware of its threatening dimension. This 11

The Myth of Jewish Communism

not only reflected their opinion that an ideological construct of such lunacy as the myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy or Jewish Communism was essentially immune to rational arguments. It also revealed the ambivalence and ambiguity with which the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war in Russia were met by many prominent Jewish leaders and organisations. Not all Jewish publicists accepted the awkward silence surrounding the issue, however, and many among them vehemently criticised their apostate brethren, the communists of Jewish descent. They forged the notion of the non-Jewish Jew: an interpretation of Jewish radicalism which would later dominate the scholarly debate on Jewish communism. The communist Jews were renegades. They supposedly had no relationship whatsoever with Jews or with the Jewish community. They should not even be considered Jews. Reality, as I will argue, was not so conveniently one-dimensional. Many Jews were perfectly capable of adopting more than a single identity. In the first two chapters, the myth of Jewish Communism will be traced from the traditional anti-Jewish prejudices on which it built, to the various modern, political connotations and considerations, which provided its widespread appeal. Jewish Communism became especially influential after the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 and the ensuing years of unprecedented political turmoil and volatility in Europe. Adolf Hitler was among the many contemporaries during the early 1920s who believed that the Jewish World Conspiracy was neither an ominous idea nor a pending threat – it was real, as was proven by what was actually happening in Europe. The myth of Jewish Communism came in many shapes and forms. Some authors used racist and biological metaphors; others employed primarily religious arguments; while still others approached the identification of Jews with communism (or political radicalism in general) from a predominantly political perspective. Some authors kept to the facts as closely as their prejudicial ideas would allow them, whilst others concocted grandiose conspiracy theories to sustain their arguments. In the third chapter I raise the question of how communist parties and regimes coped with the politically sensitive and dangerous notion of communism as an international Jewish conspiracy. Communists, Jews and non-Jews alike, were aware of the explosive mixture of traditional anti-Jewish ideas with modern anti-communist sentiments. They generally saw Jewish Communism as a dangerous weapon in the hands of the counter-revolution, as a pre-eminently damaging notion in terms of popular legitimacy and support. In fact, the identification of Jews with communism, as rude and as unfounded as the equation was, always remained a taboo in communist East Central Europe, even after the last prominent Jew had been removed from the parties’ ranks. 12

Introduction

The anxiety of the communists-in-power reflected real political change, as did the apprehension of their opponents. There may have been few Jews left in East Central Europe after the Second World War, but among those who survived the Holocaust, many seemed to be more prominent and powerful than individual Jews had ever been before. Whatever the merits or lack thereof of the communists’ attitudes towards Jews or towards the Jewish question, in most countries of East Central Europe, Russia included, communism offered the first real opportunity for Jews to participate in national politics on a wide scale. And this was a striking phenomenon in itself, as uncomfortable and awkward as the communist leaders (again: the Jews as well as nonJews) may have felt about the conspicuous presence of leading activists of Jewish descent among them. How did they cope with the issue? Were the anti-Semitic political campaigns of the late 1940s inspired by the uncomfortable presence and visibility of Jewish communists? And were Jewish communists disproportionately victimised during the lateStalinist and early post-Stalinist purges because they were Jewish, because they were Stalinist, or both? This book’s findings are based on a combination of primary sources and secondary literature. To reconstruct the myth of Jewish Communism is not particularly complicated. I have gone through hundreds of relevant anti-Semitic publications, which can be found in the main historical libraries worldwide. To do research on the actual presence of Jews in the communist movement, on the role the Jewish question played in internal party debates and external party policies, is an altogether different matter. Data are scattered, incomplete and unreliable. My analysis is based on the information other historians have collected over the last few decades. Language formed another problem. The myth of Jewish Communism was a phenomenon of truly international proportions. Given the fact that I had the intention to write a comparative analysis, language barriers have inevitably tilted my research to specific countries. Whenever possible I read books from other countries in translation: in English, French, German, Russian, Polish, or Dutch. The primary geographical focus is that of East Central Europe. The main timeframe is the interwar years and the first post-war decade. The Soviet Union is occasionally taken into account, to the extent that it is needed to comprehend developments in Poland, Hungary and the other neighbouring countries of East Central Europe. The same goes for NaziGermany. A study on the historic relevance of the myth of Jewish Communism cannot exclude Germany from consideration. Both during the early 1920s, when notions of the Jewish World Conspiracy and of Jewish Communism reached their peak, and from 1933 onwards, when it became the nucleus of the National Socialist Weltanschauung and one 13

The Myth of Jewish Communism

of the major motivations of the Holocaust, Germany was the “heartland” of the myth. Moreover, particularly during the 1920s, publications from Germany, France, and, to a lesser extent, the Anglo-Saxon world, strongly influenced anti-Semitic writers and activists in East Central Europe. Books and brochures crossed borders easily and were frequently translated. This book is limited in time and place, as well as in subject matter. It is a historical interpretation of a very specific and by now largely extinct phenomenon: the identification of Jews with communism. The issue has lost most of its earlier ferocity. It can still arouse emotions, but it essentially remains where it belongs: confined to the realm of historical writing. I hope The Myth of Jewish Communism fills in some of the remaining blank spots in the three fields of research to which it belongs: the histories of anti-Semitism, of East European Jewry, and of communism.

14

CHAPTER 1

The Debate If there was ever a final rehearsal for the Holocaust, it occurred in Russia, in the former Pale of Settlement, in the first few years after the October 1917 coup d’état. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed during the Russian Civil War, mostly in the Ukraine, by anti-Bolshevik groups and the armed forces of Symon Petliura and his allies. Jews were held collectively responsible for the communist takeover in Russia and for the real or imagined atrocities committed by the Red Army. As the chief-rabbi of Moscow once reportedly said to Trotsky (“or Lev Davidovich Bronstein as his real name is”, the standard phrase by all those who considered him to be the “Jew-Communist” par excellence): “The Trotsky’s make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills” (quoted in Muller 1988: 29). The rabbi’s ominous view was widely shared. Rivers of Jewish blood were shed in the Ukraine to avenge Jews’ participation in the Communist Party, wrote the Jewish and Russian-born journalist Elias Hurwicz in Das neue Europa in 1920. As outrageous as the identification of Jews with Bolshevism may be, he claimed, nich zuletzt Schuld daran tragen jene kommunistischen Juden, die in ihrem Allmenschenträume gegen die kräfte der Wirklichkeit, zu denen auch die Nationagefühle gehören, das Mass des zulässigen und des Taktes verletzt haben” (Hurwicz-Berlin 1920: 20).

Hurwicz’ observation would be repeated by many of his Jewish contemporaries, as well as, post factum, by many historians. In a critique of Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the so-called “non-Jewish Jew”, which plays a crucial role in the historiographical discussion on Jews and communism, Yisrael Gutman asserts: He does not bother to note, nor even hint, that a number of his heroes caused inestimable harm to their compatriots, the Jewish nation, which they often reviled, and, at best, completely denied. This avoidance is characteristic. In the eyes of their detractors, these revolutionaries who pretended to be saviours of mankind remained Jews and, albeit unintentionally, added a very significant and powerful dimension to modern anti-Semitism and the Jewish tragedy in Europe” (Yisrael Gutman, “On the Character of Nazi Antisemitism”, in Almog 1988: 351). 15

The Myth of Jewish Communism

Additionally, Judeo-Bolshevism was a hugely effective, if not, as Hannah Arendt put it, the most “efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda” (Arendt 1979: 354). The notion of an international Jewish conspiracy provided National Socialism with both the ideological justification and the political urgency necessary to carry out two of its major and causally linked ambitions: to annihilate European Jewry and to destroy communist Russia. Jewish Communism was the nucleus or “core” of Adolf Hitler’s Weltanschauung (Kershaw 2000: 325). Whether Hitler was primarily driven by anti-Jewish or by anti-communist ideas may be a matter of dispute among historians, but the combination of the two convictions certainly obsessed him. The identification of Jews with radicalism is as old as modern politics. Jews have been consistently perceived as radical revolutionaries aiming to undermine the Holy Trinity of state, nation, and religion – particularly in the politically volatile parts of East Central Europe. The myth of Jewish Communism stood in a long tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment, but was more than just the latest variant of an age-old prejudice. It represented anti-Jewish thinking in its most political and violent form. It proved an unusually powerful label, which quickly assimilated the minds of those who felt threatened by the unforeseen and unprecedented political changes of the years following the Great War. It was instrumental in mobilising the most destructive variant of anti-Semitism that Europe had ever witnessed. The thesis of Jewish Communism was not only persistent, but also widespread. Numerous books, brochures, pamphlets, and articles were published on the subject, particularly during the interwar years and especially in Germany and France. The most popular publications were translated into various languages, only adding to the pile of works by local authors. “The question of the creative role played by the Jews and their participation en masse in Russian Bolshevism is the burning topic of the day all over the world”, as the Russian-Jewish attorney Arnold Margolin wrote in 1926 (Margolin 1926: 2). The notion of Jewish communism was even more powerful than the myth it built on: the Jewish World Conspiracy, of which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an early climax and a forceful synthesis (Mosse 1978: 117). This Holy Book of radical anti-Semitic thought was a forgery concocted by the Russian secret police on the basis of two mid-19th century texts seeking to prove Jewish intentions to secretly establish a world government (Cohn 1967: 122). First published in Russia in 1903, the Protocols would reach the four corners of the globe after the Great War. In 19191920, editions of the Protocols appeared in Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States, Italy, Scandinavia, Poland, Japan and even in the Middle East (Damascus). Sales in Germany quickly exceeded 16

The Debate

120,000 copies. The French weekly La Documentation Catholique had been the first to publish parts of the Protocols in Western Europe (Poliakov 1988 (b): 155). The book went through three editions in 1920 alone. The Polish edition was sold out in a year and immediately reprinted. Benjamin Segel, a Galician-born publicist and a specialist on Jewish folklore, ridiculed the “incalculable number of news paper articles, brochures, pamphlets and books”, which tried to force him and his contemporaries to believe that Jews, and Jews alone, were responsible for the tragedy of Bolshevism. But he did admit that “one can certainly claim that no other recent books in world literature reached a comparable distribution” (Segel 1926: 17-18). What was most absurd about the Jewish World Conspiracy was not the lunacy of the myth, as the American Jew William Hard wrote in 1920, “but […] the absolutely amazing effort made by so many people in so many places to prove that it exists” (Hard 1920: 5). Segel and Hard dismissed these publications as products of sheer foolishness, but others took them very seriously. The young nationalists who murdered Germany’s minister of Foreign Affairs Walter Rathenau in March 1922 confessed their belief that Rathenau was one of 300 “Elders” preparing to surrender their country to Bolshevik Russia. The Protocols became the most widely distributed book after the Bible (Henri Rollin, quoted in Cohn 1967: 17). It circulated rapidly throughout the Anglo-Saxon world (as would the myth of Jewish Communism), including as far off as Australia (Jones 1933). Henry Ford’s The Dearborn Independent was particularly instrumental in popularising the myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy in the United States. As was his book, The International Jew, which reached 500,000 copies within a short period of time and was translated into sixteen languages. Ford’s articles in The Dearborn Independent were collected and reprinted in Germany by the guru of German anti-Semitism, Theodor Fritsch, and reached their twenty-first impression by 1922. “Whole shiploads” of The International Jew were sent abroad to countries as remote as Romania and Hungary (Segel 1926: 19). Ford would later distance himself, albeit half-heartedly, from his publications. In Britain, the Protocols was published by the otherwise respectable firm of Eyre & Spottiswoode. In late 1919, the London Times ran a discussion, inspired by the Protocols, on whether Bolshevik rule in Russia, and all the horrors it involved, should be interpreted as Jewish revenge. In August 1921, only after the Times had reported that the Protocols was a forgery, did its credibility diminish. The hype was over. The myth would rarely reach the serious media again. Nor would it find its way into official documents. No prominent politician in the Anglo-Saxon world would ever again support it in public. 17

The Myth of Jewish Communism

The idea of Jewish vengeance was less exotic than it seemed. Even among those who were essentially sympathetic to the Jewish cause, Bolshevik rule was widely regarded a means of retaliation by Russia’s Jews. A long tradition of anti-Jewish policies by the Russian imperial authorities had transformed the Jews into a malevolent revolutionary force, bent on punishing the guilty Russian people. The American president Woodrow Wilson was apparently convinced of the Jewish revenge thesis (Szajkowski 1974: 153). Particularly during the civil war in Russia, the atrocities of Bolshevism had become intimately connected with the image of the Jewish commissar. Communism, as the young Winston Churchill put it, was a “disease of the Jewish body politic.” In February 1920 he wrote: “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people” (The Times, February 8, 1920, quoted in Almog 1990: 92). Churchill’s vision of Zionism and communism as the two great messianic ideologies of the Jewish people was far from unique. At around the same time, the American ambassador to Poland reported to his ministry, “the Soviet regime is in the hands of the Jews and their oppression is Jewish oppression” (quoted in Szajkowski 1974: 154, 320, notes 30, 31). The US State Department made a practice of noting which of the key Soviet functionaries were Jewish. High British officials, “including members of the Cabinet” were also convinced of the Jewish nature of communism. Lord Balfour was “inclined to believe” that Bolshevism and disturbances of a like nature were “directly traceable to the Jews of the world”. He even proposed to transfer the “best” Jews to Palestine, so they could be held “responsible for the orderly behaviour of the rest of the Jews throughout the world” (Colonel Edward M. House, December 13, 1918, quoted in Szajkowski 1974: 174, 327, note 42). Balfour was not the only person to suggest that Zionism would help channel Jewish revolutionary energy into a more acceptable direction. Zionists availed themselves of the same stereotypes. Chaim Weizmann reportedly foresaw the massive conversion of the Jews of Poland to Bolshevism if the hopes of the Zionists would not be realised, thereby destroying, he threateningly added, the objectives of the Allies in East Central Europe (Mark Levene, “Britain, a British Jew, and Jewish Relations With the New Poland: The Making of the Polish Minorities Treaty of 1919”, in Polonsky 1994: 32, note 63). And even in openly antiSemitic circles the close association of Zionism with Jews’ revolutionary leanings served as an argument in favour of the national “gathering” of the Jews in Palestine (Prohaszka 1920: 13-14; Wójcicki 1919: 33). Part of the explanation for the Jewish World Conspiracy’s widespread appeal was the ease with which it could be manipulated to incriminate one’s own particular enemy through guilt by association. In 18

The Debate

the French translation of the Protocols by Roger Lambelin, a supporter of Charles Maurras and his Action Française, Jewish subversive activities were linked with American, British, and German imperialism – each aimed equally against the French republic. In the Times’ series on the Russian revolution the Bolsheviks were portrayed as German agents (a sentiment more broadly shared during the war) and the October Revolution was seen as a “Jewish-German invasion of Russia” (Cohn: 1967: 166-167, 155). Among the Germans who spread the myth, not only Russia but also Great Britain was allegedly under Jewish control. The fact that any real or potential enemy could be implicated proved to be one of the most attractive and enduring dimensions of the notion of Jewish Communism. The myth of Jewish Communism reached particularly acute proportions in Eastern Europe after the First and Second World Wars. The obstinacy of religiously inspired anti-Jewish prejudices and the presence of large Jewish communities, strong national identities under conditions of interrupted, flawed or failed state-formation, disputed borders and volatile relations among neighbouring countries, and of course the proximity of the Soviet state and Soviet-sponsored attempts at communist coups, gave the issue a specific edge. Minorities were generally considered as politically suspect; Jews were seen as a national liability. The Israeli historian Jacob Talmon refers to the “gigantic confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution”, which was “destined to be unrolled upon the Jewish bodies on the plains of Poland and Russia” (Talmon 1970: 66-67). Anti-Semitism was not only the nucleus of this counter-revolutionary Weltanschauung. Together with anti-communism, it was probably the only political sentiment, which acquired a true supranational quality in the region. As the American historian Joseph Rothschild put it: “Indeed, it appears, that the only real potent internationalistic ideology in the area at that time was neither Marxism, on the left hand, nor dynastic loyalism, on the right, but anti-Semitism based on conviction and expedience” (Rothschild 1990: 10). It was the specific constellation of anti-Semitism and anti-communism combined with the actual, unanticipated, and threatening political change, which awarded the notion of Jewish Communism broad and enduring legitimacy in East Central Europe. Hungary offers a vivid example. The short-lived Soviet Republic of 1919, in which Hungarians of Jewish descent played a prominent role, was a “singly traumatic experience” for most Hungarians (Katzburg 1981: 12). The revolution, itself a product of the existential crisis Hungary experienced after the war, stands out as the main reason that the attitude and behaviour vis-à-vis the country’s Jews would differ so strongly from pre-war times. Oszkar Jászi, a Hungarian sociologist and one of the founders of the Radical Party experienced the 19

The Myth of Jewish Communism

revolution at first hand. Jászi was a member of the cabinet of Count Mihály Károlyi. The formation of the Károlyi government, in October 1918, had been a revolutionary event in itself. Outspokenly antiaristocratic, it represented a break, though not a lasting one, with the country’s traditional Magyar noble’s political supremacy. Confronted, however, with the territorial ambitions of its neighbours and the cold shoulder of the Allied Powers, Károlyi felt forced to invite his social democratic coalition members to come to an agreement with the communists, and to form a new government. On March 21, 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. Under the uncompromising leadership of Béla Kún and his fellow-commissars, most of them of Jewish background, Hungary went through the first serious communist experiment outside of Russia. Although it lasted only 133 days, it made a tremendous impression, both within and outside of the country. It became the symbol of Bolshevik expansionism and of Jewish communist rule beyond the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Republic fell, Jászi, who was of partial Jewish extraction, had already left the country. For good reason, as he wrote in his memoirs about these volatile days: In the judgement of the great mass of the people, who tend always to simplify and symbolise issues, the Bolshevist domination had the appearance of the domination of the town proletariat over the countryside, and of foreign race, the Jews, over the Christian community. It is not unnatural therefore, that popular feeling grew violently anti-town and anti-Semitic (Jászi 1924: 156).

And not only “popular feeling”, he might have added. The antiSemitism of the Miklós Horthy regime was not only “wild” and “extravagant” as Jászi wrote, it was first and foremost “political”, part and parcel of a counter-revolutionary restoration. In the Polish Second Republic the link between Jews and communism was an equally prominent and enduring theme in political debate and the popular press. For the proponents of the campaign to “rid Poland of Jews”, it was the strongest card available, as a recent analysis of Poland’s interwar Catholic press demonstrates. If not every Jew was a communist, certainly every communist was Jewish. Such was the tenor of most reports (Franciszek Adamksi, “The Jewish Question in Polish Religious Periodicals in the Second Republic: The Case of the Przegląd katolicki”, and Anna Landau-Czajka, “The Image of the Jew in the Catholic Press During the Second Republic”, in Polonsky 1994: 138, 146-175). In Romania, as Stephen Fischer-Galati opines, the stereotype of Jewish Communism “made little impression in the population” at large, there was no Jewish communist conspiracy, and neither was there a meaningful recognition of such an enemy (Stephen Fischer-Galati, 20

The Debate

“Fascism, Communism, and the Jewish Question in Romania”, in Vago 1974: 162). Nevertheless, the identification of Jews with communism was the basic ideological assumption of the fascist Iron Guard, one of the major rightwing extremist movements in the region during the Interbellum. Elsewhere in the region, in Czechoslovakia and in the Balkans in particular, anti-Semitism proved less relevant, having failed to become a key political phenomenon. Only in East Central Europe would the myth of Jewish Communism survive the Second World War. German and Soviet atrocities, the occupation by the Red Army, the establishment of communist regimes, and the conspicuous role of Jews in the higher echelons of some of these regimes, created the ideal breeding ground for another wave of political anti-Semitism, for which the identification of Jews with communism would be of utmost importance.

1.1. A Controversial Issue Given the historical impact of the notion of Jewish Communism, the issue remains seriously understudied. There is a striking discrepancy between the historic relevance many historians attach to the political stereotype of Jewish Communism and the time and effort they have spent examining it. It is not only, and not even primarily the scarcity of reliable data which explains this discrepancy, as I will argue, but rather the political and ideological sensitivity of the Jewish Communism myth that explains why so few historians have researched it. “Not surprisingly […] the whole issue of Żydo-Komuna [is] rarely discussed in either Israeli or Jewish forums”, Scott Ury writes (Ury 2000: 211). The connection of Jews with revolution is something like “a foundling, a waif, an abandoned child”, as Jacob Talmon adds. “No one is willing to claim it for its own sake” (Talmon 1970: 1). Among the thousands of books on the (modern) history of East European Jewry, one searches in vain for comparative studies on the identification of Jews with communism. As the bibliography of this book testifies, references to the historical link between communism and Jews are plentiful, and many related works having been published (Checinski 1982; Frankel 2004; Gross 2006; Kersten 1992; Levy 2001; Silberner 1983; Slezkine 2006; Vetter 1995; and Wistrich 1976). General studies on the issue remain scarce, however. Jaff Schatz’ collective biography of the “Generation” of Jewish communists in Poland (Schatz 1991) deserves mention in this respect, as does a comparable study by Karin Hartewig on the Jewish communists in the German Democratic Republic (Hartewig 2000). Only relatively recently, however, was the first book-length analysis of the myth published: Jüdischer Bolschewismus (Jewish Bolshevism) by the German historian Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein. Based exclusively on 21

The Myth of Jewish Communism

western-language sources and focusing solely on Russia, the book excludes most of post-war communist East Central Europe from its analysis (Rogalla von Bieberstein 2002). Jewish Communism remains a sensitive issue. Peter Novick identifies the myth as one of the “more serious constraints on public Jewish discourse” in the United States about the Holocaust and Nazism in the early Cold War years. Jewish organisations did their utmost to combat the myth but, as Novick asserts, it was “a difficult brief”, if only because many American communists at the time were Jewish (Novick 2001: 93, 302, note 26). The notion of Jewish Communism remained so controversial because every qualification of its illusory, fallacious character could also be read as a partial confirmation of the anti-Semitic nature of this myth. No historian has ever seriously immersed him or herself in the question of whether Jews actually used the blood of children to bake their matzos or whether they really poisoned wells or conspired against the Christian Occident. So why should another anti-Jewish stereotype, that of Jewish Communism, be taken more seriously? This is not a very convincing argument though. As von Bieberstein writes: Wenngleich die Rede vom “Jüdischen Bolschewismus” eine falsche und böswillige Verallgemeinerung darstellt, lassen (die) Fakten doch folgendes deutlich werden: Viele machen es sich aus Unkenntnis der komplizierten osteuropäischen Geschichte oder aus deswegen, weil ihnen die Fakten unangenehm sind, zu leicht, wenn sie diesen Mythos als reinen Wahn verwerfen und keiner Analyse würdig erachten (Rogalla von Bieberstein 2002: 140).

Nowhere did the myth of Jewish Communism remain as persistently controversial as it did in the countries of communist Eastern Europe. Even under the relatively undogmatic regimes in Poland and Hungary, which allowed if not stimulated the rediscovery of Jewish history in their countries (partly for reasons of foreign consumption), various taboos remained, including the historic link between the communist movement and segments of the Jewish community. Rather no party history, no party heroes – many communist ideologues must have thought – than a history of Jewish communists or Jewish heroes. Only the collapse of communism allowed for a full reinterpretation of the Jewish history of Eastern Europe. Historical writing was no longer determined by the political constraints of the communist order. Libraries and archives opened their doors to non-partisan research. Communism was gone, as were many of the restrictions, controversies, and emotions it had raised. Interestingly, the identification of Jews with communism, always among the most suspiciously guarded taboos, survived as a contentious issue – if for moral, rather than political reasons. 22

The Debate

The notion of Jewish Communism is beset by questions of a political, emotional, ethical, and empirical nature. Terminology matters. Was there ever anything like Jewish Communism? Many communists of Jewish descent seem to have done their utmost either to distinguish their Jewishness from their political radicalism or to adapt their Jewishness to the causes and needs of their parties (as was attempted by many activists in the Jewish sections of communist parties and regimes). Most likely, radicals who fused their revolutionary concerns with a genuine commitment to being Jewish, would not have opted for the communist movement. There were alternatives, at least during the interwar years. Social democracy which, although it did not adopt a principally different attitude towards religion or ethnicity, was a more moderate and pluralist movement. There were also explicitly Jewish radical parties, such as the Bund and some members of the Zionist family. The communist movement generally offered few possibilities to acknowledge one’s “Jewishness”. In other words, there may have been quite a few communists of Jewish descent, but there were considerably fewer “Jewish communists”, i.e. Jews whose communism was consciously Jewish. On the whole, however, the relationship between Jews and communism seems to have been far more complex than either proponents or opponents of the myth tended to believe. Identities came in many shades. Multiple identities were combined, including the seemingly antagonistic characteristics of being both Jewish and communist. Recent research indicates that the tendency to regard Jews who were prominently active in the communist movement as typical “non-Jewish Jews” (Tamara Deutscher, “Introduction. The Education of a Jewish Child”, in Deutscher 1968: 22), who shared little in common with their (former) Jewish environment and had cut all ties to their Jewish pasts, lacks nuance. Numbers matter too. One of the main arguments against the identification of Jews with communism is the simple fact that the Jews who were active in the communist movement constituted only a minor portion of the Jewish population. As empirically correct as this observation is, its relevance is limited in the context of Jewish Communism. There may have been few radicals among Jews, as Schatz writes in The Generation, but “there have been many Jews among radicals” (Schatz 1991: 13). The fact of the matter is that people of Jewish descent were disproportionately (as relates to their share of the general population) represented in the communist movement. Moreover, their significance within most communist parties often considerably exceeded their strength in numbers. How important are figures if these can never be properly established and have long served to maintain a mythical vision of reality? Available information on the participation of Jews in communist politics is scarce, 23

The Myth of Jewish Communism

incomplete, often biased, and therefore difficult to interpret. There are official figures, and historians have used them. But in general, party statistics failed to include or obscured the ethnic background of the leadership and rank and file. Party activists often behaved similarly. When registering for membership, Jews “nationalised” their names and changed or hid their biographies, whether voluntarily or under pressure. In other words, we simply lack the empirical data to plausibly establish who among the rank and file and the sympathisers of communism in East Central Europe were Jewish and who were not (Pieter Niedermüller, “Der Kommunist”, in Schoeps 1995: 273). Jewish Communism is thus not only a contentious but also an arcane issue. A lack of reliable data makes speculation inevitable as pertains both to the views and motivations of individual communist activists, as well as to the historical substance of the Jewish Communist notion as such. “It is indeed a charged, infinitely sensitive, not to say explosive subject, while being at the same time maddeningly vague and elusive, with no definite structure”, opines Talmon. “The dangers of arbitrary speculation and unsubstantiated generalisations are calculated to make it still more of an irritant than it would in any case be” (Talmon 1970: 1-2). The propagators of the notion of Jewish Communism were not interested in whether or not the people they identified as communist Jews regarded themselves as Jewish. Since the Judeo-Communism myth equates the Jew with communism, how communists of Jewish origin, on whose apparent political ideas and activities the myth was built, actually applied to their Jewishness was of only secondary importance. Those who believed that revolution reflected the pernicious Jewish spirit did not need “real” Jews. After all, Jewish Communism is an anti-Semitic myth. Fighting fantasy with figures is futile. Still, I do think that the historian has few alternatives but to take statistics seriously and to make the best use of the available data. The actual participation of Jews in the communist movement is relevant to the discussion. It pertains to one of the central issues of research on antiSemitism, namely the extent to which myths relates to the actual behaviour of people, including those who spread the myths as well as those against whom the myth was targeted. “Mythology, it is the opposite of history”, write Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg in their history of the world of revolutionary Jews (Brossat 1983: 24). This seems doubtful. The relationship between history and myth is far more complex than a categorical denial would suggest. One may completely reject the mythical dimension of Judeo-Communism, yet still recognise the element of reality from which the myth is derived. The notion of Jewish Communism is an anti-Semitic stereotype. However, the dynamics of this stereotype or myth, its origins, rise and 24

The Debate

decline, have been determined by the vicissitudes of its two constituent parts: political anti-Jewish thinking or anti-Semitism and anticommunism. As an offshoot of the Jewish World Conspiracy, the rise and relevance of the myth of Jewish Communism is largely covered by the modernisation approach to anti-Semitism. As William Brustein defines it: The process of modernisation embodied the emergence of liberalism and capitalism, which, among other things, led to the political, social, and economic emancipation of Jews. Jewish social mobility and Jewish competition elicited fears among many Gentiles, reinforcing anti-Semitic attitudes (Brustein 2003: 35).

If wielding real political power is considered to be the ultimate form (or appearance) of “emancipation”, and there is a strong argument for this, then early communist rule, wherein Jews participated conspicuously, could indeed be regarded as a defining moment in this process of modernisation and the anti-Semitic sentiments it released. The modernisation thesis, however, cannot explain the temporal and spatial variations of anti-Semitism, as Brustein rightly argues (Brustein 2003: 38). He suggests alternative interpretations: the scapegoat thesis (but why the Jews?) and specific national political cultures (but again, how to account for temporal variations?). Still, both approaches seem relevant for an explanation of the Jewish Communism phenomenon. Generally, the interpretation of the myth of Jewish Communism combines broad theoretical interpretations of anti-Semitism with the specific timeframe of communist power. Jewish Communism would reach its huge political dimensions because of very real events: the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the communist take-overs in East Central Europe. The myth of Jewish Communism contains virtually all the elements of what Gavin Langmuir defines as a “xenophobic assertion”: Propositions that grammatically attribute a socially menacing conduct to an outgroup and all its members but are empirically based only on the conduct of a historical minority of the members; they neglect other, unthreatening, characteristics of the outgroup; and they do not acknowledge that there are great differences between the individuals who compose the outgroup as there are between the individuals who compose the group (Langmuir 1990: 328).

The crucial feature of a xenophobic assertion is that it attributes actions by some members of a group to all people labelled as members of this group. It renders the “abstraction” of the group more real than any of the “individual components”. A xenophobic assertion suggests a cognitive relationship between the abstraction of the outgroup and that of a specific social threat, in our case: the threat of communism (Langmuir 1990: 329-330). Gorden Allport comes with a comparable definition: “a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a 25

The Myth of Jewish Communism

category. Its function is to justify (rationalise) conduct in relation to that category” (Allport 1954: 191). “Whatever Jews are like, are not like, do, or don’t do, the prejudice finds its rationalisation in some presumed aspects of ‘Jewish essence’”, Allport writes. Jews could be capitalists and communists at the same time, fully contradictory perhaps, but equally subversive and genuinely Jewish. If we elaborate on Allport’s definition and regard a stereotype primarily as an exaggerated belief, it should contain at least a nucleus or core of reality. “Generally”, Allport writes, “a category starts to grow up from a ‘kernel of truth’” (Allport 1954: 195). This nucleus of truth is understood as being but a minor feature of the targeted group, which is disproportionately significant and comes to define the group as a whole. This kernel of truth may not make a myth less mythical or a stereotype less stereotypical, but it could help to explain why these figments of the imagination reached the proportions they ultimately reached. After all, real conflicts were involved, and people of Jewish descent did play a prominent role in the communist movement of Russia and East Central Europe. As Helen Fein writes: “Hostile but realistic assertions about groups may be produced by the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ in which the dominant group casts the minority or out-group in roles that evoke behaviour confirming its expectations” (Helen Fein, “Dimensions of Antisemitism: Attitudes, Collective Accusations, and Action”, in Fein 1987: 71). What do these theoretical observations tell us about the identification of Jews with communism? What are the different positions contemporaries and historians have taken on the issue? If we broaden the equation of Jews and communism to the discussion on Jews and revolutionary policies, three interpretations can be distinguished. Firstly, historically Jewry and revolution are intimately linked. Secondly, Jews have nothing in common with revolutionary politics. The myth of Jewish Communism lacks any basis in reality. And thirdly, a comparatively large proportion of Jews were in fact active in the revolutionary movement, which need not imply, however, an inherent affinity between radical political ideology or behaviour and the Jewish community at large. For those authors who fully identified Jews with revolutionary politics, the equation was not so much an intellectual opinion as it was a political conviction. Still, it would be incorrect, as will be discussed in the next chapter, to lump all contemporary propagators of the Jewish Communism myth together. Obviously, they all originated from the notion of the Jewish World Conspiracy, within which the association of Jews and communism was rooted. However, various authors emphasised different aspects of Jewish Communism, and they did so in different ways: from the most banal and vicious racist explanations to more 26

The Debate

sophisticated political and quasi-scholarly interpretations. Some publications are utterly absurd; others demonstrate at least a modicum of truth, or the appearance of scholarly objectivity. A complete identification of Jews and communism is absent in current historiography. Some authors, however, do go beyond the explanation of why relatively many Jews were attracted to revolutionary politics, and suggest an inherent, if not causal, relationship between Jews or Judaism and revolutionary politics (Bloch 1966: 43; Lerner 1992: 3, 4, 5, 20). In other words, they perceive the radicalism of individual Jews as an expression of their Jewishness. Everyone knows that “Jewish radicalism” exists, the American publicist Robert Wolfe writes in Remember to Dream, but many try to neglect it, if only to avoid any identification with the “malicious” and “wrongheaded” interpretation of the link between Jews and communism by anti-Semites (Wolfe 1994: 5, 8-10). To this tradition of Jewish radicalism Wolfe adds the devastating changes in Europe during and immediately after the First World War, which he, like a significant number of Europeans at the time, considers to be a “stunning reversal in the balance of forces between pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish elements in European society.” Jewish influence reached its zenith in early 20th century Europe, Wolfe opines. Marxism, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Bolshevik coup d’état, the Soviet Republics in Hungary and Bavaria were all the astonishing results of a “Jewish revolution” (Wolfe 1994: 136). From a scholarly perspective, Wolfe’s Remember to Dream may be seriously flawed, but it does touch on an important issue. Wolfe draws a link between the changes in the relationship between the majority of Europe’s Jews and their Christian environment on the one hand and the sudden and unprecedented political prominence of Jews in a number of countries, including communist Russia, on the other. Both events were brought about by the collapse of the great multinational empires and by the establishment of independent, quasi-nation states in Europe. Wolfe’s observations not only reflect the feelings of uncertainty and danger (or opportunity) that many Europeans must have shared at the time, they are also of direct relevance to the issue of Jewish Communism. Still, Wolfe’s interpretation of the “Jewish Revolution” should be dismissed. Jewish radicals, among others, may have brought about these revolutionary events, but this does not imply that they were Jewish revolutionary events or that they reflected a specific Jewish power. There is more than a conceptual difference between Jewish power and power by Jews. Wolfe may stand alone in his specific interpretation of Jewish radicalism, Jewish power or influence, but there are more historians who question the stereotypical image of the powerlessness of Jews in the Diaspora. 27

The Myth of Jewish Communism

The German historian Ernst Nolte, praised for his early studies on European fascism and loathed for his more recent work on the historical interrelationship between Bolshevism and National Socialism, considers it absurd that the affinity between Jews and communism (Bolshevism) is still a taboo among his fellow historians. The affinity is obvious, he claims, if not so much among the Jews of Germany perhaps, then certainly among the less assimilated Ostjuden. Nolte, who is always eager to “objectify” or “historicise” National Socialism, to free it from its alleged uniqueness (the metaphysical dimension of “absolute evil”) and to return it to its historical proportions, finds the limits of German history far too narrow to adequately interpret National Socialism. A wider dimension is needed – the by now broadly accepted perspective of a “European Civil War”, 1914-1945 (Nolte 1987), of which the clash between Bolshevism and National Socialism formed the nucleus. Nolte asserts that those who do not wish to see the atrocities of National Socialism as the mirror image of earlier cruelties committed by Bolshevism, draw a visibly distorted picture of 20th century history. There is a “causal nexus” between the Gulag and Auschwitz, he claims (Nolte 1993: 394). And Nolte poses questions which few historians have either wanted or dared to ask: if Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism was at least partly legitimate or reasonable, can the same be said for the other crucial element of his Weltanschauung, for anti-Semitism? Were the Jews simply “victims” or “scapegoats” of National Socialism? And was this true of all Jews? Or was there an inherent affinity between communism and Jewry, East European Jewry in particular? Nolte’s work demands close reading. It is polemical and confusing. Outspoken views are often presented in an ambivalent manner. Overall though, Nolte tends to answer these questions to the affirmative. He morally rejects the antiSemitic notion of Jewish Bolshevism but does regard the link between Jews and communism as conceivable, even understandable. Subjectively speaking, Nolte contends, the equation of Jews with communism is “genuine”. Hitler, however, exaggerated it for ideological purposes. He transformed rational views into mythologizing fantasies. Be that as it may, Nolte does regard the alleged relationship between Jewry and communism as the “rational core” of National Socialist anti-Semitism (Nolte 1993: 378, 418). Nolte’s dubious reputation overshadows the merits of his earlier work and undermines his position in the scholarly discussion. Very few historians would go so far as to claim that Hitler’s murderous antiSemitism had a nucleus of rationality, and certainly not the identification of Jews with Bolshevism. For a long time, the strict denial of any affinity between Jewry and revolution has been the dominant interpretation among historians. Those who take this position start from an abso28

The Debate

lute contradistinction between Jewish traditions and interests on the one hand, and radical political ideas, including communist doctrine, on the other. Jews had nothing to gain from political radicalism, they claim. Jews were always among the first victims of revolutionary changes and were therefore naturally inclined to political conservatism. Those Jews who did confess to revolutionary ideas were essentially renegades. Their association with revolutionary politics was not conditioned by their Jewish environment or tradition, but as the historian Judd Teller opines, by their “self-hatred, symptomatic of a perverse identification with the anti-Jewish attitudes of the larger community” (Teller 1954: 161). These Jews had placed themselves outside of the Jewish world. The notion of Jewish Communism does not relate to the actual behaviour of Jews. It is a phantasm, “the biggest fallacy of all” (Rubinstein 1982: 230). The categorical denial of any historical affinity between Jews and radical politics seems as questionable as its counter-position; the idea that the two were inherently connected. Rejecting the mythical dimension of Jewish Communism still leaves many questions unanswered. Norman Cohn concludes that the notion of the Jewish World Conspiracy is the “modernised, secularised version of the popular medieval view of Jews as a league of sorcerers”, aimed at the ruination of Christendom. The fantasy of Jews as a “brotherhood of evil” was first conceived, he asserts, between the 2nd and the 4th century. Neither these early medieval chimeras nor their latter-day rendering had much to do, as Cohn sees it, “with real conflicts of interests between living people […]. What Jews really were or did or wanted, or what Jews possibly could be or do or want, had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter” (Cohn 1967: 16, 25). Daniel Goldhagen presents a comparable and equally unconvincing interpretation. He draws a distinction between the sources and consequences of anti-Semitism: “Anti-Semitism is always abstract in its conceptualisation and its source (being divorced from actual Jews), and always concrete and real in its effects” (Goldhagen 1996: 35). Goldhagen expresses the traditional view that anti-Semitism tells us nothing about Jews but everything about anti-Semites. Evidently, antiSemitic opinions do not necessarily to the actual behaviour of Jews. But to principally uncouple Jewish behaviour and anti-Jewish thinking is an ahistorical generalisation in and of itself. Goldhagen’s interpretation pertains to the (traditional) anti-Semitism of the German people. Cohn draws this conclusion with regard to the Jewish World Conspiracy. But do their views also apply to the identification of Jews with communism? Did the notion not relate in any way to the actual behaviour of Jews? The fact that a substantial and disproportionate number of Jews were prominent in the revolutionary movement in East Central Europe (and elsewhere) may not make the myth any less mythical, but it does reflect 29

The Myth of Jewish Communism

the real ideas and choices of many Jews and non-Jews, as well as the different interests and conflicts by which these were inspired. In this historiographical approach, the history of communism seems to be consciously “de-Judaised”. Jews are eliminated from the history of communism. The communist Jew is not a proper subject of Jewish history. Revolutionary Jews are considered to be part of the history of the revolutionary movement, not of Jewish history (Haberer 1995: xi). A third interpretation rejects both the full identification of Jews with revolutionary politics as well as the conviction that the myth of Jewish Communism lacks any basis in reality. These historians do accept the susceptibility of a relevant part of the Jewish population to radical political beliefs as an important historical phenomenon. They consider it as an important aspect of the history of communism and of the Jewish communities in East Central Europe. This explanation dominates the current historiographical debate.

1.2. Shifting Paradigms of Jewish History The evolving discussion on Jews and communism reflects a broader reorientation of the history of the Jews of East Central Europe. As stated in the introduction, Graetz’ paradigm of Leiden und Lernen had an enduring influence on scholarly interpretations of Jewish history: the vitality, creativity, and originality of the Jewish community on the one hand, and the dangers, the repression, and the suffering it was permanently exposed to, on the other. This interpretation has gradually lost ground. In more recent research, explanations that were once accepted at face value are now questioned and critically examined. In this context, the Israeli historian Ezra Mendelsohn refers to a “revisionist” interpretation of the history of East European Jewry, and of the Jews of Poland in particular (Ezra Mendelsohn, “Jewish Historiography on Polish Jewry in the Inter-War Period”, in Polonsky 1994: 12). There cannot be a revisionist approach without a “traditional” orientation. Mendelsohn defines this traditional position as the “‘official’ establishment Jewish attitude” (Mendelsohn, “Jewish Historiography”: 4); while others refer to it as the “Zionist-influenced Jewish master narrative of the 20th century” (Ury 2000: 213). There is no neat distinction between traditionalist and revisionist interpretations. One needs only to read the work of Hannah Arendt and her biting critique of the “irritating stereotypes […] of Jewish historiography” (Arendt 1979: xiii), to recognise that both interpretations cross generational, geographical, political and “ethnic” lines. Traditional and revisionist interpretations are ideal-typical categories. This differentiation may be as good or as bad as any other historiographical categorisation. It does reflect, however, explicitly different and competing approaches to the Jewish history of East Central Europe, 30

The Debate

as well as underlying conflicting political and ideological orientations. These are of crucial relevance to the discussion of the relationship between Jews and radical politics, including communism. What are the distinctive features of the traditional approach? Firstly, the traditional interpretation is (was) primarily guided by a powerful emotional and moral impulse, an extremely strong personal commitment on the part of the historian, often based on personal experience. Secondly, traditional historians generally follow Graetz’ dichotomous paradigm of the vitality and uniqueness of the cultural, intellectual, and, beginning in the second half of the 19th century, the political life of Eastern Europe’s Jews and, on the other hand, its unparalleled suffering and distress. The traditional interpretation emphasises passivity over responsibility, powerlessness over power, and contingency over choice. Moreover, traditionalist historians tend to analyse Jewish history in “collectivist” terms: the Jewish community, the anti-Semitic reaction. Revisionists on the other hand leave more scope for nuance. They recognise the need for differentiation, thereby offering a richer, more differentiated picture of Jewish life in East Central Europe. Finally, traditionalist historians emphasise the very same continuity of powerlessness, persecution, and repression in the history of the Jews that revisionists tend to seriously contextualise and modify. For a long time, the history of East European Jewry remained the domain of Jewish historians. They were often driven by the ambition to provide the scattered Jewish population with a particular sense of continuity and self-confidence. This accounts for the heavily ethnocentric dimension of Jewish historiography (Langmuir 1990: 47). Ethnocentrism, however, was not unique to Jewish history writing. History in the 19th and early 20th century was predominantly perceived as national history. A spirit of nationalism pervaded the craft of history in general. Although Jewish historiography was not immune to change, the characteristics of this specific instrumental concept of Jewish history proved remarkably persistent. Ezra Mendelsohn traces this ethnocentrism in the interpretation of interwar Polish history. He defines it as the “official vision” of the Jewish establishment – Zionists and other Jewish nationalists who consider anti-Semitism to be the ineluctable fate of the Jewish community and propose the “uniqueness” of Jewish suffering (Mendelsohn, “Jewish Historiography”: 12). When Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of the state of Israel, made his case before the allied peacemakers of the Versailles Conference in February 1919, he used identical arguments. He claimed to speak in the name of the people “who had suffered martyrdom for eighteen centuries” (Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference 1919, quoted in Macmillan 2001: 421). Lucy 31

The Myth of Jewish Communism

Dawidowicz, born into a Polish-Jewish family and raised in the United States, is a typical representative of the traditional orientation. While working on one of her major books, The War Against the Jews, Dawidowicz was dismayed to discover how deficiently historians had always dealt with the Holocaust. She writes: “I became haunted by the fear that the history of the 6 million murdered Jews would vanish from the earth as they themselves and their civilisation has vanished” (Dawidowicz 1981: 1). Dawidowicz was driven indeed “by an overriding sense of obligation and compulsion”, as the editor of her essays affirms, as well as by a strong “obligation to the murdered kin, the Jews of Europe; [the] compulsion to set down a record already seen by her as slipping away in forgetfulness and selective distortion” (Neal Kozody, “Introduction”, in Dawidowicz 1992: x). What goes for Dawidowicz goes for most traditional historians as well. Through their work they give testimony to their moral responsibility – to remember the Jewish past and the community they come from (a community which no longer existed) and to stress the continuity of Jewish life and history. The image of Jewish vitality accompanies the idea of Diaspora passivity, impotence, and powerlessness. They are two sides of the same coin. Graetz defined the Jews as principally a “spiritual nation”, without a substantive political history. Although this interpretation was principally criticised from within the Jewish community by historians as prominent as Salo Baron and Simon Dubnow, one of the founders of the Jewish autonomist movement, it would remain a central notion of the traditionalist approach. Although, not all traditionalists share Graetz’ notion that Jewish history is largely devoid of politics, many do seem to share his principal concept of the spiritual nation. Jewish history has mostly been studied from this angle. By contrast, “revisionist” historians claim that the key to Jewish survival cannot be found in theology, law, or any other incorporeal legacy only. Jewish political tradition, Jewish politics, and even Jewish “power” also need to be taken into account. David Biale defines power as “the ability of a people to control its relations to other peoples as well as its own internal political, cultural, religious, economic, and social life” (David Biale, “Modern Jewish Ideologies and the Historiography of Jewish Politics”, in Frankel 1994: 7). And he agrees that Jews were closer to the centres of political power and were sometimes better able to create inventive alliances with those in power than the traditionalist notion of Jewish powerlessness suggests (Biale, “Modern Jewish Ideologies”: 12; see also Biale 1987 and Paula E. Hyman, “The Dynamics of Social History”, in Frankel 1994: 12, 93). Jewish communities were able to secure high levels of autonomy and positions of privileged or protected status in various parts of Medieval Europe. The privilege to be 32

The Debate

protected, fragile though it may have been, was a sign of power in itself, as David Biale writes (Biale 1987: 65). Moreover, if one accepts that the concept of power in Jewish history is more than just Jews’ ability to do something for other Jews, individual Jews had ample opportunity to transform their ideas into political reality: from the Court Jews in the 17th century to the Jewish revolutionaries in the 20th century. Whether this ability to act in the interests of other Jews was coupled with the desire to do so, remains to be seen. The idea of Jewish powerlessness contrasts sharply with the popular perceptions commonly held by contemporary non-Jews, who tend to believe that Jews were closely connected to those in power. In other words, Jews were generally not identified with powerlessness, but with power. Jews’ seclusion from Christian society reinforced this image. Hannah Arendt has elaborated on the issue of Jewish power and wealth. She shares the revisionist argument that economic and political power was an important feature of Jewish history, but as she asserts, by the end of the 19th century Jews had lost most of it. When the political map of East Central Europe evolved from predominantly multinational empires to exclusively national states, many powerful Jewish individuals lost their prominent positions. State power was increasingly “nationalised”. Some specific services of Jews, particularly in state finance, were no longer required. Individual Jews may have continued to wield economic power, but they were no longer at the service or under the protection of the state. They may have retained their wealth, but they lost their power. Arendt perceives the increase of anti-Semitism around that time primarily as a reaction to the “emptiness” of this Jewish wealth. Real power enforces conformity and obedience. Wealth without power, however, only generates contempt. By the time of the Great War, Jews had been deprived of their former influence. They had atomised into a “herd of wealthy individuals”, entirely impotent as a group and regarded by many as being parasitic and redundant. “In an imperialist age”, Arendt writes, Jewish wealth had become insignificant to a Europe with no balance of power between its nations and of inter-European solidarity, the nonnational, inter-European Jewish element became an object of universal hatred because of its useless wealth, and of contempt because of its lack of power (Arendt 1979: 15).

The sporadic and precarious influence wielded by individual Jews was only loosely connected with the notion of Jewish power that inspired so many in East Central Europe during the first half of the last century. Even without the myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy or the notion of Jewish Bolshevism, they would still have harboured antiJewish ideas. These were based on other circumstances too. First of all, 33

The Myth of Jewish Communism

the full and formal emancipation of Jews in most countries before or immediately after the Great War and their access to positions of political prominence (which was very different from the “behind-the scenes” influence of the 19th century Jewish financiers) was an important event as such. Secondly, the fact that these unprecedented changes occurred mostly under conditions of revolutionary changes and turmoil added to feelings of insecurity and retribution. And thirdly, the considerable, specific, and very visible economic weight, which Jews carried in most countries was an important separate impetus for anti-Semitic ideas and sentiments. Diversity and divisiveness were more prominent characteristics of East European Jewish life than the traditional image of a closed and culturally uniform community elicits. According to traditional interpretations, the Jewish people are “one”, a single whole. By contrast, revisionist historians tend to stress diversity and pluralism. They discuss the increasingly important lines of division within and between Jewish communities. First of all, diverging developments in 18th century Western and Central Europe on the one hand and Eastern Europe on the other had a schismatic effect. The radical changes of Jewish life and of the relationship between Jews, non-Jews, and the state in the western part of the continent, did not occur in Tsarist Russia and the Romanian lands, where the majority of Ostjuden lived – at least not at the same time and to the same extent. Full emancipation was not realised before the Great War and the levels of assimilation or acculturation remained much lower than in Western and Central Europe. There were feelings of sympathy and solidarity among West European Jews for their far off co-religionists, particularly in times of acute repression and persecution. The founding in France in 1860 of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a major Jewish international educational charity, was a clear expression of this solidarity. Most Jews in Western Europe, however, felt little more than a remote affinity with their East European brethren (and, probably, vice versa). Could it have been otherwise? From the end of the 18th century Western and Central European Jewry had experienced a period of unprecedented upheaval and change (Katz 1973: 191). Well before the turn of the century, the Jews of Western and Central Europe were formally emancipated. In the legal sense, they had become full citizens. By contrast, the world of the East European Jews was largely unscathed by such changes. The gap between the Jews of the East and the West widened rather than narrowed. For some West European Jews, East European Jewry had become a model of authentic Jewishness, a lost world which inspired feelings of sympathy and endearment. For others, however, the Ostjuden bore an unsettling resemblance to the anti-Jewish stereotypes they so feared and 34

The Debate

detested. For still others, the Jews of Eastern Europe represented both an image of the past and a source of solidarity, a cause for pity as well as embarrassment. Fluid and dynamic as the differences between the various Jewish communities in Europe may have been, they were very visible, very real, and very relevant. The gap was simply too wide. The French writer, literary critic and one of the early activists in the Dreyfuscase, Bernhard Lazare drew a strict distinction between the French Israélites, among whom he counted himself and most other assimilated Jews in France, and les juifs, the others, the foreign Jews. “We have nothing in common with those who are constantly thrown in our face. We should abandon them”, he concluded callously: Russian usurers, Galician tavern-keepers and money-lenders, second-hand peddlers from Prague, Polish horse-dealers, money-merchants from Frankfurt, what do they mean to me, a French Israelite? In the name of what supposed fraternity should I care about measures taken by the Tsar against subjects who appear to him as harmful.

Lazare would eventually change his mind. He became a staunch advocate of Jewish autonomous nationhood, presenting himself as a champion of the marginalised Jews of Russia and Romania – “a kind of roving ambassador of his oppressed brethren” (Wistrich 1976: 230). Lazare’s diatribes come from Bernard Lazare, “La solidarité Juive”, in Entretiens poliques et littéraires, October 1890: 230-231, quoted in Wistrich 1976: 136). Yet his initial reaction was far from unique. “It is quite impossible to describe to a group of men who are accustomed to western standards of culture and literacy, the pathetic backwardness of our people”, stated two officials of the Jewish relief organisation Joint, the American Joint Distribution Committee, to their fellow American Jews in October 1926. They had just returned from a fact-finding mission to the Sub-Carpathian region, in the Jewish heartland of Europe: With the exception of a few Magyars and almost assimilated Jews there may be said to be no contact with the West whatsoever. The milieu is entirely an Eastern one, an Eastern one of the year 1500. This sounds almost unbelievable; nevertheless it is an absolute fact (Billikopf 1926: 48).

A mere two decades after a wave of migration that brought hundreds of thousands of East European Jews to the United States, the culture shock seemed beyond repair. While the response of these two American Jews demonstrated astonishment and alienation, the reaction of many Jews in Central and Western Europe was more consequential. Anxiety with respect to their own precarious political and economic status, as well as feelings of superiority, caused them to regard East European Jews with a combination of sympathy, pity, contempt, and suspicion. From the Litvaks in Poland to the Polaks in Belgium – Jews from the 35

The Myth of Jewish Communism

East were never really welcome (Maurer 1986; Doorslaer 1995: 35; L. Fuks, “Oosteuropese joden in Nederland in het interbellum”, in Gerrits 1993: 62). The Jewish “nation” in East Central Europe disintegrated long before 1914. The 19th century also witnessed important new lines of division within Jewish communities. This was mostly a consequence of forces beyond the control of the Jewish population, such as the proliferation of political ideologies and the prevailing political system, as well as industrialisation and state formation. Despite the fact that the forces of continuity and tradition proved to be far stronger among the Jews of Eastern Europe than they were among those of Western Europe, the unique culture and cohesion of the Kulturgemeinschaf of the Ostjuden (to use the designation by Nathan Birnbaum, a lifelong activist for the national rights and cultural identity of the East European Jews during the late 19th century) was subject to increasing pressure too (Birnbaum 1916: 15). Most Jews in Western Europe and the United States cherished their newly acquired status of equal citizenship. They generally believed in evolutionary change and cautious and tactful policies. Many East European Jews, however, developed more radical and nationalistic political cultures. The stakes were higher than in the western part of the continent, the choices were more fundamental, and the answers were often more uncompromising and dogmatic (Tartakower 1952: 105). The Jewish question in the “Old World” asked for “systemic change”, as the historian Jonathan Frankel phrases it (Jonathan Frankel, “Modern Jewish Politics East and West (1840-1939). Utopia, Myth, Reality”, in Gitelman 1992: 83-84). Should a Jewish identity be religious or secular? How and where to solve the Jewish question: in the Diaspora or in Palestine? And how to return to the Land of Israel: through laborious agitprop among the Jewish masses or through divine intervention? Should Jews be politically active and if so, how: in Jewish or in nonJewish political parties? Cleavages throughout Jewish communities ran to unprecented depths, driving a wedge between secular and religious Jews; between the enlightened, the assimilated, the acculturated, the Hassidic, and the orthodox Jews; between leftwing and conservative Jews; between Zionists, autonomists, and all other Jews. Hirsz Abramowicz recalls the heated political arguments in the Jewish communities of the eastern lands of Poland during the early decades of the 20th century. “Organised discussions about Bundism, Zionism, and socialism took place in almost every city and town”, he recollects. “At the time, each party was still enthusiastically and aggressively zealous. Not infrequently, these discussions resulted in physical clashes.” Jewish politics and political sympathies were volatile and changeable, Abramowicz adds. “Both of the two major Jewish parties – the Bundists 36

The Debate

and the Zionists had experienced propagandists and public speakers. Sometimes rank and file members left one party and joined another as a result of the oratorical appeal of a speaker” (Abramowicz 1999: 169). This growing pluralism had mixed consequences. It weakened the cohesion of Jewish society. Increasingly, young people sought to escape the constraints of traditional Jewish life and search for “alternatives”, within or without their parents’ community. Given the fact, however, that almost every conceivable aspect of life could still take place within the boundaries of the Jewish community, the bulk of the Jews of East Central Europe continued to live separately from their non-Jewish environment. Even those Jews who had liberated themselves from the narrow margins of traditional, religiously defined Jewish life, did not need to merge into non-Jewish society. There were numerous alternatives within the Jewish community: Jewish socialism, variants of Zionism, and other secular movements (see also Stephen D. Corsin, “Aspects of Population Change and of Acculturation in Jewish Warsaw at the End of the Nineteenth Century. The Censuses of 1882 and 1897”, in Bartoszewski 1991: 221). For the first generations of post-war scholars, the collective remembrance of the traditional world of East European Jewry before the Holocaust served as a powerful impetus for historical research. “Today, when organised Jewish life barely survives on Polish soil, it is vital for Jews to preserve the memory of a world from which so many of us are descended and from which we derive so many of the vital springs of our beings”, the editors of the first edition of Polin, a yearbook devoted to Polish-Jewish studies, wrote (“Statement from the Editors”, in Polin 1986: 1). The world of the Ostjuden, which for some Jews had already become a model of authentic Jewishness by the end of the 19th century, would gradually be seen in an ever more nostalgic light. It was “the golden period in Jewish history, in the history of the Jewish soul”, writes the philosopher Abraham Heschel in 1944 during the penultimate year of the war. Heschel, who was born in Warsaw in 1907 and died in New York in 1972, concludes: “A day will come in which the hidden light of the Eastern European era will be revealed. This era was the Song of Songs […] of Jewish history in the last two thousand years. If the other eras were holy, this one is the holy of holies” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History”, in Moore 1990: 2, 21). From the traditionalist perspective, the secluded, segregated position of the Jews in East Central Europe had a paradoxical quality. Historians stressed the “splendid isolation” of the Jewish community. “In the Ashkenazic era, the spiritual life of the Jews is lived in solitude, among primitive Germanic and Slavic peoples”, Heschel asserts. 37

The Myth of Jewish Communism

Spiritually above their neighbours, the Jews developed a unique Jewish collective life, based upon its own traditions, upon the cultivation of the indigenous and the personal, to the utter disregard of the outside world. They borrowed from other cultures neither substance nor form. Their literature was written by Jews and for Jews; no apologies were offered to philosopher or historian. No commendation was asked of either prince or penman. No comparisons with others were indulged in, no energy wasted in rebuttal of hostile prejudices (Heschel, in Moore: 1990: 2-3).

Gradually, historians’ perspectives have shifted. Both the causes and the extent of Jewish isolation are increasingly questioned. Revisionist historians generally recognise the vitality and spirituality of Jewish cultural life, but tend to lay more emphasis on the interaction with the non-Jewish environment than do most traditional historians. In his study of the relations between Poles and Jews in 18th century Opatów, a city in the southeastern part of Poland, the American historian Gershon Hundert disputes the cultural isolation of the Jews. Among themselves Jews spoke Yiddish, though knowledge of Polish and other European languages was not exceptional, he writes. Jews did not consider themselves to be “mere sojourners”, nor were they perceived as such by others in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There was a “sense of permanency and rootedness” among Jews, Hundert concludes (Hundert 1992: xiii, 37). Other historians stress similar arguments. Jews were not the “alien body within Polish society”, Jerzy Tomaszewski reports. Jews and Poles were in closer contact than was often assumed (Jerzy Tomaszewski, “Some Methodological Problems of the Study of Jewish History in Poland Between the Two World Wars”, in Polin 1986: 163164). Overall though, there is not much reason to believe that the traditional barriers between the various populations in Poland (or, for that matter, anywhere else in East Central Europe) became significantly less relevant with the passage of time. Even during the interwar years, the large majority of East European Jews, those in Poland included, remained within their own, gradually more pluralistic society. The point, however, is that these barriers were not exclusively, and perhaps not even primarily, the result of anti-Jewish sentiments among their Christian neighbours. Jewish isolation was also self-selected. Hasidism, a religious, mystical, anti-rationalist movement widespread among the impoverished masses of Ostjuden, strengthened the Jews’ sense of community considerably, as the Israeli historian S. Ettinger writes. Based as it was on a rebellious kind of inward-looking religiousness, it would widen the gap between Jews and gentiles. Outside influences, including those from the state, came to be seen as explicitly hostile, against which the Jewish community had to protect itself (S. Ettinger, 38

The Debate

“Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern and Central Europe between the Wars. An Outline”, in Vago: 1974: 39). As the historian Yuri Slezkine adds: “Each side (Jews and non-Jews in the Pale, ag) saw the other as unclean, opaque, dangerous, contemptible, and ultimately irrelevant to the communal past and future salvation” (Slezkine 2006: 106). Obviously, the extent to which Jews felt motivated to assimilate, to adapt to their non-Jewish environment was largely determined by the probability of acceptance. And in this respect, as most traditional historians would claim, assimilation was not an attractive option for the Jews of Eastern Europe. For most revisionist historians, however, anti-Jewish sentiment in Christian society offers only a partial explanation for the isolation of the Jewish communities. The power, the omnipresence, and the rigidity of the Jewish tradition; the feeling of spiritual “superiority” among many Jews; the desire to have the greatest measure of autonomy and self-governance possible; and even professional preferences and economic considerations are also regarded as having been decisive factors of Jewish isolationism (Brym 1978: 35-36; Katz 1973: 204). The relationship between the isolation of Jews and the anti-Jewish attitudes of non-Jews is complex. The prospect of acceptance in the non-Jewish world served as a strong motivation for adaptation, whereas the lack of possibilities to fully and equally participate in the non-Jewish world was a source of frustration for many Jews. On the few occasions that these barriers were removed, youngsters in particular were prepared to break with the traditions and taboos of their community. Jewish isolation in East Central Europe was a matter of choice for many Jews, and so was the urgent desire by others to escape it (S. Ettinger, “Jews and NonJews”: 3). Given this element of choice, remarkably little research has been done on Jews’ perception of the people amongst whom they lived. This perception must have had a bearing on Jewish assimilation or lack thereof. Moreover, how Jews judged their environment undoubtedly influenced the ideas they harboured with regards to the national state and national identity, and even their susceptibility to radical political ideas, including communism. Historiography has mostly neglected this, focussed as it as on how non-Jews related to the Jewish population. Only in exceptional cases are the ideas and opinions of Jewish communities themselves seriously considered as a relevant factor in these mutual relations (see Davies 1982: 25). Yet for those Jews who did cross the borderline, and who attempted to enter the non-Jewish world, assimilation came in many shapes and gradations. The ultimate step was to surrender their Jewish identity altogether. Few would go so far as to abandon their “past” so radically, but among those who did, many were to be found among the communists of Jewish descent. In a sense, to become a communist was not so 39

The Myth of Jewish Communism

much an act of assimilation as an act of exchanging one form of isolation, that of being a Jew, for another, that of being communist (if not to add one to the other; becoming a Jewish communist). Jewish communists remained an embattled minority, at best wilfully ignored by Jews and non-Jews alike, but more often vilified and attacked. More Jews stopped somewhere along the road to full denial of their Jewishness. They adopted the external features of the dominant nation, primarily the language. This occurred on a relatively large scale in interbellum East Central Europe. Finally, most Jews – important geographical differences notwithstanding – never seriously considered “assimilating” into Christian society. They were the largest, the poorest, and the fastest growing segment of East European Jewry, inhabiting the eastern provinces of Poland, the Kresy, of Bessarabia, Moldavia, the Bukovina, and Ruthenia. They were the stereotypical Ostjuden. They continued to live in traditional, tight communities, generally regarding outside influences and loyalties with deep suspicion. National integration was the most crucial dimension of Jewish assimilation. The first serious discussion on Jewish national assimilation in East Central Europe occurred well into the 19th century, analogous with the rise of modern nationalism and the struggle for national independence in the region. The enlightened philosophers in the Polish Lands defined the concept of the nation in primarily political terms, as the community of all free citizens. They rejected the concept of nations within nations and regarded assimilation as a precondition for emancipation. Assimilation was of course principally seen as an act of “Polonisation”. Emancipation had to be earned (Eisenbach 1991: 97, 135, 157). To the extent that assimilation meant more than the “formal” acceptance of the dominant culture (implying a desire to share the goals and aspirations of the dominant nation), assimilation into the Polish nation concided with loyalty to the Polish nation-state. This concept of integration (with or without assimilation) may have appealed to some of the Haskilim, representatives of the Jewish enlightenment, but it remained foreign to most of the Jewish masses. Little is known about East European Jews’ perceptions of concepts such as “national loyalty”. From the moment that the Jews were confronted with the national aspirations of the peoples in the Habsburg, Prussian, Ottoman, and Russian empires this question reached an acute, if not dangerous dimension. During the 19th century most Jews in Western Europe gradually identified with the national states they lived in. The situation in the eastern part of the continent differed. Empires remained the dominant form of statehood. Even without the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that Jews generally had fewer reasons to engage in struggles for national independence than did their Christian neighbours. In this sense, a full national “commit40

The Debate

ment” was likely uncommon among East Central European Jews in the second half of the 19th century. The Jews in the Hungarian Kingdom may have been the exception to the rule, although historians continue to disagree on the extent of their assimilation. Bibo claims that assimilation did not go beyond the acceptance of the Hungarian language (István Bibó 1990: 132); others believe that the process of Magyarisation went much deeper (Lendvai 1971: 38; McCagg, Jr. 1989: 139, 193). However, the image of a “Western type of Jewry, living in an Eastern European […] environment” (Kenez 2006: 152) probably applies to the Jews of Budapest in particular. It covered far from all Hungarian Jews, of which a substantial part immigrated from Russia and the eastern lands of the Empire during the late-19th century. Much smaller still was the number of Jews who went “beyond” a national commitment, who deliberately crossed (in reality or in a metaphorical sense) the borders of the national state and adopted explicitly internationalist positions. Small though their numbers were, they are especially relevant for our purposes, because many of the prominent Jewish revolutionaries belonged to this category. Together with the traditional, orthodox Jew, they represented the anti-Semitic doubleimage of the non-national Jew. Much later, during the final decades of communist rule in East Central Europe, this relatively small group of Jewish intellectuals and other avant-garde became the object of intellectual-political nostalgia. After Central Europeans experienced the misery of interwar Kleinstaaterei, the ravages of the war and the depressing reality of the Pax Sovietica, these “internationalists” were remembered as the integrative element par excellence of a continent which was otherwise torn by national divides and conflicts as well as by depressing communist parochialism. Hannah Arendt characterised them as the “living tie”, binding “famous individuals into a society of the renowned, an international society by definition, for spiritual achievement transcends national boundaries” (Arendt 1979: 53). More influential were the writings of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who referred to the “Jewish genius” of the interwar era (Kundera April 1984; see also Rupnik 1990: 252-254). The apparently supranational or universal nature of this concentration of Jewish intellect and artistry around the turn of the century (Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, Robert Musil) was of course far from representative of the larger Jewish community, even in Central Europe. They were mostly assimilated Jews, unconventional thinkers and pioneers of modernity. In antiSemitic circles they embodied Jewish internationalism, cosmopolitanism, modernism, and Jewish decadence. They were the intellectual pendants of international Jewish capitalism (and, for that matter, communism). The Jewish masses, however shared little in common with and 41

The Myth of Jewish Communism

they showed little interest in these pioneers of modernity. Why express any sympathy with a world that was essentially foreign, a world they would rather ignore? Another factor hindering the assimilation of Jews in East Central Europe were the strong variants of political nationalism Jews developed during the 19th century, Zionism in particular. Zionism came in many shapes and forms. Not all Zionists focussed on the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. At least before the 1930s, many nationalminded Jews concentrated on the actual conditions of Jewish life in the Diaspora (present-day work or Gegenwartsarbeit). Simon Dubnow, the Russian-born founder of the Jewish People’s Party, a leading advocate of Jewish autonomy and a prominent historian of Russian and Polish Jewry, proposed that neither assimilation nor emigration would offer substantial relief for the Jewish masses – only autonomy would. If Jews did not have the political and territorial characteristics of the nationstate, they had to create the conditions in the Diaspora which would still enable them not only to enjoy their civil and political rights, but also and primarily to preserve their (national) unity and identity. Jews needed to reinvigorate and modernise their traditional forms of autonomy and selfgovernance (Stillschweig 1944: 31, based on the writings of Simon Dubnow). It was a matter of survival. Dubnow was not a pessimist, though. He believed in the coexistence of Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe – living together but apart. He would become the most influential ideologue and theoretician of Jewish Volkstum (Wininger 19251936, Band I: 80). Notwithstanding the deep divides between Dubnow’s autonomists, Zionists, as well as religiously orthodox Jews, all shared the conviction that the greatest danger to the Jewish community did not come from anti-Semitism or other conceivable threats from the nonJewish environment, but from Jewish assimilation. Dubnow actually referred to the “menacing proportions” that Jewish “Polonisation” had assumed in the final decades of the Tsarist Empire (Dubnow 1916-20: 213). Anti-Semitism is as crucial for the traditional approach to the Jewish history of East Central Europe as it is to the revisionist alternative. Still, there are vital differences. According to traditional interpretations, antiSemitism is an invariable and integral aspect of Jewish history. “In Eastern Europe […] anti-Semitic feelings have always been vicious and vile”, as two historians explain in a recent general history of antiSemitism (Perry 2002: 113). Moreover, anti-Semitism is predominantly seen as a chimerical phenomenon, lacking any relationship with the behaviour of Jews. Michael Marrus criticises this approach as the “‘germ’ theory” of anti-Semitism. “Anti-Semitism is highly contagious and […] always capable of producing the worst”, he writes. “The germ 42

The Debate

[…] is seen to operate independently of the Jews themselves and independently of historical contingencies. In this view, anti-Semitism is the reality of Jewish history, the force which has conditioned the environment in which Jews lived” (Marrus 1982: 38-39). Among revisionist historians anti-Semitism is also considered as a critical variable of Jewish history, but its relevance, dimension and nature are no longer taken for granted (Brustein 2003; Lindemann 2000; MacDonald 1998; Marrus 1982). Revisionist historians discuss the various roots, types and degrees of anti-Semitism and the circumstances that conditioned them, including the ideas and behaviour of the Jewish population itself. They place anti-Semitism in the context of social and political changes, of real differences of interest and conflicts among Jews and between Jews and non-Jews. They question and qualify frequently and uncritically used clichés and commonplaces. To begin with, anti-Semitism is not a uniform phenomenon. Michael Marrus suggests a set of three concentric circles, each of which contains a different type of anti-Semites: from those who represent relatively moderate anti-Jewish thought and behaviour in the outer circle to the fanatical, obsessed, ideological anti-Semite in the inner one. Most of the people and ideas mentioned in this book would probably figure in Marrus’ first and second circle. However, as will be discussed in the next chapter, even the propagators of the myth of Jewish Communism showed considerable variety of interpretations and explanations, ideas and conclusions. Secondly, anti-Semitism was neither always present nor always equally significant throughout Europe, not even in East Central Europe. The picture is diverse, and to paraphrase William Brustein: an approach that assumes invariability cannot explain variation (Brustein 2003: 43). AntiSemitism varied significantly over time and across countries. Whereas in the Russian Empire popular anti-Jewish sentiments coincided with state-sponsored anti-Semitism; in the Hungarian Kingdom the ruling elite was basically pro-Jewish and popular anti-Semitism was limited, at least in the core provinces. During the interwar years in Poland, Hungary, and in Romania anti-Semitism was prominently present and it would ultimately become state policy; while in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia it remained largely absent until the outbreak of the war. Thirdly, anti-Semitism, of the non-violent variety, was not an equally urgent matter for all Jews. For the closed communities of traditional, deeply religious Jews who preferred to ignore the outside world, anti-Semitism mattered less than it did for those Jew who tried to enter the world of non-Jews. Paul Lendvai makes a comparable point. Even though the orthodox, “Galician” type of traditionally dressed, nonassimilated Jew was the main target of anti-Semitic propaganda, “social wrath and jealousy” was primarily aimed at the more urban Jewish 43

The Myth of Jewish Communism

middle-class (Lendvai 1971: 45). Anti-Semitism alone does not suffice to explain the waves of migration from Eastern Europe. A substantial part of the more than one million Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the 20th century were probably motivated by dire economic circumstances, rather than by the anti-Semitism they endured. Many Russian Jews did not even cross the ocean. They chose to remain closer to home, hoping to find a better life in the economically more dynamic western parts of the Empire and elsewhere throughout the region. Moreover, many Jews from Galicia also fled Europe. And they had not experienced the same anti-Jewish violence that Jews from the Pale did. Fourthly and finally, anti-Semitism was not the integrative force for which it has been taken a posteriori. Growing anti-Jewish sentiments and policies exacerbated, rather than weakened, the cleavages amongst the Jewish population. Assimilated and nonassimilated Jews, Zionists and socialists – each had their own answers to anti-Semitism. The almost proverbial anti-Semitism of the late-19th century Tsarist regime in Russia offers a good example of the shifting perspectives in historiography. Traditionalist historians share the firm conviction that the Tsarist regime itself instigated and organised, or at the very least, encouraged the pogroms, which were aimed against a traditional and largely passive Jewish society (Baron 1964 (a): 68; Dawidowicz 1992: 230; Gorev 1928: 93; Johnson 1987: 363; Sachar 1990: 280-281). The persistence of this “pogrom paradigm” is closely linked to the interpretation of Jewish history as a chain of repression and suffering. Michael Aronson, in his analysis of the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881, refers to “the distorting lenses of hindsight”. What do the sources really reveal?, he asks (I. Michael Aronson, “The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia in 1881”, in Klier 1992: 44). They indicate that despite their ambivalent and often hostile anti-Jewish policies, authorities in St. Petersburg were unpleasantly surprised by the pogroms, and had certainly not instigated them. The reaction of the Russian government was not prompted by compassion for its Jewish subjects, but by its strong aversion to all forms of instinctive popular violence. The policy was not so much to promote pogroms and other forms of spontaneous riots, as it was to strengthen the legitimacy of Russia’s political order through the spread of anti-Semitic sentiments (Shlomo Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 19031906”, and Michael Ochs, “Tsarist Officialdom and Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Poland”, in Klier 1992: 241,184). Maintaining control over the population in the Pale was considered to be more important than impetuous pro-regime behaviour – whether anti-Jewish or otherwise. Additionally, the image of a hermetically closed Jewish community, immune to the centrifugal tendencies of West and Central European 44

The Debate

Jewry and passively suffering under the repressive policies of a rigidly and inflexibly anti-Jewish Tsarist regime, has been considerably modified. “During the 19th century, Russian Jewry was not simply a reservoir of tradition but a cauldron of intramural conflicts whose effects were to have a vital impact on the Russian-Jewish encounter”, as the American historian Benjamin Nathans writes in his account of how the Tsarist regime attempted to integrate selected Jewish groups into Russian society (Nathans 2002: 5-6). The Jewish community was not as isolated or as closed as has often been assumed. Official Tsarist policies were not as inflexible or as dogmatic as the stereotypical interpretation of 19th century Russia suggests. Jewish integration into Russian society started well before 1917, though hesitantly of course. Initially it affected only a small minority within the Jewish community. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War the British theologian and historian James Parkes published a sophisticated study of Eastern European Jewry. “The colours are sombre, the horizons dark”, he writes, “but I fear that there is still worse to come; the last act of the tragedy is not yet upon the stage” (Parkes 1939: 237). His reading of the situation of the Jews of East Central Europe became the standard approach of many historians after the Holocaust. One of the most significant features of the traditional interpretation of anti-Semitism is its deterministic and apocalyptic nature. Modern anti-Semitism in the region supposedly “foreshadowed” the Shoah. The destruction of the unique world of the Jews of East Central Europe led not only to a massive, often nostalgic literature of remembrance and commemoration. It also sparked a retrospective or apocalyptic history writing, which primarily perceived the history of the Jews in East Central Europe through the prism of their ultimate destruction. Jewish history became a history of martyrdom, of continued repression and suffering. “It is virtually impossible to study the history of the Jews from the May laws (a series of anti-Jewish measures issued in Tsarist Russia in May 1881, a. g.) to the rise of Adolf Hitler without detecting a kind of Greek preclusiveness in the unfolding course of events”, writes Howard Sachar. “In Eastern Europe, particularly, it was as if each new horror was a merely a rehearsal for tragedy to come” (Sachar 1990: 414). Revisionist historians generally reject this deterministic interpretation. Due to the manner in which Jewish history has generally been narrated, as Michael Bernstein asserts, “its annihilation in the camps is granted a kind of negative teleology that then retroactively provides the terms by which its entire experience prior to the Third Reich is judged” (Bernstein 1994: 84). Clearly, the primary reason is the shattering and unprecedented impact of the Holocaust. The Jews of Eastern Europe did not undergo “an unremitting cold pogrom, portending catastrophe”, as 45

The Myth of Jewish Communism

Arno Mayer rightfully stresses (Mayer 1988: 77). And the Polish historian Jerzy Tomaszewski introduces another, more practical consideration: anti-Jewish incidents are easier to document than the regular, eventless, day-to-day contacts between Jews and Christians which left no traces in governmental archives. (Tomaszewski, “Some Methodological Problems”: 166). The precarious situation of the Jewish communities was neither the result of anti-Jewish policies and legislation alone, nor was it hopeless. During the final decades of the 19th century, Jewish communities were confronted with the rise of anti-Jewish sentiments and incidents, but also with a host of new challenges and opportunities. In the Russian Pale such challenges exerted a positive influence on the Jewish community, activating Jews and boosting their self-confidence. The historian Alexander Orbach: The sense of Russian Jewry as a community, divided in the same ways that all national or ethnic groups were divided but all the same still an identifiable entity with characteristics unique unto itself, was accepted, recognised, and understood by all groups vying for its leadership […]. All looked forward optimistically to the new century as the time when significant and positive changes would take place (Alexander Orbach, “The Russian Jewish Community, 1881-1903”, in Klier 1992: 160).

Few historians would deny the anti-Semitic nature of the late Tsarist regime in Russia or for that matter, that of the 1930’s Polish government. Ant-Semitism, however, is no longer perceived as the sole or even the major cause of the miserable situation of a large part of the Ostjuden. The anti-Jewish measures of the Russian or Polish governments, the continuous anti-Semitic propaganda of some mass media, of most political groups and of many servants of the Orthodox or Catholic Church, are identified as conditions of Jewish Verelendung. But so too is the underdevelopment of the region’s economies, the overpopulation and poverty of Jewish villages and districts, the one-dimensional social structure of the Jewish community, the emerging industrial revolution which threatened Jewish small traders and craftsmen, and, finally, the Great Depression. This brings us to the final question: How to define the “Jewish Question” in East Central Europe? Is the Jewish question another antiSemitic invention, or was it a real issue that deserves to be taken seriously? Terms such as the Jewish Question or the “Jewish Problem” became en vogue around the middle of the 19th century, when Jews left their ghettos, entered Christian society in most West European countries, and demanded equal rights. Many historians tend to interpret the Jewish question as a product of anti-Semitic reasoning, indeed as a chimera. The so-called Jewish problem was essentially a problem of 46

The Debate

anti-Semites. Although the notion has become increasingly less controversial among historians, there is no consensus on how the issue should be defined. Does the Jewish question pertain to Jews, non-Jews, or both? And even if it is used to broadly define the difficult position of the East European Jews from the second half of the 19th century onwards, was their position conditioned by the political and economic changes in the region (which many Jews found difficult to adapt to but others were way ahead of) or by anti-Jewish discrimination and repression? Was the sheer number of Jews, their uneven geographical distribution or their anomalous professional structure rightly considered to be problematic, or were concerns over the position of the Jews essentially illusionary? In 1986 Ezra Mendelsohn published a controversial and muchquoted article titled Interwar Poland: Good or Bad for the Jews? He writes: Interwar Poland was […] bad for the Jews, in the sense that it excluded them from first-class citizenship in the state. This led, by the late 1930s to a widespread feeling among Polish Jews, and especially among the youth, that they had no future in Poland and that they were trapped. Interwar Poland was good for the Jews because, among other things, it provided an environment in which forces were unleashed in the Jewish world which many Jews regarded then, and today, as extremely positive (Ezra Mendelsohn, “Interwar Poland: Good or Bad for the Jews?”, in Abramsky 1986: 139).

On the whole, Mendelsohn follows the traditional interpretation. A few years later, in a contribution to Polin, he shifts his emphasis. Mendelsohn now refers explicitly to a Jewish question in Poland. The substantial Jewish minority confronted the Poles, so anxious to establish themselves in a viable state of their own, with very real problems. “The Polish historians have emphasised”, he concludes approvingly, that the Jewish problem in interwar Poland was a problem for the new Polish state and for Polish society. The question of how to deal with this large, economically powerful but poverty-stricken, unacculturated but polonizing Jewish community that spoke with many voices and made contradictory demands – this constituted a real dilemma. Historians have a duty to present the “problem”, to analyse the various options available for dealing with it, and to explain why, in various periods, various policies were or were not put forward (Mendelsohn, “Jewish Historiography”: 13).

All the explanatory historical and sociological factors – including formal restrictions on Jewish occupational behaviour, widespread literacy, early urbanisation, a “general Jewish preference for selfemployment” (Slezkine 2006: 50), and changes in the socio-economic position of the Jews during the interwar years – did not make the prominent role of Jews in certain sectors of the national economies (trade, manufacturing and, above all, the liberal professions) any less problem47

The Myth of Jewish Communism

atic in the eyes of their non-Jewish contemporaries. The traditional economic influence of East European Jewry certainly decreased during the interwar decades. Most modernising tendencies and governmental policies were at odds with the traditional Jewish economy. Industrialisation, increased competition, restrictive economic and employment policies (if only to support the emerging native commercial and professional middle class) and, again, the Great Depression, further contributed to the pauperisation of the Jewish masses. Yet as incomplete as the figures may be (Yehuda Don, “Patterns of Jewish Economic Behavior in Central Europe in the Twentieth Century” and György Lengyel, “The Ethnic Composition of the Economic Elite in Hungary in the Interwar Period”, in Don 1990: 121-15, 229-247; Jerzy Tomaszewski, “The Role of Jews in Polish Commerce, 1918-1939”, in Gutman 1989: 141-157) and as far-fetched as the notion of Jewish dominance is, would not every country that sees a minority community expand from 250,000 to 900,000 in less than two decades (the Jews in Romania from 1910 to 1927) consider this problematic, even if it resulted largely from territorial annexations? Is it necessarily malicious to define a situation in which a single group almost monopolises the free professions (law, medicine, and dentistry) as undesirable? “Modern Romanian nationalism”, as Robert Levy writes, “was a conscious rebellion against external enemies and foreign elements residing in the country – elements that played a crucial socio-economic role in the 19th century” (Levy 2001: 21). The Romanian historian and economist B. P. Haşdeu, a devout Christian, a fierce Romanian nationalist, and an early critic of the Jewish “invasion” of his country, who wrote in 1871: “Foreigners at the head of the state, foreigners in the ministries, foreigners in the parliament, foreigners in the magistracy, foreigners at the bar, foreigners in medicine, foreigners in public works, foreigners up, foreigners down and yet – Romanism is on the move” (quoted in Eugen Weber, “Romania”, in Rogger 1974: 505, italics in original). In Poland, during the early 1920s, Jews made up 30 percent of all university students. Hungary offers another example. Toward the turn of the century close to a quarter of the population of Budapest was Jewish. Their percentage of the country’s lawyers, doctors, and journalists was twice as large. Compared to these figures, the 25 percent of Jews in law and medicine in interwar Czechoslovakia seems almost modest, as is the 30 to 40 percent of all the industrial capital invested in the 1930s for which the country’s Jews accounted (Muller 1988: 32; see also Sachar 2002: 74, 153-154; Berend 2003: 200-204). There was an element of fear involved and, apparently, of bad conscience. As Alex Bein explained in his “biography” of the Jewish question:

48

The Debate

Durch alle Argumente tönt die Angst beherrscht zu werden, beherrscht von einem, der gestern noch ein unterdrückter war, dessen Herrschaft in sich die beschämenden Element des Hochgekommenen und das fremden Eroberers birgt – und vielleicht auch die Rachsucht gegen die ehemaligen harten Herren (Bein 1980: 241).

Initially, opponents of Jewish emancipation and assimilation raised the Jewish question as an urgent concern. As time passed, Jews also began to take the notion seriously. From the moment Theodor Herzl introduced the Jewish state as a potential solution to the Jewish question, the issue rose to prominence in discussions among Jews (Bein 1980: 2-4). Zionism, autonomism, Jewish socialism (Bund), orthodoxy – all were Jewish political answers to the Jewish question. The Jewish problem became a condition for Jewish political thinking. Revisionist historians’ view of the Jewish problem is symptomatic of their interpretation of the history of the Jews in East Central Europe more generally: less emotional and personally involved, more distanced and critical. Fear of foreigners is not a healthy stimulus for political action. Nor should nationalistic ideas and anti-Semitic stereotypes be thrown into the same basket. Yet the very real problems that served as the basis for chimerical and hate-mongering convictions do not lose their significance only because they were wickedly exploited or mobilised. “I do not propose studying history without emotion and with indifference”, Tomasewski asserts in one of his contributions on the historiography of Polish Jewry. “This would be disrespectful to the human tragedies, strivings, hopes, achievements and disappointments of the past. The historian’s emotions, however, should not cloud his thought or impair his critical faculties” (Tomaszewski, “Some Methodological Problems”: 175).

1.3. Anti-Semitism and Anti-communism Anti-Semitism rarely comes alone. In the concept of Jewish Communism it is causally linked to anti-communism. It may, however, be useful for analytical purposes to attempt to separate them. This may not only provide greater understanding of how anti-communism relates to anti-Semitism, but it may also help explain why Judeo-Communism proved to be a more powerful idea in some countries than in others. In the mindset of many contemporaries, however, the issue seemed fully obsolete: anti-communist and anti-Semitic sentiments were inextricably and incontrovertibly linked. “An honest leader of the antiBolshevik movement, has to be an anti-Semite too”, a German activist stressed in 1920. “Those who want to fight Bolshevism, should first deal with its root cause – the Jews” (Quindel-Hannover 1920: 2). How real 49

The Myth of Jewish Communism

was the threat of communism and how genuine was the fear it supposedly presented? Did the propagators of Jewish Communism disseminate the threat of communism just to add new ammunition to traditional antiJewish sentiments? These are simple questions, but difficult to answer. How does one assess a threat and how does one measure fear? And how to distinguish between the real, the imagined, and the manipulated dimensions of the communist menace? Historians are remarkably divided on the issue of a communist threat in interwar East Central Europe. A minority view takes the menace of communism seriously, while others perceive the anti-communist argument as largely chimerical, as a means of political manipulation exploited by the region’s dominant conservative elites. Essential to the communist threat seemed to have been the expansionist nature and geographical proximity of the Soviet Union. Nolte believes the Soviet threat during the interwar decades to have been real and hence anticommunism to be legitimate. This also applies to Hitler’s antiBolshevism, he adds, “understandable and, within certain limits, even legitimate, though overreached and therefore inadequate”. Bolshevism, in Nolte’s view, was more than a mere Gespenst manipulated by the Nazis in Germany and by the much weaker political elites in the countries to the East. The danger of communism was more than a phantasm, an excuse to mask other objectives. Nolte attaches crucial importance to anti-communism (rather than anti-Semitism) as the “driving force” (die bewegende Mitte) behind Hitler’s inner conviction and ideology (Nolte 1987: 16). Von Bieberstein presents a comparable opinion. Hitler principally fought the “revolutionary” in his struggle against the “Jew”, he opines (Rogalla von Bieberstein 2002: 271). The American historian Arno Mayer argues along similar lines: “although anti-Semitism was an essential tenet of the Nazi worldview, it was neither its foundation nor its principal or sole intention. Anti-Semitism was one of the several central creeds of an essentially syncretic ideology, the others being social Darwinism, the geopolitics of eastern expansionism, and antiMarxism” (Mayer 1988: 90). Most historians, however, are inclined to stress the centrality of antiSemitism in Hitler’s Weltanschauung. They consider it to have been more decisive than was his anti-communism. Whereas Nolte believes that in the perception of many National Socialists the revolutionary activities of the Jews were the key to understanding Bolshevism; others go as far as to de-couple the twin elements of Hitler’s worldview. “It is likely that the Jew was more closely identified in his mind with democracy, not Bolshevism, as well as with internationalism or “cosmopolitanism”, liberalism, and pacifism”, Harold Kaplan writes. “The record shows that Hitler regarded bourgeois democracy as his natural enemy 50

The Debate

(or victim) to be destroyed, and that Bolshevism, though surely to be destroyed, was less a moral antithesis than a dangerous rival which shared the same ultimate goals of power” (Kaplan 1994: 199, notes 34, 171). In general, historians who write about the notion of Jewish communism tend to give much more weight to the anti-Jewish than to the anticommunist dimension of the myth. Anti-communism, as is often suggested, supplied the conservative ruling elites with ready-made slogans and opponents, which could easily be mustered against the real enemy: the Jews. Anti-communist sentiments were principally mobilised to strengthen and legitimise more traditional and more deeply ingrained anti-Jewish sentiments. And they certainly made for an attractive combination. Additionally, historians tend to neglect the fiercely and expressively anti-communist horror propaganda, so widely disseminated throughout Europe during the red scare of the first post-war years. Only few are inclined to go so far as does Antony Polonsky, who defines the “fear of communism” as one of the major political issues in interwar East Central Europe (Polonsky 1975: 23). Otherwise, however, the communist threat between the two World Wars is generally denied or, at best, seriously qualified. While at times international communism may have been a serious menace in countries such as Poland, Romania and Hungary, the communist peril never was so imminent as to credibly function as a convincing argument to suppress the democratic order, to account for the success of conservative or extremist political forces in the region, or to explain the strength of political anti-Semitism. Still, fear of communism did not demand an immediate communist threat. In Poland the Bolshevik menace ceased after the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920, but the dread of communism remained (Stephen-Fischer Galati, “The Political Right in Eastern Europe in Historical Perspective”, in Held 1993: 3-5; see also Piotr S. Wandycz, “Fascism in Poland: 1918-1939”, in Sugar 1971: 97). After Józef Piłsudski’s coup in 1926 the radical left ceased to be a substantial political power in Poland, but the “spectre of the communist threat” remained to “haunt the country”, as the American historian Andrzej Korbonski writes. “The memories of the Polish-Soviet war remained as fresh as ever and having both a long common border with the USSR and a large Ukrainian and Belorussian minority made Poland particularly sensitive to developments in the Soviet Union” (Andrzej Korbonski, “The Revival of the Political Right in PostCommunist Poland: Historical Roots”, in Held 1993: 16-17). The identification of Jews and communism seemed to have been particularly popular in interwar Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Why in these countries? Is the strength of the communist movement the princi51

The Myth of Jewish Communism

pal variable, was the influence of extreme rightwing forces the determining factor, or were numbers critical; in this case the number of Jews and the size of the Jewish communities? The strength of the communism cannot have been the decisive issue. In Poland, Romania, and Hungary the communist movement was negligible within a few years of the war’s end. In Czechoslovakia on the other hand, with its relatively strong and prominent Communist Party, the myth of Jewish communism never attained wide political or popular legitimacy. Could the influence of extreme rightwing political parties have been a critical factor? Was the more distinctive role anti-Semitism played in political life in Hungary, Romania and Poland in any way related to the vigour of right-wing extremism or fascism in these countries? This seems a more relevant issue. The myth of Jewish Communism found little resonance in most of the countries where fascism did not gain a solid footing. Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (with the partial exception of Croatia, although the Ustaša remained a relatively minor political factor until the Second World War), and Czechoslovakia are primary examples. Fascism was never an important political factor among the Czechoslovaks, with the possible exception of the Sudeten Germans during the late 1930s. It had few followers, and of those who did support fascism, many were more concerned with target groups other than Jews. Democracy remained relatively unscathed – both as an ideology and as a form of government. Additionally, anti-Semitism left few traces in the programmes of the mainstream political parties (the Slovak People’s Party being the major exception). Political anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia was less likely to have been aimed against Jews per se, than it was against Jews as Germans. In Czechoslovakia, as in Poland, NaziGermany was considered to be the major and, in the former case, the only serious threat to the country’s national security. This dampened society’s enthusiasm for fascist adventures. So even in Poland, where the myth of Jewish Communism was widely spread, fascism remained marginal. Due to the circumstances listed above, the Jewish Communism stereotype in Poland was more popular during the first few years of the Republic, when fascism was non-existent in the country, than it was during the second half of the 1930s, when Polish fascism had gained at least some prominence, although it remained at the “margins of political life” (Piotr S. Wandycz, “Fascism in Poland”: 97). In the Balkans, where communism was a mass movement in the early 1920s and democracy never really took root, rightwing extremism of the fascist kind did not flourish either. Despite a strong tradition of chauvinism and anti-Semitism in prewar Romanian nationalism (Stephen Fischer-Galati, “Romanian Nation52

The Debate

alism”, in Sugar 1969: 385-386; Oldson 1991: 99), it would take until the foundation of the League of the Archangel of Michael in 1927 for anti-Semitism to assume “more than ordinary significance” during the interwar years (Fischer-Galati, “Fascism, Communism, and the Jewish Question in Romania”: 164). Anti-Semitism was an integral component of the organisation’s ideological make-up. As Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, founder of the League, succinctly stated: “When I say communist, I mean Jew” (Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Pentru Legionari. Bucharest 1936: 353, quoted in Bela Vago, “The Attitude Toward the Jews as a Criterion of the Left-Right Concept”, in Vago 1974: 24). The fight against Judeo-Communism which was considered as the antithesis of Romania’s Christian national values, was indeed one of the ideological cornerstones of his movement. Unlike other political parties in interwar Romania, the Iron Guard seriously sought to involve the masses in politics. Its fanatical and brutal anti-Semitism, its militant antiBolshevism, its social reformism as well as its radical Romanian nationalism garnered a substantial response from Romanian society. The party received close to 16 percent of the votes in the December 1937 parliamentary elections and rumour had it that it had actually won more. The message of the Iron Guard was generally welcomed in the villages and the countryside. Clergy, schoolteachers, students, disgruntled intellectuals, and bureaucrats – all acted responsively and often enthusiastically. Especially the seizure of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in June 1941 bolstered the image of the Iron Guard as the country’s champion of true Romanianism and a major defender against Bolshevism and the Jews (Stephen Fischer-Galati, “Fascism in Romania”, in Sugar 1971: 116, 119). In neighbouring Hungary, the Arrow Cross movement proved to be even more attractive to the electorate. At the peak of its popularity, it gathered 250,000 members and 31 percent of the electorate (parliamentary elections in May 1939). The Arrow Cross elaborated on a relatively recent element of anti-Semitism in Hungarian nationalism. The post-war amputation of its territory and the loss of practically all of its former minorities had made the pro-Jewish dimension of Magyar nationalism largely obsolete. The Soviet Republic of 1919 added extra fuel to the anti-Semitic orientation of a large part of the Hungarian elite and the common population. Hungary and Romania knew the two most sizeable fascist movements in the region. This cannot have been a wholly irrelevant explanation for the significance of the myth of Jewish Communism in these two countries. Yet the identification of Jews with communism did not necessarily require the presence of substantial extreme rightwing forces. Jewish Communism found popularity beyond the radical right. Both the 53

The Myth of Jewish Communism

ruling authoritarian regimes in interwar East Central Europe – “petty, brittle, irresolute, and demoralising” though they may have been (Rothschild 1990: 21) – and the political parties upon which they based their support, took most of the wind out of the extremists’ sails. It often proved difficult for fascist parties to distinguish themselves from the ruling authoritarian regimes, which increasingly mirrored their rhetoric (including the myth of Jewish Communism), but mostly abstained from the activism and the political hooliganism of the radicals. During the 1930s anti-Jewish sentiments were widely harboured by practically every conservative political group in East Central Europe. It was also one of the reasons why native fascism struggled to differentiate themselves from the powers that were. The threat by expansionist Germany further contributed to their marginalisation. The Colonels’ regime, which ruled Poland after Piłsudski’s death, had practically taken over the anti-Jewish position of the Endecja (from Narodowa Demokracja, People’s Democracy). Unlike the position of the regime’s standardbearer, however, Jews were now widely regarded as unfit for assimilation. Integration or isolation of the Jewish community was no longer desired; the Jewish element had to be removed from the life of the country. Involuntary emigration was ever more forcefully proposed as the only viable option. Yet despite the mounting passions that the Jewish question aroused during the 1930s, it generated only occasional violence. Could the vehemence aroused by the notion of Jewish Communism have been linked to the size of the Jewish communities? Historians tend to dismiss causality between the number of Jews in a given country and the fervour of anti-Semitism. In this case, however, causality is not implausible. In the Balkans where fascism remained weak, Jewish communities were generally small (less than 0.5 percent in Yugoslavia; 0.8 percent in Bulgaria) and relatively well assimilated. Anti-Semitism was not particularly widespread either. Jewish Communism never reached serious proportions. Poland, on the other hand, had the largest Jewish minority, more than 3 million or almost 10 percent of the population in 1931; while Romania and Hungary harboured the second and third largest Jewish communities: 756,930 (4.2 percent) and 444,567 (5.1 percent), respectively. Lithuania is the exception to this rule. The country boasted an even higher share of Jews among its citizens than did the two latter countries (7.3 percent, or 157,527 people in 1923), but until the war it remained mostly free of serious political anti-Semitism, despite some lawmaking with anti-Jewish connotations in the 1930s (Mendelsohn 1987: 237). It is generally accepted that the virulence of anti-Semitism is only loosely related, to the size of the Jewish population. It is the prevailing 54

The Debate

image of the Jew, rather than any specific experience with the Jewish population, which accounts for the persistence of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Yet with respect to the myth of Jewish Communism, the actual number of Jews seems to have been a crucial variable, at least to the extent that Jews could be “credibly” linked to another threat to the country’s national security: aggression from neighbouring Soviet Russia. Attitudes towards the revolutionary Soviet state and unwelcome experiences with Bolshevik rule provide crucial explanations for the strength and popularity of the Jewish Communism stereotype. AntiSoviet sentiments were particularly lively and politically vibrant in Poland, Romania, and Hungary, but they remained generally absent (or of minor importance) in most other countries. The strength of the Jewish Communist image in interwar Hungary cannot be understood in isolation of the experience of the 1919 Soviet Republic or its fateful end: the amputation of the Hungarian state as formalised by the Trianon Treaty. These remained closely identified with the revolutionary activities of Jews. Also in Poland and Romania, the Jewish question was at least partly based on the growing conviction that Jewish communities were not only alien and impossible to assimilate, but that they also posed a grave danger to the countries’ national existence. The war with Soviet Russia in 1919-20 and the apparent role of Jews in the soviets established on Polish soil, remained a carefully cultivated and vivid memory in Poland throughout the interbellum. It would gain new strength from September 1939, when Soviet forces invaded the country again, occupied a large part of its eastern territories, and, as many Poles believed, were once more warmly welcomed by many Jews in the region. Large Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Jewish minorities along the border with the Soviet Union rendered the Poles particularly sensitive to developments in communist Russia. The establishment in 1925 of separate parties among the territorial minorities of Belorussians and Ukrainians strengthened their anxieties. In Romania the incorporation of Bessarabia and Bukovina after the Great War only added to pre-existing popular anti-Semitism throughout the country. This was primarily the result of the combination of a relatively high percentage of Jews in both regions, who were generally regarded as alien and inassimilable, and the lively territorial aspirations of the Soviet Union. In countries where the Russian threat was less credible or less seriously felt, the myth of Jewish Communism remained relatively marginal. Czechoslovakia, which knew the largest communist movement in the region, or Bulgaria, where communism had been a crucial political factor during the early 1920s, seemed hardly susceptible to the antiSemitic notion of Jewish Communism. The same goes for Yugoslavia. In conclusion, the popularity of the image of Jewish Communism in 55

The Myth of Jewish Communism

Hungary, Poland, and Romania was based on a combination of factors absent or less prominent elsewhere in East Central Europe: large Jewish communities, a (recent) tradition of virulent anti-Semitism, a largely credible fear of Russian expansionism in combination with acute political instability, experiences of Bolshevik revolutionary attempts and the participation of Jews therein. Nowhere in East Central Europe, it seems, could the equation Jews = communism = Russia be more forcefully propagated, and nowhere did it mobilise as much support as it did in these three countries. Despite all this, if one would separate the two elements of JudeoCommunism, i.e. anti-communism and anti-Semitism, the myth appears primarily as a variant of anti-Semitism. Overall, in the perception of most of those who propagated the myth, anti-Jewish sentiments dominated anti-communist feelings. Anti-Semitism rather than anticommunism seems to explain both the popularity and legitimacy of the notion. Obviously, anti-Jewish sentiments preceded anti-communist or anti-Bolshevik attitudes in the region. The Bolshevik Revolution, revolutionary attempts elsewhere, the dramatical surge of political relevance of social democracy, and the role that people of Jewish descent played herein were woven into a pre-existing framework of anti-Jewish thinking. Be this as it may, the anti-communist dimension of Jewish Communism was more than a mere rationalisation of anti-Jewish feelings. The idea of Judeo-Communism was based on an attractive combination of sentiments. The power of the communist threat was a highly relevant factor. Whether this threat was real or perceived remained a matter of only secondary importance though.

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CHAPTER 2

The Myth In 1879, Wilhelm Marr, publicist, agitator, and supposed author of the term anti-Semitism, established the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Anti-Semites) in Germany. It was one of the first political organisations (for non-Jewish men only) erected on a racist basis, aimed exclusively at the struggle against the Jews. Until then, few explicitly anti-Jewish political organisations could be found in Germany or elsewhere. The number of anti-Semitic political parties increased rapidly throughout the German Reich during the final decades of the 19th century. They remained dramatically divided, however, boasting but a limited number of followers. In the French Third Republic before the Dreyfus affair antiSemitic agitation had been the domain of mostly anti-clerical leftwing parties. These also lacked much mass support. The Action Française (French Action), one of the country’s most prominent and oldest antiSemitic movements, was only established in 1899. In Central Europe, except Austria (Vienna), anti-Jewish sentiments were no more effective in terms of party formation and political support. Only in the Russian Empire and in newly independent Romania did anti-Semitism take on noticeable political proportions, becoming an instrument of considerable political mobilisation. At the very end of the century, anti-Semitic ideas rapidly gained popularity elsewhere in Europe. Anti-Jewish sentiments became a fashionable political notion. Anti-Semitism offered the ignorant and the malevolent an easy explanation and a convenient scapegoat for the rapid and disturbing changes in the region.

2.1. The Anatomy of a Myth From a doctrinal point of view the Jewish world conspiracy, or for that matter the notion of Jewish Communism, could be seen as a secularised or modernised version of traditional, medieval images. Judd Teller defines it as the modern variant of the medieval “legend of the Jew as a plague-carrier” (Teller 1954: xiv). And, as mentioned before, Norman Cohn’s depiction of the pre-modern identification of the Jews “as a league of sorcerers employed by Satan for the spiritual and physical ruination of Christendom” (Cohn 1967: 16) could also be easily adapted to 19th century anti-Semitic thinking. The notion of a Jewish 57

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world conspiracy, a secret world government led by a mystical sect with magical powers, was indeed a modern function of the medieval demonisation of the Jews – something which had yet to vanish from the popular mind. During the finale decades of the 19th century, owing to the dramatic and disturbing changes European, including Jewish, societies experienced, these traditional anti-Jewish myths and stereotypes were revitalised, freed of their predominantly religious connotations, and politicised. They would ultimately derive their strength, vehemence, and unlimited radicalism from the association with modern, non-religious issues at stake in fierce political battles with secular nationalism, international capitalism, political extremism, and racism. A Jewish world conspiracy, with a network of organisations at its disposal, supposedly influenced and subverted national states and governments, political parties, banks, press as well as public opinion, with the ambition to establish Jewish control over Christian society. Traditional remnants of ancient demonological fears coexisted with typically “modern” anxieties and resentments, and were translated into easily acceptable, popular conspiracy theories (See Rogalla von Bieberstein 1976). Such was the genesis of the Jewish World Conspiracy and its legitimate offspring, “Jewish Communism”. Indeed, the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy was more than just a modern variant of an ancient anti-Jewish prejudice. It combined traditional, religiously inspired anti-Jewish sentiments with radical 19th century and highly eclectic anti-Semitic ideas: from anti-Judaism, Jews as sorcerers, symbols of money making, blood libel and other popular images to either religious or vigorously anti-Christian ideas to pro- or anti-capitalist sentiments. In East Central Europe the apparent prominence of Jewish individuals in an otherwise highly volatile world proved fertile ground for existential fears and mythical generalisations. The Jew would invade, undermine, and eventually dominate Christian Europe. Modernity was identified with the subversive and corruptive Jewish spirit. The notion of a Jewish world conspiracy became a popular instrument in the struggle against liberalism, democracy, humanism, socialism and other dangerous challenges to the traditional social and political order. Initially it was the Jewish deicide, later it would be the Jewish liberal or democrat, and occasionally the Jewish capitalist, who was identified as the principal threat to Christian civilisation. Eventually, however, it would be the Jewish revolutionary, the Jewish communist or Bolshevik, who was singled out as the principal enemy. In East Central Europe, the propagators of the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy harboured relatively few anti-capitalist or anti-Christian prejudices. It was an essentially political notion. Even among the most hardened believers, 58

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however, the image of the Jewish revolutionary remained somewhat ambivalent. “Revolution” was only the latest, albeit the most radical and dangerous instrument in Jewish hands to protect their real interest: their capital (See Fehst 1934: 101, 150-151; Kommoss 1942: 33; Von Poehl n. d.: 92). Elaborating on traditional resentments and prejudices, Jewish Communism derived its ultimate strength and lethal vigour from very real and for many Europeans, very threatening changes. The myth of the Jewish world conspiracy might indeed have been monopolised by a handful of “rightwing Russians and a few cranks in Western Europe” (Cohn 1967: 18), had the First World War, the Russian Revolutions, the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, the Balfour Declaration, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the political disturbances in Berlin and Bavaria and other seemingly related events not occurred. For those who wished to believe it, nothing corroborated the Protocols more convincingly than the actual events in post-war Europe. The Jewish world conspiracy – Jewish power – gained a macabre credibility (Parkes 1939: 138; see also Jouin n. d.: 4; Segel 1926: 7). The Protocols figured prominently among the apocalyptic scenarios of those days. Apocalyptic though not necessarily defeatist As a widely distributed brochure published in Germany shortly after the war put it. Das “grosse Chaos”, von dem die “Weisen von Zion” bereits im Jahre 1897 vorahnend zu berichten wussten, ist also sichtbar für jedermann in Erscheinung getreten: Wir stehen am Beginn der jüdischen Weltherrschaft. Das arme, beschwindelte und so schmachvoll betrogene deutsche Volk aber stand bis jetzt jammernd da und – schwieg; lange dauert es, bis sich bei dem gewissenhaften Deutschen die Wahrheit durchdringt; dann aber wird der Furor teutonicus hervorbrechen, wie nie zuvor (Wichtl n. d.: 29, 31).

Even relative moderates such as the editor of the London Morning Post, H. A. Gwynne, referred to a “conspiracy against civilisation” (H. A. Gwynne, “Introduction”, in The Cause 1920: xiii). And the French Count and anti-Semitic publicist Léon de Poncins, who figured amongst the most prolific propagators of the Jewish Communism myth, wrote: Nous assistons actuellement à un immense mouvement révolutionnaire, dont la première manifestation extérieure a été la Révolution française de 1789. Ce mouvement, qui depuis a gagné toute la Terre, a une signification bien plus profonde qu’on ne se le figure généralement et tend à un bouleversement de la civilisation. Le sort de l’humanité en dépend (De Poncins 1929: 13).

De Poncin’s anti-Semitic agenda was truly “international”. His major concern was to eliminate the “principles” of 1789, which the Jews had 59

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imposed on the peoples of Europe. Abolish parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, and liberalism, he advocated, and let us return to our traditions, to the absolute monarchy, to obligatory religious education in schools, to social hierarchy, and moral elevation (De Poncins 1929: 288289). This was the message of old-style European conservatism. It reflected the kind of ancien régime nostalgia, including its uncertainty, misgivings, and fear, typical of the “soft” variant of anti-Semitism and the moderate interpretation of the Jewish world conspiracy. Although de Poncins and his aristocratic ilk communicated the same kind of absurd anti-Jewish generalisations, their message was different from the strongly politicised, the aggressive, and the physical kind of Jew-hatred which could be found among the many radical anti-Semites of Central and Eastern Europe. De Poncin’s idea of an epic, global struggle between the powers of good and evil was widely propagated (Trzeciak 1936: 40; the Catholic priest Trzeciak published the Protocols in Polish). Most authors identified “good” or “civilisation” with western Christianity, and “evil” with Jews and the Jewish spirit. Others adopted more discriminatory positions. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British devotee of German racist Romanticism, outlined human history as an equally bitter struggle between “the only two pure races”: the German, embodying “spirituality”, and the Jewish, representing “materialism”. All others were merely a “chaos of peoples”. Only through the “destruction” of the Jewish nation and its aspiration of global domination would Germans realise their divinely appointed destiny: a new, radiant world, where modernity and tradition was equally mysteriously as harmoniously combined (see Cohn 1967: 172). De Poncins genuinely believed that the Final Confrontation was approaching. In truly Nietzschean style, he prophesied that it would be only a matter of time before the battle was definitively settled. Jews would either become the “masters of Europe”, he predicted, or utterly defeated, as they had when they lost Egypt. Anti-Semitism was a strictly defensive posture, de Poncins maintained, “une révolte contre le monde moderne, produit du judaïsme” (De Poncins 1929: 151, 271, note 2). The burning question remained: how to stop modernity; how to stop the Jews? De Poncins was not the only political publicist to raise this issue. Europe’s anti-Semites were well aware of the pre-eminently international (cosmopolitan) nature of their adversary. They were also aware, however, of the frustratingly provincial quality of their own movement. International co-operation to fend off the Jewish peril was never one of the strongest points of Europe’s anti-Semites (Bonhard 1928: 178). Chauvinism should not stand in the way of our common effort, the 60

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French aristocrat and kindred spirits repeatedly stressed. But in reality, it did. Anti-Semitism seemed indeed pre-eminently suitable to unite different people from different countries. The anti-Semites’ enemy, world Jewry, was perceived as an international force par excellence; and anti-Semitism was a widely shared popular sentiment in many countries. In interwar East Central Europe, to recall Rothschild’s assertion, it was the most prominent internationalist ideology available. Yet contrary to what some historians suggest (S. Ettinger, “Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern and Central Europe between the Wars”, in Vago 1974: 12), not even the force of anti-Semitism succeeded in uniting the region’s diverse crowd of anti-Semites. The Statutes of Marr’s Antisemieten-Liga (1879) did not contain a single reference to the need for international co-operation (see Antisemiten-Liga 1879). As much as anti-Semites stressed the international dimension of their ideas, and as much as they loved to list the dozens of parties and periodicals of anti-Jewish leanings, they hesitated to cooperate. Tibor von Eckhardt, president of the interwar Hungarian Smallholders Party, member of parliament, leading activist of the antiJewish organisation The Awakening Magyars, and publisher of the equally anti-Semitic Courier Danubien, was among the most vocal proponents of the anti-Semitic international between the world wars. Our nationalism is not necessarily non- or anti-internationalist, he asserted: “international nationalism” is neither inconceivable nor impossible. Paraphrasing Alfred Rosenberg, Von Eckhardt claimed that in this respect early nationalism had failed miserably. This outmoded variant of nationalist thinking had set social classes and nations against one another for purely materialistic purposes. It had enabled international high finance under Jewish leadership to emerge as the real victor of the war. Von Eckhardt’s presented his international nationalism as a different, new kind of nationalist thought. It purported to the co-operation of nations, not to their merging. It would give Europe the unique means to liberate itself of the “uncultured world regime of money”, Jewish money (Tibor von Eckhardt, “Internationaler Nationalismus”, in Krebs 1938: 916). Before Von Eckhardt uttered his battle cry, Europe witnessed a series half-hearted attempts to merge anti-Semitic forces in the fight against the common Jewish enemy. In September 1882, some twenty years after the founding of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, some leading antiSemites and their followers from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Russia met in Dresden to establish the Alliance Antijuive Universelle. It was the first organised international response to the reputed Jewish world conspiracy. A second congress took place less than a year later, in April 1883 in Chemnitz. Romanians, Serbs, and French had now joined 61

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the gang. More than anything else, however, they added to the confusion and divisiveness. National and ideological differences reigned supreme. Both congresses were overshadowed by mutual disagreements within and between delegations (Katz 1980: 279-280, 292). Attempts to organise anti-Semitic parties on an international scale were continued after the war. But the objectives, slogans and mutual rivalries remained the same. Nothing really changed. After extensive fact-finding by Hungarian activists, the first post-war conference was staged in Budapest in 1925. At outset, the Budapest meeting, as it pre-war predecessors, was marred by mutual competition and petty conflicts. Radical participants demanded immediate political action against Jews (Theodor Fritsch from Germany, the Romanian fascist intellectual and activist Alexander Cuza, and other representatives), while others advocated restraint. The moderates were reportedly greeted with jeers: “Jesuits” and “Jewish hirelings of Rome” were among the more friendly abuses. It proved to be the traditional division between the primarily politically and racially inspired radical anti-Semites and their more traditional, less extreme, and principally religiously motivated colleagues. In spite of their differences, the participants agreed to establish a Bureau and Council of the Anti-Semitic International. Headquarters were to be located in Vienna. The Bureau consisted of representatives from Germany, France, and Austria, as well as Russian monarchist circles. Two seats were left open for other national delegates to occupy at a later date at the unanimous agreement of the current participants. Among the members of the council meant to co-ordinate the anti-Semitic movement were some of Europe’s most prolific anti-Semites, including Theodor Fritsch from Germany and Nesta Webster from England. Fritsch, the “Schöpfer des praktischen Antisemitismus”, as he was proudly presented in the preface to his Handbuch der Judenfrage (Fritsch 1919: 9) was widely regarded as the doyen of anti-Semitism in Germany. His book was originally published in 1887 as Antisemiten-Katechismus or Catechism for Anti-Semites, under the pseudonym of Thomas Frey, and it became mandatory reading at German schools after 1933. Webster fell into a different category. Born in August 1876 into a well to do British family, she spent part of her youth in continental Europe. In 1910, during a visit to Switzerland, she had a profound mythical experience. It suddenly dawned upon her that she was the reincarnation of the late18th century French Comtesse de Sabran, who had apparently seen her daughter arrested and her son-in-law guillotined during the French Revolution. Webster became obsessed with these revolutionary events and the personal drama she believed she had experienced. After the war Webster made a modest career in anti-Semitic circles. She published in the conservative Morning Post as well as in the more obscurantist 62

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rightwing press. Later she would get involved in fascist circles. She lived long enough to witness what she dreaded most: the collapse of the British Empire. Nesta Webster died in 1960. The anti-Semitic international established a press committee to further disseminate the anti-Jewish message, which read as a Who is who in interwar European anti-Semitic printing. The publishers of Der Hammer, Welt-Kampf, and the Völkischer Beobachter from Germany; of Nep, Szózat, and Courier Danubien from Hungary; of Agenzia Urbs and Rama from Italy; and of Stitt Narodu from Czechoslovakia were all present. Finally, and most ominously, the establishment of armed groups was announced, which would be equipped to fight the Jews and their organisations wherever necessary. Hungary, Germany, Poland and France were specifically mentioned. Apparently, the anti-Semites of interwar Europe were fond of their international endeavours; within a year, in August 1926, they gathered again in Copenhagen. Representatives of the thirteen countries spent most of their time on the alleged Jewish domination of high finance. Apart from the proposal to exclude Jews from public life, nothing serious came out of the conference. The same prevailed for the two subsequent meetings, in 1933 in Copenhagen and in 1934 in Budapest. By then Nazi Germany had appropriated the international Anti-Semitic movement for its own ends. The secretariat of the World Confederation of Anti-Semites was relocated to Erfurt, but it would never play any role of substance in German foreign policy (see Mintzer 1946: 1-9). The anti-Semitic international was doomed from the start. Europe’s anti-Semites have never been able to reach beyond the narrow limits of their own parochial nationalism. They proved incapable to escape the dilemma, which was so typical of their kind of world outlook and political activism, of how to reconcile their ingrained nationalism with the internationalism needed to confront their common enemy, international Jewry. The Jewish international has been interpreted in many ways. According to the least radical interpretation, Jewish revolutionary behaviour was based on Judaism, Jews’ religion, and Jews’ apparent desire to spread the word of God and his rule over the entire earth. Others stressed the Jewish International’s ethnic or racial features. They believed the Jewish international was determined by the Jews’ common ancestry and their extraordinarily strong sense of community. There was also an outspoken racist interpretation of the Jewish international. Jews would ultimately replace the community of free and individual nations with a “cosmopolitan human porridge”. But the most popular interpretation of the Jewish international was explicitly political – it symbolised, more than anything else, the ambition of the Jews to dominate and rule 63

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the world. The Jewish international reportedly disposed of three instruments: Free Masonry, high finance, and Bolshevism. Bolshevism was generally seen as the most dangerous and most powerful of these (Weil 1924: 15). Among the propagators of the Jewish international, some tried to avoid speculation and kept as close to the facts as ideologically possible; while others built enormous and absurd conspiracy theories. Many anti-Semitic propagandists were principally religiously inspired, basing their ideas on age-old anti-Jewish prejudices and fantasies; whilst others were primarily guided by modern-day political convictions, anticommunism in particular. The racist and political interpretation of Jewish communism was especially popular among the National-Socialists propagators of the myth and their predecessors. As the German scholar and loyal servant of the National-Socialist regime Hermann Greife typically asserted in ideologically driven jargon: “In the National Socialist racialist perception of reality, Bolshevism is racially rooted, racially determined, and racially defined. It has discovered and identified the Jewish race as the inventor and the carrier of Bolshevism” (Greife 1939: 36). In 1936 Greife published a severe attack on the proponents of the traditional school of Russian studies in Germany (Otto Hoetzsch and Klaus Mehnert in particular). Greife’s book, Sowjetforschung, was the first study of the Institut zur wissenschaftliche Erforschung der Sowjetunion (Institute for Scientific Research on the Soviet Union), published by the Nibelungen-Verlag of the Anti-Komintern organisation, under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels’s ministry of Propaganda. The institute was founded to introduce “kämpferische nationalsozialistische Erforschung” into the study of Marxism and Bolshevism (Adolf Ehrt, “Geleitwort”, in Greife 1936: 12). Ideology, Greife asserted, is the basis for scientific research: false worldviews create false and unsuccessful science. Russian studies in particular were said to suffer from such erroneous assumptions, of which the most serious was the obstinate refusal to accept the essence of communist rule: its Jewish dimension. “The Jewish question”, Greife stressesed, “was an absolute taboo for these ‘Russian experts’” (Greife 1936: 48). Peter Heinz Seraphim, director of the Institute for the Jewish Question (Institut zur Judenfrage) in Berlin, was an equally if not more prominent Nazi-expert on East European Jewry. His studies on Jews and communism, maliciously biased as they may have been, were more thoughtful than the flow of cheap agitprop which was published for general consumption. Indeed, Seraphim, who was born in Riga in 1902 into a scholarly Baltic family, was a convinced anti-Semite. He was a member of the NSDAP and the SA. And he seemed to have had no qualms about putting his expertise on racial and population policies at the disposal of a murderous regime, 64

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whereas he must have been aware of the fact to what his argument for “systematic and massive migration” (Seraphim 1942: 52) of East European Jews would eventually contribute to. Greife, Sepharim and their ilk regarded the notion of Jewish Communism or Judeo-Bolshevism as tautological. Marxism, and for that matter communism or Bolshevism, was Jewish, served Jewish interests, and was part of a carefully crafted Jewish plot to dominate mankind. It was not anti-Semitism that brought Jews to Marxism; Marxism was their very nature (Fritsch 1941: 22). Anti-communism was a variant of anti-Semitism. The German anti-Semitic activist Georg Quindel was quoted before: those who want to fight Bolshevism must first strike at its very roots, the Jews (Quindel-Hannover n. d.: 2). For the less extreme interpretations of the Jewish World Conspiracy and Jewish Communism one may consult the works of authors from the democracies of Western Europe – countries which had experienced neither defeat in the Great War nor revolution thereafter. Perhaps not each and every Jew was a Bolshevik, Freemason or revolutionary atheist, viscount Léon de Poncins wrote at the end of the 1920s, but certainly every Jew, on account of his Jewish mentality, was “essentially a conscious revolutionary” (De Poncins 1929: 278). De Poncins, in his thirties and still living at his father’s (a rich industrialist) expense, may not have been France’s most well known anti-Semite, but he did become one of the country’s most active writers on the international Jewish conspiracy. Together with Georges Batault, whom we will meet later, he edited Contre-Révolution, a journal whose political message left little to the imagination. De Poncins’ work was translated into various languages and was eagerly quoted by his many sympathisers across Europe. De Poncin stayed true to a long tradition of anti-Semitic activism in France. Édouard Drumont’s La France juive (1886) had sold over a million copies. His trade union Les jaunes (The Yellows) attracted more followers than any other extremist rightwing organisation elsewhere in Europe, East or West. Although De Poncins was not an outspoken racist, to some of his like-minded compatriots he was still too radical. My anti-Semitism is “human” and “reasonable”, an anonymous Frenchman wrote at the end of the 1930s. It is neither racist, nor is it religiously or historically inspired. It is not based on economic rivalry or intellectual jealousy. It is based on sober political observation. There is no such thing as a Jewish world conspiracy, and the Protocols are an obvious forgery, he stated. And as “cruel”, “absurde” and “stupide” as the Bolshevik Revolution is, it would be incorrect to put all Jews in the same category of revolutionaries. This creates a false and irreconcilable contrast between Jews and non-Jews. Yet our anonymous author did not fail to add that the Jewish 65

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spirit is revolutionary, aiming at the complete, sudden, and violent transformation of our society – “and therefore I argue that the minority which leads the world revolution is indeed Jewish” (Est-ce que je deviens antisémite? 1938: 70). These kinds of interpretations could also be found among other West-European authors. Gwynne, in his Morning Post, the “leading organ of conservative opinion” in Great Britain (Wolf 1921: 1), held such views. “It would be unfair and un-English […] to argue that all Jews are Bolsheviks”, Gwynne wrote. He was absolutely convinced of the authenticity of the Protocols, but he maintained his British upperclass manners at all times. Undoubtedly, he claimed, an age-old international Jewish conspiracy existed but to ascribe this “mad and menacing policy” to Jewry in general was foolish and unwise. Gwynne warned against “violent and indiscriminate anti-Semitism”, but called on the Jews to avert this themselves. The honest, patriotic Jew should come to the fore. Stop defending the “revolutionaries of [your] race”, he advised, “repulse anything which undermines our civilisation – those who are not with us are against us” (H. A. Gwynne, “Introduction”, in The Cause 1920: xii-xiii). Gwynne’s remarks were rather typical of British publications on the Jewish Communism stereotype, i.e. more moderate in style and argument, and less aggressive than those from Germany and East Central Europe. Racist or biological metaphors were already in wide use before National Socialists reduced history and politics to an essentially biological exercise. The struggle against Jewish aspirations for world domination should be seen as a defensive reaction by the working people against parasitic and degenerative Jewish influences, wrote a German publicist in the early 1930s: “As the human body protects itself against an infection, so the people’s body (Volkskörper) defends itself against the Jewish infection, which endangers its race and national health. This is a law of nature” (Hermann 1932: 3). To accept that Marxism was a “germe morbide”, a lethal virus attacking the healthy body of European civilisation (Lakhovsky 1937: 6), as the French Georges Lakhovsky put it, required a great deal of empathy for biologically-determined thinking. To analyse the French Revolution in similar terms, however, demanded considerably more political and intellectual flexibility. Jews did not figure prominently in contemporary publications on the French Revolution. When assumptions of conspiracy were expressed, they tended to concern Freemasons, radical philosophers and various spiritual orders, rather than Jews. But the German anti-Semitic publicist Walther Kramer was not impressed by these early analyses. In a booklet issued in 1919 he depicted the French Revolution as having been a racial conflict, a war of extermination 66

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launched by the native Celtic-Alpine race against the culturally superior immigrant Franks: Kenner der Zustände während der Revolution von 1793 berichten, dass es genügte, blond zu sein, um die Häschern des Revolutions-Tribunal “verdächtig” zu erschienen. Gegen 200,000 Blondlinge, also Nachkomme der Franken, sollen während der Revolution unter dem Fallbeil geendet haben (Kramer 1919: 2).

It is difficult to avoid the impression that some racist authors truly indulged in their own explicitly physical exposés. Georg Lanz von Liebenfels (pseudonym for Adolf Josef Lanz) was an old hand in German racist anti-Semitism who supposedly had a certain influence on Adolf Hitler’s Weltanschauung. Lanz von Liebenfels founded the Order of the Temple in 1905. Membership was limited to blond-haired, blueeyed men only: men who were expected to engage with women of the same stock and to breed a superior new Aryan race. Lanz von Liebenfels wrote his major work on Theozoology in 1908. His thesis that world history was an eternal conflict between the “children of light” and the “children of darkness” continued to dominate his later work, including that on Jewish communism. Bolshevism is a “zoologischer Garten”, a zoo, he asserted. It is the product of “shameless orgies”, the mixture of a “heroic” race (heldische Rasse) with “inferior” races. Von Liebenfels: Wir brauchen keine weiteren beweise für den zoologischen Ursprung des Bolschewismus, wir brauchen nur den Bolschewikenführer anzusehen. Fast durchwegs sind es geradezu abschreckende, dinosaurirhafte Ur- und Untermenschentypen, wie: Marx, Loslauer, Kún, Szamuely […] (Lanz-Liebenfels 1930: 14).

In another principally racist interpretation of the Jewish world conspiracy Walther Kramer linked early Bolshevism to the danger of the approaching Chinese hordes. Seventy thousand Chinese would form the nucleus of Bolshevik forces in the southern part of Russia, he maintained. Bolshevism was the foreboding of the breakthrough of the yellow peril, as led by the Jews. And in this case, dann wäre der Weltkrieg nur der erste Akt in dem furchtbaren Völkerdrama gewesen und die kampfesmüden Seelen der mitteleuropäischen Völker wären in ihrer Friedenssehnsucht betrogen. Dann wären neue fürchterliche Kämpfe zu bestehen, in denen alle uns noch verbliebenen weicheren Gefühlsregungen untergehen müssten. Eine neue geistige Eiszeit wäre da (Kramer 1919: 11).

Count Cherep-Spiridovich, a Russian emigrant of dubious origins but “a prophet in all seriousness” to his sympathisers took the argument even further. He claimed that the world was threatened by three Mongolian foes: the Judeo-Mongolian world government or “The Hidden 67

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Hand”, amounting to 300 people, which controlled 300 billion dollars and most national governments as well as the world press. Mongolian Japan was the second menace, whilst Judeo-Mongolian Bolshevism, financed by German-Anglo-American bankers, represented the third. Cherep-Spiridovich’s analysis was profoundly racist. Bolshevism is militant Judaism, he asserted. It aims to exterminate the “white race” and to substitute the “Aryans” with “Asiatic parasites” (Cherep 1925: 7, 27). Jewish rationalism and materialism also figured prominently among the traditional anti-Jewish ingredients of the Jewish communist stereotype – as they do, mutatis mutandis, in more academic interpretations of Jews’ predisposition to radical politics. Democracy and socialism were the “most brutal, honourless and materialistic worldviews available”, Rosenberg wrote, and Jewishness is what linked them (Rosenberg 1935: 204). De Poncins related the alliance of Jews and Freemasons, the key subversive forces of the 19th century, to a shared humanism. “The deification of man and its defiance of any divine authority”, as the French count characterised humanism, would inevitably lead to a “socialising democracy” and ultimately to Bolshevism (De Poncins, “Freimaurerei und Judentum”, in Krebs 1938: 84). His anti-Semitism directly pertained to his anti-democratic disposition. It is absolutely logical, he asserted, that in a democratic system Jews will take the ruling positions. His contemporary, the Hungarian sociologist of partially Jewish extraction, Oscar Jászi, one of the founders of the Radical Party on the eve of the First World War and minister of Nationalities in the Károlyi cabinet before he left his country in 1919, offered a surprisingly comparable identification of Jews and communists. The communist is strikingly similar to the “historic Jewish type”, he asserted. Both are predominantly rationalistic and non-moral. They both share an identical lack of instinctive and natural prompting, the same lack of tradition, the same proud exclusiveness, the same call to deliver a messianic message, the same impatience of other ways of thinking, the same overdevelopment of materialist hedonism in some, and absolutely oriental, lifespurning mysticism in others (Jaszi 1924: 123).

While Jewish Communism was perceived as the final stage in a conspiracy to dominate mankind, the Jewish Communist was seen as the ultimate embodiment of evil. The “Jew-Devil” was a conspicuous motif of the Judeo-Communism myth: the devil who embodied the forces of heresy and rebellion, who sowed doubt and discourse among the faithful, and who aspired to control the world. The Jew-Devil motif combined tradition with context, Christian teachings with the modern notion of a global political conspiracy. It added new dimensions to ancient antiJewish demonology. Trotsky, Kún, and other icons of the Jewish com68

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munist international were routinely portrayed with the traditional symbols and attributes of the devil: horns, tails, bulging eyes, and the like. “The fanatical destructive rage the world witnesses today in Russia and Germany”, Theodor Fritsch wrote in 1919, “can only be explained by the anti-human being of the Jews, threatening to fulfil their solemn pledge: ‘You will destroy all people.’ […] The Jew is the devil incarnate” (Fritsch 1919: 236). Another feature of the myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and Jewish Communism was a rather ambiguous interpretation of Jews as the Chosen People. To their enemies Jews represented seemingly paradoxical qualities – a “universal solvent and […] a ghostly anti-race” on the one hand and a “most cohesive and tenacious racial group determined to establish its rule over the whole world” on the other (Talmon 1970: 61). The literature on Judeo-Communism persistently conveyed this dual image of contempt and admiration. Exclusivity was perceived as the basic principle of Judaism. It not only enabled Jews to sustain their race, nation, religion, and mentality for over 3,000 years, but it also produced their “inextinguishable spirit of revolt” against a non-Jewish environment, to which they would always remain “d’éternels inadaptés”, eternal strangers (Batault 1921: 104). The Jews were an Übernation, archetypes of universalism, and innately superior. They did not need to hide their self-chosen mission. It was common knowledge. Jews would deprive the Christian nations of their spiritual and material independence. Under close supervision of a secret Jewish government and through various camouflaged agencies and organisations, Jews would divide them, play them off against one another, and they would ultimately force them to resign to the Jewish cause, the reign of Hochfinanz (Paul Boeche, “Die Organisation der kommunistischen Weltverschwörung”, in Bley 1938: 243). In Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts the nazi ideologue of Baltic descent Alfred Rosenberg mentioned democracy and Marxism as examples of the “brutal, dishonourable and materialistic worldview” of the Jewish race. Rosenberg, a “walking encyclopaedia of imperfect knowledge and factitious information about religion and race” (Teller 1954: 1), might not have been the most influential thinker in NationalSocialist circles, but his ideas did have a certain bearing on Nazi ideology and, from his position as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, on Eastern policies during the first half of the war. Marxism played a relatively subordinate role in Rosenberg’s analysis of the Jewish World Conspiracy. Racist and anti-capitalist reasoning dominated his interpretation. The real malefactor in Rosenberg’s anti-Semitic world view was Jewish international capital or high finance – this “disgraceful reign of money” was fundamentally incompatible with the 69

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characteristics of the “Nordische Seele”, the Nordic Soul, i.e. honour, freedom, and duty. “The essence of today’s world revolution is to wake up the races”, he wrote in his typically eclectic style, combining racist, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, as well as anti-Marxist arguments. Rosenberg: Diese Erwachen ist die organische Gegenbewegung gegen die letzten chaotischen Ausläufer des liberal-wirtschaftlichen Händlerimperialismus, dessen Ausbeutungsobjekte aus Verzweiflung dem bolschewistischen Marxismus ins Garn gingen, um zu vollenden, was die Demokratie begonnen hatte: die Ausrottung des Rasse- und Volksbewusstseins (Rosenberg 1935: 204, 215, 479-480; see also Bonhard n.d.: 14).

One stereotype elaborated on another. Bolshevism was a typically Jewish phenomenon, but it was certainly not the only weapon at the disposal of European Jewry. Jews played different roles under different circumstances. In 1921, the French Tharaud brothers, Jérome and Jean, published one of the most popular anti-Semitic tracts of the interwar years: a history of the Hungarian Soviet republic. “A new Jerusalem has been established on the shores of the Danube”, the Tharauds wrote. They tell the story of the Soviet republic from the perspective of a fictitious backward, Galician Jew. Budapest had always lit the imagination of the Galician ghetto Jews, they asserted, and now finally their Messiah had arrived: Bela Kún. The Soviet Republic was a Jewish republic. Jewish revolutionaries ruled the country, as the Tharauds concluded from the fact that 31 of the 49 commissars of the ruling revolutionary council were of Jewish descent. The non-Jewish leaders were mere figurants, they cynically joked, needed to order executions on Shabbat. “After the Arpad dynasty, after Saint Étienne and his sons, after Anjou, after the Hunyade dynasty and the Habsburgs, a new King of Israel in Hungary has arisen”, the brothers Tharaud wrote: Dans un état ferme et sain, nous sommes Disraëli, le meilleur soutien de la tradition et de l’ordre; et par ce même désir de l’action et de la puissance (deux objets qu’on ne saurait distinguer) nous donnons, en des temps troublés, un Trotski ou un simple Bela Kún (Tharaud 1921: 198).

The same imaginary Jew not only confessed the principally Jewish nature of Bolshevism but also the essentially “imbecile” state of their followers: “I cannot deny that the revolutionary myth is an almost irresistible force of attraction. We are a nation of fools and clowns” (Tharaud 1921: 274-275, 273). The identification of the corporate Jew with the hidden but apparently highly influential world of international finance was another major characteristic of late-19th century anti-Semitism. “No propaganda could have created a symbol more effective for political purposes than the 70

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reality itself”, as Arendt writes (Arendt 1979: 27). However, and this demanded more ingenuity, Jewish international financial power also played a particularly conspicuous role in the myth of JudeoCommunism. Jewish capital and Jewish Marxism were regarded as spiritual manifestations of the same master plan, the “Marx-Rothschild alliance”. In the eyes of anti-Semites an instrumental symbiosis existed between capitalism and Marxism, the role of the latter being to protect the former. Increasingly, capitalism and socialism were referred to as the two wings of international Jewry. Capitalism was the “inner-Jewish communism of wealth” (Wulf Bley, “Weltfeind Nr. 1”, in Bley 1938: 2). To prevent the toiling masses from forming a hostile reaction to Jewish capitalism, Jews (who were basically alien to the working class) had to assume control over the proletariat. By introducing class struggle and dividing the nation into two ostensibly hostile camps (working class versus bourgeoisie), international Jewry created the conditions to safeguard its financial interests. The proletariat was both an object to exploit and an instrument to attain Jewish goals. Control over the labour movement enabled Jews to incite the masses against capital – against nonJewish capital of course. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the dictatorship of the Jews (Bonhard n. d.: 35; Fritsch 1919: 537; Halicki 1933: 35; Koehler 1937: 119; Kommoss 1942: 213-214; Rosenberg 1935: 124). Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written during the author’s rather comfortable detention in the prison fortress of Landsberg, Bavaria (November 1923-December 1924), reads as a perfect example of antiSemitic eclecticism. Only a few vicious characteristics are not attributed to Jews. Among their many vices, the manipulation of the nations’ workers counted as the most despicable: Er macht sich an den Arbeitern heran, heuchelt Mitleid mit dessen Schicksal oder gar Empörung über dessen Los des Elends und der Armut um auf diesem Wege das Vetrauen zu gewinnen. Er bemüht sich, alle die einzelnen tatsächlichen, oder auch eingebildeten, Härten seines Lebens zu studieren – und die Sehnsucht nach Änderung eines solchen Daseins zu erwecken.

And Hitler continues: Von jetzt ab hat der Arbeiter nur mehr die Aufgabe, für die Zukunft des jüdischen Volkes zu fechten. Unbewusst wird er in den Dienst der Macht gestellt, die er zu bekämpfen vermeint. Man lässt ihn scheinbar gegen das Kapital anrennen und dann ihn so am leichtesten gerade für diese Kämpfen lassen (Hitler 1939: 313).

In a Letter to a social democrat Karl Baumgartten, one of Hitler’s compatriots and contemporaries, lectured leftwing Austrians on the “Jewish deception” which was Marxism. Marxist ideas thrived on the “envy of the unpropertied” (the Neid der Besitzlosen), as Baumgartten 71

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defined it (an argument which can also found with Ernst Nolte, 1933: 323-324, who defines it as the Ewige Linke, the “eternal left”). “What you have, I want to have, and because I cannot obtain it through my own capability and power, I will take it from you” – that was the brutal truth upon which communism was allegedly based. This was the conflict of time immemorial between the haves and the haves-not, and this was also where Jews stepped in, Baumgartten writes. Jews have always lived of the labour of others. They shun physical work. Parasitism was their second nature. Marxism was just another of those Jewish instruments to control and exploit people, and to protect Jewish property against the have-nots. And so too were liberalism and socialism, according to Baumgartten. Do not take these so-called internal Jewish conflicts seriously, he warned. They are a Jewish comedy. Why, Baumgarten rhetorically asked, do most socialists hide their Jewish descent? From Marx, Lassale, and Eisner to Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev – why do they hide behind their Christian names? His answer was simple and not entirely unconvincing: Aus ganz genau demselben Grunde, als dem sich der Wolfsohn-Loslauer und der Mordechai die nicht jüdischen Namen beilegten. Es ist gewiß keine Übertreibung und keiner falscher Schluß, wenn wir behaupten: Wenn die Sozialdemokratie immerfort die Namen Mordechai und Wolfsohn als die Namen ihrer Gründer nennen müsste, hätte sie niemals die riesigen Anhängerzahl erworben (Baumgartten n. d., b: 28).

You ought to be ashamed, Baumgartten snapped at his imaginary social democratic opponent: Schämen Sie sich denn nicht, wenn man Ihnen ins Gesicht sagt, dass Sie und Ihre Genossen das niederträchtigste Schandwerk der Weltgeschichte, die politische, wirtschaftliche und sittliche Zersetzung und Zerstörung aller Kulturgüter Ihres Volkes ermöglichen und nach Kräften fördern (Baumgartten n. d., a: 62-63; idem n. d., b: 5, 26).

It should not come as a surprise that great Jewish capitalists allegedly played a crucial role in the establishment of Bolshevik rule in Russia. If Marxism was an instrument of Jewish power, then so too was Bolshevism. “In Russian Bolshevism we witness a twentieth century’s attempt by the Jews to establish world dominance”, Hitler, as did so many others, stressed, “as they did in earlier times through different though intimately related means. The Jew’s aspiration is rooted in the essence of his being” (Hitler 1939: 658). Of all the characteristics imputed to the Jews of Europe, their radical political inclinations were certainly the most crucial. No issue was as central to the myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and no anti-Semitic idea was so widely shared in Europe after the First World War as was 72

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the identification of Jews with revolutionary upheaval. Jews were inherently radical – their sense of revolt, exclusivity, and messianic attitude. Revolution was quintessentially Jewish, based on specifically Jewish features. Ce sont les morts qui parlent. Jews derived their revolutionary spirit from their long-time history of dispersal and isolation. It had created a race, a nation, a religion and a mentality of unparalleled exclusivity and rebelliousness. Contempt and admiration were never far apart in the minds of anti-Semites. Jews were the hidden hand behind all subversive, revolutionary attempts (Batault 1921: 104). There were no great upheavals in which Jews were not involved, whether revolts against tradition, religion, or private property (J. F. C. Fuller, “Der Krebsschaden Europas”, in Krebs 1938: 71; De Poncins 1929: 153). Revolution was the “ultimo ratio” of the Jewish people (Krasnowski 1937: 68). Revolution was “der Stern Juda” (Fritsch 1919: 529). Jews had been given equal rights (Gleichberechtigung), but what they actually wanted was superior rights (Mehrberechtigung) – not only to secure their dominance over the world but also to take revenge, which was a popular notion among the propagators of Jewish Communism (De Poncins, in The Cause 1920: 57; Beauftragte: 7). Precisely because they were a dispersed people, a minority among the nations of Europe, they needed the help of others. The Chosen People fought hand in hand with the drags of the nation (l’écume des castes inférieures d’Europe): the proletariat, or so the Polish publicist Zbigniew Krasnowski put it (Krasnowski 1937: 65). At the basis of the identification of Jews with revolution lay the mythical Jewish international. “No single international is so often mentioned in the context of today’s struggles and battles, as is the Jewish international”, as the Jewish-German publicist Bruno Weil, prominently active in the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith), recorded a few years after the Great War (Weil 1924: 15). The Jewish international was a traditional notion, based on the Jews’ ability to combine their dispersion throughout the world with a strong sense of tradition and cohesion inspired by a strong messianism. The nation of the Jews was considered to be as cohesive and as closed as their Weltanschauung was universalistic and purposeful. 19th century nationalism added a new, political dimension to this traditional notion. The Jewish international became the antithesis of the (perceived) nation-state. It was the mythical and malicious interpretation of a very real supra-nationalist element in Jewish life, which practically no anti-Semitic tract did leave unmentioned.

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2.2. The Force of Nationalism and the Rise of the Jews The anti-Semitic construct of the Jewish International can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. By that time national identity and emancipation had become notions of great political importance in East Central Europe. Nationalism, as Hans Kohn emphasised in one of the earlier scholarly studies on the subject, “has its good and its evil aspects”. It may divide or unite, repress or liberate (Kohn 1962: 12-13). Nationalism comes in many varieties. Kohn’s interpretation of nationalism has survived the work of the hundreds of historians who researched the phenomenon in more recent times, although negative readings of nationalism have probably outweighed his rather neutral analysis. This particularly applies to East Central Europe, where nationalism took an explicitly nasty, because principally ethnic, divisive and antagonistic form. “Romanticism was primarily responsible for introducing the Western values of freedom, liberty, and nation” in Eastern Europe, as Ivan Berend writes, “combining messages of reason and emotion.” (Berend 2003: 41-42). Romanticists painted a glorious and heroic picture of their suffering, subordinate and orphaned nations – past, present and future. No state without a nation; no nation without a strong national identity; no national identity without a homogeneous national culture. Whereas the state had been the driving force behind the process of nation-building in most of Western Europe, East Europeans “had to go the other way around”: from nation to state. “The nation became a sacrosanct notion, to die and kill for” (Berend 2003: 44). In East Central Europe the national idea was particularly divisive. In this part of the continent nationalism, to quote the German historian Theodor Schieder, essentially developed against the existing order of states (“nicht im und am Staat, sondern gegen den Staat”). The national idea worked in opposition to the existing state-order (Dann 1991: 350). Large, multinational empires were increasingly perceived to be foreign, repressive, and unjust. In an environment of intense national rivalry and foreign domination the essentially political interpretation of the nation soon gave way to an ethnic one, which proved to be no less political in its consequences than had the “original” West European variant. The nation in East Central Europe (the “bourgeois” nationalism of the Czechs being the primary exception) came to be seen as a unique, natural, and objective subject of history. It represented more than just the community of citizens. The nation developed its own distinctive spirit from the language, religion, culture and history of the community. It actually transcended the community, becoming a new organic whole, which could only reach its full potential when sovereignty of statehood had been achieved. The nation needed the state as much as the individual needed the nation – their mutual relationship was as natural as it was 74

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historically inevitable. Given the absence of historical continuity of state-formation along national lines (such as was the case in large parts of Western Europe), ethnicity was generally considered not only as the distinguishing feature of the nation, but also as the most suitable principle for the organisation and legitimacy of the state. This inevitably involved an element of exclusivity, if not of xenophobia. The fact that most peoples in the region acquired their independence due not to the strength of their nationalism or national identity but as a result of imperial decay and foreign intervention did nothing to alter the fact that the power and attractiveness of this dominant variety of nationalism significantly impeded democratic development. Peter Sugar defines the East European variant of nationalism: Religious and laic institutions, constitutions and other political documents, the aversion to foreign rule, class privileges and economic change, the various forms of xenophobia, belief in a special mission, real or imaginary historical interpretations of the past, and the western idea ideas that were adapted to local needs are the pieces of a puzzle with one important difference: although always adding up to Eastern European nationalism, they could and were joined together in different ways producing variants of the same basic picture. Some solutions were rejected, others gained general acceptance, but all versions contained the same basic puzzle pieces (Peter F. Sugar, “External and Domestic Roots of Eastern European Nationalism”, in Sugar 1969: 44-45).

The distinction between a West European and an East European type of nationalism – of which the former coincided with a fundamentally altered socio-economic and political reality and proved essentially unifying, while the latter seemed primarily based upon myths and dreams, and was principally divisive – is of course an ideal-typical division. Both types of nationalism could be found on either side of Europe’s imaginary East-West divide. Moreover, and as pertains directly to the theme of this book, the vehemence of anti-Semitic sentiments in early-20th century East Central Europe and the pre-eminence of the idea of Żydo-komuna among the aggressive political notions of the interwar years were as much the result of distinct political events (the rise of Bolshevik Russia in particular) as they were determined by a specific type of nationalism; a particular idea of the nation and the nation-state. More so than other ethnic groups, Jews were caught in the crossfire of national ambitions. In a context in which the ideology of the nation, and later, the nation-state, became increasingly monolithic and compulsory, Jews – the traditional other – became a major source of distrust and xenophobia. In a world of national states Jews represented an explicitly non-national, if not international element. A markedly xeno75

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phobic, often anti-Semitic dimension crept into the dominant, ethnic form of nationalism in East Central Europe. Jews were commonly regarded as the minority which was least able and least willing to assimilate. This confronted Jews with a new challenge: to define their position in the growing conflict between the nationalist aspirations of newly awakened nations and the imperial order. Traditional Jewish loyalties became highly controversial, even dangerous. Contrary to what many of their contemporaries believed, Jewish reactions to the national struggles of their Christian neighbours were not so much defined by their specific Jewish traits as they were by personal preferences and local conditions. In the Polish lands, in the 19th century, Jews belonged to all camps. They could be found among conservative loyalists, who served the occupational regimes faithfully, among the Romantic nationalists, who were prepared to die for Poland’s independence, and with the socialist revolutionaries, who had internationalist aspirations. In the German part of Poland, only a minority of Jews were likely to have shared Polish national ambitions. The youth tended to perceive German culture and language as a means to escape their social isolation, while the bulk of the Jewish population, spurned by Germans and Poles alike, remained indifferent. Elsewhere, however, Jews reportedly supported and actively participated in various uprisings. In the 1861 revolt against Tsarist rule, leaders of the Polish patriotic movement named the emancipation of the Jews as one of their political priorities, which likely encouraged Warsaw’s rabbi to call upon his co-religionists to support the national demands of the Poles. Earlier, in 1846, Jews had enlisted en masse in the Polish insurrectionary army in Galicia. They were probably motivated by the pro-Jewish direction of the uprising. The Polish revolutionaries had announced their intentions to annul all anti-Jewish legislation. They were allegedly inspired by the principles of fraternity and equality among nations, as well as their explicit wish to liberate the Jews form their miserable living conditions in the Russian Pale, if only to mobilise much-needed political support (Eisenbach 1992: 364, 479, 489). Apart from reasons of self-interest, the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe had little reason to identify with the particularistic national aspirations of their Christian neighbours. Jews had never demonstrated an excessive interest in the culture and politics of the nations in which they resided. They probably saw little reason to change their attitudes now. In cases where Jews did take a position, opting to cast aside their traditional indifference, the majority tended to support the existing order. They adopted “pro-imperial postures” (Shmul Ettinger, “Forword”, in Almog 1980: xvi). But an increasingly significant minority of politically active Jews – Zionists and socialists – took an essentially 76

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different position. They were equally indifferent to the interests of the empire as they were to the national ambitions of their neighbours. They were fully occupied with the specifically Jewish struggle for sovereignty and self-determination (Zionists), or they maintained a strikingly ambivalent attitude towards the national question in general, whether Jewish or not Jewish. Even without the benefit of hindsight, it seems safe to conclude that Jews had little to gain from the disruptive consequences of nationalist action. There were few attractive options for the Jews of Eastern Europe. Loyalty to one group usually implied hostility from another. If Jews were not seen as either proponents of the dominant culture or as instruments of the repressive nation, they were considered agents and accomplices of minority groups, the main instigators and beneficiaries of revolt (Eisenbach 1992: 458). Despite their participation in the 1846 uprising, Jews in the Bukovina and Galicia were widely seen as agents of Austria. In Poznań Poles suspected Jews of harbouring pro-German sympathies. In Slovakia and in Transylvania they were seen as agents of the Hungarian nation. Czechs distrusted Jews as being exponents of German culture. Although Jews were seen as strangers and as accomplices of Polish nationalism in late-19th century Russia, many Poles believed them to be proponents of either German or Russian interests. In the latter case the Litvaks, the growing number of eastern Jews who entered Polish territory, were specifically distrusted. In Transylvania Jews were narrowly identified with Hungarians and Magyar nationalism, as they were by national and ethnic minorities elsewhere in the Empire. Hungarians for their part identified the Jews with imperialist Germans or Austrians. In the interwar years nationalism had largely lost what was left of its creative and democratising function in East Central Europe. It no longer served the struggle for national emancipation and self-determination against foreign, autocratic rule. Instead, it had become a cardinal instrument in the homogenising policies of the elites of newly independent states. Where the nationalism of one nation became the basis for the legitimacy of multinational states, the distrust of minorities became almost axiomatic. Discredited and treated as second-class citizens, minorities on their part had ample reason to view the new states with scepticism, if not suspicion. The Great War, the creation of new, fragile and multi-ethnic states, much-disputed borders, cross-border minorities and volatile international relations added fresh ammunition to the traditional distrust of Jews. The myth of the Jewish International and strong doubts about the national credentials of the Jewish population at large, took on new proportions.

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In reality, few Jews actively opposed the war effort of their countries. Many backed it. Others remained indifferent. The “universalist mission of world peace” that the prominent socialist revisionist Eduard Bernstein suggested the Jews of the belligerent countries of Europe to support, mobilised only few people. And most of the Jewish men and women who answered his appeal probably did so from a far more radical state of mind than Bernstein’s, namely the Übernationalismus of Rosa Luxemburg and other leftwing socialist Jews. Bernstein was disillusioned not only with the failure of the socialist movement to prevent the proletarians of Europe to go to war against one another, but also with what he perceived as the mindless internationalism of his leftwing co-socialists. But he truly believed in the cosmopolitan responsibility and the reconciliatory capability of the dispersed Jewish people. There is no reason to doubt Bernstein’s call for Jewish mediation between the fighting nations, even though his message attracted less attention among fellow Jews, than it did in anti-Semitic circles. Bernstein’s Von den Aufgaben der Juden im Weltkriege included almost everything their anti-Jewish sentiments were built on: anti-war, cosmopolitanism, reconciliation, and worst of all, the special mission of the Jewish people (see Wistrich 1976: 73). This suspicion was not groundless. “It should be said to their credit”, Vladimir Lenin professed in 1917, “that today the Jews provide a relatively high percentage of representatives of internationalism compared to other nations” (Lenin 1929: 355). Indeed most of the internationalists Lenin referred to were insensitive to the national concerns of the peoples of East Central Europe. But the situation was considerably more complex. While the early communists in Poland, active in the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), largely regarded an independent Polish state as an obstacle to the expansion of the Bolshevik Revolution westwards, the communist rulers of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919 vehemently opposed the amputation of the Hungarian state and the expansionism of its neighbours. Even within the Polish socialist movement, the national “nihilism” of radical comrades was never undisputed. And when the Polish state was finally established and the Communist Party (by then illegal and irrelevant) carefully toed the line of Soviet interests and the Communist International, the negative attitude it initially adopted towards Polish national sovereignty and the independent Polish state were duly self-criticised. The war and its immediate aftermath brought enormous changes to the peoples of East Central Europe and to many Jews in particular. On the face of it, Jews had every reason to welcome the new post-war order. Millions of Jewish men and women had been liberated from the oppres78

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sive conditions of Tsarist Russia, either because the provisional government had granted them full emancipation or because they were citizens of countries in which they were formally accepted as equal citizens (the Baltic States, Poland, and eventually Romania). East European Jews had participated in the political and administrative lives of their pre-war states but only occasionally, as for example in the eastern Habsburg lands (Wandycz 1993: 222). After the Great War, however, Jews were drawn into the vortex of politics on a much larger scale. They had ample reason to expect that these political changes would benefit Jewish community life and their relations with non-Jews. “Neither before nor since that post-war era has the fate of Europe’s gentile majority and its Jewish minority been entangled as intimately, as passionately, as contentiously – as ferociously”, as Howard Sachar rightly stresses (Sachar 2002: xi). Many Jews suffered terribly both during and after the war. Others, however, benefited from the political changes and fully embraced the new opportunities – eagerly, impatiently, and full of hope and expectation. The walls between the worlds of Jews and non-Jews may not have fallen, but they had certainly grown more porous. The emancipation of the Jews in most of the East Central Europe and the series of revolutionary changes were intimately connected in the minds of many contemporaries. Jews would enter non-Jewish society and politics in unprecedentedly large numbers. In countries where Jews had always lived in their own world, their sudden visibility was more than a revolutionary event in and of itself. It is this “rise of the Jews”, a multifaceted process of rapid and dramatic changes within the Jewish communities and, even more importantly, between Jews and their nonJewish environment, that the historian Albert Lindemann causally links with the growing political anti-Jewishness that marked the final decades of the 19th century. “Without this fundamental factor, this ever more impressive rise”, as Lindemann writes, “there would not have been a specifically modern anti-Semitism” (Lindemann 1997: 21). William Brustein offers the same argument. The decades from the 1870s through the 1930s “marked a high point in popular anti-Semitism in Europe”, he writes. “This period signals a reversal in Jewish-Gentile relations within Europe that had begun with the European Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century” (Brustein 2003: 5). Ultimately the most controversial aspect of their advance was Jews’ entrance, with some delay, into the realm of non-Jewish politics. Before the Great War, the highest political offices were closed for Jews. This changed after 1918. No longer did Jews operate behind the scenes, as some wealthy and powerful individuals had done for centuries before. Jews were openly and conspicuously present.

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The impact of these changes would be considerable. But the fact that the political advance of Jews coincided (and was actually preconditioned) by two other equally unexpected and disturbing events dramatically exacerbated the effects of these developments: the dissolution of the anciens régimes and the ascendancy of leftwing politics in Europe. Never before had a socialist entered a national government on behalf of his or her own party. Discredited and cornered, conservative rulers now had little choice but to invite these radicals – of whom quite a few were of Jewish heritage – to assume power, if only to quell the looming threat of communist upheaval. For many Europeans the events following the Great War (and for most East Central Europeans, those following the Second World War too) made the issue of Jewish presence and power considerably less theoretical and much more real. Even if Jews had not “invaded” non-Jewish society physically in large numbers during the first few post-war years, they had done so metaphorically. And metaphors made for powerful myths. Europe was flooded with anti-Jewish pamphlets and brochures, all of which conveyed the same message: Jews, agents of internationalism and universalism, are among us, threatening our nation and state. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was portrayed as an acute example of Jewish subversive influences. In The Inside Story of the Peace Conference the British journalist E. J. Dillon attempted to convince his readers that Jews dominated the proceedings from the outset. “It may seem amazing to some readers, but it is none the less a fact that a considerable number of delegates believed that the real influences behind the Anglo-Saxon peoples were Semitic”, Dillon writes. And they concluded that the sequence of expedients framed and enforced in this direction (the minority treaties, ag) were inspired by the Jews, assembling in Paris for the purpose of realizing their carefully thought-out program, which they succeeded in having substantially executed. However right or wrong these delegates may have been, it would be a dangerous mistake to ignore their views, seeing that they have since become one of the permanent elements of the situation. The formula into which this policy was thrown by the members of the Conference, whose countries it affected, and who regarded it as fatal to the peace of Eastern Europe was this: “Henceforth the world will be governed by the Anglo-Saxon peoples, who, in turn, are swayed by their Jewish elements” (Dillon 1920: 496-497).

Léon de Poncins listed the League of Nations among the chief instruments of global Jewish power. The League was the realisation of an old idea, he asserted, the idea to establish a supreme Jewish tribunal to judge and decide conflicts between nations. De Poncins was not impressed by the concept of a secret Jewish world government. There is no need for a hidden hand, for a stealthy body somewhere to direct and co80

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ordinate activities, he claimed. The religious exclusivity of the Jews, their racial solidarity and community of mind and interests would suffice. Moreover, he continued, Jewish subversion was not so much about conspiracy per se. Rather, it reflected an action programme, a “programme d’action générale”. De Poncins went so far as to dispute the authenticity of the Protocols, although he immediately added that neither those who denied nor those who confirmed the authenticity of the document could really prove their position (De Poncins 1929: 260, 267). Both winners and losers of the peace agreements believed the Paris Peace Conference represented just another chapter in the Jewish World Conspiracy. The French De Poncin and the British Webster wholeheartedly agreed on the Jewish nature of Versailles. The American and British delegations were “surrounded by Jews”, Webster wrote in The Cause of World Unrest. “To describe the unofficial activities of the Jews in Paris would be to describe the work of the Conference”. Webster had her own particularistic reasons to denounce the conference, namely the disastrous effect of the idea of self-determination on the old imperial order. Whether it was the Third International or the League of Nations, while the instruments differed, the idea remained the same: national self-determination. “To sacrifice an Empire for a principle is surely a new thing in political idealism”, she wrote with barely concealed cynicism. Webster presented us with a peculiar amalgam of old and new: the feeling of being lost in the dangerous and uncertain times of the postwar world combined with an outspoken nostalgia for the ancien régime and an arrogant anti-democratic persuasion. As morally and politically objectionable as her position was, it was not incomprehensible. It grew grotesque only when she attempted to link it all together, developing a universal explanation. For this purpose, she added an element of conspiracy theory, a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, a “vast Asiatic plot, which is aimed directly at the whole of Europe as well as the British Empire”. But Webster remained optimistic. Jews and Bolsheviks, she was convinced, would never break the spirit of the peoples of Western Europe: “Christianity is still the beacon that will guide them out of the slough of despond in which they now groan” (The Cause 1920: 155, 159, 188, 244). No historic event was as crucial to the broad appeal of the Jewish Communism myth as was the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. To begin with, Russia’s revolutionary leaders did not leave any room for doubt that their assumption of power was but the first step in a global proletarian revolution. Moreover, among the Bolshevik leaders were some prominent and conspicuous Jews. The Bolshevik take-over was regarded as milestone in the Jewish World Conspiracy. “The land and the sea, the mountains and the valleys, flora and fauna, everything in 81

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this immeasurable country is the undeniable possession of the Jews”, as a Polish publicist observed rather poetically (Chmielowski n. d.: 5). Why Russia? Why had international Jewry chosen the Tsarist Empire as the first juncture on its way to global political supremacy? Initially, as our French Count de Poncins stressed, Jews had few means to control the situation in Russia. The country had always been at the forefront of the counterrevolution. Jews were systematically barred from governmental, bureaucratic, and military positions. The Tsarist Empire was also largely self-supporting. It had proven resistant to the aims of international Jewish capital to enslave it. Jews had thus opted for other means: Socialism. While high finance, resting as it did on a solid sense of self-interest, represented the material dimension of Jewish rule in Russia, De Poncin concluded that the fanatic messianic ideology of socialism was Jewish rule’s spiritual side (De Poncins 1929: 178). It was common wisdom among the propagators of the myth of Jewish Communism that capitalist and socialist Jews had worked hand-in-hand to oppose and destroy Tsarist rule. The Bolsheviks had only succeeded in assuming power because of the support and influence they received from international Jewish financiers. The Bolsheviks were mere instruments in the hands of Jewish capital, eager to secure a field for Jewish (and occasionally German) exploitation of Russia. Jacob Schiff, a New York shipping magnate, banker, philanthropist and one of the selfappointed spokesmen of America’s German-Jewish establishment (Sachar 2002: 33) was routinely mentioned in this context. Schiff, who was accused of donating $12 million to support the revolution in Russia (Krasnowski 1937: 91), was associated with the banking group Kuhn Loeb and Co., as was his close colleague and co-benefactor of the Russian Revolution, Felix Warburg. Warburg, who would receive a royal welcome in Russia in 1927, was also connected with the Federal Reserve Bank of America. The English brochure from which these observations were taken (a reprint from the Catholic Herald of OctoberNovember 1933) is another prime example of the principally eclectic nature of the Jewish Communism myth. The myth offered something for everyone. Hitler was in power for almost a year, but German and Jewish interests were still believed to be identical. The Herald portrayed the Bolshevik coup d’état as a product of the combined “German and German-American-Jew interest”. The German High Command had sent Lenin to Russia so that he could withdraw the army from the war, topple the pro-Allied Provisional Government, and, assist the German war effort. Bolshevism was the best means available for the “World’s SuperCapitalists” to conquer and control Russia (Homer 1934: 3-4; see also Batault 1921: 172; Beauftragte: 10; De Poncins 1929: 128; Krasnowski 1937: 91; Est-ce que je deviens antisémite?; and Labelin 1924: 185186). It was also by far the most lethal. The Jew is “determined to 82

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physically destroy his opponent, using the bloodiest terror imaginable. His road to power crosses through a devastaed and ruinous killing fields”, as the National Socialist publicist Rudolf Kommoss would later assert. He elaborated on the familiar theme of a tripartite alliance of “Jew-states” (the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States) aimed at destroying the German people (Kommoss 1942: 214, 217). Some years later, Hermann Fehst, professor at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German Academy for Political Science) in Berlin and a prolific writer on Jewish communism, admitted that the majority of Jews in pre-revolutionary Russia were influenced by Jewish-national thinking, rather than Bolshevism. Even among socialists, he wrote in his oft-quoted textbook, Bolschewismus und Judentum, Jews were more prominent in moderate than in radical circles. Fehst faced the same challenge that did every academic propagator of the myth of Jewish: how to link a relatively sober analysis with outspoken “fantastic” and ideologically-driven conclusions. Fehst’s decisive criterion was the Jews’ “Wille zur Macht”, their absolute lust for power. Jews initially supported the provisional government in Russia. But when they realised that the Bolsheviks had dramatically strengthened their position, they sided with the communists en masse. The capitalist road to Jewish hegemony was blocked and Bolshevism was considered to be the most convincing alternative. The Bolshevik Revolution offered substantial perspectives for Jewish global hegemony, Fehst asserted. In the West, Jews occupied the commanding heights of capitalism. In the East, Jews dominated socialism (Fehst 1934: 29-34). Fehst’s analysis followed more than fifteen years after the October Revolution. Bolshevism had not extended far beyond the borders of Soviet Russia. Initially however, the Bolshevik slogan of world revolution had not seem an empty threat. In the aftermath of a vicious civil war which only few foreign observers expected the Bolsheviks to win, the Red Army reached Warsaw in August 1920. It created an atmosphere of “radical intoxication” (Maier 1975: 151) among the delegates of the second congress of the Communist International, who gathered in Moscow. It seemed that it would only be a matter of months before the revolution would reach the countries of Central Europe. The Bolshevik threat proved far more real than most contemporaries first imagined: “The degree of working-class unrest and revolutionary potential smouldering between 1918 and 1920 has remained unparalleled in the 20th century. It was probably the only period during which it was not unrealistic to assume that a revolution in the West was on the agenda” (Sassoon 1996: 32). The traditional order did not merely seem to be on the brink of collapse. It had already come apart, most notably in East Central Europe. 83

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Empires had collapsed. Political revolutions were coupled with nationally inspired rebellion. Europe grew obsessed with the threat of revolt and revolution. Latent anti-Russian prejudices (barbarians) coupled with horror stories from the civil war created an explosive combination of fright and anger. “Bolshevism is gaining ground everywhere”, Colonel House, adviser to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, noted in his diary. “We are sitting on an open powder magazine and some day a spark may ignite it” (Seymour 1926-28: 405). Bolshevism became a scarecrow, irrespective of the strength of the indigenous communist movement (Lichtheim 1972: 128). The presence of Soviet troops at the gates of the Polish capital was not the first event to substantiate Bolshevik expansionism. In early 1919 workers and the police clashed throughout Germany. In March the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. The regime’s callous disregard for Hungary’s traditional symbols and the repressive measures it employed had an enormous psychological impact – both inside and outside of Hungary. The Soviet Republic became one of the primary examples of communist expansionism and the Jewish-communist conspiracy, despite the fact that the situation was fully reversed within five months. Shortly after the collapse of the revolutionary government Horthy introduced extensive anti-Jewish legislation, especially in the universities and bureaucracy. Jewish organisations were put under restrictive control. Jews became victims of indiscriminate and widespread physical terror. That Jews of Hungary ranked among the primary targets of Horthy’s repression did not go unnoticed however. Three years after the Soviet republic had collapsed, Jews in Hungary were still identified as communist, as Robert Tarcali wrote in response to the Tharaud brothers’ Quand Israël est roi: Every night soldiers still plunder Jewish neighbourhoods. Jews disappear without a trace. There are cellars stacked with bodies […]. In broad daylight, Jews were beaten in the streets and molested, their shops and houses systematically looted. Jews no longer dare to take the train. They are exposed to unprecedented violence (Tarcali 1922: 17).

Similar revolutionary events had shaken Germany. On April 7, 1919, a small group of revolutionaries, most of them utterly lacking in political experience and tact, proclaimed a Soviet republic in Munich. Leftist intellectuals of predominantly Jewish stock ruled this Bavarian Socialist Republic for only one week. Their revolutionary attempt was succeeded by a second Soviet Republic, which was led by a better skilled leadership affiliated with the Communist International and chaired by Eugen Leviné (yet another revolutionary of Jewish and East European descent). It was not granted a much longer lifespan, however. The revolution was violently repressed and its instigators hunted and killed. Leviné was 84

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summarily shot in June 1919. There were revolutionary upheavals in Berlin, massive strikes in the Ruhr area, and similar unrest in other parts of Germany. Meanwhile, Jewish social democrats and liberals joined the government in Weimar and, inter alia, proved very instrumental in quelling these revolutionary events. Europe seemed aflame. In April 1919 sailors of the French Black See fleet mutinied. A general strike was announced in France in April, with demonstrators fighting the police on the streets of Paris on the first of May. In June, 200,000 engineers went on strike. The red scare even reached the United States. Steel and coal workers laid down their tools. In January 1919 workers in Seattle called a general strike – the first in US history. Oswald Spengler wrote and titled his Untergang des Abendlandes before the first shot of the Great War was fired, but his intuition that Western civilisation was on the brink of collapse reflected the general mood of pessimism immediately after the war. These revolutionary events were connected, not because they were a premeditated means to destroy Europe’s traditional order (as the propagators of Jewish Communism and others had it) but because they were widely regarded as constituent elements of devastatingly intense social and political turmoil. With the exception of the Bolshevik take-over of Russia, however, no single revolutionary attempt would prove successful. By the beginning of 1921 the political left was in retreat. A “world-wide Thermidor” (Maier 1975: 136) had set in. Throughout Western Europe the majority of workers either remained or were re-united under the firm control of moderate social democrats. Even in the southern and eastern countries of the continent, where Bolshevised communists briefly wielded a considerable influence on the urban and rural proletariat, the revolutionaries were disarmed and suppressed relatively quickly. In hindsight, the red wave was less demonstrative of the vulnerability of the ancien régime, than it was of the weakness of the revolutionary movement. The myth of Jewish Communism flourished in the paradoxical context of post-war Europe: unprecedented political upheaval on the one hand and basic political continuity on the other. With the exception of Russia, ruling elites recovered from the war and its immediate aftermath, having survived relatively unscathed. The hereditary principle upon which their status rested, remained in tact, and so did, for all practical purposes, their political prevalence. “Strikingly tenacious” as the social hierarchies in 20th century Europe proved to be (Maier 1975: 3), the prestige and legitimacy of the elites’ positions had been under unprecedented political fire. Nowhere, however, the contrast between the continued privileges of the old elite and the challenges posed by the forces of revolutionary change was as sharp as it was in East Central Europe. The political consequences of the war were more extensive than 85

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in the western part of the continent, the revolutionary attempts more dramatic, and the regime of post-revolutionary restoration more violent – and the worst was yet to come.

2.3. Jews and Revolution: The Polish Case Nowhere in Europe did the notion of the Jewish revolution arouse more emotion than it did in newly-established Poland. Poland was one of the main battlefields for Europe’s revolutionary wars. The history of interwar East Central Europe was demarcated by the desperate and lonely wars Poles fought for the survival of their republic. In midsummer 1920, only the Miracle at the Vistula saved the Poles from defeat – the Bolsheviks were at the gates of Warsaw. Piłsudski would ultimately drive them back to their revolutionary homeland. Twenty years later, in September 1939, the Soviet army would return with a vengeance. The two wars with the Soviet Union, in 1920 and in 1939, not only poisoned Polish-Russian relations for generations, but also deeply affected Polish attitudes towards their Jewish neighbours. For many Poles few issues related to the resurrection of the Polish state were as “important” (Bujak 1919: 3), “crucial” (Kruszyński 1921: 3), or “decisive” (Stanislawski 1924: 4) as that of the Jewish question. As did many others, the Polish nationalist intellectual and politician Roman Dmowski repeatedly stressed that Jews had greatly benefited from the First World War. Their strong financial and economic positions in Germany and Austria, as well as their traditional pro-German persuasion, not only made them accountable for the horrors of the war, but also allowed them to frustrate the national aspirations of the Polish people. When Jews were strong, Poland was weak, and Poland was at its weakest when it was divided, as the argument of Dmowski (Dmowski 1988: 52) and his friends abroad (Nesta Webster, in The Cause 1920: 164) ran. Dmowski, whose political influence never matched his politicalintellectual prowess, was a typical proponent of the culturally inspired dominant type of East European nationalism discussed above. Dmowski defined the nation as a living social organism, which could only fully blossom and flourish within its own nation-state. Language, religion, culture, and ethnicity (or to use the more fashionable term in those days: race) were the main determinants of Dmowski’s concept of the nation. For the new Poland to be stable and viable, it had to be sufficiently ethnically cohesive. Among the minorities present within Poland’s borders, the Jews were singled out. According to Dmowski it was neither desirable nor possible to assimilate the Jewish citizens of Poland. Jews were strangers in all respects. Jews had been a “source of trouble” in the late Tsarist Empire and would be even more so in an independent Poland. They were a direct threat to the country’s economic and political 86

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life. Exclusion from the national community, and, ultimately, expulsion from the Polish state, was the only serious option (Dmowski 1909: 181). Dmowski was Poland’s most prominent and most eloquent antiSemite. Among the many Polish intellectuals who toed his line, François Bujak, professor at the Catholic University of Kraków, stood out as a particularly prolific writer on the Jewish question in general, and on the notion of Jewish Communism in particular. The Jewish problem had grown substantially during the war, Bujak reported in 1919. From the very moment Jews had entered the Polish lands, they had acted either as a “German avant-garde”, or as “superior instruments in the hands of Russian politicians.” During the war, he continued, Jews, while evading military service, were eager to co-operate with the partitioning powers. Only the vigilance of the Polish people had saved the republic from Jewish informers, snitches, and Bolshevik propagandists, as the professor from Kraków concluded. Bujak still believed, quite exceptionally, that it was not too late for rapprochement. Jews should abandon their foolish Germanophalia and dangerous Bolshevik inclinations and reunite with the Polish nation. Poland offered them immeasurably better living-conditions than Russia even could. Many of the Polish publicists who had joined the chorus proved less forgiving. They insisted that Jews had conspired to weaken Poland and to keep the country as fragile and politically and economically dependent as possible (Stanislawski 1924: 31). Jews and Poles fought a life-and-death struggle. Być albo niebyć (Kruszyński 1921: 17) – to be or not to be, that was the issue. Jews apparently wanted to destroy the newly established Polish state politically and economically, by frustrating its trade relations, preventing the acquisition of armaments and destroying the Polish national currency, the złoty (Chmielowski n. d.: 31). Jews attempted to establish a new Palestine on Polish and Russian soil (Stanislawski 1924: 7), thereby creating their own Poland: a “Judeo-Polska” (Kruszyński 1921: 17). Bujak sought to convince his readers both inside and outside of Poland that the presumed anti-Semitism of the Polish population was merely a defensive reaction to Jews’ anti-Polish attitudes. He published his brochure in 1919, when the first serious concerns about anti-Jewish excesses in Poland were expressed in Western Europe and the United States (see the report of a fact-finding delegation of the International Socialist Conference, the successor to the pre-war Socialist International: Bureau Socialiste International 1920: 41). Bujak anticipated another round of fierce anti-Polish criticism. After all, western governments had intervened on behalf of the Jewish communities of East Central Europe before. The Congress of Berlin (1878) had made the recognition of Romania’s independence and sovereignty conditional on Bucharest granting citizenship to most of its Jewish inhabitants. As 87

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Bujak reports, the Poles, at the time their state was established, feared and vehemently resented the same sort of interference by the “international community” in favour of the Polish Jews. The Poles felt belittled and misunderstood. The country was in mortal danger; it was fighting for its survival? Bujak regretted the “so-called” pogroms in Galicia in November 1918. These unfortunate incidents were incompatible with the typical Polish characteristics of humanity and a strong sense of justice. They should be understood though, he added, in relation to the actual behaviour of Jews during the war and to their attitude towards the Bolshevik revolution in particular. The violence had been spontaneous and unorganised. Jews have never been victims of organised racism. Jews and Christians suffered equally during the war and its trail of misery. The international reaction was excessive (Bujak 1919: 29-35; the same arguments were reiterated by many authors throughout the interwar years; see Nowakowski 1918, 1919: Trzeciak 1934; Kruszyński 1921, 1938; and Georg Zychowski, “Die jüdisch-bolschewistische Gefahr in Polen”, in Krebs 1938: 105-110). The identification of Jews with anti-Polish (or pro-Soviet) behaviour was a crude generalisation and therefore principally erroneous. Many Jews persisted in their Polish patriotism, even enlisting in the Polish army. Others remained aloof from the warring factions, particularly during the Polish-Russian war. They tried chiefly to survive, which was difficult enough in those days. Only a minority, particularly among the more secularised, younger and radical parts of the Jewish population, offered their services to the Bolshevik invader. Initially, Polish communists of Jewish descent figured prominently in the ranks of the ruling bodies set up in Soviet-occupied territories (Heller 1977: 52). Herschel Mendel, a member of the Revolutionary War Committee in Warsaw, was among them. He and his comrades eagerly awaited the arrival of the Soviet troops. They had already devised the contingency plans for the first day of Soviet rule. As much as Mendel’s activities opposed the interests of the independent Polish state, they were less inspired by antiPolish sentiments than they were by his universal revolutionary beliefs (Mendel 1989: 23). Mendel considered himself to be a convinced revolutionary. His enemies saw him as an exemplary Jewish communist. Most Jews lacked the strong (pro-communist) sympathies of Mendel and his colleagues. Their reaction was primarily determined by their precarious situation. Hirsz Abramowicz, one of Mendel’s Jewish contemporaries, vividly recalled the deprivation his fellow Jews endured. “People were on the move, wherever the road took them. They were practically barefoot and exhausted. Everybody looked dreadful”. During the Russo-Polish war Abramowicz lived close to the Russian-Lithuanian demarcation-line, on the Bolshevik side. When the Soviets entered their 88

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village they immediately established revolutionary councils, arrested local authorities and confiscated bulls, cows and other precious ware. In due course, however, the village adjusted to Bolshevik rule. The Bolsheviks were particularly successful in reaching young people, Abramowicz asserted. When rumour reached the village that in nearby Vilna, occupied by the Poles, a pogrom had occurred, the local Bolshevik military commissar gathered the people of the village and ordered some of his troops to go to Vilna and rescue their comrades. “As he spoke, he broke into sobs”, Abramowicz recollected. “All the Jews present in the marketplace (it was the seventh day of Passover) also wept bitterly. More than a full company of soldiers, including all those who were Jewish, volunteered” (Abramovich 1999: 213-214). History may never repeat itself, but for many among the 1.2 million Jews who lived in the eastern territories of Poland in 1939, the invasion of Soviet troops in the early morning of September 17 must have brought back disturbing memories of the first Polish-Russian war. The Second World War was two weeks old. The partition of Poland between Germany and Russia put an end to the unhappy interregnum of the interwar decades in East Central Europe. These had been years of unfulfilled dreams and aspirations, persistent backwardness, reactionary obstinacy, and unsolved crises. For the Jews of Poland, the interwar experience had been even less agreeable. Gradual economic modernisation, the Great Depression and ethnically inspired state policies had further undermined their economic position. Their political situation was not much better either. Anti-Semitism had assumed new dimensions. Expulsion of the Jews was seriously debated. Physical violence was no longer exceptional. Everything indicated that the future would only be worse. Nothing, however, could have prepared the Jews for what was to come. With respect to the myth of Jewish Communism, it was not so much the German attack on Poland as it was the subsequent Soviet invasion which would strengthen it so dramatically. How the Jews of eastern Poland reportedly received the Soviet Army added enormous impetus to the myth. As during the Russo-Polish war at the beginning of the interbellum, Poland was again fighting for its survival. And once again, the Jews betrayed it. Such, at least, was the opinion of many Poles. How have historians interpreted this episode? A lack of reliable data forces historians to proceed with care. They do, however, agree on some major issues. Clearly, Soviet occupation and the communist take-over fully uprooted the Jewish communities. In his study on shtetl life under Soviet rule, the Israeli historian Ben-Cion Pinchuk asserts that the local Jewish population greeted the Soviet Army warmly: “an outburst of joy and relief was the overwhelming reaction of the Jews in the many small villages of eastern Poland to the 89

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entry of the Soviet army” (Pinchuk 1990: 5, 21). Jews initially participated “in disproportionate numbers” in the Soviet-government, as he writes, despite the fact that the new regime painstakingly avoided being associated with them. Together with the Ukrainian and Belorussian local populations, Jews happily engaged in the new regime’s attack on Poles and Polish hegemony in the region. After a few weeks of general disorder and temporary revolutionary rule, however, the Soviets established a more permanent administrative machinery. Herein Jews were less conspicuous. Actually, they were hardly to be found in the administrative upper echelons (Pinchuk 1990: 26, 7, 49). Other locals and vostochniki (officials who were brought in from the “East”, from the Soviet Union) largely replaced Jewish activists. Jan Gross, in his study on the Sovietisation of eastern Poland, reaches similar conclusions: For the record it must be stated unambiguously: throughout the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, in hamlets, villages, and towns, the Red Army was welcomed by smaller or larger but, in any case, visible, friendly crowds. These were largely composed from the so-called ethnic minorities – Belorussians, Jews, and Ukrainians. But since ethnic minorities were a majority in these lands, such welcoming committees were truly scattered all over the invaded territory (Gross 1988: 29).

Gross is more careful in his later work. He now criticises those academic interpretations of Jewish behaviour under the Soviet occupation as stereotypical, despite their similarity to his own initial observations. In his book on the 1941 pogrom in the Polish village of Jedwabne, he refutes a number of “standard historiographical perspectives”, by Polish historians in particular. Gross writes: “enthusiastic Jewish response to entering Red Army units was not a widespread phenomenon at all, and it is impossible to identify some innate, unique characteristics of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets during the period 1939-1941” (Gross 2001: 155; see also 43, 45; Jan T. Gross, “A Tangled Web: Confronting Stereotypes Concerning Relations between Poles, Germans, Jews, and Communists”, in Déak 2000: 94). Gross compares the assumed reaction of the Jews to the Soviet invaders with the Polish response to the German advance two years later when Operation Barbarossa began. “The local non-Jewish population projected its own attitude toward the Germans in 1941”, as he asserts, “onto an entrenched narrative about how the Jews allegedly behaved vis-à-vis the Soviets in 1939” (Gross 2001: 155). Probably, only few historians take “innate” Jewish characteristics in this case very seriously, and Gross’ interpretation contains too many variables to either agree or disagree: behaviour by Poles, by Jews, and how this was perceived. In other words, unlike Gross’ earlier analysis, it tells us little about the actual behaviour of the Jews in eastern Poland. 90

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Gross’ second major point of concern is the privileged relationship Jews supposedly had with the Soviet occupiers. Gross asserts that there is “very good evidence” to state that Jews were only occasionally involved in local communist government (Gross, “A Tangled Web”: 97). Again, most historians would probably agree. A considerable number of Jews, among other ethnic minorities, welcomed the Soviet order and participated in its newly installed institutions, especially during the first few months of Russian rule. Many, however, would rapidly lose their special privileges once Soviet rule was firmly established (Heller 1977: 52; Teresa Prekerowa, “The Jewish Underground and the Polish Underground”, in Polonsky 1996: 149). The reaction of Jews in eastern Poland to the Soviet army is less disputed among historians than is the explanation for their behaviour. Why did they react to the invading Soviet forces as they reportedly did? Pinchuk questions ideological fervour as a significant explanatory factor. Rather, he stresses anxiety and fear. “Pogroms and Nazi terror, not enthusiasm for Communism, were the dominant forces that drove the Jews towards the Soviets”, he writes, “fear was the most important single factor that determined Jewish attitudes towards the Red Army” (Pinchuk 1990: 22, 20). Anxiety about physical security was an understandable concern among Jews who had just experienced the defeat of the Polish army and state, the threatening advance of German troops and the many anti-Jewish incidents in the days between the collapse of Polish rule and the establishment of Soviet power. Their reasoning may have been quite simple: where Russians were present, Poles were disarmed, and Germans could not come. Other historians assign greater relevance to the anti-Polish sentiments among Jews than does Pinchuk. The reactions of the Jewish population may have had ideological underpinnings (i.e. pro-Communist and pro-Soviet) but it was first and foremost anti-Polish. Teresa Prekerowa doubts whether fear was the primary motive for the Jews of eastern Poland to welcome the Soviet army. She insists that “anti-Polish feelings” were the decisive sentiment. After 20 years of Polish rule, few Jews, the Polish historian asserts, seriously regretted the collapse of the old order (Prekerowa, “The Jewish Underground and the Polish Underground”: 149). Aleksandr Smolar puts forward a similar argument: Jews welcomed the Soviet armed forces, particularly because they no longer identified with interwar Poland. The attitude of the local Jewish population, he continues, confirmed Poles’ suspicions about Jewish loyalty to the Polish state, “and indeed to the idea of Polish independence itself” (Smolar 1987: 39). Gross adds nuance to the relevance of fear (or actually, of anti-German sentiments). Many Jews initially considered the Soviet regime to be a lesser evil. For some of them, however, it was not 91

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long before they changed their minds. When the Germans were allowed to repatriate people from Soviet-occupied territory, tens of thousands of refugees queued for days on end to get their names on the list – many Jews included (Gross 1988: 32, 150). Gross also mentions procommunist leanings among Jews, although he denies the relevance of any “preconceived ideological notions” (Gross, “A Tangled Web”: 94). Outspoken pro-communist sentiments were not required to welcome the onset of Soviet rule. Even the remote expectation that the new regime would offer possibilities for social and political progress would have been reason enough for many young Jews to offer the Soviets a joyous welcome. That few of these expectations were actually met, and that Jews suffered as much, if not more, than did other groups, does not substantially alter this fact. As do other historians, Pinchuk insists that the local Jewish population was not singled out for special treatment by the occupying forces. According to him, anti-Semitism did not play a manifest role in the repressive measures taken by the new Soviet rulers. The uprooting of Jewish community life occurred according to wellknown Soviet practices, and should be viewed in the context of the destruction of the old order, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Jews who participated in the new communist regime were a small and gradually decreasing minority. Otherwise, the Jewish masses were as uncertain, as needy, and as desperate as they had been before the Soviet invasion. But as would be the case under communist rule after the Second World War, the consequences of the total Sovietisation of social life were most severe for the Jewish community. Even under communism, Ukrainians and Belorussians enjoyed (restricted) community life – national in form, socialist in content, as the familiar Stalinist phrase went. Jews, however, generally lacked such an expression of their collective existence. Jews have paid dearly for their alleged prominence and conspicuousness during the brief era of pre-war Soviet rule. Their seemingly treacherous behaviour in eastern Poland in September 1939 provided enormous impetus for the notion of Jewish Communism. It figured prominently in the Polish (underground) press during the early days of the war (Engel 1993: 47). When Romanian troops entered the Soviet Union in June 1941, they used the same arguments of Jewish betrayal and communist sympathies to justify the killing of thousands of Jews in Bessarabia and the Bukovina. Strong anti-Jewish ideas, including the myth of Jewish Communism, predated the alleged behaviour of Jews in Polish and Romanian eastern lands. The association of the Jewish community with disloyalty and treason occurred well before September 1939. Jews’ supposedly warm welcome for the Soviet army only added to pre-existing anti-Jewish sentiments. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka relates Polish reactions to what she defines as the “victimological definition” of 92

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the Polish historical experience. It applies primarily to the post-war discussion of Jewish-Polish relations but it is also relevant for wartime sentiments. The notion that Jews were perpetrators and Poles victims was a classical ingredient of the Polish mindset. The perceived behaviour of Jews in 1939 and especially the popular image of Jewish participation in the Stalinist regime after the war only strengthened the Poles’ self-perception of victimisation (Irwin-Zarecka 1990: 164; Blatman 1997: 43).

2.4. The Jewish Response How did contemporary Jewish publicists and activists respond to the allure of the myth of Jewish Communism? Given the wide circulation and the political potency of the myth, the scarcity of Jewish intellectuals and politicians who seriously countered the argument is remarkable. In East Central Europe, the public assault on anti-Semitism was never a prominent feature of Jewish life. Many Jews believed criticism of the rising tide of anti-Jewish thinking and behaviour to be either futile or counterproductive. Many among the orthodox Jewish masses in the Russian lands probably regarded anti-Semitism as a highly unpleasant, even threatening phenomenon. But they also believed it was inevitable. Moreover, they were probably too isolated and inward looking to even seriously consider public protest. And to whom could they have effectively addressed their complaints? In Central Europe and Germany, though, Jews were more assimilated and they approached the issue from a different angle: they feared that public criticism of their anti-Jewish compatriots might endanger their already fragile assimilation and emancipation. They therefore averted open criticism and resistance. Silence was commonly accepted as the price of emancipation. A second wave of anti-Semitism during the 1890s changed the atmosphere, at least amongst Germany’s Jewish elite. Anti-Semitism was longer lasting and more dangerous than initially anticipated. Although disagreements remained as to the causes of anti-Semitism, no longer would Jews place the blame with their own communities (Schorsch 1972: 105). The most important expression of Jewish assertiveness was the establishment in 1893 of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens. The Centralverein marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the mood of German Jewry, as the historian Ismar Schorsch writes. Many Jews “had at last resolved to abandon the psychological fetters imposed by emancipation. They stood ready to reveal and defend their Jewishness in public” (Schorsch 1972: 116). The notion of Jewish Communism was not just another variant of anti-Semitism. The wave of anti-Semitism in late-19th century Europe was almost trivial to the explosive mix of anti-Jewish and anti93

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communist rhetoric which poisoned the political debate of the 1920s. How did Jewish organisations and publicists cope with the threatening identification of Jews and communism? Many chose to ignore it. Many prominent Jews, in other words, reacted in more or less the same way as did the other target group of the myth of Jewish Communism: communists. At face value, communist parties might have been expected to refute the myth forcibly. But they did not, at least not persistently or convincingly. Rather, they remained silent (exceptions will be discussed in the next chapter) – a habit mirrored by a good deal of Jewish intellectuals and political activists. In the early 1920s, it took the Jewish sociologist Fritz Bernstein enormous effort to find a publisher for his treatise on political antiSemitism (H. T., “Nachwort zur Neuauflage”, in Bernstein 1926: 226). Bernstein was convinced of the causality between the increase of antiSemitism and the political behaviour (i.e. radicalism) of his fellow-Jews. Among the Jewish leaders and publicists who preferred to disregard the issue, many must have been of the opinion that these so-called Jewish communists, who carried Jewish names and were of Jewish descent, had little to do with the Jewish people or with Jewishness as such. Jewish communism was not regarded as a Jewish concern. Additionally, many Jews found the allegations so far-fetched and preposterous that they too chose to disregard them. They considered the thesis of Jewish Communism and those who propagated it beneath contempt. Such anti-Semitic fantasies could not be countered with serious, rational arguments, they argued (Goslar 1919: 31). Nor could they be addressed with ironical, cynical or sarcastic arguments (for an exception, see Hard 1920, published by the American Jewish Book Company). Others may have been embarrassed or uncomfortable with the relatively large number of Jews among the politically radical, but chose to conceal their discomfort by keeping silent or minimising its relevance. Public statements, they believed, would be counterproductive. Many Jews believed that the less fuss they made about the identification of Jews with communism, the sooner it would fade away. Why contribute additional ammunition to an anti-Semitic prejudice? With hindsight, the resignation these words thoughts conveyed is striking. Hitler has fabricated a “world Jewry” to construct a “world anti-Semitism”, the German-Jewish journalist Iwan Heilblut wrote. “Would Jews not have existed”, he asserted, “Hitler would have invented them” (Heilbut 1937: 137-138). Still, the sceptics had a point. After all, the propagators of the Jewish Communism myth took every opportunity to substantiate their interpretation of the revolutionary Jewish spirit by referring to Jewish sources. The Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz was frequently cited: “The revolution is the Star of Judah, which lightens and continues to lighten Israel!” (as quoted by 94

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Karl Baumböch, “Die Revolution, der Stern Judas”: 95). Lazare was another favourite. Especially popular were the passages in L’Antisémitisme (Paris 1894), in which Lazare elaborated the authoritative role of Jews in the post-1830 revolutionary disturbances – liberal revolutionaries by reason, temperament and self-interest (De Poncins 1929: 153, 269). Every Jewish publicist who did not vehemently deny the affinity of Jews to socialism (the identification with Bolshevism was practically absent in Jewish circles) was eagerly brought forward as a witness à charge. Not all Jews, however, accepted this uncomfortable silence. While they understood the widespread aversion to efforts aimed at openly dealing with this problem, they found them to be ill considered and dangerous. Jewish organisations in various countries issued public statements to this effect. They believed the danger posed by antiSemitism to be too clear and too present to ignore. Too many hollow and demagogical anti-Jewish phrases had entered the hearts and minds of too many men and women, an anonymous but authoritative statement by prominent German Jews asserted: the lives of too many innocent people were at stake (Jüdische Weltherrschaft 1924: 5; see also Goslar 1919: 4 and Wolf 1921: 4). The National League of Hungarian Jews tried to dampen anti-Jewish emotions after the demise of the Soviet Republic in the end of 1919 by publicly denying charges that Jews were responsible for Bolshevism (Katzburg 1981: 51). In the spring of 1919 the League of British Jews, which consisted mainly of the traditional pre-war Jewish elite, sent an open letter to the Morning Post denying and denouncing any similarity between revolutionary ideals and Judaism. They disassociated themselves explicitly from the Zionist as well as the pro-Bolshevik attitude of (foreign) Jews in England (Brustein 2003: 307; David Cesarani, “The Politics of Anglo-Jewry between the Wars”, in Elazar 1991: 145). Another major reason why many Jewish organisations and prominent figures struggled with the issue of Jewish Communism were the tensions and disagreements which Bolshevism and Soviet Russia had generated within the Jewish communities of Western Europe and the United States. Generally, Jewish leaders had received the October Revolution and the civil war in Russia with ambivalence. The dangerous nature of the events was recognised immediately. Outright rejection of the Bolshevik take-over would support the case of the anti-Bolshevik (and anti-Semitic) forces; while openly pro-Bolshevik statements would strengthen the mythical identification of Jews with communism. There was at least a modicum of hidden sympathy for the Bolsheviks among Jewish organisations in the West, a prime example being the Joint (see Billikopf 1926, who suggests to double the Joint’s budget for Russia 95

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from 1.5 to 3 million US dollars). This is understandable given the antiJewish atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks’ white opponents during the civil war. The myth of Jewish Communism reached such grand proportions, however, that despite the sensitive nature of the issue and the risks involved, the American Jewish Committee found it necessary to publicly and officially denounce the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy, which they had initially dismissed as a “mere recrudescence of medieval bigotry.” In 1921 the AJC issued an appeal to their compatriots in which it exposed the Protocols as a “base forgery” and the idea of Jewish Bolshevism as “absurd in theory and absolutely untrue in fact” (The American Jewish Committee 1921: 6, 11). The AJC offered the same standard, ambivalent interpretation of the relatively high number of Jews among the Russian radicals as did other contemporary observers: the role of anti-Semitism, affinity in terms of social justice, and Jewish communists as renegades (Szajkowski 1974: 196-204). Alarmed by the popularity of the myth of Jewish Communism, the American Jewish Committee took the initiative (in September 1918) to launch a publicity campaign to explain the situation in Russia to the general public. The Committee issued a statement in which it not only confirmed the Jewish descent of some Bolshevik leaders but also explicitly proclaimed Jews’ lack of sympathy for communism. A month later, the Jewish Committee repeated a declaration of similar import. The overrepresentation of Jews within the Communist Party of the United States would force the AJC to repeatedly return to the issue throughout the decade. At around the same time, a number of prominent German Jews publicly expressed their astonishment at the lack of an unambiguous Jewish stand against the un-national behaviour of so many of their fellow men. It is in the shared Jewish interest to unequivocally repudiate “the unpatriotic wreaking of their ethnic brethren”, initiators asserted. Jews should “unanimously profess their Germaness” (Protest 1920: 19). Their initiative was controversial, as was the hesitance of some of the Jews they approached to support their petition, among them such dignitaries as Walter Rathenau (Altheir 1920: 6). Individual Jews offered less restraint. They forcefully professed their anxiety and apprehension. Jakob Marx, lawyer in Karlsbad, Germany, made his aversion to Zionism and Bolshevism known in a publication by the prestigious Philo-Verlag. He followed the same reasoning as did other prominent, assimilated German Jews, but added an element of blatant dislike for his less-adapted fellow Jews from the east. Zionism was a political sentiment typical of eastern Jews, he wrote: Vor 40 Jahren wäre es in Deutschland und in England, in Frankreich und Amerika keinem Menschen eingefallen, an die Lösung der Judenfrage, die

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es damals schon gab, durch eine künstliche Nationalisierung des gesamten Judentums heranzutreten.

Their status as a national minority may have protected the Jews of Eastern Europe, Marx asserted, but it damaged West European Jewry. Radical Zionists, mostly Ostjuden, have done great harm to German Jews, and this applied in particular to communist and “quasicommunist” Jews. The Jews of Bavaria may have been spared many problems if Jews, Marx concluded, and in particular, eastern Jews had not been so prominently present in the various revolutionary endeavours in Germany (Marx 1925: 8, 20). As we saw during the first few post-war years, Jewish publicists everywhere almost desperately stressed the national loyalty of their fellowmen – even against their better judgment. Jews did not start the world war, they had not welcomed it, and they had not benefited from it (Goslar 1919: 27; Jüdische Weltherrschaft 1924: 13; Lange 1919: 9; Altheir 1920: 19). Jews, like their non-Jewish compatriots, were overwhelmingly nationally oriented (Weil 1924: 90). There is no anonymous Jewish power, Michal Ringel, member of the Polish Senate, emphasised in the early twenties. Jews were as much committed to the Polish state, as were other Poles (Ringel 1924: 31). The Jewish deputies in the Sejm did their utmost to refute the idea that Jews had willingly co-operated with the Bolshevik invaders shortly after the war (Inwazja bolszewicka a żydzi 1921: 6). At around the same time, a spokesman of the Jewish Division of the German Workers Organisation (Jüdische Abteilung der deutschen Arbeiterzentrale) argued that contrary to the popular perception among many Poles, Jews were first to suffer from foreign occupation. As small traders and businessmen, Jews were particularly vulnerable to the repressive German system of law and order, as well as the numerous restrictive measures and officially sanctioned acts of theft and robbery it involved. Jews and Jewish workers in particular, were the true victims of the war and of the even greater catastrophe of German occupation. The author reached such sombre conclusions while on a factfinding mission in Poland (November 1915-January 1916) conducted on behalf of an American-Jewish relief committee. The journey had certainly strengthened his Zionist inclinations. Initially he believed that German anti-Semitism was typical of the German bureaucracy and officers’ caste, but now he realised that the country’s democratic and social democratic government were no better (Berger 1919: 3-14). Among the Jews who refuted the myth of Jewish Communism while acknowledging the high proportion of Jews among revolutionaries, two explanations predominated. The majority view pointed at the strength of anti-Semitism in East Central Europe (Russia in particular), which had supposedly driven Jews to radical policies. A minority saw certain 97

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similarities between the Jewish world outlook and the socialist doctrine. Most Jewish publicists agreed that the origins of Bolshevism did not lie in the Jewish spirit or any other specifically Jewish characteristic, but in the special conditions of the Tsarist polity, as well as the nature of the Russian people. They stressed that the large majority of Russian Jews never had any affinity with Bolshevism, if only because of their specific social structure of middle-class tradesmen and artisans. Bolshevik ideology and the Jewish tradition (and religion) were fundamentally contradictory and irreconcilable (Goldmann 1924: 28; Margolin 1926: 5; Lange 1919: 3, 19; Serebrenik 1936: 6). Arnold Margolin related the contribution of Jews to the Cheka (the Bolshevik Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) and other organs of Bolshevik power to the corruption of state and society in Tsarist Russia. Part of the Jewish youth leaned toward extremism and revenge because, as he wrote: “Yesterday’s stepsons of fate, these citizens of ‘the third rank’ were enabled for the first time to dominate those who had but yesterday made sport of them” (Margolin 1926: 2324). If the Jewish proletariat in Russia was attracted to socialism, they opted for the moderate variant, either Menshevism or the Jewish Bund. And the Jewish upper and middle-classes, if engaged in non-Jewish policies at all, was overwhelmingly liberal. The Jewish nature of Bolshevism was an “optical illusion”, as Lucien Wolf, son of BohemianJewish immigrants and the representative of Britain’s joint Jewish delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, claimed (Wolf 1921: 47). The Jewish communists were a corps of officers without an army. Similar conclusions were drawn with respect to other European countries. In Germany, as Bruno Weil wrote, even the Jewish masses were principally conservative. In cases in which individuals did sympathise with leftwing politics, it was because they had no other option given the antiSemitic orientation of most other political formations (Weil 1924: 81). The Russian emigrant Bernard Segel (Dimitri Bulaschow), author of extensive refutations of the identification of Bolshevism with Jewish rule, stressed that the number of Jews among the Bolshevik leaders may have been very small, but that their numbers in the country’s bureaucracy were indeed significant. Segel mentioned the anti-Semitic tradition in Russia as the single most important explanatory variable. If you want to comprehend Bolshevism, he wrote, study Russia. Study the Russia of Tsar Nicolas I, the “prison-warder” who chained the free spirit of the Russian population, thereby radicalising his people enormously (Bulaschow 1923: 50). Segel’s explanation was widely shared. Hans Goslar, spokesman of the social democratic government in Prussia and a prominent advocate against anti-Semitism in his country, reported that Jews joined the revolutionary movement in those countries whose 98

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reactionary anti-Semitic legislation and government frustrated Jews’ creative and intellectual gifts. He reminded his readers of Bismarck’s well-known aphorism: every country gets the Jews it deserves (Goslar 1919: 23, 25). Jewish publicists pointed to anti-Jewish violence during the Russian civil war, which pushed Jews into the Bolshevik camp (Valentin n. d.: 7). Extreme conditions generated extreme reactions. (Herzog n. d.: 38). The same argument was brought forward in a book published in 1932: Der Jud is schuld? (The Jew is guilty?), which German editors portrayed as a neutral platform for arguments pro and contra the perception of Jewish radicalism. One of the authors, Heinz Liepmann, who emphasised that the Jewish tradition was principally antithetical to revolutionary politics, could not ignore the remarkable fact that, as he put it, practically every old Jew was a reactionary and every young Jew a revolutionary. Why do so many Jewish youngsters betray their own traditions, he asked? The key to understanding Jewish behaviour could not be found with Jews themselves, as he stressed, but with their anti-Semitic environment. Every Jew experienced exclusion and repression in his life, Liepmann concluded, but fewer and fewer Jews, and young Jews in particular, were prepared to accept it (Heinz Liepmann, “Judentum und Marxismus”, in Der Jud ist schuld?: 320321; see also Ringel 1924: 45). What other contingencies determined the political choices Jews made? A common explanation was the urge supposedly felt by many young Jews to flee their social or cultural predicament, isolation, and marginalisation. Whether such a desire was rooted in the anti-Semitism of the Christian environment or in the constraints of the Jewish community was not deemed to be particularly relevant – it probably developed from a combination of both (Valentin n. d.: 7; see also Deutscher 1968: 33-35; Mendelsohn 1987: 96; Prager 1985: 60-61; Seton-Watson 1977: 393; Vetter 1995: 63; Wistrich 1976: 4-5). Alexander Szurek, born in August 1907 in Kalisz, in Russia, close to the German border, vividly expressed these sentiments. He gives a lively impression of his family’s expectations and concerns at the time Poland regained its independence. In Szurek’s recollection of his father’s enthusiastic account of a meeting in Moscow in 1918 where Trotsky spoke, he wrote: Never had father seen so many people at a mass meeting as he did the day when Trotsky spoke in a Moscow square. Although there were no loudspeakers, Trotsky’s voice reached everyone. His speech was very convincing; it fascinated and even convinced my father. People listened excitedly. Father told us that Trotsky’s real name was Bronstein and added: “After the Revolution, Jews will be free”.

Szurek’s mother seemed less confident, though. “Do you think it will be better now?”, she asked. “Yes”, her husband said, “Poland is inde99

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pendent.” The Szureks were no communists, and, as Alexander emphasises, the “yearning for an independent Poland” was ingrained in the family. Meanwhile Alexander grew up as a rebellious youngster. He walked through his native village bareheaded, a symbol of his liberation from the religious restrictions of his community. Looking for an answer to the Jewish question, as well as his own plight, he initially joined a leftist-leaning Zionist youth movement. Ultimately however he found salvation, “like many others”, in “revolution and communism”. Alexander’s political career followed a familiar pattern. In 1928 he was briefly imprisoned for his revolutionary activities, left for France, fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, and returned to Poland after the war. He became a journalist at the Party’s main daily Trybuna Ludu, only to suffer the same fate as would so many Polish communist of Jewish descent. In the notes which he adds to his memoirs, Szurek relates his political demise in the People’s Republic: “The Moczars […] they have decided that I am unworthy to be a communist because I am a Jew. I left Poland in 1930 because I was a communist, and in 1969 because I was a Jew” (Szurek 1989: 5-6, 11, 19-20, 352). Although few Jewish publicists endorsed the notion of the Jewish nature of Bolshevism, some emphasised the evident similarities between the socialist doctrine and Jewish traditions. The French Jewish activist Bernard Lazare was very explicit with regards to the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Through history, he wrote at the turn of the century, massacres, lootings as well as insults had sensitised Jews to the issues of justice, equality (if not anarchy) and freedom. Moreover, as he asserted, Jews lacked patience. Once they held a concrete ideal, they wished to realise it, without delay. According to Lazare, the link between Jews and radical politics (Lazare 1934: 156, 160, 164, 178) was self-evident, and he demonstrated his full solidarity for this. He wrote: Ich gehöre zum Stamme derer, die, wie Renan gesagt hat, die Idee der Gerechtigkeit zuerst in die Menschheit getragen haben. Der Glaube an das Herschen dieser Gerechtigkeit hat all die Meinen beseelt, von den Propheten und leidenden Dichtern, die die Psalmen gesungen, bis zu denen, die wie Marx und Lassale die Rechte des Proletariats vertreten haben und bis zu den demütigen Märtyrern der Revolution, die ihren Glauben an das Ideal der Gerechtigkeit in den russischen Kerkerhöhlen, unter der Knute oder am Galgen der Zaren, gebüsst haben. Sie alle, meine Ahnen und Brüder haben fanatisch gewollt, dass jedem sein Recht werde und die Wagschale sich niemals ungerecht neige. Dafür haben sie geschrieen, gesungen, geweint und gelitten, trotzdem man sie schmähte und auspie […]. Ich bin einer der ihren und will es sein (Wininger 1925-1936, Band III: 610).

Hans Goslar reiterated this argument: Jews’ strong sense of justice was one of the primary reasons why socialism attracted so many of them 100

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(Goslar 1919: 26). The Jewish publicist Elias Hurwich alluded to the “psycho-physical agility” of the Jewish people, which had brought them into the avant-garde of trade, theatre and press, and, most recently, revolutionary politics. He pointed at the “disintegrative” (dekomponierende) role of the Jews. The decay of the ancien régime in Europe was not in any way related to the Jewish people, Hurwich wrote in 1920, but the fact that it coincided with the emancipation, i.e. the “deghettoisation”, of Jews, made it a particularly attractive development to the most radical part of the Jewish population (Hurwich 1920: 18). The German Jewish publicist Moriz Rappaport did not hesitate to mention Jews as the “driving force” (das treibende Element) behind the revolution. It was nonsensical to believe that Jews consciously played different roles (the capitalist, the socialist) to reach world supremacy, he stressed, but there is a “purely inner motivation” (ein rein innerliches Moment), which attracted Jews to socialism. And this inner motivation, as he saw it, stemmed from Jews’ religious convictions as much as it did from the unparalleled strength of their materialist worldview. Moreover, Rappaport added, for a people with no connection to either soil or state, internationalism was a matter of course. Rappaport did not wish to rekindle anti-Semitic sentiments, he wrote, but he did wish to stress the differences between the Arian and Jewish perception of things (Empfinden). Paraphrasing Lazare, he regarded impatience as a primary Jewish trait. The natural development of the Arian peoples is too slow. Jews, and assimilated Jews in particular, aspire to faster change, and now, for the first time in history, they were in a position to realise their ambitions. Jews’ intellectual and analytical talents, as well as their persuasive powers had allowed them to incite the masses, which was precisely what had generated the current wave of radical anti-Semitism, according to Rappaport. Anti-Jewish feelings grew out of a sense of impotence and weakness, of Angst. It would be best for Jews to take a few steps back, if only, as he expressed with foreboding, because the “autochthonous peoples” might one day turn against the Jews (Rappaport 1919: 11-12, 14-16, 19, 23, 25, 28). In 1933 the Zionist Eli Strauss elaborated on the same theme and actually repeated the words Winston Churchill had spoken immediately after the Great War: there is a lethal struggle for the Jewish soul between Zionism and communism. All other solutions to the Jewish problem are helplessly outmoded (Strauss 1933: 9). Alfred Nossig, a Polish-born German Jewish writer, sculptor, and political activist, acknowledged that Jews were “extremely strongly represented” in the Bolshevik movement. His analysis of Jewish susceptibility to political radicalism was rather ambiguous though. On the one hand, Nossig asserted that Jewish communists shared little if anything in common with the bulk of the Jewish people. On the other hand, he 101

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claimed that there were important similarities between world socialism and Judaism. The point of the matter was the crucial difference between socialism and Bolshevism, Nossig opined. Jewish Bolshevik leaders were fully integrated into Russian society. It would be nonsense to derive their revolutionary activities from an apparent Jewish mentality. As Jews, they were renegades, Nossig wrote, and as communists they were more Roman than the Pope. Communism, or actually Bolshevism, was terrorism, Nossig asserted. Jews who were actively engaged in Russia’s Bolshevik dictatorship were completely alienated from the “spirit of Judaism”. Socialism, however, was a different matter. Socialism bore the imprint of the Jewish Geist. “Today’s world socialism is the first stage of the realisation of Judaism (Mozaismus)”, as Nossig wrote, “it is the beginning of the fulfilment of the future state of the Prophet” (Nossig 1922: 76). The Jewish leaders of the socialist movement had remained essentially Jewish, both in their thinking as well as their temperament: Sozialismus und Mozaismus sind keineswegs gegensätzliche Programme. […]. Die beiderseitigen Ideale lassen sich auf demselben Wege verwirklichen. […]. Der Mozaismus ist Sozialismus, frei von den Utopien und dem Terror des Kommunismus und frei von der Askese des Christentums (Nossig 1922: 74-75).

Nossig wondered why Bolsheviks had permitted the massive inflow of Jews in the first place. After all, this had not made them especially popular among the Russian people. His answer was not devoid of a certain grasp of the Bolshevik condition. The Bolsheviks took advantage of their Jewish comrades to mobilise support among the Jewish population, but, as he prophesied, they would abandon the very same Jews the moment they were no longer needed. Ergo: it was not the Jews who used the Bolsheviks, as the standard anti-Semitic argument ran, but the Bolsheviks who used the Jews (Alfred Nossig, “Bolschewismus und Judentum”, in Roditschew n. d.: 30). Nossig also introduced his own ethnic, or rather racist element into the discussion. He pointed to Khazar and Tartar influences on Bolshevism. “Their blood has given the descendants of these half-Jewish tribes […] their specific, their wild and cruel instincts” (Nossig 1922: 80). To the Jews who entered the service of the new regime, Nossig offered greater compassion. The average Jew had been forced to make a choice between hunger and collaboration. Many had chosen the latter. They were “Bolsheviks by compulsion”, to use the phrase by Margolin (1926: 22). J. F. Rodichev, a prominent Russian liberal and a member of the Kadet Party, sided with Nossig. The identification of Jews with Bolshevism was absurd, he wrote. “Bolshevism is supposed to be a Jewish conspiracy. If everything that has happened would be the work of Jews, it would be wiser to say that it 102

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would not be their work, but their suicide” (J. F. Roditschew, “Bolschewismus und Juden”, in Roditschew n. d.: 10). Various contemporary Jewish thinkers posited a similarity between the Jewish spirit and the socialist idea (the existential explanation of Jewish radicalism). Yet few were as convinced as was the Austrian philosopher Martin Buber. Through the soul and the written word, Jews sustained a unique spiritual continuity, he asserted. Their messianic vision of history is crucial, combining unity (the interrelationship and coherence of things), act (the need to create) and future (a strongly developed sense of time and progress): “it is the notion of the absolute future, which, as true and perfect life, fully contradicts the reality of the past and the present. Messianism is the quintessential idea of the Jewish people” (Buber 1932: 58). Socialism, Buber wrote, belongs to this category of “absolute reality” (Absolutes Leben). Socialism rested on a double fundament: a critical understanding of the human condition and the aspiration for a better, more just society. And the latter is directly related to the Jewish cultural heritage. Ernst Bloch, a Jew born in Berlin who left for Israel before and returned to Germany after the Second World War, perceived the same affinity between the Jewish religion or tradition and socialism. The Jewish tradition knows elements “which, to put it carefully, resemble socialism”, he asserts. Other issues played a role as well, including the intellectual and bourgeois milieu from which many Jewish radicals stemmed as well as the opposition to the Christian world, from which they felt excluded and repressed. But the essential reason was that socialism, this universal and historical movement of salvation, represented the inner drive and identity (innerste Drang und Wesen) of the Jews (Bloch 1966: 28, 34). Some Jewish publicists hailed the revolutionary inclinations of their people. Others expressed indignation at their radical, quasi-assimilated brethren. Still others ridiculed their apostate fellowmen and blamed them for their naïveté. The fiercest and most vocal opposition against assimilated Jews, including those who chose to join the non-Jewish workers’ movement, came from Zionist circles. The Zionist Robert Stricker deemed expectations that Jews would be easily accepted by their non-Jewish environment, to be astoundingly naive. He offered Rathenau as an example: Der Jude Rathenau tritt unter sie und fordert Dank und Gruss, dass ihre Herzen ihm entgegenschlagen sollen […], ihm, dem Walter Rathenau, der ein Deutscher und kein Jude sein will. Wie er unter sie tritt, da speien sie ihn an und schiessen ihn tot und singen an seiner Leiche das Lied: “Schlagt ihn tot, den Rathenau, Gottverdammte Judensau!” Dank und Gruss der deutsche Ju-

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gend, an einen, der ihr dienen und ein Deutscher und kein Jude sein wollte (Stricker 1929: 240).

Precisely because they believed themselves to share nothing in common with the Jewish masses, Rathenau and the like expected acceptance into the non-Jewish world. But they would not be accepted, Stricker emphasised. They were no exception to the rule. However they might try to deny their Jewishness, they remained what so-called assimilated Jews had always been: unwelcome guests (Stricker 1929: 241). Stricker, who was known within the Zionist movement in Vienna for his highly temperamental activism (Wininger 1925-1936, Band VI: 55), called upon his fellow Zionists to mercilessly fight these renegade Jews. After all, they had consciously refuted the basic principle of Zionism: the unity of the Jewish people – “The denial of this axiom is the most hideous, the most despicable, and the most harmful feature of assimilated Jewry” (Stricker 1929: 249). Other champions of the Jewish national cause agreed. The Jewish-Polish historian Simon Dubnow also criticised the schismatic consequences these Jews’ revolutionary behaviour had on the Jewish community at large. Given their common enemy, he found it unacceptable that such Jews treated the interests of a foreign country’s proletariat as superior to their own people’s bourgeoisie. In times of crisis, Jews should unite. “Those leaders destroy what is left of the consciousness of national unity and nullify all possibility for common action by our people, faced as we are by the combined hostility by the external enemies, the foreign bourgeoisie, and, sometimes, also the foreign proletariat” (Dubnow 1958: 217). Another Zionist, the Prague-born Robert Welsch, defined the emancipated Jew as a fully alienated human being, whose behaviour could only be explained by his “pathological self-hatred” (Robert Weltsch, “Judenfrage und Zionismus”, in Klärung 1932: 130). Welsch, frontsoldier during the war and general-secretary of the Jewish National Council in Vienna after the war, reasoned along well-known Zionist lines, but his diagnosis was more widely supported. Jewish internationalists were Jews “without history”, as Hugo Valentin in a brochure published by the AJC asserted. He came up with the often-mentioned anecdote about Trotsky. Sometime after the Bolshevik Revolution a delegation of two rabbis from the Jewish congregation of Petrograd and the Jewish lawyer, public figure, and Cadet leader, M. M. Vinaver, visited Trotsky. They requested that he resign as a Bolshevik leader, “in view of the terrible reprisals to which his kinsmen would otherwise be exposed.” Trotsky bluntly refused, replying: “Go home to your Jews and tell them that I am not a Jew and I care nothing for the Jews and their fate” (Valentin n. d.: 7-8). 104

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Dubnow made a similar point. Before a large gathering in St. Petersburg in June 1917, he said: It is true that a few demagogues, who have joined up with the street heroes and the preachers of forcible expropriation, have come out of our midst. They appear under Russian pseudonyms, because they are ashamed of their Jewish origins (Trotsky, Zinoviev and others). But it would be better to say that their Jewish names are pseudonyms; they are not rooted in our people (Sophie Dubnow-Ehrlich, the speaker’s daughter, quoted by Koppel S. Pinson, in Dubnow 1958: 26).

It is a tragic paradox, as an authoritative, though anonymous, refutation of the myth of Jewish Communism put it: while anti-Semites suppose that Jews use their economic or political power to further the interests of the Jewish people, the Jews who wield these powers are mostly estranged from the Jewish community. This applied to the Jewish Bolsheviks in particular. Their rule brought the Jews of Russia only pain and misery. The life of the Jewish masses remained as terrible (grauenhaft), as it was before the revolution. While the Trotskys, the Radeks, and a few thousand Jews active in the Communist Party lived comfortably, Russia’s true Jewish community “had sunk into poverty, was fragmented, repressed, and unable, under the permanent risk of police terror, to engage in any type of Jewish activities, for religious, educational or pro-Palestine purposes.” And now the same threatened to happen in Germany, the book, published in the early 1920s by the Berliner Philo-Verlag, stated. Kurt Eisner, minister-president of revolutionary Bavaria, was repeatedly requested to step down so as to use his considerable talents not to the disadvantage but for the sake of the Jewish community. Eisner’s response, however, was as stereotypical as it was naive: if there was still a distinction between Jews and non-Jews, if there were still specific Jewish goals, then the whole revolution would have been a waste. “This typical, unworldly, and utopian Jewish ideology, which indulges in dreams of global fraternisation”, was the harsh judgement passed on Eisner and his fellow-radicals. The authors of the highly critical brochure did not hide their sense of fulfilment brought by Jews’ instinctive inclination towards the ideals of socialism. Their overriding concern, however, was the dramatic increase of violent antiSemitism and the immediate pogrom danger to which the revolutionary activities of these renegade Jews had led (Jüdische Weltherrschaft 1924: 31). The idea that the prominent role of Jews in the revolutionary upheavals of early-20th century Europe would ultimately lead to a “day of reckoning”, to an unprecedented act of retribution on the part of the nonJewish population, was not only presented by the propagators of the myth of Jewish Communism. It also figured prominently in the works of 105

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Jewish publicists. Sonja Margolina, daughter of a Russian Jewish communist, refers to a sense of foreboding and oncoming danger. She writes: Die Tragödie des Judentums bestand darin, dass es keine praktische Option gab, um die Rache für die geschichtliche Sünde der Juden – ihre exponierte Mitwirkung am kommunistischen Regime – zu entgehen. Der Sieg des Sowjetregimes hatte sie zeitweilig gerettet, die Vergeltung stand ihnen noch bevor (Margolina 1992: 66).

Margolina enjoyed the benefit of hindsight; others did not. In 1922, the Jewish journalist S. M. Melamed put forth the same argument in no uncertain terms. “Leon Trotsky is the greatest Jewish figure in Jewish Diaspora history”, he wrote. “Just as St. Paul organised one of the greatest revolutions in the world’s history and the Sauls paid for it, so Leon Trotsky is now organising one of the greatest revolutions in history and the Bronsteins will have to pay for it.” The future looks gloomy. “This is our tragedy”, Melamed wrote. “For the deeds and misdeeds of Leon Trotsky, the next fifty Jewish generations will suffer martyrdom and pain” (S. M. Melamed, “St. Paul and Leon Trotsky”, in East and West, II 1922: 651-652, as quoted in Szajkowski 1974: 203). The renegade metaphor, the assumption that Trotsky and all other leftwing and assimilated Jews were actually non-Jewish Jews was the most widely used excuse given by contemporary Jewish publicists to acknowledge the fact that so many people of Jewish descent were prominently active in the communist movement. The renegade metaphor predated the identification of Jews with Bolshevism. Assimilated Jews whose world outlook conflicted with the traditions of the Jewish community (their atheism, their receptiveness to non-Jewish political orientations, including liberalism and, indeed, socialism) were consistently criticised by their own society. Their integration into the non-Jewish world had always been questioned – morally of course, but also practically. They had broken free from the Jewish community, but they would never be fully accepted or integrated into non-Jewish society. So they had not only betrayed their own community, but had also demonstrated a basic misunderstanding of the non-Jewish world and the severe antagonisms between Jews and non-Jews. Their presumed liberation and emancipation were largely a matter of self-delusion and negation (see Wistrich 1990: 199). The very same issues and the very same arguments arose with respect to those non-Jewish Jews in East Central Europe who would enter the communist movement. What most Jewish communists considered to be a one-way ticket to full social acceptance and political emancipation, many others saw as an act of lunacy and betrayal, if not suicide. 106

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2.5. The Non-Jewish Jew The question as to why Jews, “Jewish Jews” or “non-Jewish Jews”, were so disproportionately attracted to radical politics has been identified as “one of the most basic problems of research in Jewish history” (Ezra Mendelsohn, “Introduction”, in Mendelsohn 1997: 15). We discussed the various contemporary explanations and these are rather similar to those put forward by historians. Both either stress the Jewish character as the decisive issue (as the propagators of Jewish Communism did, although with fully different intentions) or else they emphasise the constraints and determinant effects of the environment, which apparently left many Jews with little option but to engage with the forces that aimed for radical change. One-dimensional, monistic explanations of Jewish radicalism are essentially flawed. They fall short of the variety of circumstances and considerations, which most probably influenced the individual decision to join the communist or any other radical political movement. To bring some order into the variety of interpretations, two basic historiographical approaches can be distinguished: an existential and a circumstantial explanation. As previously mentioned, the existential interpretation starts from the idea that specific features of Jewishness of a religious, cultural, or psychological kind correspond to the basic tenants of radical political ideology. These characteristics predisposed Jews to revolutionary sympathies. The Jewish prophetic and messianic tradition is often mentioned, as are rationalism, materialism, moralism (i.e. the supremacy of moral ideas), a strong sense for justice, and Jewish exclusiveness (Brym 1978: 54; Jaszi 1924: 123; Kainer 1995: 363-364; Ornstein 1951: 2). Jaff Schatz, whose interpretation combines both the existential and the circumstantial approach, asserts: “(H)ad not the Marxist ethos strongly corresponded to the essential core of their (the Jews’, ag) heritage, it would never have succeeded in attracting such a large and intense following” (Schatz 1991: 51). The allure of communism apparently came from its emphasis on equality and social justice, secularism, universalism, and chiliasm. Although this need not in any way imply that socialism is Jewish or that communism was related to Jews or Jewishness, some interpretations come close to it. Everyone knows that “Jewish radicalism” existed, the historian and political activist Robert Wolfe writes in Remember to Dream. He considers the circumstantial explanations of Jewish radicalism to be relevant, but insufficient. “Understanding Jewish radicalism as a movement means understanding it as an expression of Jewishness”, he attests. The radical Jews of 20th century Europe, as he sees it, were only the most 107

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recent examples of a radical tradition in Jewish history, which dates back at least 3,000 years. The major difference between modern (post19th century) and earlier examples of Jewish radicalism is the far higher rate of interaction between Jews and non-Jews. This generated doctrines and beliefs, such as Marxism, which were attractive to both groups, Jews and non-Jews alike, but which still essentially expressed traditional Jewish messianic thinking, be it in a secular form (Wolfe 1994: 5, 8-10). Wolfe may have had a personal agenda – “to promote a new upsurge of Jewish radicalism” (Wolfe 1994: 5) – but his interpretation was not unique. Judaism carries “a revolutionary ethos”, writes the historian Michael Lerner, its spirit is rebellious, its message is revolutionary. “One need only pay attention to the content of Jewish religion to understand why ruling elites always hated the Jews […]. Even Judaism’s essential concept of God is revolutionary” (Lerner 1992: 3-5, 20). Lerner believes ideological commitment was the primary reason why Jews were inclined to leftwing politics. The idea that the world is malleable and that Jews were obliged to participate in the transformation was based in Jewish religion. Lerner offers a specific, dialectic variant of the thesis of the non-Jewish Jew. Jews who joined the revolutionary movement did so to assimilate, he claims. They denied or rejected their own cultural, religious, or national heritage. What they did not realise, however, was that the Judaism they tried to shake off was the distorted product of centuries of oppression. In other words, the desire of many leftwing Jews to shed their Jewish past and to prove their universalism to the world was primarily an act of self-preservation against antiSemitism (Lerner 1992: 25). Others share the idea of a strong doctrinal similarity between Jewish culture and socialist ideas. Gregory Aronson stresses the yearning for equality as one of the central elements of the Jewish heritage and as uniquely conducive to the “socialistic, or communistic, conception of the transfiguration of the world”. He adds that as communism developed in Russia, it had no links whatsoever with the “collective Jewish mind and life”. Bolshevism was alien to the Jewish mind (Gregory Aronson, “Communism”, in Vlavianos n. d.: 250). The idea that Judaism predisposed Jews towards radical political ideas has always been highly controversial, if only because it was the standard argument used by the propagators of Jewish Communism (who defined Judaism not only in religious, but also in ethnic or racist terms). Moreover, it suffers from a serious flaw: how could radical Jews have been politically inspired by the very same Jewish community in which they remained a tiny minority and from whose traditions many were so fundamentally estranged? Purely existential explanations of Jewish radicalism are relatively rare among contemporary and scholarly observers. A decisive similarity between Jewish culture, religion and 108

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tradition on the one hand and modern revolutionary chiliasm on the other is generally rejected, due to its supposed distorted understanding of both phenomena. It was the situation rather than the tradition that led Jews to political radicalism (Krajewski n.d.: 10). More so than historians, contemporary Jewish observers stressed the relevance of typically Jewish characteristics to explain the revolutionary inclinations of many (younger) Jews. Among historians circumstantial factors prevail decisively over existential explanations. The circumstantial interpretation focuses on the environment as the decisive factor in Jews’ decision to opt for radical political solutions. One of the crucial arguments is that due to these restrictions young, impatient, and enterprising Jews had relatively few options available. The historian Robert Brym draws this conclusion for 19th century (Jewish) intellectual radicalism in Russia – there “were few arenas of employment in which intellectuals could develop and propound liberal ideas”. From this observation, he draws the more general, theoretical conclusion that “the weaker the bourgeois class of a society at any given point in time, the higher the degree of intellectual radicalism” (Brym 1978: 48-49). Other historians reflecting on different, though similar cases, share his interpretation. Hugh Seton-Watson explains the popularity of communism among young Jews in some of the most disputed areas of interwar East Central Europe (Bessarabia, Bukovina, Molodova, and the Polish Kresy) as a largely negative choice: “[They] could look forward to nothing” (Seton-Watson 1945: 293). Jacob Talmon combines the two arguments. He acknowledges the essential role Jews played in the Bolshevik regime in the higher echelons of the Party and, “not less vital”, its cadres. “The contribution of the Jews to the maintenance of the system in a country shattered by external and civil war, afflicted by famine, was of the utmost importance”, he affirms. While the pogroms during the Civil War left many Jews in Russia with little choice but to side with the forces of the revolution, Talmon stresses that for most prominent Jewish revolutionaries the situation differed. They shared a “most distinctive feature”; their “internationalism”. And this internationalist spirit was easily linked with the image of a “sinister Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy” (Talmon 1970: 72-73). The historian Erich Haberer locates the roots of Jewish radicalism in 19th century Russia in “the volatile social and cultural transformation under the impact of modernity.” He singles out the gradual secularisation of the Jewish intelligentsia during the first half of the century (Haskalah), as a result of which many would ultimately find themselves in a kind of social limbo, isolated from their own traditional Jewish community and likewise rejected by the non-Jewish Russian society. Others went beyond the Jewish enlightenment and simply 109

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dismissed Jewishness as a negative phenomenon, or, in any way, as an impediment to social progress. Their cosmopolitanism actually was the “observe side” of their Jewishness, as Haberer argues (Haberer 1995: 25, 261). The American historian William McCagg relates the radical aspirations of Hungarian Jews around the First World War to the very same issues mentioned by Haberer with respect to late-19th century Russia. The Jews who have figured as revolutionaries in modern Central and Eastern Europe were basically modernisers. The Jewish revolutionaries were not – to cite some hackneyed explanations – a sign that Jews were particularly addicted to revolution, or merely a symptom of general class conflict within the urban sector of society. Rather they were a function of tensions between modern city and traditional agrarianism (McCagg 1972: 85-86; see also McCagg 1989: 54).

The Jewish revolutionaries who participated in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 were mostly “representatives of the dynamic and mobile society of Budapest”, similar in class background and in career (McCagg 1972: 84-85). These Hungarian Jewish revolutionaries elaborated on the “rejectionist patterns” of 19th century’s Jewish radicals, who reacted to the lack of assimilatory possibilities by discarding their secular and religious Jewish identites. They developed, as McCagg asserts, a kind of Great Hungarian nationalism which neither excluded the notion of a greater Hungarian, nor that of the ruling Magyar nation. Paradoxically, their Jewish radicalism seemed to reveal itself primarily in the explicitly non-Jewish and non-religious political alternatives they advocated. At least in part, it should be understood as a revolt against their fathers’ lack of determination, McCagg opines, against their fathers’ weakness and corruption (McCagg 1972: 99-100). Isaac Deutscher, who embodied the combination of revolutionary Jew and historian, eloquently summarises this form of “escapism”: We knew the Talmud, we had been steeped in Khassidism. All its idealisations were for us nothing but dust thrown in our eyes. We had grown up in that Jewish past. We had the eleventh, and thirteenth and sixteenth centuries of Jewish history living next door to us and under our very roof; and we wanted to escape it and live in the twentieth century. Through all the thick gilt and varnish of romanticists like Martin Buber, we could see, and smell, the obscurantism of our archaic religion and a way of life unchanged since the Middle Ages (Deutscher 1968: 46-47).

To elaborate on the revolutionary ambitions of Jews, we might once again focus on the issue which not only dominated the discussions among contemporaries but also the scholarly debate: the notion of the non-Jewish Jew (which can be found in Baron 1964 (a): 204-205; Heller 1977: 258-259; Perry 2002: 100-101; Teller 1954: 161; Vital 1999: 110

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727). Many of the Jews who had accepted communism should no longer be considered Jews, or so the argument ran. They had cut off ties to their own community. Many had expressed indifference to all things Jewish. They were renegades, “Abfalljudentum”, in the sarcastic language of the Zionist Robert Stricker (Stricker 1929: 248). The choice for communism was the most extreme among the radical political options Jews had. Joining the communist movement would isolate Jews not only from their Jewish environment, but also from non-Jewish society. This double ostracism could only be compensated by the solidarity, moral support, the unconditional loyalty and in particular, the alternative set of ideas and values of a tightly knit community or movement. This was precisely what the communist party offered them – or so they hoped. At the same time, the communist party seemed to be the last place for Jews to confirm their Jewishness and to insist on specific Jewish interests. The causal relationship between the individual’s degree of embededness in the Jewish tradition and his or her party affiliation seems convincing. As Brym suggests for Russia’s early-20th century radical Jews: the Jews who opted for the Poale Zion movement (Workers of Zion), were less estranged from their traditional environment than those who chose for the Bund, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks – in this order probably (Brym 1978: 45). The allure of the idea of the non-Jewish Jew, to contemporary Jewish publicists and historians alike, is self-evident: it was the quintessential denial of the myth of Jewish Communism. If one could fully disengage the communists of Jewish descent from the Jewish community, the notion of Jewish Communism is rendered obsolete and illusory. This was an extremely attractive option for those communists who wanted to prove their true internationalist credentials, as well as for Jews wishing to prove their anti-communist convictions. Moreover, the concept of the non-Jewish Jew answered the common interpretation that explicitly ideologically motivated organisations such as the communist or socialist movements could only stimulate the further de-ethnification of its members. Many radical Jews, and particularly the more prominent ones, considered their openly and demonstratively stated aversion to any Jewish identity (secular or religious), to the Jewish community altogether, as a statement of their independence and full emancipation. In reality, they had few options. Socialist ideology, not to mention the communist world outlook, offered few possibilities for particularistic concerns, especially for any type of ethnicity-based solidarity. In this respect, the interests of the individual Jewish communist and those of the communist party at large coincided – for ideological, political or practical reasons. The idea of the apostate or non-Jewish Jew was therefore as important to the communist parties and to their Jewish 111

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members, as it was to those Jews who had no affinity with communism whatsoever, but who had equally pressing reasons to fear the wider, political consequences of its identification with the Jewish community. The non-Jewish Jew remains an ambivalent notion. Firstly, it radically, and as may be added, conveniently, departs from the conventional idea that Jewishness is not a matter of birth, something which is inherited and not freely adopted, but of choice (Slezkine 2006: 185). Secondly, the idea of non-Jewish Jew is a misnomer because it is essentially contradictory. It starts from the assumption that the radicals who fit within this category remained Jews, therefore non-Jewish Jews. This may apply to Isaac Deutscher, for whom the notion was actually coined. Deutscher’s world outlook, as he himself wrote, had specific Jewish traits (Deutscher 1968: 27). But should it also apply to Trotsky and others, who denied the relevance of their Jewish descent as consistently as their political opponents stressed it? Thirdly, and most importantly, the idea of the non-Jewish Jew is a crude generalisation. It fails to explain the many different and often paradoxical motivations and ambitions of Jewish radicals. Communists of Jewish descent were a mixed group of individuals. Many among the early generation of Jewish communists had undergone a process of secularisation before joining the party. They had thus already assimilated new ideas, having extended beyond the narrow confines of their traditional environment. Many found themselves on the periphery of the Jewish community before they even entered the radical non-Jewish movement. They were often of middle-class background, and came from assimilated or assimilating families. They had joined the movement at a relatively early stage, and likely composed a larger segment of the (early) leadership of the radical (including communist) movement. They were among the more conspicuous, dedicated, and prominent communists of Jewish heritage. The idea of the non-Jewish Jew may apply primarily to these culturally and socially estranged, more ideologically motivated and more politically convinced (early) generation of Jewish communist (Schatz 1991: 55 makes a comparable distinction for the Jewish communist in interwar Poland, but he adds a geographical component: Jews from Galicia versus those from Central Poland and the eastern lands, the Kresy). The profile of a substantial portion of the Jews who would later join the rank and file of the communist parties may well have been considerably more Jewish. Whether or not their radical political convictions were more superficial or ephemeral is impossible to establish. It seems clear, however, that they were better able to combine their political radicalism with a continuing sense of Jewishness. Although the decision to join the communist movement was momentous for everyone, not all Jews who identified with the radical move112

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ment experienced an identical “pattern of withdrawal from the Jewish community” (Brym 1978: 41). Many, if not most, came from more traditional families, having been raised in a predominantly Jewish environment, and spoke Yiddish (where relevant). Their revolutionary engagement, whether or not superficial, did not inevitably imply an escape from their Jewish environment. Identities were fluid and overlapping and not necessarily mutually exclusive. Many of the young Jews who sympathised with the non-Jewish workers movement did not so much want to shake off their Jewish identity, as they aspired to be part of a universal emancipator movement, a movement which promised to solve the issues with which they, as Jews, felt particularly concerned. Shlomo Szlein, born in a Galician village, recollects how during the interwar years the youngsters in his region were “massively engaged” in the communist movement. They not only believed, on the basis of what they knew about the Soviet Union, that communism would offer shortterm solutions to their predicaments, but they also perceived the movement as a national Jewish one. “The majority of young Jews entered [the party] from a national Jewish consciousness” (Brossat 1983: 84-85). Again, apart from communist sympathies, Jewish communists may not have had all that much in common. There was probably a huge gap, in many respects, between the Jewish youngsters who joined the Communist Party in interwar Poland and those who carried a membership card of the Communist Party of Germany in the Soviet Zone of Occupation after the war. Most of the repatriated communists of Jewish descent in eastern Germany perceived themselves as German, not as Jewish communists, as Karin Hartewig writes in their collective biography Zurückgekehrt, “Returned”. Most had previously experienced a process of “red” assimilation in Weimar Germany. For them, this was a far less dramatic event given the relatively liberal Jewish community they came from, than it was for their fellow East European Jews who followed the same track. However, in the case of German Jews too, affiliation with the communist party was the most radical of all assimilation options available (Hartewig 2000: 3-4). We witness a similar diversity among Jewish radicals with respect to their sensitivity to the living conditions and interests of the Jewish people at large, including their own family and friends. Sympathy was neither self-evident, nor was it fully absent or even exceptional. Jews qua Jews were not an insignificant part of the populist movement in Russia, Haberer reports. He emphasises “that on many occasions Jews were quite explicit in their concern for things Jewish and in linking their revolutionary dedication with Jewish aspirations.” Their Jewishness did make a difference – but in various ways. Compared to many of their gentile comrades, many Jewish populists were over-all more cosmopoli113

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tan than Russian nationalistic, more inclined toward socialist internationalism than toward populist romanticism, more focused on practical political freedom than on the idea of an immediate peasant revolution, and more predisposed to Russia’s (nihilistic) intellectuals than to the Russian narod, the common people. Although far from all Jewish populists had left their Jewishness behind; most of them did not join the movement for reasons of Jewish emancipation only or primarily. Haberer perceives a “higher sense of dedication” among Jewish populists, often stemming from a feeling of uneasiness with respect to the anti-Jewish sentiments among their revolutionary friends. “Already alienated and often physically remote from the Jewish world, the response of committed Jewish socialist to the pogroms was conditioned by a misplaced sense of loyalty that was rooted in their identification with the revolutionary movement and its lofty ideals”, he opines. “Consequently, they at best remained indifferent to the victims of the pogromshchiki or at worst promoted their action” (Haberer 1995: 174, 218). Haberer also points to the fact that many Jewish populists in Russia would later revise their political attitude towards their fellow Jews, identifying more closely with their tribulations. This was no easy step. Many Jewish revolutionaries underwent a “tortuous process of taking sides”, and would eventually bid farewell to their former comrades, opting instead to identify with the predicaments of their fellow Jews – in the populist as well as the early socialist movement in Russia (Haberer 1995: 222; Erich Haberer, “Cosmopolitanism, Antisemitism, and Populism: A Reappraisal of the Russian and Jewish Socialist Response to the Pogroms of 1881-1882”, in Klier 1992: 111-112, 117, 124). Pavel Akselrod was one of them. He bitterly regretted that the full commitment of many Jewish revolutionaries to the cause of the non-Jewish socialist movement had eradicated their “last bit of interest” in the fate of their own people, “which needed the help of its own intellectuals as much as the other poor classes in Russia.” He truly believed that the Jewish socialist intellectuals had practically and wrongfully abandoned the Jews – wrongfully, because “the cosmopolitan aspect of socialism did not demand that we be indifferent to the conditions of life among the Jewish masses” (Pavel Borisovich Akselrod, “Socialist Jews Confront the Pogroms”, in Dawidowicz 1967: 407). In his introduction to a publication by the leading theoretician of the Poale Zion movement Ber Borochov, Abraham Duker quotes from a letter by Lev Deutsch, one of the Jewish pioneers of Marxism in Russia, to Pyotr Lavrov, a prominent spokesman of Russian populism. It is worth to quote in full because it succinctly captures the agony of many Jewish revolutionaries at that

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time. “It is impossible for a revolutionary to solve the Jewish problem in a practical way”, Deutsch writes: What can be done by revolutionaries in places where Jews are attacked? To defend them, would mean to arouse the hostility of the peasants against the revolutionaries. It is bad enough that they killed the Czar; yet in addition they are defending the Zhids. The revolutionaries are faced with two contradictions. It is simply a situation without an escape, both for the Jews and for the revolutionaries […]. Do not think that I was not embittered and faced by a dilemma. Nevertheless I shall always remain a member of the Russian Revolutionary Party and will not leave it even for one day, because this contradiction, the same as many others, was not created by the Party. Zionists, obviously, never considered socialism (or communism) as a suitable way to solve the Jewish Question (Borochov 1937: 22-23).

Haberer’s marginality thesis of the 19th century Jewish intelligentsia in Russia is not only shared by other historians (Brym 1978: 4; Prager 1985: 60-61), but it also figures in the politically inspired analyses of anti-Semitic authors during the interwar years – although they had great difficulty to reconcile the isolated position of these revolutionary Jews with their unwavering dedication to the Jewish cause (Fehst 1934: 28; Levine 1938: 314). Traces of the ambivalence shown by Haberer’s Russian-Jewish revolutionaries can also be found among later generations of East European Jewish communists – either during or after their political career. One well-known anecdote recalls Mihály Farkas, a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee for most of the Stalinist era in Hungary. In 1955 Farkas was removed from the Party leadership and subsequently imprisoned. Upon his amnesty he tried to rejoin the Budapest Jewish community. He became a regular visitor to the synagogue, much to the alarm of the local rabbi, who feared the unforeseen consequences of this once so prominent communist amongst his flock (Hegedüs 1986: 208). Robert Levy’s recent biography of the Romanian communist leader Ana Pauker and Rudy Doorslaer’s history of Jewish revolutionaries in Belgium during the interwar years provide us with additional evidence, however dissimilar, of the invalidity of the crude notion of the nonJewish Jew. Levy adds nuance to the dominant image of Ana Pauker as the archetypal Stalinist and self-hatred Jew. Doorslaer convincingly demonstrates the elements of tradition and continuity (and in this case of Jewish and Polish continuity) among the Jewish communists in his country. Pauker might have avoided all things Jewish while in power but, as Levy stresses, she remained acutely conscious of her Jewish descent (and the dangers that came with it) and never fully rejected it. Pauker’s life was guided more by contradictions than by dogmas (Levy 2001: 180, 3). Of a total of 65,000 Jews in Belgium in the second half of 115

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the 1930s 2,000 joined the otherwise minuscule Communist Party. As Jewish communists, they often preserved their cultural individuality, as Doorslaer asserts. And in their case, this implied a double identity: Jewish and East European. They did not share much in common with the well-known image of the non-Jewish Jew. They had become Bolsheviks. Yet they remained East European Jews in heart and soul. This would encourage their rejection of the full Bolshevisation of the Party from the end of the 1920s onwards. It also generated serious frictions within the tiny Belgian Communist Party with regards to “Jewish ‘particularism’” (Doorslaer 1995: 6, 58-59, 63, 104). This “most radical and unequivocal rejection of Jewish identity” (Gross 2006: 195), which may have been a typical choice for many communists of Jewish descent, did certainly not apply to all. Even among the most prominent communists of Jewish descent, a return to their lost world was not inconceivable – after they had been politically kaltgestellt, of course. Other communist Jews may never have lost their sense of belonging to the Jewish community, including their specific obligation to it – against all political odds and public appearances. Individual Jews were able to combine more than one identity. There were many shades of Jewishness (and anti-Jewishness) among those who contemporaries and historians alike have one-dimensionally defined as non-Jewish. Many communist Jews never needed to chose between being a communist or being a Jew. For them, “communism was not only not the enemy but the very possibility of Jewish national existence” (Aronowicz 2002: 117).

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CHAPTER 3

The Party Jews have played a role out of proportion to their numbers in the socialist and communist movements in Europe. Their participation in the early communist regimes of post-1917 Russia and the countries of East Central Europe after the Second World War, in particular, bolstered anti-Jewish sentiments. The myth of Jewish Communism became one of the most powerful and destructive political stereotypes in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. The most crucial feature of a (xenophobic) myth, as discussed earlier, is that it renders the abstraction of the group as more real than any of its specific, individual components. On this basis, one could argue that the actual involvement of Jews in the communist movement is of only minor importance for the study of Jewish communism. The myth of Jewish Communism tells us more about anti-Semites, and perhaps communists, than it does about Jews. It should be considered, first and foremost, in the tradition of politically motivated anti-Jewish thinking. If the question of Jewish communism is basically a chimera, a political fantasy, there would seem to be little need for historians to tread beyond either its mythical or fantastic dimensions. This problem is compounded by the fact that Jewish participation in the communist movement lacks a reliable, empirical basis. Figures are fragmentary and limited and therefore difficult to assess. Jewish communism is as controversial as it is elusive. No wonder then, that so few historians have risked burning their fingers by it. This book is not principally concerned with the actual participation of Jewish people in the communist movement. It discusses the historical relevance of Jewish Communism as a specific anti-Semitic stereotype. For this purpose, one needs not know how many people of Jewish heritage were really active within the communist movement. What is important is how anti-Semites used the real or perceived presence of Jews for their own purposes. Still, as I see it, the issue of Jewish participation in the communist parties of East Central Europe is important. Figures are relevant. I do not share the argument that attempts to assess the factual representation of Jews are both illusive (because impossible) and undesirable (because they attach undeserved relevance to an antiSemitic chimera). The problem instead, is to determine which conclusions can be drawn from the available information? How reliable are the 117

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available data? We have figures, but do we have facts, too? Unfortunately, in this case numbers raise more questions than answers and introduce multiple problems of interpretation. Most information pertaining to the ethnic composition of the communist membership in East Central Europe comes from the parties themselves. This information could be public, especially during the interwar years; but more often than not it was classified, particularly in the post-war decades when the communist parties were in power. How should such figures be interpreted? Why were people of Jewish descent over-represented in some communist parties or sections within the party and state (the ideological apparatus, the mass media, and the security services) as opposed to others? Was there any relationship between activists’ Jewish backgrounds and their positions on specific questions, particularly those pertaining to Jewish issues? They were communists first and foremost, that seems obvious, but did their Jewishness matter? Did these communists of Jewish descent feel any drive to protect specific Jewish interests or, to the contrary, did they do their utmost to hide or to try to forget their Jewishness, and to act accordingly? Was this the reason that so many “Jewish” communists reportedly acted so rigidly, so cruelly vis-àvis the Jewish communities in their countries? As to the actual participation of Jews in the communist parties of East Central Europe, my figures are mostly based on the scattered archival findings of other historians and contemporaries. These may not give the full picture, but they are all we have and do seem solid enough to bear the underlying assumption of this book, namely that activists of Jewish descent did play a disproportionate role (in terms of numbers and conspicuousness) in the communist parties and regimes of East Central Europe. There is another, equally nebulous issue which will be discussed in this chapter, and that is the way the communist parties themselves dealt with the relatively large number of Jews among their leadership and rank and file. Paradoxically, nowhere was the notion of Jewish Communism as sensitive as within communist parties. Both communists of Jewish and of non-Jewish origin were aware of the issue’s volatility. It was generally perceived as a crucial variable in the party’s political legitimacy, or the lack thereof. Communist leaderships may have held rather instrumental ideas on ethnic issues and exploited national prejudices whenever necessary, but the notion of Jewish Communism proved to be an extraordinary difficult thing to handle. Jewish communists were among the prime victims of de-Stalinisation or, in the communist jargon of the time, the “re-nationalisation” of the communist regimes during the mid-1950s. Even in those countries, however, where Jews were practically eliminated from the parties’ rank and file, the issue lost little of its sensitivity. In fact, it remained a taboo 118

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in communist East Central Europe until the very end. How communist regimes coped with the relatively large number of Jewish activists in their midst (which appears to be directly connected to the effect the Jewish communism stereotype had on these regimes) is an extraordinary chapter in the history of East European Jewry and of communism.

3.1. Figures, Facts, and Interpretations Every interpretation of the apparent prominence and conspicuousness of Jews in the communist parties of East Central Europe should start from the simple and quintessentially important observation that there may have been many Jews among radicals, but there were few radicals among Jews. The rest of the story is open for interpretation. Why, when, and where were people of Jewish descent over-represented in the communist movement? My analysis is structured around four observations. Firstly, not only Jews, but ethnic minorities in general were by and large over-represented in communist parties in the region, especially during the interwar decades. Secondly, Jewish participation in the communist movement varied considerably. It was far from equally extensive in all parties, in all countries, at all times. Thirdly, more significant than the actual number of Jews in the communist movement was their conspicuousness: people of Jewish origin were often concentrated in the higher echelons and in specific branches of the party and state apparatus. Finally, the number of prominent positions occupied by Jews in the communist parties of Eastern Europe often diminished rapidly after communist rule was firmly established. For the convenience of comparison I will distinguish between the situation in Russia before and after the October Revolution, and in East Central Europe before and after communism came to power. Richard Burks suggests that the “ethnic factor” does much to explain who was a communist and who was not (Burks 1961: 190). Generally, national or ethnic minorities disproportionately supported communism in East Central Europe during the interwar years. Taking into account some remarkable exceptions (communism was not a particularly popular political sentiment among Germans in East Central Europe or amongst the Turkish minority), Burks asserts a positive correlation between numerically small and ethnically Slavic minorities on the one hand and communist proclivities on the other. This would explain the relatively strong communist leanings among the Belorussian and Ukrainian minorities in Poland (who, from 1925, on had their own semi-autonomous communist parties boasting a large Jewish presence), the Czechs (“surrounded by Germans”, as Burks asserts), and the Slovaks. A combination of political repression and pro-Russian sympathies, rather than socio-economic conditions, seemed to have offered major incentives for 119

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ethnic minorities to join communist parties. Although the communist movement was too weak, too numerically small, and too politically controversial to bridge the gap between the various ethnic groups in any of the East Central European societies, it belonged to the few political forces that actually cut across ethnic lines. Burks’ explanation for the disproportionate role Jews played in the communist parties of the region is meagre, however. He mentions Birobidzhan, the experiment of a Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet Union, which might have attracted young Jews to communism. Yet this is hardly convincing. In all likelihood, sizable numbers of the Jewish party membership had already distanced themselves from their national allegiances to such an extent that the promise of a Jewish homeland in far off Siberia could not have been their primary motivation. Generally, the early communist movement was rather light-hearted in regards to the national issue. Many communists dismissed national sentiments, identities, and other interests without much notice. Few political organisations in interwar East Central Europe boasted members who cared less about the national issue than did those of the communist parties, or so it appeared to most noncommunists. Jews did not play an equally prominent or conspicuous role in all parties, at all times. Figures indicate that activists of Jewish descent were particularly over-represented during the early history of the leftwing socialists and communist movements, as well as during the first years of the communist regimes – in Russia and in the other countries of Eastern Europe. Jews formed a significant part of the emerging Marxist and populist movement in Russia. In the latter, their numbers increased from approximately 5 percent in the early 1870s to an impressive 20 percent in the 1880s. Populism proved less strange to Jews than is commonly assumed, as Erich Haberer reports. Many Jews took populism to be a variant of socialism (Haberer 1995: 112, 114). Yet Jews also remained practically absent from the early Bolshevik movement, particularly with regards to its rank and file. The Bolshevik Party conducted practically no agitation among the Jewish masses, and few Bolsheviks were familiar with the Jewish community (Gitelman 1972: 105). More impressive than the total Jewish membership of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (the Bolsheviks) before the revolution, was the conspicuous presence of Jews in the party leadership and in specific sectors of the party and state apparatus after 1917. During the initial phase of the revolution the leadership of the Party consisted of seven men, three of which were Jewish revolutionaries (Lev Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Grigory Sokolnikov), one a half-Jew (Lev Kamenev), and three non-Jewish comrades (Lenin, Stalin, and Andrey Bubnov). Of the 21 members of the Central Committee, five or six were 120

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of Jewish descent. Kamenev remains a dubious case. Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev were removed from the supreme Party leadership in October 1926. Their fate is well known. Trotsky would be exiled and ultimately assassinated. Zinoviev would be tried during the Great Purges and perished. Kamenev spent his final years as the token head of state – in poor health, under permanent stress, and with overwhelming longing for his imprisoned wife. Sokolnikov, once a (candidate) member of the Politburo, would also lose his position within the Party leadership in 1926. Despite the fact that Sokolnikov had never fully committed himself to the United Opposition against Stalin, he would eventually be arrested and tried at the second Moscow show trial in January 1937. He was sentenced to ten years of prison and died under obscure circumstances two years after his incarceration. Never again would another communist of Jewish descent reach the apex of the ruling Party in Russia. With one exception: Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich. Kaganovich, “a boisterous, booming and handsome Jewish cobbler”, who reportedly coined the phrase “Stalinism” (Montefiori 2003: 10, 56), became a candidate and full member of the Party’s political bureau in December 1927 and July 1930 respectively. He survived the purges of the 1930s and remained one of Stalin’s closest associates. Only Nikita Khrushchev’s move against the “AntiParty Group” (June-July 1957) proved fatal to this last, powerful Jewish member of the Politburo. Kaganovich would outlive all of his former comrades. He died in 1991. There is no conclusive evidence that Jewish Bolsheviks as Jews were specifically targeted during the Great Purges. Figures indicate otherwise. The purges in the Soviet Union were primarily aimed at the communist elite and Jews comprised a substantial part of this elite. Among those repressed, however, Jews do not seem to have been singled out disproportionately. While Jews remained practically absent from the Politburo after the campaign against the United Opposition within the Party (Lazar Kaganovich was indeed the only Jew in the Party’s highest body by the end of the 1930s); their presence in the Central Committee remained substantial. In 1939 there were still eleven Jewish full members and three candidate members of the Central Committee, whilst they formed just over 4 percent of the Party membership in general and less than 2 percent of the population at large (Pinkus 1988: 80-81). The same goes for the Soviet government. Before the purges six Jews were among the government’s twenty members; by 1939 there were still seven ministers and deputy-ministers of Jewish descent. “Throughout the whole period”, as Benjamin Pinkus concludes, “Jewish representation in the central administration was well above any proportional relation to the national ratio of the Jews in the Soviet

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Union, and very high in comparison with all the other national minorities” (Pinkus 1988: 83). The largest influx of Jews in the Communist Party occurred during the Civil War. Before the October Revolution Russia’s socialist Jews either joined the Bund, the Poale Zion movement, or the Mensheviks. This changed dramatically after October 1917. Bolshevik rule proved to be less ephemeral than most observers, either in or outside of Russia, initially believed. Moreover, given the anti-Jewish excesses committed by some of the Bolsheviks’ enemies during the civil war, Jews had few reasons not to support, if only passively, the revolutionary government. As the British publicist James Parkes, a keen observer of East European Jewish life in the interwar years, wrote; Jews “were compelled by circumstances to accept the regime, they found themselves also compelled to provide a totally disproportionate number of its clerks and officials” (Parkes 1939: 103). The number of Jews who actually joined the Communist Party was small in absolute terms, though high in comparison with their share of the population. According to official Party censuses, 5.2 percent of Party members were Jewish in 1922 (approximately 19,500 communists), while Jews accounted for only 1.8 percent of the population. The figure for 1927 was 4.3 percent (almost 52,000 members), a percentage which, as Pinkus asserts, might also apply to the end of the 1930s. Estimates for 1940 range from 4.3 to 4.9 percent, 146,000 to 166,000 respectively (Pinkus 1988: 139). During most of the early history of the Communist Party, Jews were not alone in their overrepresentation. Other minorities – Latvians, Georgians, and Armenians in particular – were also disproportionately represented. Although from the 1930s onwards the percentage (and number) of Jewish party members gradually decreased, they remained over-represented until the final decades of the Soviet Union. On the first of January 1976 the official figure was almost 1.9 percent (294,774 communists). Given that their share of the total population was just around 0.9 percent, Jews were thus disproportionately present in the Communist Party. This was still an obvious discrepancy, though not as notable as during the first decades of Soviet power. Moreover, by the 1970s the average party member regarded his party affiliation as a mere precondition to launch a career, any career. This applied to most Jewish party members too – with one caveat: Jews had long been barred from the highest echelons of the party and state apparatus. The Jewish share of the early communist regime in Russia was openly discussed – with some notable omissions. During the 1920s the Soviet regime conducted a vigorous campaign against anti-Semitism among party workers and society as a whole. A large series of brochures and booklets was published in which various authors attempted to 122

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explain and combat the wave of anti-Semitism in their country (Alekseyev 1930; Bezborodov 1929; Dobin 1928; Glebov 1927; Gorev 1929; Kantselyarsky 1929; Larin 1929; Petrovsky 1931). They substantiated their arguments with statistics on the actual participation of Jews in the communist apparatus of the Soviet Union. The reliability of their figures cannot be established, but they do not seem unrealistic. The economist Yuri Larin was one of the most prolific activists against antiSemitism. He asserted in the mid-1920s that Jews made up no more than 4 percent of the membership of the Party, the labour unions, and the Komsomol, the communist youth movement. In the apparatuses of these organisations, however, their share was much higher, as he reported: around 19 percent of the elected or appointed members of executive Party and state organisations were Jewish (Larin 1927: 257; see also Gorev 1928: 179-180). In another publication Larin offers a lower figure for the bureaucracy of Party and state in general, namely 8 percent, which, he adds, largely corresponds with the Jewish share of the urban population. This statistics probably cover the entire Soviet Union, since Larin’s estimates for the percentage of Jews among communist bureaucracies in Ukraine, Moscow, and Belarus (where 80 percent of the Russian Jewish population was concentrated) are considerably higher. In the Ukraine, Jews comprised 22.7 percent of the general population, and 20.5 percent of the communist apparatus. In Belarus they accounted for 6.5 percent of the population and 30 percent of the communist apparat. In Moscow the figures were 9 and 40.1 percent, respectively (Yu. Larin, “Intelligentskii i burzhuazhnyi antisemitizm v SSSR”, in Alekseyev 1930: 24). Larin also reported that Jews were over-represented in the higher echelons of the armed forces. The census of 1926 showed that Jews made up 1.8 percent of the population, whilst they formed 2.1 percent of the Red Army personnel and 4.6 percent of its noncommissioned and higher officers (Larin, “Intelligentskii i burzhuaznyi antisemitizm v SSSR”: 27). Larin and other Soviet scholars believed that the prominent role of Jews in the ruling apparatus should be understood as a consequence of their urban backgrounds and comparatively high levels of education. They acknowledged that the disproportionate role of Jews in the early communist regime did at least partly account for the persistence of antiJewish sentiments in Bolshevik Russia. Some understanding was shown for the feelings of surprise and indignation that the prominent position of Jews in certain segments of the bureaucracy had aroused. Jewish participation in the state apparatus was completely new to Russian society, they stressed. Most civil servants had never known a Jew to be in their midst before. Some of the popular complaints were duly reproduced: Jews were too concentrated in executive positions; they were 123

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inclined to nepotism; they were largely engaged in light and administrative work; and they were given the best land, the best apartments, and the best jobs. Larin and his fellow activists viewed anti-Semitism as an objectionable but largely “transitional” and relatively harmless leftover of Tsarist times. Yet they also saw it as a new and dangerous counterrevolutionary phenomenon. The residue of traditional anti-Jewish sentiments still visible in Soviet society was an ephemeral issue, they argued. It had developed in reaction to the New Economic Policy and other temporary “deficiencies” of Russian socialism, among them unemployment, housing shortages, and the occasionally low levels of cultural and political awareness of the peasants and the new working class. This type of antiSemitism was particularly acute among the bourgeoisie (the NEP-men) and among the “serving intelligentsia” (the non-Jewish members of the party and state apparatus), as Larin argued. Soviet authors were far more concerned with the other dimension of anti-Semitism in their country: the deliberate attempt by the old regime intelligentsia, the kulaks and the representatives of the formerly ruling classes, to identify the new revolutionary regime with Jewish interests. This type of anti-Semitism was closely linked to the counter-revolutionary effort. Anti-Semitism was perceived as a weapon in the hands of the regime’s opponents – both within and without the Soviet Union. On an ideological level, this form of anti-Jewish sentiment was far more difficult to cope with. Its “carriers” (peasants, workers, and civil servants) were regarded as loyalists to the new communist order. In the end, however, the problem would remedy itself. In true Marxist-Leninist fashion, these scholars-activists predicated that the anti-Jewish sentiments of workers, peasants, and other representatives of the new Soviet man would prove as ephemeral as had Jewish overrepresentation in the new Soviet state (Heller 1931: 235). The disproportionate share of Jews in the Soviet apparatus would inevitably decline. All references to “Jewish power” (zhidovskaya vlast) or “Jewish dominance” (yevreyskoe zasilye) in the Soviet Union were decidedly rejected. Meanwhile, Larin deliberately shunned one of the most controversial issues involved in the identification of Jews with communism, namely the share of Jews in the security organs of Soviet power. It was one of the key components of the myth of Jewish Communism: the prominent role of Jews in the Bolshevik repression apparatus. The Russian historian L. Krichevski reports from the Soviet archives on the position of Jews in the state security services during the 1920s. His figures are impressive. The Cheka (established in December 1917) struggled with a permanent cadre crisis. The workload was extremely heavy and the organisation was not particularly popular among party activists. Few 124

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reliable and capable workers were available. To the dismay of the Bolshevik leadership, ethnic minorities filled the gap: Latvians, Poles, and, after some hesitation, Jews. In September 1918 the Cheka apparatus in Moscow had reached 781 officials. More than 35 percent of these police workers were of Latvian background (35.6 percent or 278 people), 6.3 percent (49) were Polish, and 3.7 percent or 29 functionaries were Jewish (of which a considerable number were non-party members). In the early-1920s, Jews accounted for 5.2 percent of the party membership and 9.1 percent of the staff of the provincial (gubernskie) branches of the Cheka. Throughout the decade the percentage of Jewish workers generally remained higher in the leading bodies of the secret service (the Cheka and its successor organisations) than among its rank and file, in both its national and regional headquarters. Russians accounted for the majority of the organisations’ apparatus and top echelon: 69.5 percent or 1,670 members of the OGPU central apparatus as measured on May 1, 1923; and 56.3 percent or 54 officers of its leading body, as of November 15, 1923. Jews came second, with 8.5 percent or 204 people, and 15.2 percent or fifteen workers, respectively. Krichevski’s explanation for the considerable number of Jewish individuals in the service remains remarkably vague. It “may have had something to do”, he argues, with the relatively high level of education many Jews enjoyed. Although the disproportionate presence of ethnic minorities in Soviet state security decreased during the second half of the 1920s, the number of Jewish political policemen remained relatively high. Jews still accounted for 14.7 percent of the leadership of the district organisations of the OPGU in February 1927 and, as Krichevski asserts, the role of Jews increased rather than decreased during the first half of the 1930s (Krichevskii 1995: 104-137). This trend would only be reversed during the second half of the decade, as the research of other Russian historians testifies to N. Petrov and K. Skorkin give the following numbers and percentages of Jews among the leading cadres of the NKVD from 1934 to 1941: 37 people (38.5 percent) in July 1934, 43 (39.1 percent) in October 1936, 42 (37.8 percent) in March 1937, 36 (31.9 percent) in July 1937, 35 (27.3 percent) January 1938, 32 (21.3 percent) in September 1938, six (3.9 percent) in July 1939, six (3.5 percent) in January 1940, and ten officials (5.5 percent) in February 1941. Until the end of 1938, Jews formed the second-largest group of leading NKVD officials. Russians came first, from 31.2 percent in 1934 to 64.8 percent in 1941; whilst Ukrainians came third, 5.2 and 15.3 percent in 1934 and 1941 respectively (Petrov 1999: 495, table 4). It was only after the Second World War, when Stalin initiated his anti-cosmopolitan campaigns, that the prominent role of Jews in Soviet state security would cease, definitively. 125

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Larin and others have asserted that none of their figures justify the notion of Jewish power in the Soviet state. Yet the increase of antiSemitic sentiments among the non-Jewish servants of the Bolshevik regime was surely not lost on the propagators of the myth of Jewish Communism beyond Russia’s borders (Vlad. Bonch-Bruyevich, “Ob antisemitizm”, in Alekseyev 1930: 17). They saw it as further evidence that communist rule in Russia was Jewish, alien to the Russian nation, and therefore hated by the Russian people (Fehst 1934: 78, 81; Kommoss 1942: 196; Krasnowski 1937: 67, 105-106; Petrovsky 1931: 62). The high figures of Jews among the Soviet bureaucracy added ammunition to their argument that the Jews of Russia were essentially parasitical. Jews lived off the poor and ignorant Russian peasants and workers (Kommoss 1942: 191). The resurgence of anti-Semitic sentiments, both amongst the party’s rank and file as well as society at large, was a manifestation of increased popular discontent with the privileged position of Jews. Or so the myth’s proponents optimistically and selfconfidently concluded (Krasnowski 1934: 130-131). The political purges and the show trials in Soviet Russia during the 1930s received a mixed response. Some Jewish publicists actually welcomed the purges, as part of the state’s political and ideological reorientation. They hoped this would eliminate the forceful anti-Semitic argument of Jewish predominance in the Bolshevik leadership. Stalin’s “elimination campaign” (Ausrottungsfeldzug) has basically “normalised” the share of Jews in the communist administrative apparatus, as an anonymous writer in the Jüdische Pressezentrale (Zurich) reported in 1938, apparently not without relief (“Darf man Bolschewismus und Judentum identifizieren?” 1938: 1). For those who were convinced that Jews ruled Bolshevik Russia, the explanation of the inner transformation of Soviet rule demanded considerable intellectual and political imagination. How to explain the strengthening of Russian nationalism at the expense of socialist (Jewish) internationalism? How to perceive the introduction by the Soviet regime of such “bourgeois deviations” as growing differentiation in wages, the reintroduction of military ranks, and the use of money as an economic regulator? If Jews ruled the Communist Party, how should the purging of Old Bolsheviks, among them a substantial number of Jews, be understood? Were the Jewish communists of Russia a spent force? Would the Soviet Union ultimately develop into a “normal” national state? Few propagators of Jewish communism expressed interest in the changes ongoing in Russia. Their myth seemed to have run out of steam. By the mid-1930s, the number of pamphlets, brochures, booklets, and other publications on the issue had decreased substantially. It would never again equal the wide dissemination witnessed in the immediate 126

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post-war era, with one major and obvious exception: Nazi-Germany. A tremendous number of publications on Judeo-Bolshevism were published in the Third Reich. Most of them were wholly obsolete, ephemeral, and profoundly uninteresting. They mindlessly and endlessly repeated the prescribed catchphrases of National Socialist propaganda. It was the exceptions which proved most interesting. Until the mid-1930s, there still seemed to be some room for dissent, considering the surprisingly critical thesis Die Lage der Juden in Russland von der Märzrevolution 1917 bis zur Gegenwart (The Situation of the Jews from the March Revolution until Today) which Abraham Heller defended in October 1935 at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Heller dismissed the notion of Jewish Communism entirely. It would be nonsense, he asserted, to collectively accuse the Jews of Russia of communist sympathies. Revolutionaries like Trotsky had little in common with the Jewish population of Russia. The living conditions of the Jewish masses had generally deteriorated under Bolshevik rule, as Heller related, and most Jews, if only because of the specific social structure of the Jewish population, remained “completely ill-disposed towards communism” (Heller 1935: 36, 38, 128). Heller’s book was highly exceptional given the time and place in which it was published. It seemed to have escaped the university’s ideological watchdogs. I have no knowledge of the young doctor’s academic career, but given the fierce attacks on his dissertation by prominent and loyal Nazi-scholars, it cannot have been particularly flourishing. Hermann Greife rapidly repudiated Heller’s study as “nonacademic” and typical “Jewish propaganda” (Greife 1936: 49). Incidentally, Greife was among the few Sovietologists in Nazi-Germany (see Adolf Ehrt, “Anti-Komintern”, in Völkischer Beobachter: October 1, 1936; Fehst 1934: 101; Kommoss 1942: 32-34; and Von Poehl n. d.: 92) who took the changes in Stalinist Russia seriously – although he expressed doubt in their substance. He openly reckoned with the possibility that Bolshevik Russia might go through a real process of “inner change”: a “national development” in education, in family and military polities, which would make its “revolutionary, international orientation” largely obsolete”. Greife even perceived a “change towards democracy” in Russia: an “embourgeoisement” of Bolshevism (verbürglichung des Bolschewismus). Ultimately, however, Greife questioned the real import of these events. He related the changes in the Soviet Union to the National Socialist take-over in Germany in 1933. National Socialism had scattered the revolutionary dreams of the communist leaders of Russia. Thus for reasons of domestic support and legitimacy, Stalin had no option but to strengthen the national dimension of communist rule.

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Greife and other German observers assumed that the changes were essentially tactical. There may have been a “complete change in Bolshevik methods’, but this did not alter the “nature of its political goals”. A true change of Bolshevism was by definition impossible, as Greife opined, whatever the supporters of this “evolutionary theory” would argue. No names were mentioned. He vehemently rejected any suggestion that Soviet Russia might possibly evolve into a “national” state. The Soviet Union would never become democratic, bourgeois, fascist, let alone National Socialist, he asserted. The so-called “evolutionists” missed the essential point: the race issue. Bolshevik rule remained immune to fundamental change, Greife concluded, because it was Jewish, and a “Jew can never become an Aryan” (weil der Jude nicht zum arischen Menschen evolutionieren kann) (Greife 1939: 37-38). Moreover, as Greife continued, whether or not the Jewish-Bolshevik leaders in Soviet Russia ruled throughout the communist doctrine was politically irrelevant. The strength of their position permitted Jews to abandon some of their Marxist dogmas for reasons of economic efficiency and foreign consumption. Greife’s works on communism in Russia may be somewhat less grotesque than many other politically inspired publications, but he relied on a crude ideological bromide to combine his contradictory observations: Mit die Haupterkenntnis der rassisch-völkischen Weltanschauung des Nationalsozialismus ist die dass der Bolschewismus blutmässig bedingt, blutmässig festgelegt und blutmässig gebunden ist. In der jüdischen Rasse ist der Träger, der Erreger des Bolschewismus entdeckt worden (Greife 1939: 36, italics in original).

Other prominent National Socialist Russia watchers shared Greife’s arguments. Rudolf Kommoss observed that the share of Jews in the Communist Party peaked in 1922 and that the turning point (Wendepunkt) in “Jewish power politics” in Russia occurred in December 1927, when Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others were removed from the Party leadership and their political line was eliminated. But Kommoss seemed to question whether 1927 truly represented a true turning point. Were not Trotsky and his clique merely replaced by another Jewish clan led by Lazar Kaganovich? Kommoss posed the question and he answered it too. “The Kaganovich clique is the decisive power factor in the Soviet state”, he opined: “It firmly established Jewish power” (Kommoss 1942: 33). Kommoss seemed too realistic to assert that Kaganovich actually ruled Russia, but he implied it. Stalin may be Russia’s supreme leader, he wrote, but Kaganovich is the man who pulls the strings, the country’s “invisible” chief. Kaganovich is Stalin’s “right hand”, the man who shifts the figures and who influences the real decisions. If Stalin is the “heart” of the Party, Kaganovich is its “brains” (Kommoss 1942: 42). 128

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Kommoss did not seem fully confident in his otherwise ideologically acceptable observations. The “Jewish crisis” (Judenkrise) of 1936 (the time of the first major show trials) might not have been “solved”, but as he put it, “things have been set in motion”. A taboo had been broken. “Behind the scenes, the Jewish question is ever more lively debated. The carefully cultivated smokescreen becomes increasingly permeable” (Kommoss 1942: 212). Greife and Kommoss were not the only German observers fascinated by ongoing developments in Stalinist Russia. Even among the highest circles in Nazi Germany the idea of an evolutionary change in the Soviet Union was seriously considered. The show trials, the elimination of most of the prominent (Jewish) Old Bolsheviks, the dismissal of Maksim Litvinov as minister of Foreign Affairs, and, in particular, the signing of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939 were all interpreted as deliberate efforts to rid Soviet politics of the “Jewish element”. At least this seemed to have been the line of thinking offered by some leading Nazi figures. In public, they never deviated from the official line of Jewish-communist rule in Russia. In private, however, they struck a different note. In his diary entry of March 1940, Joseph Goebbels confided that Stalin really was a “pan-Slavic” and that the Bolsheviks would ultimately deal with the Jewish question in their own particular way. In December 1939, he had described Stalin as a “typical Asiatic Russian” who had eliminated the Party’s former “West European elite” (Fröhlich 1987, Volume 4: 72, 74; Volume 3: 679). Goebbels shared Hitler’s thoughts on the matter. On different occasions Hitler expressed his views with regards to the internal development of Soviet Russia – views which were not particularly consistent. By the end of the 1920s, Hitler already seemed to have pondered the possibility that Russia would one day transform into a “national communist” state (Weinberg 1961: 153). Some ten years later, shortly after the National Socialist take-over, Hermann Rauschning recalled the Führer to have said: Nicht Deutschland wird bolschewistisch werden, sondern der Bolschewismus wird eine Art Nationalsozialismus werden. Übrigens gibt es mehrVerbindendes als Trennendes zwischen uns und dem Bolschewismus. Vor allem die echte, revolutionäre Gesinnung, die auch in Russland überall dort lebt, wo keine jüdische Marxisten ihr Wesen treiben. Ich habe diesem Umstand immer rechnung getragen und Anweisung gegeben, dass man ehemalige Kommunisten sofort in die Partei aufnimmt. Aus den kleinbürgerlichen Sozialdemokraten und gewerkschaftsbonzen wird nie ein Nationalsozialist, aus Kommunisten immer (Rauschning 1973: 124).

Mussolini’s son-in-law and Italy’s minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano reported from a two-hour speech given by Hitler at a 129

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conference of military experts (January 20, 1941) in which the German leader had offered some reassuring qualifications regarding the Jewish influence on the Soviet leadership: “As long as Stalin lives, there is no threat; he is clever and catious. But when he will be gone, the Jews, who are now in the second and third echelons of power, might return again” (Domarus 1965: 165). Excerpts from Hitler’s Tischgespräche point in the same direction. In July 1942 Hitler referred to his minister of Foreign Affairs Von Ribbentrop, whom Stalin would have convinced of the fact that he would effectively deal with the Jewish elite, as soon as its place could be taken by Russia’s own intelligentsia (Picker 1951: 119). The German historian Matthias Vetter asserts that until his death, Hitler never believed Stalin to have been an instrument in the hands of Jews (Vetter 1995: 352). Whether or not Hitler believed in his own ideological constructs is important for more than academic purposes. It seems impossible, however, to establish his precise beliefs.

3.2. The “People’s Republics” Jewish prominence in the revolutionary movement of the interwar years was not limited to the Soviet Union. Some of the communist parties and, after the Second World War, communist regimes in East Central Europe exhibited a similar phenomenon. Seven out of ten leaders and ideologues of Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the radical offspring of the Polish Socialist Party and one of the precursors to the country’s Communist Party, were Jewish. Most of these radicals manifested an almost insatiable revolutionary zeal. Some of these names, including Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Jochiges, Karol Sobelson (Karl Radek), would become rallying cries for anti-Semites throughout Europe. The preponderance of Jewish revolutionaries among the commissars of the Hungarian Soviet Republic has already been mentioned, as has the conspicuous role Jews played in the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic: Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller, Eugen Leviné, and others. In Poland during the RussoPolish war of 1918-21, two of the four members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, which was to have assumed power once the revolution had triumphed, were Jewish. The same is likely true for a considerable number of activists in the revolutionary committees the Bolsheviks established in those parts of the country that they temporarily controlled. By the end of the interwar years, one-third of the Lithuanian Communist Party members were supposedly Jewish (in 1940 the Party consisted of 2,000 members), and Jews were particularly well represented in the Party’s upper echelons (Levin 1980: 24). The communist movement in interwar Romania was small and inconsequential. The Party recruited heavily among the country’s substantial minorities 130

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and demonstrated an alarming lack of sensitivity to the national concerns of their fellow-countrymen in the early interwar years. No wonder that it found it so difficult to mobilise support among the small, mostly first-generation working class in the country, which was “steeped in traditionalism and authoritarianism” (Gilberg 1990: 34). Classified party statistics provide the ethnic composition of the membership in 1933: 26.58 percent Hungarian, 22.65 percent Romanian, and 18.12 percent Jewish. Official figures are probably too conservative. Jewish veterans estimated the number of Jews at approximately 50 percent (Levy 2001: 5). Even in this case, as in Poland, party members could not have represented much more than a small minority, no more than 1,000, of a total Jewish population of approximately 800,000. The Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or KPD) is a remarkable exception in Central Europe. During the final years of the Weimar Republic, Heinz Neumann was the only Jew who occupied a top position in the Party. There was one Jew among the seventy KPD deputies in the Reichstag in 1930. There was none in 1933, shortly before Hitler assumed power. Communists of Jewish descent did not play an equally conspicuous role in all communist parties, at all times. The membership of the Polish Communist Party (KPP, Komunistyczna Partia Polski) fluctuated markedly during the interwar decades. So did the percentage of Jews in the Communist Party, although it was never less than 22 percent. Jan Gross estimates that the total number of communists in interwar Poland (the combined membership of the Communist Parties of Poland, of Western Ukraine, and of Western Belorussia) was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 (Gross 2006: 196). According to official reports presented at the Party’s fourth conference in November-December 1925, 40 percent of the Party membership was Jewish. This figure would later be adjusted to 20 percent of KPP workers. Around the same time, the Warsaw Party organisation counted 434 members, of which 202, or almost half, were Jews (Silberner 1983: 232-233, derived from official party documents). Overall, communist influence would grow in the Jewish streets of Warsaw and elsewhere in Poland. At the beginning of the 1930s, Jewish presence in the Party reached almost 35 percent. In the larger communities the percentage of Jewish communists was around 50 percent; while in smaller cities it exceeded 60 percent (1933). Official sources, Burks adds, are almost certainly too conservative since they cover only those communists who admitted to have come from Jewish families (Burks 1961: 160). Schatz reports that during the 1930s the proportion of Jews among the communists of Poland fluctuated between 22 and 26 percent. This implies, as Gross concludes on the basis of these figures, that at this moment of the Party’ greatest popularity, 7,000 to 7,500 Jews were 131

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affiliated – one fifth of 1 percent of the total Jewish population (Schatz’ estimation and Gross’ comments, in Gross 2006: 197). Among the communist youth during the early 1930s, Poles were a minority. In the Communist Union of Polish Youth, ethnic Poles constituted 19 percent of the membership in 1930 and 33 percent in 1933. For Belorussians and Ukrainians the figures were 12 and 19 percent and 18 and 17 percent, respectively. Jews formed 51 percent in 1930 and 31 percent of the communist youth movement in 1933 (figures are based on Polish sources and western estimates. See Auerbach 1965: 42, note 49; Schatz 1991: 96, 85; Silberner 1983: 236). If any social class dominated the leading communist cadres in East Central Europe during the interwar years and in the first post-war decade, it was the (petite) bourgeoisie, professionals in particular (Burks 1961: 20, 21, tables 1.1, 1.2). The proletariat or working class was not prominent in the higher echelons or amongst party activists or voters. Especially where the communist vote was “massive”, the majority of supporters came from rural communities. As Burks suggests, it seems “more than probable”, that “two-thirds of the communist voters were tillers of the soil” (Burks 1961: 42). In countries where the native middle-class was absent or still undeveloped, Jewish pre-eminence was almost inevitable. As it had in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, in East Central Europe the issue of Jewish communism took on new proportions following the establishment of communist regimes. The post-war years opened a new chapter in the lives of remaining Jews, as they did in the history of the myth of Jewish Communism. The first decade of communist rule was a very mixed experience for the surviving Jews of East Central Europe. In theory, Jews had various options after the war. They could try to pick up their lives and participate in the rebuilding of the Jewish communities in their countries. They could attempt to further assimilate into non-Jewish society and to contribute to the new, post-war order. Or they could leave their places of birth, try to exit their countries, and emigrate. Communism explains neither why so many surviving Jews left their homelands or why most others stayed. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish returnees attempted to leave their countries – the scene of their greatest misfortunes and often the grave of their beloved ones – when the occasion first presented itself. Janina Bauman, who had spent the war in hiding in Warsaw, was one of them. “During the first years after the war I wanted to leave Poland – to get away from a place where I was seen as an unwanted stranger”, she recalled. “I felt lonely at school, lonely among my neighbours, singled out and set apart in the very place where I felt I belonged” (Bauman 1988: 15). It would take Bauman another twenty years before she finally left Poland. By then, the communist 132

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authorities had left her little choice. Most Polish Jews did not hesitate that long. Many people in East Central Europe distrusted Jewish survivors. Would they not reclaim their belongings? The Polish underground had warned against the restitution of Jewish property well before the war had ended. The Delegatura, the representative in occupied Poland of the Government-in-Exile in London, showed remarkable foresight in a memorandum to London in August 1943: In the Homeland as a whole – regardless of the general psychological situation at any given moment – the position is such that that the return of the Jews to their jobs and workshops is quite out of the question, even if the number of Jews were greatly reduced. […] the return of masses of Jews would be perceived by the population not as an act of restitution but as an invasion against which they would to defend themselves, even by physical means (From a memorandum by Roman Knoll, Head of the Office for Foreign Relations by the Delegate in occupied Poland (Yad Vashem Archives, M-2/262), quoted in Yisrael Gutman, “Polish and Jewish Historiography on the Question of Polis-Jewish Relations during World War II”, in Abramsky 1986: 182).

Ultimately, very few Jews would have their property returned. Initially, the relevant legal acts were often sabotaged. Later they were revised and eventually repealed. Anti-Jewish arguments and stereotypes (the Jewish capitalist, usurer, and parasite) were never far off. Restitution was frequently considered politically unwelcome. It would unnecessarily anger the anti-communist feelings among a part of the population and it did not correspond to the economic and political premises of the new order. Jewish returnees were distrusted for other reasons, too. Would they not seek revenge? Would they not betray those who had treated them so miserably? In reality, the large majority of Jews did nothing of the kind. Instead, they would attempt to begin their lives anew, adjust to the new circumstances, and cope with the rising tide of anti-Semitism. Others simply emigrated (Meyer: 1953; Schatz 1991: 365-366, note 7; and Grynberg 1986: 98): Jews in post-war East Central Europe (estimates, second half of the 1940s) Bulgaria Hungary Yugoslavia Poland Romania Czechoslovakia

49,172 (1945) 143,624 (1945) 15,000 (1945) 245,000 (1946) 428,000 (1947) 56,000 (1946)

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The survivors of the Holocaust lived under dire circumstances. Many had lost everything: their hearth and home, their family and friends. Even the Bulgarian Jews, who had remained relatively unscathed by Nazi policies, suffered tremendously. In January 1945, a New York Times correspondent wrote: Four months after the liberation, the situation of 45,000 Jews in Bulgaria is deplorable and desperate. They are without clothing, without shoes, and starving. They are existing, not living, under the most unsanitary conditions, 3-4 families sharing a dingy little room, unheated, without windowpanes. Most of them told me that they envy their Macedonian co-religionists who have been exterminated by the Germans. The Bulgarian government has done nothing to help these thousands of destitute Jews (The New York Times, January 20, 1945, quoted by Meyer, “Bulgaria”, in Meyer 1953: 576).

In Hungary, during the same winter, 700 Jews reportedly died of diseases, hunger, or exhaustion every week (Sachar 1990: 603). Foreign aid was essential to survival. The American Joint was particularly active. The organisation provided financial support, distributed food, supplied soup kitchens, and medical care. It even supported old people’s homes and orphanages. At the end of the 1940s, after the communist parties had established their full power and had either outlawed or incorporated most autonomous social organisations, the Joint was forced to cease its activities. Its offices were closed and its workers sent home. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were hardly ever welcome, anywhere. Sympathy and compassion were scarce commodities in post-war Europe, East and West alike. Even in Palestine, among fellow Jews, many immigrants from Europe were given the cold shoulder. What Janina Bauman writes about her native Poland certainly applied to other countries, too. “Jews were somehow soiled, marked with suffering, branded with tragedy. It is better to keep away from them and not let the evil taint one’s own tidy life” (Bauman 1988: 13-14). The outright hostility, violence even, with which the returnees in some countries in East Central Europe were met in their home cities and villages, was exceptional though. One of the major reasons that Jews did not return to their former places of residence was indeed the resurgence of grassroots anti-Semitism across East Central Europe. The dehumanising effects of warfare and Nazi and Soviet occupation, as well as the outcome of the war, had negatively affected the perceptions of Jews and the Jewish question by large parts of the non-Jewish population. The abuse and killing of Jews had been a highly public affair in most of East Central Europe. Humiliated, expelled, packed in overcrowded and stinking ghettos, sick, emaciated, filthy, and desperate – Jews evoked disgust and aversion, rather than compassion or remorse. The Holocaust rather 134

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strengthened than reduced traditional anti-Jewish sentiments. The return of survivors added to these sentiments feelings of guilt, fear, and contempt. Few East Europeans were willing to accept the claim of a unique Jewish suffering. Jan Gross locates the reasons for the viciousness of post-war antiSemitism (in Poland) in the experiences of Jews and Poles during the war. “I see no other plausible explanation of the virulent post-war antiSemitism in Poland but that it was embedded in the society’s opportunistic wartime behaviour”, he writes. “Until someone offers an alternative explanation, we must consider that it was ordinary Poles’ widespread collusion with the Nazi-driven extermination of the Jews which alone could produce such callousness” (Gross 2006: 247-248). New issues were added to old prejudices: from embarrassment and confusion with respect to the brutalities Nazi-troops and their local auxiliaries had committed, to fears that returnees would reclaim their belongings, and the recognition of Jews’ conspicuous presence in the new communist regimes. People just did not want to receive the Jewish returnees (Józef Adelson, “W Polsce zwanej ludowa”, in Tomaszewski 1993: 474). A Polish Jew remembers his arrival from the Soviet Union: I was with a group of Jewish children from an orphanage which I had directed in Turkmenistan. The moment our train passed the Polish border, it began. At the stations we were booed and spit at. “What do you want here, creeps?” The children were afraid, and I was appalled (Niezabitowska 1987: 119).

Spitting and shouting was not the worst of it. Pogroms took place. In Kunmadaras, a sleepy Hungarian village, in May 1946, the board of a protestant school ordered little children not to go out in the streets alone – Jews supposedly threatened them. A Jewish weekly, Uj Elet (New Life), reported what happened next: The Jews returning from deportation were received by a population chagrined to see them again. They did not wish to return to Jews the property stolen from them. […] On the day of the pogrom, at 8 A.M., many women gathered in the market place and shouted impatiently: “when do we begin, its eight o’clock already.” The mob then attacked all Jews who could be found in the market place. The village magistrate ordered the mob to clear the market place. Whereupon, they invaded Jewish homes and started to beat up women, children and old people until they bled. They killed Joseph Rosinger, a poor carter. They killed Francis Kuti, a poor huckster, and pillaged his home. The third victim, Francis Mailander, died from his injuries in the Karczag hospital. Within a few hours a larger detachment of policemen arrived in Kunmadaras under the command of Major Polonyi of Szolnok. Polonyi ordered the mob to disperse, and asked them what was the

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matter with the Jews. There came an answer from one of the mob: “Nothing. They just kill our children.” Polonyi said: “Let all those come forward whose children have disappeared.” Nobody came forward. The murderous mob, in the course of the pogrom, answered to women who implored them to spare their lives: “Did you have to come back? Why didn’t you stay in Germany? It wasn’t the Russian who liberated you, we are going to liberate you, but you won’t thank us for it. […] Now it is the people who deal with justice. This is the real people’s court, not the one you have […]”. Following the arrival of a Budapest police detachment, order in the town was restored completely (Uj Elet, May 30, 1946, quoted in Duschinsky, “Hungary”, in Meyer 1953: 423).

More violent incidents followed. Two months after the events in Kunmadaras, another pogrom took place in Miskolc. Fifteen Jews were killed in the village of Svinná, Slovakia, immediately after the war. They had survived their liberation from a nearby concentration camp for only a few days. Anti-Jewish violence spread rapidly throughout Slovakia, culminating in an outright pogrom in Vel’ké Topol’cany in September 1945. Elsewhere in East Central Europe the situation did not seem very different. Romania was swept by an “unprecedented wave of political anti-Semitism” in the first few post-war years, as Stephen Fischer-Galati argues. He relates it directly to the conspicuous role of “non-Romanians” in the new communist-dominated regime (FischerGalati, “Fascism, Communism, and the Jewish Question in Romania”: 173). Nowhere, however, was the situation as threatening as it was in Poland. Estimates of the number of Jews murdered in the country in the immediate post-war years vary between 1,000 and 2,000 (Aleksiun 1998: 54). Violent riots took place in Rzeszów, July 1945, in Kraków, August 1945, and in Kielce, in July 1946. Of the 25,000 Jews who had lived in Kielce, a provincial town south of Warsaw, a mere 200 returned after the war. Of these returnees, 42 would be killed in the pogrom of July 1946. The pogrom was provoked, as were the riots in Topol’cany a year earlier, by rumours of ritual murder of Christian children by local Jews. Kielce was the most deadly anti-Jewish incident in the country after the war. It has remained one of the most controversial issues in Polish-Jewish relations ever since. The communist leaderships did not hide the occurrence of antiJewish violence in their countries. On the contrary, they condemned it and arrested (some of) the alleged perpetrators, putting the blame on the anti-communist opposition (Dobrowolski, “Na smiertelnej fali (zamiast wstępu)”, in Andrzejewski 1947; The Jewish Question in Hungary 1946). In other words, anti-Jewish incidents were used to discredit the opponents of communism. They were consistently portrayed as reac136

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tionary provocations against people’s rule. The day after the massacre in Kielce, the Polish Press Agency PAP issued a statement in which it accused “reactionary elements” of having instigated it (Kersten 1992: 98). This would remain the official interpretation until the very end of the Polish People’s Republic. Some historians uphold the explanation that radically anticommunist and anti-Semitic guerrilla groups active in Poland incited the pogrom in order to create chaos and ultimately harm the country’s reputation in the West (Weinryb, “Poland”, in Meyer 1953: 253). Others, however, believe that the Polish secret service, by order of the NKVD, stood behind it. Through these pogroms, Moscow supposedly attempted either to disgrace the anti-communist resistance in Poland, thereby damaging Poland’s reputation in Western Europe and the United States (to shut the door on any rapprochement in the foreseeable future), or to force Polish communists to follow a more stringent line towards the opposition in their country, in close cooperation with the Soviet security services (Chechinski 1982: 21-32; Kersten 1992: 115-138; Michal Borwicz, “Polish-Jewish Relations, 1944-47”, in Abramsky 1986: 194; Stanisław Meducki, “The Pogrom in Kielce on 4 July 1946”, in Polonsky 1996: 158-169). It is beyond doubt, indeed, that local authorities were involved in some of the anti-Jewish riots. The instigators of the Kunmadaras pogrom were party people from the area. Few were arrested; none was seriously punished (Duschinsky, “Hungary”: 425). Among the perpetrators of the Kielce riots were state officials, too. The presence of anti-Semites within the ruling communist parties was explained mostly by the large and rather indiscriminate recruitment drives of the early post-war days, in practically every communist party. Too many “Little Nazis” (former members of the Arrow Cross movement) had entered the Party, the Hungarian communist leadership complained. In reality, many of them had been invited to join the Party. Communist officials participated in the pogroms, but there is no reason to believe that these incidents were either instigated or manipulated from above. Popular anti-Jewish violence drew to a close by the end of 1947, when communist rule was firmly established. Did the communist rulers no longer need these kinds of provocations or were they finally able to prevent others from staging them? The latter explanation seems more likely. At the very least, the policies of Polish authorities and other (proto-) communist countries, with respect to these manifestations of anti-Semitism, were “contradictory and confused” (Kenez 2006: 161). Political engineering does not provide a satisfactory explanation for either the scale or vehemence of the Kielce pogrom and other antiJewish incidents in post-war Poland. Neither does the interpretation of anti-Semitism as “part of the protective wall” that the nation apparently 137

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raised against the new order (Smolar 1987: 70). Firstly, it holds a concept of the nation as one and undivided, which reflects a romantic image rather than a realistic impression of post-war Polish society. Secondly, it underestimates the presence and continuity of traditional anti-Jewish sentiments which inspired the rioters and pogromchiki. Political engineering and social prejudices were closely interrelated. People were easily provoked into violence. Or as Gross puts it: To give an account of the uniqueness of time and place, of specific triggering factors, of the personal relations between actors who controlled organisational resources, is less significant than to understand how thousands of ordinary people could engage in a prolonged murderous assault against their fellow citizens. […] This could have happened anywhere in Poland, and at any time during this period (Gross 2006: 159, 158).

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church neither formally condemned nor explicitly condoned the acts of physical violence against Jews. The bishop of Częstochowa, Teodor Kubina, was the only Catholic man of authority to denounce the pogroms – and unequivocally so. Otherwise, the Episcopate took an ambivalent position. It was apparently the notion of Jewish Communism, more than anything else, which motivated the position of the church leadership. Anti-Jewish violence was not seen as a moral issue, but as part of a broader political conflict. Jews were not murdered as Jews, the argument ran, but as communists. Poles were responding to the crimes that the Jewish-led communist government had inflicted on the Polish nation. In other words, Jews had only themselves to blame. They had brought their misfortune upon themselves. Primate August Hlond did not hide his sympathy for the perpetrators. “Jewish communists are running this country. Why does World Jewry allow them to take over the government and oppress the Christian people?” he rhetorically asked Joseph Tenenbaum, president of the World Union of Polish Jews, in June 1946. Tenenbaums’ response that Jews were not only active in the Communist Party but in most other political parties as well, failed to make any real impression, nor did his argument that most Jews in Poland were busier surviving than making revolution. “These Jewish communists in the government are at the root of all evil”, Hlond repeated. “As long as the Jews continue to rule, there will be trouble, and the people will retaliate. […] The Jews […] are communists, they are communising, they are constantly communising” (Tenenbaum 1948: 237-238). The establishment of communist rule was a watershed event in the history of East Central Europe. It would impact the lives of each and every individual citizen – whether from majority or minority groups. Still, wartime experiences and post-war expectations differed widely 138

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across the various parts of the population, between Jews and non-Jews for example. Communism presented the survivors of the Holocaust with unprecedented challenges, including new and unforeseen chances. For many Holocaust survivors migration was on the top of the agenda. During the first post-war years, the communist-led regimes took a benign position on the emigration issue. Initially, they facilitated or allowed emigration for those who wished to leave and advocated assimilation for those who chose to stay. The governments’ motivations were mixed. Humanitarian concerns may have played a role, but political considerations were probably more important. The communist authorities likely believed that the combination of emigration and assimilation would prove to be the most convenient way to solve the Jewish question. The smaller the Jewish communities, the easier it would be to cope with those issues pertaining to their return (compensation, housing), and to assimilate them into the new order. The first serious region-wide restrictions on emigration were imposed only at the end of the 1940s. Migration drew to a standstill almost immediately. Emigration from some countries remained virtually impossible, while from others it was intermittently allowed and occasionally even stimulated (in 1950-1951 the Romanian communist authorities abruptly permitted 100,000 Jews to leave the country). The only truly exceptional case was Yugoslavia. The regime of Josip Broz Tito felt secure enough to give its Jewish citizens a free hand: they could either stay or leave, with the exception of a handful of technical specialists. Emigration remained a recurrent feature of the Jewish question in communist Europe. The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 motivated 20,000 Jews to leave the country. Some of them may have been prompted to leave by the anti-Semitic incidents which occurred during the failed revolution (Weidlein 1957: 17, 19); but most of the Jewish refugees fled the Soviet invasion, the collapse of the Nagy government, and the instalment of another orthodox communist regime. The forced Jewish exodus from Poland at the end of the 1960s was the apotheosis of the last state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign in Europe. And the refusal of the Soviet authorities to let the country’s Jews go would burden EastWest relations until the very end of the Cold War. In line with the policies of the Soviet Union, the East European communist regimes supported the establishment of an independent Jewish state. While trumpeting Jewish aspirations in the Middle East, the communist parties neglected and occasionally pressured Zionists in their own countries. It enabled them to tow the line of Moscow and to maintain their reputation in the West, without making too many concessions to their ideological opponents at home. Jewish sections of the 139

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communist parties participated wholeheartedly in this endeavour. Zhak Natan, leader of communist-dominated Jewish community life in Bulgaria, addressed his fellow countrymen in May 1948: Today, before the eyes of the whole world, a new nation is being born, a nation constitutes itself which has been dispersed all over the world for thousands of years. […] And we, the Jews who inhabit other parts of the earth, we cannot but feel spiritually and historically connected with this new nation which is being born in Palestine. […] Today there cannot be a Jew who would think otherwise about the future of the Jewish people than that the Jewish people has the right to exist in its own independent state (Evreiski Vesti, May 9, 1948, quoted in Meyer, “Bulgaria”: 611).

It was not long before Natan seriously regretted his eloquent words. Six months after the establishment of the State of Israel, Moscow fundamentally changed its position. Its geo-political gamble had failed. Israel did not become the anti-Western force that Moscow had hoped it would be. Soviet propagandists had to dig deep to come up with the appropriate ideological justification for their country’s political volteface. Their formulations would become the catchphrases of Soviet agitprop in the decades to follow. Israel was a hotbed of reaction. Zionists and Zionism acquired new meaning. They no longer denoted, or solely denoted, Jewish nationalism but would also be linked to capitalist aggression and expansionism. Actually, the Zionist label could be applied to anyone or anything related to “Jews”, which the communist regimes targeted for attack. The Jews of Eastern Europe had obvious reason to welcome the communist-dominated regimes. Occupation by Soviet troops meant an end to the war and German extermination policies. The Soviet army had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of East European Jews. Jews that had either spent the war years in Soviet Russia or been liberated from camps, hiding places or other perilous situations had ample reason to feel obliged to the Soviet Union and to the new order that it supported in their countries. Whether or not these feelings of gratefulness were translated into political support for the communist parties and regimes remains doubtful, however. Scattered and imprecise information on Jews’ voting behaviour in the immediate post-war years indicates that a substantial minority supported the communists – a reported 25 percent of the Jewish voted in the Hungarian national elections in 1945 and “an even larger share” in 1947 (Kenez 2006: 156). However, the predominant position of Zionism within Jewish communities and the large number of emigrants from the region demonstrate that many more held different political views. The new political order in East Central Europe, not yet fully communist but under the political control of communist parties and their 140

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foreign masters, offered Jews unforeseen and unprecedented opportunities. Apart from their physical security (for which Jews fully depended on the communist-dominated governments) they profited in particular from the unique possibilities for social mobility, employment, and political emancipation which the new order offered. Abel Kainer (pseudonym of Stanisław Krajewski) emphasises that few Jews as Jews chose for the communist regime in Poland. Those who participated in the new order (a minority among the Polish Jews who had survived the war, but the majority, most probably, of those who ultimately decided to stay) did so as individuals, mostly assimilated and, as Kainer asserts, often convincingly communist. Kainer lists a series of variables that can be read as partial explanations for why Jewish survivors were above average with respect to their receptivity to communist rule. Under post-war conditions, communism meant more than just acceptance by a community of non-Jews. Considering the situation in which most Jews found themselves immediately after the war (lacking housing and employment and boasting few relatives to fall back on), many relied heavily on support from the communist authorities. Additionally, and unlike any government before, the communist regime offered Jews major opportunities to enter the civil service and to acquire a corresponding social status. As such, Jews had ample reason to identify with some of the most important political premises of the new order, particularly its opposition to the ancien régime, including its ethnically inspired Polish nationalism and the recent tradition of antiSemitism. In general then, Jews might indeed have been less sensitive to the loss of Poland’s national sovereignty and traditions. They were also likely to have been less susceptible to some of the regime’s more negative features than were many other (non-Jewish) Poles (See Kainer 1995: 377-379). Jan Gross adds that: “They (Jews, ag) certainly considered the Communist-dominated government a natural ally, given the hostility of the social environment” (Gross 2006: 62). Gross’ comment raises two interesting issues. Were the beneficial relations between surviving Jews and the communist authorities in post-war Poland indeed mutual? And was the loyalty to the Polish communist state exceptional, to be explained by either the extremely fragile position or, as many nonJewish contemporaries believed, by the pro-communist leanings of Jewish survivors? Or did it reflect a more common, traditional progovernmental attitude by the Jews of East Central Europe? Neither of the two questions bears simple, straightforward answers. Mutual relations may have been beneficial, but they remained ambivalent too – from either side. As to the issue of loyalty, let me briefly return to the interwar period. Jan Gross opines that during the interbellum, Jews did in fact comprise 141

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“the most consistently law-abiding and pro-regime” portion of the population (Gross 2006: 198). Gross bases this conclusion on analyses of Jewish voting patterns during the 1920s and 1930s (Kopstein 2003; Daniel Blatman, “The Bund in Poland, 1935-1939”, in Polonsky 1996: 79). These findings add nuance to the conclusions of Burks and others, who argued that minority voters, including Jews, supported communist parties disproportionately. The outcomes of these studies point into various directions, however. In the national elections of 1922, 4 percent of the Jews voted communist, whilst 65 percent of the Jewish vote went to minority (predominantly Jewish) parties. In 1928, approximately 33 percent of Jewish voters supported minority parties while 49 percent favoured the pro-government Bloc (as compared to 16 percent of “Catholic” voters). Jewish support for minority parties decreased from roughly two-thirds to one-third of the Jewish vote. “Thus, quite contrary to expectation, the Jews were not only among the biggest supporters of the government among minorities”, the analysis suggests, “they were three times as supportive as the Poles themselves!” (Kopstein 2003: 105). Unfortunately, the authors of the study did not cover the election outcomes during the 1930s. The last democratic elections, held in December 1938, showed an overwhelming Jewish support for minority (read: Jewish) political parties. In Poland’s major municipalities, 38 percent of Jewish voters voted for the Bund, 36 percent supported Zionist lists, whilst the conservative religious Agudas Yisroel received 23 percent, and “others” 3 percent. These election outcomes clearly refute the Żydokomuna thesis. Yet it also remains questionable whether Jews’ near total support for Jewish parties in the local elections of late 1938 supports the proposition that Jews were unequivocally loyal to the Polish state and government. Every indicator of political preferences (voting behaviour, party affiliation) shows that the large majority of Jews in East Central Europe were not predisposed to radical, let alone to radical non-Jewish political movements. I suspect that in East Central Europe, especially in the early twenties and late thirties – years of drastic change and looming threats – Jews were more inclined to vote “Jewish”, i.e. for Jewish political parties. Only in cases where individuals did not support Jewish political parties, would Jews have been likely to favour “those ruling powers which guaranteed maximal stability and order, and opposed extremist tendencies” (Bela Vago, “The Attitude Toward the Jews as a Criterion of the Left-Right Concept”, in Vago 1974: 45). The post-war regimes, which initially consisted of both communist and non-communist parties, either disregarded or formally revoked antiJewish discriminatory laws and practices. Political conditions enabled the reconstruction of Jewish community life, at least what was left of it. 142

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The communist authorities agreed to and sometimes even supported the reconstruction of many, mostly autonomous, Jewish community institutions. Jewish emigration was tacitly accepted or even promoted. Jews benefited from the benign neglect and occasional support which the post-war regimes displayed towards Holocaust survivors. Jewish schools were established. Education in Yiddish and, occasionally, in Hebrew was resumed. Talmud Torahs, yeshivas, even a rabbinical seminary (in Budapest), opened their doors again. And so, too, did Jewish theatres, community, and other welfare organisations. Jewish publishers printed books in Yiddish. Jewish historians conducted research on Jewish history and atrocities committed during the war. Many of these autonomous Jewish activities were coordinated by officially sanctioned central Jewish bodies and sponsored by foreign organisations, especially the Joint. Jewish community life during this short period paled in comparison to Jewish life in the interwar decades, but for better or worse, it functioned. Even political parties resumed their activities. Zionist parties and organisations dominated Jewish political life, focusing almost exclusively on emigration to Palestine. Meanwhile, the communist parties held on to their traditional conviction that only full assimilation would ultimately solve the Jewish problem. Initially, the communist authorities followed a dual track, combining Jewish autonomy with assimilation. Eventually, however, the assimilation drive – the ambition to control Jewish community life and all other aspects of societal autonomy – would dominate. The gap between communist regimes and their Jewish subjects gradually widened. Ambivalence gave way to hostility. By the end of the 1940s, the communist regimes had eliminated practically every organisational expression of Jewish identity and autonomy. Even secular Yiddish culture, which the communist authorities in East Central Europe initially regarded as a progressive alternative to traditional Jewish community culture, came under fire. The Jewish economy, or what was left of it after the war, was eliminated, too. In the early 1950s, tens of thousands of superfluous “capitalist elements” (among them many Jews) in Hungary and Romania were deported from the cities and sent to work elsewhere. The number of people arrested, imprisoned, and internally exiled under the Stalinist regime in Hungary is reported to have been 150,000 (1.5 percent of the population). The Jewish share remains unknown. In 1951, almost 40,000 people were deported from Budapest alone. In this case, the number of Jews was given: 14,353 people or 37.19 percent of all deportees (Heinricht 1986: 32; Duschinsky, “Hungary”: 477). In political and cultural life all references to Jews, to Jewish history, and to related themes were practically eliminated. Government subsidies drew to a halt and all ties with foreign or international Jewish organisations 143

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were cut. Jewish political parties were dismantled; their leaders persecuted and forced to emigrate. The Jewish communist movement was purged of “rightwing” deviations. Jewish national and cultural identity had become counterrevolutionary notions. Jewish autonomy was considered unnecessary and Jewish nationalism deemed unacceptable. A political process which had spanned more than two decades in the Soviet Union, from the October Revolution to the late 1930s, took place in less than ten years in East Central Europe. Autonomous Jewish community life, any autonomous community life, was at loggerheads with the monopolistic communist system, based on a rigid and arbitrary ideology and armed with a strong apparatus of repression. The communist authorities exhibited a keen interest in the further ethnic homogenisation of their societies. “The Polish nation […] transforms itself from the multinational to the one-nation state”, as Bolesław Bierut, one of Poland’s supreme communist leaders, was pleased to announce in his 1946 New Year message (Głos Ludu, January 1, 1946, quoted in Krystyna Kersten, “Polish Stalinism and the SoCalled Jewish Question”, in Luks 1998: 222). Forced population transfers became a prominent feature of early communist rule. Twelve million ethnic Germans were expelled from Central Europe, from Polish and Czech lands in particular, as were large numbers of Poles from the Soviet Union, Ukrainians from Poland, and Hungarians from Slovakia. Self-interest on the part of communist parties, support provided by the Soviet Union, and a benevolent lack of interest and in some cases consent shown by Western allies, all of this made these mass expulsions possible. Ethnic engineering served important communist goals. It materialised the communist rulers’ claims to the new territories. Additionally, ethnic cleansing provided much needed capital for social and economic reconstruction. It further homogenised (a political asset per se) and revolutionised their societies, while simultaneously strengthening their national credentials. In short, ethnic engineering bolstered the legitimacy of communist rule. Even though communist policies vis-à-vis the Jewish communities largely mirrored the Soviet example, full conformity was lacking. In certain respects the situation in the countries of the newly established Pax Sovietica deviated from the example set by the Kremlin. Jews were regarded as a separate nationality in the Soviet Union; elsewhere in communist Europe religion was identified as the determinant criterion. In the Soviet Union practically all Jewish cultural institutions (with the exception of some synagogues) were shut down; in other communist countries their numbers were reduced and their autonomy taken from them, but they did continue to function. In Soviet Russia nearly all Jews were removed from the party leadership and the highest government 144

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bodies; in most of the communist countries in East Central Europe this was not the case, at least not before the 1960s and 1970s. Emigration from the Soviet Union was effectively impossible; communist authorities in most other countries adopted less rigid positions. Although official propaganda was never formally anti-Semitic, it certainly contributed to a pogrom-like atmosphere in the Soviet Union during the final years of Stalin’s life. Prominent Jews were arrested and deported. Others feared for the worst. In all other communist states, the situation had also deteriorated markedly during the “dark years”, though in most countries not nearly as badly as in the Soviet Union. Did the vicissitudes of the Jewish minorities in post-war East Central Europe differ essentially from those of the majority nations or other minority groups? In some respects they did, in others they did not. Jewish communal life was not so much destroyed because it was Jewish, but because it was traditional and autonomous and therefore incompatible with the fundamentals of communism. In this respect, Jews were not singled out for special treatment. They may have suffered more due to continuing grassroots and on occasion state-sponsored anti-Semitism, but other minorities (Germans, Hungarians) experienced similar, if not worse, misfortunes during these years. Jewish institutions were confronted with the same ideologically inspired policies of Gleichschaltung as were most other non-communist organisations. The same applied to the traditional economic activities of many Jews. Such activities were basically antagonistic to the communist order and irreconcilable with the prerequisites of communist planning and state control. The position of minorities was primarily determined by systemic factors, by the lack of political and economic pluralism, and thus by the basic features of the communist order. These were largely identical for minorities and majorities. There were of course differences between Jews and other groups. Even if we exclude the immediate legacy of the war, which was far more devastating for the Jews of East Central Europe than for any other minority or majority group, communist policies vis-à-vis the Jewish population and generally, the conditions of Jewish life, were exceptional. Firstly, the Jewish community and its institutions were extremely fragile. There was very little to fall back on. The Polish Catholic Church would survive the levelling aspirations of the communist regime. The Jewish Church would not, or barely so. In most countries Jewish community life would be reduced to a number of semi-official organisations serving the interests of the communist authorities as well as those of remaining Jews. Spiritual leadership was generally lacking. The heads of the Jewish communities were mostly controversial figures, not because they cooperated with the communist authorities (they had few 145

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alternatives) but because they were inclined to extenuate those unpleasant aspects of communism which did not have an immediate bearing on the lives of their community members. The more overlap there was between the interests of the communist regime and those of the fragile Jewish community, the more Jewish leaders would benefit. Secondly, Jews still occasionally endured grassroots hostility and violence more so than did any other group. Thirdly, and most importantly, despite the fact that Jewish communal life in East Central Europe was practically extinct a decade after the war, the Jewish question remained a thorny political issue. It would continue to play a pronounced role in domestic policies (intra-party struggles and party propaganda) and foreign relations. The Jewish question remained closely linked to matters of political power and legitimacy. In Poland in particular all functions of the Jewish question, as both a political instrument and a diversionary tactic, survived: to obtain popular legitimacy, to adjudicate power struggles within the party, and to fight enemies from without the communist regime. Jews had ample opportunity to benefit from the post-war regimes in East Central Europe – even more so than national majorities, given their underprivileged position during the interwar years. Jews entered unfamiliar territories, particularly large-scale industry and the administration. Of all the opportunities that the post-war order offered the surviving Jews of East Central Europe, employment in the state and party apparatus was the most unexpected and the most significant. In most of the countries in Eastern Europe before the war, with the ominous exception of the Soviet Union, Jews had been barred from government service. This had now changed. Individuals of Jewish descent came to play a more pronounced and prominent role in the early communist regimes of East Central Europe, than they ever had before in any country, at any point in time. In Poland few communists of Jewish descent had been active in the wartime communist resistance; fewer than were present in Moscow’s Polish communist (front) organisations. Membership of these Russian-based institutions was diverse, but Jewish radicals were clearly over-represented. They formed half of the leadership of the Union of Polish Patriots, half of the preparatory committee of the new Polish army on Soviet soil, and practically all of the contributors to the Polish language journal Wolna Polska. They made up the core of the leadership of the Polish Communists in the USSR, which was secretly established in January 1944, under the name of the Central Bureau of Poland’s Communists (Nussbaum 1972: 96-97; Schatz 1991: 363, notes 12, 13). In 1947 almost 60 percent of Jews in Poland would be employed in the industrial sector; 14 percent would enter the governmental bureaucracy (Orlicki 1983: 174). 90 percent of the 1,200 Jews who lived in the Gdansk province in 1947 were hired by the government to serve the 146

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local administration, the Citizens’ Militia, and the secret service (Adelson, “We Polsce zwanej ludowa”: 418). For the first time in history, Jews in Poland and elsewhere in the region would enter the state bureaucracy and upper echelons of the political hierarchy. Jews wielded real political power. It must have come as a complete surprise to a large part of the non-Jewish population. As Paul Lendvai puts it: Though six out of seven had been killed, the Jews appeared more prominent, more conspicuous, and more powerful than ever before in the history of Eastern Europe […] Jews entered the top ranks of the new regimes at the very time when the East European nations were engulfed in a national catastrophe (Lendvai 1971: 66).

Immediately after their moment of greatest grief and disaster, Jews attained what they never attained before: formal positions of political power. At a time of almost existential crisis for most of the nations of the region – from the ravages of war and occupation to the subjugation to Soviet rule – Jews had returned with a vengeance, or so many believed. There were fewer Jews than ever but they seemed more powerful than ever. Jews appeared to be the main beneficiaries of the new order, profiting from the misfortunes of the East European nations. As during the revolutionary events in the wake of the First World War, the collapse of the ancien régime was a precondition for Jews to enter the political arena of their countries. Once again, they were caught in the same web of frustration, fear and, indeed, treason. This time, however, the notion of Jewish Communism appeared to have lost most of its prewar mythical qualities. With the conspicuous role of Jews in most of the communist regimes, it seemed far more real than ever before – as biased and malevolent as this interpretation of communist rule may have been. It is impossible to give a reliable estimate of the number of Jews in the communist parties and leaderships of East Central Europe after the Second World War. In Poland their number is calculated at 10,000 by the end of the 1940s (Weinryb, “Poland”: 313), while the Jewish faction of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland counted 3,000 members (Adelson, “W Polsce zwanej ludowa”: 394). It is important to remember, however, that Zionism was by far the most popular political current among Jewish survivors in all of East Central Europe. Moreover, despite the relatively large numbers of Jews among the rank and file, the supreme Party leadership remained largely closed to Jewish communists. The Hungarian communist Party was the main exception. During the first post-war years the leadership of the Party consisted of five men: Mátyás Rákosi, Ernö Gerö, Mihály Farkas, Zoltán Vas en József Révai. They were all Moscovites and they were all Jewish. They would remain in power throughout most of the Stalinist years. 147

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But even if they did not reach the apex of the communist hierarchy, some Jewish communists did come very close. Occasionally they wielded even more power than the formal number one. Ana Pauker offers a good example. Pauker was probably the most powerful member of the trio that ruled Romania immediately after the war. Together with Iosif Chisinevschi they were the only Jews who ever became full members of the Party’s political bureau. Pauker never made it to the top position though. Others members of the leading troika included Teohari Georgescu and Vasile Luca. Luca, a Hungarian as well as a member of the Secretariat, the Politburo, and the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist (Workers) Party from 1947-1952, was purged with Pauker in 1952. But unlike his Jewish comrade, Luca was not released but sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in detention in 1963. Georgescu was an ethnic Romanian. He was also arrested in February 1953 and thrown in prison for three years. He was pardoned in March 1956 and spent the rest of his working life as the director of a printing firm. The second and third in command in the Polish People’s Republic were also of Jewish descent: Jakub Berman, a member of the Party’s Politburo (1948-1954) and secretary of the Central Committee (19481956), and Hilary Minc, co-member of the Politburo and the Central Committee (1944-1956). Berman was responsible for ideology, education, culture, and propaganda, as well as foreign policy and security matters. Minc’s responsibilities covered Poland’s post-war economic reconstruction. Berman and Minc, together with Roman Zambrowski, were the only Jews on the Politburo during the first years of the Polish People’s Republic. As in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, in some of the other East European countries Jewish communists were not only prominently present in the highest echelon of the Party, but they were also over-represented in specific sectors of the Party and state apparatus: in domestic security, in foreign relations, and in culture and press (agitation) departments (Câmpeanu 2000; Hartewig 2000; Levy 2001; Schatz 1991; Toranska 1987). In Budapest in January 1945 Gábor Péter was entrusted with the organisation of the political police. Among the first 113 people who came to work for the new institution, 83 were party members. As in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and in other countries during the initial phase of communist rule, a remarkably large part of the political police was non-communist. Jews were over-represented in the organisation: Péter reported that 28 of his co-workers, or slightly less than 25 percent of his staff, were Jewish (Kenez 2006: 54-55). Pavel Câmpeanu refers to the “overwhelming distribution of Jews” in the ideological apparatus of the Romanian Communist Party. He pro148

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vides a long list of Jews who occupied leading positions in the ideological and related departments of the Party. But what exactly is overwhelming? Obviously, one does need not have precise numbers (if available) to draw such qualitative conclusions. But imprecise figures or overblown interpretations easily lead to misunderstandings. Burks’ assertion that in post-war Bucharest, Budapest, and Warsaw “virtually every important police official was Jewish” is certainly a gross exaggeration (Burks 1961: 166). Recent researchers are more reserved. Krystyna Kersten quotes from a memorandum of the Polish Party leader Bierut (November 21, 1945), which reports that at that time the entire secret service (UB) employed 28,000 people, of which 2,500 worked at the Ministry of Public Security (MBP). Of the remaining 25,600 employees, 67 (or 1.7 percent) were Jewish. Among the leading cadres of the secret service, which consisted of approximately 500 people, the share of Jews was substantially higher: 67 individuals or 13 percent of all staff (Kersten 1991: 14). The Polish historian L. W. Gluchowski, who bases his figures on recent archival findings, reports that of the 447 “high ministry officials” within the MBP (in 1945), 131 were Jewish or more than 29 percent (while Jews in early post-war Poland did not make up more than 1 percent of the population). More than one of every three Jewish officials had been a member of the interwar Polish Communist Party (Gluchowski n. d.: 8), a figure which largely corresponds with the relatively low number of “Old Bolsheviks” of Jewish descent in the early Soviet state security. The other data he provides, derived from NKVD reports, points in the same direction. In 1945, 18.7 percent of the MBP staff was Jewish, as were 50 percent of its leading officials. Among the cadres in the Ministry of Culture, some 12.3 percent were Jews, of which eight held commanding positions. In the central apparatus of the Central Bureau of Press Control, up to half of all the employees were reportedly Jewish (Gluchowski n. d.: 28-29, note 26, based on NKVD reports, see: Aleksiun 1998: 63). Former employee of the Polish state security service, Michael Checinski, claims that, “contrary to popular belief”, only a “token number” of native Polish and Jewish officers were employed in the Informacja (military intelligence): fifteen to twenty Poles, amongst whom five to seven Jews on a total number of almost 120 senior positions. The organisation was mostly staffed and fully controlled by Soviet officers. Within the civilian security service, Checinski writes, the total number of Jews was probably higher, though the Jewish share never reached more than a fraction of the entire apparatus (Checinski 1982: 53). Whether or not the lack of reliable date renders such figures “meaningless”, as Gross asserts (Gross 2006: 230), is a matter of interpretation. Full statistics would not make the identification of Jews with 149

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communism any less grotesque or perverse. And even without full figures, the relatively strong presence of Jewish activists in certain sectors of the early communist regimes remains an intriguing issue. Security, culture, press, and foreign relations were among the most sensitive segments of the communist power apparatuses, as perceived by both party leaders and the general public. Why would Iosif Chisinevschi, a Jew from Bessarabia who reportedly spoke barely a word of Romanian, be put in charge of cultural policy (agitprop) and the foreign section of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party? Why would the Jewish communist and Moscovite Gábor Péter be placed at the head of the State Security Service (ÁVH, Államvédelmi Hatóság) in Hungary in 1945? Why would Colonel Anatol Fejgin, a Pole of Jewish descent, hold various high offices in public security, especially in the powerful and controversial Tenth Department of the ministry of Public Security? The department’s main task was to protect the party and state against enemies from within through the surveillance and infiltration of the communist elite. The directorate had extensive prerogatives. It carried out its own operations, ran special prisons, and kept its own archive and card index system (Gluchowski n. d.: 10). Evidently the department played a crucial role in the search for a Polish Rajk or Slánský as well as the preparation of a possible trial against Gomulka and other “rightwing nationalist deviants”. The simplest response is a counter-question: why not? Chisinevschi, Fejgin, and Gábor were loyal, trusted, and capable communists. This answer would suggest however that their Jewish background was regarded as irrelevant by the top leadership (Jews and non-Jews alike) in the early Romanian, Polish, or Hungarian People’s Republics. Yet evidence suggests otherwise. The supreme party leaderships seriously considered the prominent role of Jewish activists in the party. They clearly recognised the negative impact it had on the parties’ image and legitimacy. Thus, the question remains: why were these Jewish functionaries granted such sensitive positions? There is another, more convincing answer as to why these communists and so many other Jewish comrades occupied prominent positions: they were urgently needed and the party had few alternatives. Clearly, no single ruling political party (let alone parties suffering from a serious lack of legitimacy) wish to be identified with minority interests. Notwithstanding the internationalist tone of their propaganda, the communist parties of East Central Europe, weak and dependent as they were upon the Soviet Union, had ample reason to emphasise their countries’ national histories, identities, and interests. In this respect, having had a large number of Jews in their midst would not have been particularly helpful. Given the fact, however, that the communist parties and regimes 150

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lacked a reliable and knowledgeable cadre, they simply could not have managed without the relatively large number of “minorities” in the apparatus, Jews and non-Jews alike. Given Jews’ wartime experiences, their uncompromising anti-fascism, as well their seemingly insusceptibility to particularistic nationalism, communist leaders had few reasons to doubt the political loyalties of their Jewish comrades (Lendvai 1971: 77; Raymond Taras, “Gomulka’s ‘Rightist-Nationalist Deviation’: The Post-War Jewish Communists and the Stalinist Reaction in Poland, 1945-1950”, in Huttenbach 1994: 115). Nepotism and clique forming have also been mentioned as specific reasons for the relatively large number of Jews in specific sections of the communist apparatus. Prominent communist Jews preferred to work with fellow Jews rather than with their non-Jewish compatriots, as Câmpeanu asserts with respect to the ideological apparatus of the Romanian Communist Party. In this specific instance this may be true. In general, however, it seems rather unlikely. Most leading communists, and especially those of Jewish descent, were mindful that they lacked legitimacy, due to the disproportionate presence of minorities among the Party’s leadership and rank and file. In other words: the fewer Jews (or in the Romanian case, Hungarians) in the party apparatus, the better. Câmpeanu also suggests that non-Jewish heads of the Party, being less familiar with certain aspects of political life such as ideology, were “quite willing to leave the matter to ‘foreigners’” (Câmpeanu 2000: 163). This, too, seems rather improbable. The author rightly rejects the claim that the disproportionate Jewish presence was a “strategic objective” of the Party’s leadership. However, the alternative hypothesis he poses – that of a “decision-making coherence” with “strategic connotations” – is doubtful too. It lacks cogency and empirical evidence. Still, other historians offer comparable explanations. Checinski for one stresses the strategic dimension of cadre policies, though not in a particularly consistent manner. On the one hand, he asserts that in their quest for political legitimacy, the communist leaders (of Poland) “were anxious to make Jews ‘invisible’”. On the other hand, however, he stresses that Jewish communists were frequently placed in the more controversial and conspicuous positions, so that they “could easily be blamed for all the regime’s crimes.” This approach was followed throughout Eastern Europe, Checinski reports. In this way, anticommunist feelings were easily channelled into anti-Semitic sentiments (Checinski 1982: 13, 62-63). In her major study on the Jewish communists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Karin Hartewig observes a similar concentration in specific branches of the party and state apparatus. Her explanation is twofold: clustering was the result of a combination of individual orienta151

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tions and capabilities on the one hand, and of strategic cadre-policies on the other. Hartewig mentions culture, press, journalism, and foreign economic relations as professional spheres wherein Jewish communists were particularly active. She explicitly excludes the law and order departments, as well as the military. These institutions were probably too controversial and politically sensitive to employ Jews in larger numbers, she asserts. The communist leadership, as Hartewig opines, probably feared negative reactions from society. This “negative selection” of Jewish communists by the leadership of the GDR offers a reasonable and convincing explanation. It actually refutes the interpretation, as presented by Checinski and others, that the positioning of Jews in these sensitive and conspicuous places was a deliberate strategy and diversionary tactic (Hartewig 2000: 201, 246). An even more intriguing variation on the theme of “deliberate cadre policies” is the belief that the disproportionate number of Jews in the higher echelons of the party and state in East Central Europe was primarily the result of a cunning strategy led by the Soviet leadership (Checinski 1982; Mantel 1986: 11). Every communist leader in East Central Europe during the first post-war decade was fully subordinate to the Kremlin, if not to Stalin personally – ideologically, politically, psychologically, and physically. Greater loyalty and dependence, and therefore also pliability, was expected of Jewish communists. From these “victims of fascism”, many of which had spent the war in the Soviet Union, Stalin expected the fanaticism, lack of scruples, and unbinding devotion necessary to execute his revolutionary strategies (Stephen Fischer-Galati, “National Minorities in Romania, 1919-1980”: 193). Ray Taras explains the prominent role of communist Jews in Poland as a “function of Moscow’s preferences” (Taras, “Gomulka’s ‘Rightist-Nationalist Deviation’”: 121). Moscow deliberately recruited Jewish communists in an effort to play them off against their comrades from the “ascendant nationalist group” (Taras, “Gomulka’s ‘RightistNationalist Deviation’”: 117-118). Additionally, Jews in conspicuous positions would serve as scapegoats for the shortcomings and mistakes of Soviet leaders and their local satraps, thereby deflecting anticommunism into anti-Semitism (Checinski 1982: 62-63). It is an implausible hypothesis. Not only is it difficult to reconcile this explanation with the fact that the establishment of Stalinist regimes coincided with “Stalin’s discovery of Jewish untrustworthiness” (Slezkine 2006: 314), but it also lacks (archival) proof to support it. I have yet to come across a single piece of evidence which confirms that the positioning of communists of Jewish descent in high and sensitive places was indeed a deliberate strategy of the Kremlin leadership (See recent studies based on Soviet archives: Volokitina 1997 and 2002). 152

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Scattered pieces of information on how Moscow viewed the disproportionate role of Jewish communists indicate moderate concern rather than malicious consent. Georgi Dimitrov, hero of the international communist movement and ex-leader of the defunct communist international, advised Rákosi that in light of the high numbers of Jews within the Hungarian Communist Party, it would be preferable to employ them in those positions which would not bring them into contact with the local population (Kenez 2006: 23-24; see also Mevius 2005: 94-95). Stalin probably preferred Moscovites, who had spent the war under the close political and ideological supervision of the Soviet Party, to “home” communists, who had fought the German occupier and his local auxiliaries in their own countries. Jewish communists happened to be better represented among Moscovites than among home communists. In other words, they were strong candidates for important positions, not because of their Jewish ethnicity but because of their political reliability. Moreover, the notion of a political strategy aimed at placing Jews in sensitive and conspicuous positions contradicts evidence pointing to the distrust and suspicion the presence of Jewish comrades aroused among Soviet officials in Eastern Europe. Gluchowski refers to a particular order from August 1950 by Poland’s military counterintelligence branch, the Chief Directorate of Information, directed by Soviet officers between 1950 and 1953. It targeted “Jewish nationalism” and Polish Jews in the armed forces as “potential enemies of the state” (Gluchowski n. d.: 8). Why should Stalin have been interested in promoting potential enemies of the state to such powerful and sensitive positions? We actually know very little about Soviet involvement in the cadre policies of the allied communist regimes. My interpretation is that whenever the appointment of prominent party officials demanded the consent of the Soviet leadership, communists of Jewish descent received the Kremlin’s blessing not because of, but rather, in spite of their Jewish background. Revenge or, as Salo Baron phrased it, “subconscious retaliation”, is another oft-mentioned reason that so many Jewish communists joined the security services of the early communist regimes (Abramson 1999: 151; Baron 1964 (a): 204; Gitelman 1972: 165; Hegedüs 1986: 143; Kenez 2006: 155; Mantel 1986: 11; Mevius 2005: 95). It is a traditional argument, one which was widely upheld during the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, and among historians, it remains mired in controversy. The revenge thesis adds to the uncomfortable notion that Jews – at least some Jews – saw employment in the communist state security apparatus as a major opportunity to avenge the injustice inflicted upon them and their loved ones. Although vengeance may not have been deemed an appropriate motivation to enter the communist security apparatus, it might have played a role in individual cases. 153

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Recent archival findings on the Cheka and the security services in the early communist regimes in East Central Europe may shine additional light on people’s motivations to join these institutions. Given that a surprisingly large number of officials were non-party members, their primary motivations may not have been strong pro-communist leanings. Instead, they may have been motivated by other incentives, such as the simple need to find a means of living or, indeed, the opportunity to take revenge. The revenge motif is mentioned every now and then in the literary renderings of Jewish survivors (See Krajewski n. d.: 3). Unfortunately, the only book-length analysis related to the theme, An Eye For an Eye, American journalist John Sack’s story of Jewish revenge against the Germans in Poland after the war, suffers from too many methodological shortcomings to be taken seriously (Sack 1995).

3.3. The Myth of Jewish Stalinism The most convincing argument in favour of the proposition that Jewish over-representation in the early communist regimes was seen by many of the parties’ leaderships as a lesser evil, is the fact that the very same communist apparatuses were (largely) cleansed of Jews once the regimes felt secure enough to do so. From the very beginning, the “deJudaisation” of the communist regimes may have been considered, with careful steps having been taken in this direction almost immediately after they assumed power. Yet it could only be realised once party rule was fully established and sufficient numbers of “national” cadres were available to staff the bureaucracy. This only occurred after the death of Stalin, within the context of the intra-party strife and political consolidation which dominated the mid-1950s. De-Judaisation was a by-product of de-Stalinisation. “Nothing has been so disadvantageous to the Kremlin as the vicious, universal legend that Jews and Communism are synonymous” (Teller 1954: 335), Judd Teller argues in Scapegoat of Revolution, an early study on the fate of Jews during political upheavals. This evaluation may be slightly exaggerated, but there is little doubt that even at the outset the spectre of Jewish communism haunted the communist movement. The myth had a distinctly negative impact on many communist parties. It seriously impaired their popular legitimacy and, by a devilish twist of fate, contributed considerably to their anti-Semitic inclinations. Many studies have been devoted to the origins, the nature, and the consequences of anti-Semitism in the socialist and communist movements, but the extent to which the myth of Jewish Communism may have affected the communist parties and influenced their attitude towards the Jewish question, has been largely neglected. My proposition is that the myth of Jewish Communism became an integral part of the 154

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fabric of East European Stalinism. It provides us with at least a partial answer to the question of why regimes, in which people of Jewish descent played so conspicuous a role, could have been so openly and ostentatiously “anti-Jewish”. As we have seen, the early communist leaderships were all too conscious of the negative consequences brought by their parties’ unbalanced ethnic composition. They were particularly wary about the disproportionate role that Jews played in their ranks. In theory again, Jewish membership was not a problem. Jews who joined the communist movement were first and foremost regarded as communists, rather than Jews. This is how they perceived themselves, as did their comrades – at least initially. Yet such perceptions were short-lived, particularly after communist parties assumed power. Evidence makes it abundantly clear that the conspicuous role of Jewish activists was an embarrassment to many. Both Jewish and non-Jewish party leaders alike regarded it as a major internal complication, particularly in light of the persistent antiSemitic persuasions of the parties’ rank and file and society at large. When communists and their sympathisers referred to Jews’ contribution to the communist cause, this was occasionally interpreted as a major motif of anti-communist propaganda (Heller 1935: 231). One well known incident pertains to Maksim Gorky’s publication, On Jews (O Yevreyakh, 1919), in which he lavishly praised the prominence of Jews in the revolutionary movement and the Bolshevik regime of Russia. Sholem Dimanshtein, a Jew from a traditional family in a small Belorussian village who would go on to become one of the leading activists in the Jewish sections of the Soviet Party and state, reportedly pressured Lenin to have Gorky’s pamphlet confiscated. Dimanshtein rejected the booklet not only for its factual inaccuracies, but first and foremost for the political ammunition it provided the anti-Semitic opponents of Bolshevism. Lenin refused the request. I am not sure whether Gorky learned from the incident, but he would be considerably less jubilant about the revolutionary zeal of Russian Jews in later publications. He even criticised those Jewish communist insensitive enough to defile the “sanctuaries of the Russian people”, churches in particular. This should have been left to others, Gorky stressed, to Russian Bolsheviks (Heller 1931: 230). For similar reasons, Trotsky reportedly refused to take over the commissariat of the Interior in 1917. Why would I put into our enemies’ hands such an additional weapon as my Jewish origin?, he rhetorically asked (Trotsky 1975: 354). Trotsky realised that, irrespective of his strong convictions to the contrary, he would always be a Jew – a “yid”, to quote Wolfe’s Remember to Dream (Wolfe 1994: 186) – in the eyes of a substantial part of the Russian people. Few communists, either in Russia or, later, in East Central Europe, were so naïve as to 155

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believe that because they no longer considered themselves Jews, neither would their opponents. The communist regime in Soviet Russia was the first to cope with the negative political impact of the Jewish Communism myth. As we discussed, the continuation or revival of anti-Jewish sentiments in Russian society and among the rank and file of the Communist Party and state apparatus was the reason for various propaganda campaigns throughout the 1920s. It is uncertain whether the CPSU leadership had the notion of Jewish Communism in mind when it called for a “merciless struggle” (Vetter 1995: 177) against anti-Semitism. We may assume, though, that it viewed anti-Semitism to be a dangerous counterrevolutionary argument, given the popular identification between communist rule and Jewish power. If Bolshevik leaders in the Soviet Union were aware of the negative impact brought on by the perceptible Jewish presence within their ranks, the communist elites in East Central Europe were even more so. After all, in their countries the idea of Jewish Communism had assumed an extra dimension, namely the association of Jews and communism with the Soviet Union, the occupying power. Almost three decades after Trotsky renounced the commissariat of the Interior in revolutionary Russia, Ana Pauker used the very same argument when in the mid-1940s, Georgi Dimitrov suggested that she take over the Romanian Party leadership. Pauker’s situation was even more precarious than Trotsky’s. She was very much aware of her “flaws”: an intellectual, a woman, and a Jew. As she confided to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, her non-Jewish comrade who would go on to become the Party’s leader: “Considering the state of cultural backwardness of our people, and the strong prejudices concerning women, they will say: a woman to lead the Communist Party, and a Jewish one at that, who came not long ago from the Soviet Union” (both quotations from Levy 2001: 71, 72). It is very difficult, however, to accurately gauge the extent to which the anti-Semitic and anti-communist conception of Jewish Communism influenced intra-party life, party policies, and the relationship between regime and society. As in the interwar years, the association of Jews with communism did not play an equally prominent role in every country. Moreover, its effect on the ruling parties fluctuated considerably. For obvious reasons, the myth was most significant during the first postwar decade. After all, most of the prominent Jewish activists were politically eliminated during the first half of the 1950s. Finally, it is difficult to assess the relevance of Jewish communism as a motive for the policies of the communist authorities in so far as they often concealed other motives and arguments.

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In interwar East Central Europe the communist and social democratic parties were among the few political organisations that generally abstained from anti-Semitism and other forms of political bigotry. They kept their ranks open to all nationalities, including Jews. Otherwise, however, the differences between social democracy and communism were huge. Social democratic parties were legally active, occasionally participated in national politics (whether in power, particularly during the 1920s, or in the opposition), and took a relatively moderate position with respect to the prevailing socio-economic and political order (Gerrits 2002: 87). Communism presented a different picture. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, communist parties were by and large illegal. They remained small, underground, ethnically diverse, and politically marginalised groups. The communist parties’ positions on anti-Semitism and the Jewish question were dictated by tactical considerations as well as ideological convictions. Ethnic minorities, including Jews, comprised a substantial segment of their support. Moreover, antiSemitism was regarded as a petite-bourgeoisie deviation and an instrument of the class enemy. The Polish case is particularly illustrative of this point. In general, the interwar Polish Communist Party exhibited the same ambiguity which the communist movement as a whole displayed towards the Jewish question. Party documents and comments made by prominent Party members indicate the continuous presence of antiJewish sentiments among the rank and file, as well as a rather condescending attitude towards the Jewish milieu (the Yiddish language, the “non-Polish” cultural environment) of many Party members. Although this never seemed to interfere with the Party’s principal, if not always consistent, position against anti-Semitism during the interwar years, the “Polonisation” of the Party was a constant concern for its leadership. Polonisation in this context sought less to diminish the number of Jews, than it did to increase the number of non-Jewish Polish Party members (Bernstein 1955: 29; Julia Brun-Zejmis, “The Origin of the Communist Movement in Poland and the Jewish Question”, in Huttenbach 1994: 31; Heller 1977: 129; Silberner 1983: 232). Anti-Semitism among the rank and file of the communist parties of East Central Europe became a more conspicuous issue after the Second World War than it had been during the interwar period. On various occasions prominent party officials openly expressed their concern. Kazimierz Mijal, a highly placed official of the communist Party and state in Poland and who would also become one of the prominent member of the Natolin faction during the mid-1950s, discussed the issue extensively at the July 1948 Central Committee plenary meeting. He related it to the war years, when, as he put it, anti-Jewish feelings were particularly acute among the lower Party ranks. And they still were, 157

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Mijal added. The Party leadership had never decisively dealt with the issue (Nowe Drogi, 1948, 10: 40, quoted in Silberner 1983: 240). The Party had compromised with non-communist ideologues and activists. The post-war pogroms in Poland and Poles’ angry response to the protest manifestations which the communist authorities forced them to join, revealed the range and depth of anti-Jewish sentiments in post-war society. Attempts by the Communist Party to propagandise the antiJewish incidents in July 1946 in Kielce seriously backfired. Rather than participate in officially sanctioned manifestations of solidarity with the victims of the riots, workers went on strike in protest of what they regarded as Jewish dominance in Poland. In July the communist authorities pressed workers in the industrial city of Łódz to collectively condemn the anti-Jewish violence in Kielce. They refused. They actually engaged in spontaneous demonstrations against the very resolution they had allegedly signed. The Łódz workers demanded the release of the perpetrators of the pogrom and they agitated against the pro-Jewish leanings of the communist regime. “Poland is ruled by Jews”, they cried angrily after the Kielce pogrom (Kenney 1997: 115; Kamiński 1999: 46). Their actions took the local Party people by surprise (Kamiński 1999: 46; Kenney 1997: 110-115, 156). The Party should have known better, of course. Shortly after the war, worker-activists of the Polish Communist Party in Łódz again openly expressed their frustration about the apparent privileges awarded to Jewish communist officials. Even NKVD reports filed in 1945 assert that anti-Semitism was widespread among the general population, workers included. The complaints presented in these reports are clearly reminiscent of the grievances expressed in the Soviet Union some two decades earlier. Similar protest was reported in other countries as well (See Kenez 2006: 158 on Hungary). Jews were reluctant to engage in productive work. Jews occupied white-collar jobs, whilst Poles did the hard work. Jews received the best apartments, while the non-Jewish Polish workers struggled merely to maintain body and soul. Jews were portrayed as both “shirkers” and “oppressors”. Initially, such complaints were motivated primarily by economic concerns, as the Polish historian Łukasz Kaminski reports, and were not yet explicitly linked to anti-communist sentiments (Kamiński 1999: 46). Yet NKVD reports tell a different story. In 1945, less than a year after the war had ended, the apparent cooperation between Jews and communists was already cited as the primary cause of Polish anti-Semitism (Aleksiun 1998: 54). The same reports implicated communist officials in anti-Semitic incidents. Soldiers, policemen, and ordinary citizens had participated in the pogroms (Aleksiun 1998: 55). Widespread anti-Semitism among the parties’ rank and file was caused, at least in part, by the extensive and indiscriminate recruitment drives of the immediate post-war years. In December 1944 the Hungarian Party 158

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leader, Ernest Gerö, reported to his comrade Mátyás Rákosi, that the Hungarian communist Party likely totalled no more than 3,000 members (Martin Mevius 2005: 44 quotes János Kádár who reported at the end of August 1942 that the Party had just seventeen members). Less than a year later, in October 1945, the Party boasted half a million members. The Party’s leadership “openly courted” low-ranking followers of the former fascist Party (Kenez 2006: 45, 47). The Romanian Communist Party also organised a massive recruitment drive in the spring of 1945. Among the many new faces were an undefined but substantial number of former members of the Iron Guard. As Ana Pauker would later admit, there were so many Legionaries among ordinary workers that the Party leadership had no choice but to forge a compromise (Levy 2001: 76). Comparable recruitment drives occurred in most other countries. Checincski is very explicit with respect to the Polish ruling Party, but his observation is more generally relevant: An amorphous mass of peasants was left in possession of the reins of government. Their parochial outlook and inherent xenophobia, strengthened by clerical and nationalistic prejudices, instinctive conservatism and suspicion or even hatred of the better educated strata, penetrated the “new class” and its ruling Party (Checinski: 1982: 257).

Schatz views the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign in Poland as having been a logical outcome of the Party’s post-1945 history. It was also an attempt to force a communist regime on a deeply anti-communist society (Schatz 1991: 307). Jan Gross takes the argument even further. He inverts the stereotypical interpretation of Jewish Communism, asserting that “anti-Semites rather than Jews were instrumental in establishing the Communist regime in Poland after the war” (Gross 2002: 167, italics in original). Gross’ observation can also be applied to other communist states. One of the major reasons anti-Jewish sentiments fell on such fertile ground within the communist parties, were the largescale and dramatic social changes these parties experienced during their first few years in power. The social composition and the ideological outlook of the parties’ rank and file changed dramatically. During the immediate post-war period, even the KPD in the Soviet Zone of Occupation actively recruited former “nominal members” of the NSDAP with Stalin’s consent (Hartewig 2000: 259). Whether Gross is correct in asserting that the “natural allies of the Communist Party on the local level were people who had been compromised during the German occupation” remains to be seen. This demands further and more detailed research. But that many locals of poor conscience and dire future – Gross’ “indigenous lumpenproletariat” (Gross 2002: 167) – saw participation in the new regime as an excellent opportunity to escape their predicament is very likely. “Under the circumstances, it was com159

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forting to believe that Jews had deserved their fate, that they were in fact an alien, subversive, and exploitative people”, writes Peter Kenez about the pogroms in post-war Hungary (Kenez 2006: 151). Gross’ observation that the dramatic influx of new members and ideas had a stronger, more enduring impact on the social and ideological composition of the communist regime than did the few thousand communists of Jewish descent (as prominent and conspicuous as many of them may have been) is equally plausible. If the opponents of communism had previously invoked a Jewish presence within the Stalinist regimes to demonstrate the “non-national” character of communist rule, by the mid-1950s leading communists presented their own variant of Jewish communism: Jewish Stalinism. Jews were not identified with communism, but with all the failures of communist rule. The notion of Jewish Stalinism was a textbook example of externalising guilt. After the death of Stalin and the onset of the deStalinisation campaign, those communist leaders who believed they stood to benefit from political changes, lay the blame for the regime’s mistakes and crimes on their former Jewish colleagues. The disproportionate presence of Jews in the party and state apparatuses was used as propaganda, an instrument of political scape-goating by post-Stalinist communists, in an attempt to divert the blame for Stalinist rule. PostStalinist leaders would blame the old guard, among them many comrades of Jewish descent, for the problems and failings of the early communist order. The ambition to “nationalise” the parties’ leaderships and apparatuses was now taken much more seriously. Such measures also proved to be considerably more effective. Although the idea of “Jewish Stalinism” was a highly opportunistic, novel perversion of a traditional anti-Jewish and anti-communist political fantasy, it did reflect some important realities. First, if communists of Jewish origin ever wielded substantial political power, it was indeed during the Stalinist decade. De-Stalinisation meant the rapid decline of Jewish activists in the upper echelons of the ruling parties in East Central Europe. Disassociation from Jews became the primary concern of almost all post-Stalinist leaderships. Secondly, the myth of Jewish Stalinism should be seen as a last-ditch effort on the part of hard-pressed orthodox communists to acquire much-needed popular legitimacy by internalising and employing the very same arguments that their anticommunist opponents had once launched against the regime. It was in fact an intricate, sometimes hidden, but mostly straightforward combination of “official” and traditional elements of nationalism, which the communist regimes used throughout their rule to mobilise sympathy and support.

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During the first post-war decade of communism, when the parties’ political legitimacy was low and the number and conspicuousness of Jewish party activists were high, the communist rulers of East Central Europe were indeed well aware of the potential dangers associated with the relatively large number of Jews in their regimes. Briefly after the war, Zeno Kliszko, a close associate of Gomulka and head of the cadres department of the PPR Central Committee (1945-1948), complained to an old (Jewish) schoolmate, Zenek Weinerman, who was looking for employment: “What can we do? The population doesn’t like Jews […]. You look fine”, Kliszko said, meaning not Semitic, “and speak good Polish. The best thing for you is to go into the army”. As Kliszko and his friend discussed the latter’s career, the phone rang. Kliszko answered it, and asked: “Is this comrade a Jew?” Then he returned to Weinerman. “What do you want? They don’t like Jews” (Szurek 1989: 318). Many years later Berman told the Polish journalist Teresa Toranska that both he and first Party secretary Bierut were extremely uncomfortable with the high concentration of Jews in certain Party organisations. “It wasn’t the right thing to do”, he admitted, “but it was a necessary evil that we’d been forced into when we took power, when the Polish intelligentsia was boycotting us” (Toranska 1987: 321). Communist leaders publicly acknowledged the negative consequences of the Party’s “inappropriate national composition”. At the June 1948 plenum of the Polish United Workers Party, Gomulka blamed the Party for its “erroneous national policy” during the interwar years, which had led to this unbalanced ethnic representation (Taras, “Gomulka’s ‘Rightist-Nationalist Deviation’”: 118). He wrote a letter of similar import to Stalin (December 1948) and was thus reportedly the first (ex-)East European leader to complain to Stalin about the irresponsibly large number of Jewish activists within the communist regime (Quoted in Gluchowski n. d.: 16, for full references see p. 31, note 59). In his letter, Gomulka expressed his ambition to decrease the number of Jews in the Party’s higher echelons. Ambitions, he added, which his “political opponents” tacitly frustrated. Although he did not identify his opponents, he did refer to “Jewish comrades” or “national nihilists” who lacked “any bonds to the Polish nation or therefore to the Polish working class” (“Władysław Gomulka’s Letter to Stalin of December 1948”, in Polonsky 2004: 376381). Gomulka’s letter did not overly impress Stalin. Shortly after he received it, the Soviet leader urged Bierut, who had every personal reason to mistrust Gomulka’s anti-Jewish drive, to pursue the case against Gomulka. Gomulka was already under house arrest when serious anti-Jewish purges in Poland and other communist countries in the region took place.

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Neither the Stalinist nor the post-Stalinist purges occurred in every communist country simultaneously or with equal intensity. The antiJewish (or anti-Zionist) campaigns, purges, and trials held in Poland, Hungary, and Romania never reached the magnitude they would in Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s, during the openly anti-Semitic Slánský trial. From the end of the 1940s onwards, however, all communist parties conducted massive verification campaigns so as to eliminate the opportunists, vacillators, and other unreliable elements, which had entered the party around the end of the war. The “ethnic” overtones of these campaigns were evident. Upon its return from Moscow immediately after the war, one of the first concerns of the Hungarian Communist Party’s leadership was to Magyarise the Party (Hegedüs 1986: 144). In 1947-1948 a large number of Party members of Jewish descent were reportedly purged (Eugene Duschinsky, “Hungary”: 463). From November 1948, the Romanian Communist Party also launched a massive verification campaign. Within half a year almost 192,000 people (more than 20 percent of the rank and file) were removed. The intended result of the campaign was the further “Romanisation” of the Party. “Jewish predominance was no longer tolerated from the late 1940s”, writes the historian David Levy The Jewish old guard was gradually replaced by “ethic” Romanians (Levy 2001: 7). Many of the late Stalinist purges and trials were not directly related to genuine political differences. The demise of the Polish Party leader Gomulka in November 1949 was likely one of the few (partial) exceptions. Most intra-party conflicts are best defined as local examples of a Soviet-inspired mutual reckoning between equally loyal Stalinist leaders: the trial of the former Hungarian minister of Foreign Affairs, Lászlo Rajk, in October 1949; the case against Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria in December 1949; or the show process against the secretary-general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Rudolf Slánský in November 1952. Kostov was primarily charged with pro-Yugoslav sympathies. The prosecutors at the Rajk case suggested links between Zionism, Titoism, and Western imperialism. But only the show trial against Slánský was openly and viciously anti-Semitic, wrapping traditional anti-Jewish conspiracy thinking in the new, ideologically acceptable terminology of anti-Zionism. Of the fourteen defendants, eleven were of Jewish descent, including Slánský. The official indictment listed their sins as follows: As Trotskyite-Titoist Zionist, bourgeois nationalist traitors, and enemies of the Czechoslovak people, of People’s democracy, and of Socialism, they formed, in the service of American imperialists and following the directives of hostile Western counter-intelligence outfits, a subversive conspirational centre; subverted the regime of the People’s Democracy, sabotaged the so-

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cialist construction, damaged the national economy, organised espionage activities, weakened the unity of the Czechoslovak people and the defence of the Republic, in order to destroy the firm alliance and friendship with the Soviet Union, to liquidate the People’s Democratic order, to introduce capitalism, to drag our Republic back into the camp of imperialism and to destroy its sovereignty and independence. “Rudé Právo”, November 21, 1952, cited in Meyer, “Czechoslovakia”, in Meyer 1953: 169).

But even in the Slánský case, anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism seemed to have been dragged in as a kind of excuse, an attempt by frightened local servants to accommodate their Moscow masters. Soviet foreign policy interests, especially relations with Israel, and its domestic repercussions, can largely explain the anti-Semitic character of the trial. Karel Kaplan meticulously describes the desperate search, under heavy Soviet pressure in Czechoslovakia, for a suitable “Rajk”. Initially the campaign was primarily aimed against “Slovak bourgeois nationalism”. AntiZionism was added as an afterthought. Kaplan quotes N. T. Likhachev, a prominent Russian “adviser” who arrived in Prague in early October 1949. “Stalin sent me here to prepare a trial, and I have no time to waste”, Likhachev barked at his hosts. I didn’t come here for discussions. I came to Czechoslovakia to see heads roll. I’ll rather wring a hundred and fifty other necks than lose my own. I don’t care where you get [the information] and I don’t care how true it is. I’ll believe it, and you leave the rest to me. What do you care about some Jewish shit, anyway? (Kaplan 1990: 54-55).

That Slánský would eventually suffer as this Jewish “piece of shit”, was due to an unhappy combination of circumstances. Slánský’s arrest served the political survival of the Klement Gottwald leadership, as it worked for the domestic and hegemonic great power interests of the Soviet Union. The Slánský trial was a kind of apotheosis of a silent, creeping purge of Jewish functionaries in various departments of the state bureaucracy (Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade, Finance, Home Affairs and Information) and, from the end of 1950 onwards, the central Party and government apparatus. The purges were not exclusively aimed at Jewish officials, but, as might be expected in an atmosphere of growing anti-Zionism and anti-cosmopolitanism, Jews suffered disproportionately. The increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere in the Soviet Union must have frightened the communists of Jewish background in East Central Europe. They may have had few connections with and little affinity for the Jewish communities in their countries, but try though they might, they were unable to spirit away their own Jewish origins. Only after communist rule was firmly established in 1948, did the satellite regimes in East Central Europe follow the Soviet example. In most countries, 163

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and occasionally under the supervision of communist leaders of Jewish background, “anti-cosmopolitanism” became a crucial theme of political agitation and propaganda. In Hungary, the Party leader, Rákosi, went so far as to alter his personal biography. The son of Jewish merchants now officially proclaimed gentry origins. In late 1947, the Hungarian leadership allegedly decided to refuse the admission of Jews to the higher echelons of the Party and state, stopping short of removing all Jewish communists from positions of prestige and responsibility. In 1950 the anti-Semitic campaign began in earnest. The political careers of a considerable number of prominent, mostly Jewish functionaries were abruptly terminated, among them the country’s supreme police chief, Gábor Péter. Lajos Stöckler, head of the Jewish community in Budapest, was arrested at the end of 1952, and so were more than thirty medical doctors at elite hospitals. François Fejtö ascribes the prominence of Jewish communists among the victims of the wave of terror in post1948 Hungary to “overcompensation” by the country’s top communist leaders, who, being of Jewish background themselves, had ample reason to pre-empt possible accusations of unreliability (Fejtö 1967: 84). Romania’s most prominent Jew, Ana Pauker, was arrested in February 1953, almost a year after her removal from her leading positions. She was probably saved by the death of Stalin in March, and was released the same month. The fall of Pauker and other “non-Romanian” communists was propagandistically exploited to further substantiate the socialist patriotic nature of Romanian communism. During a second major purge, which began in May 1953, the propaganda became more aggressive and its political consequences more severe. Pauker’s fall was followed by a purge of Jews working in the state and Party apparatus. Their removal was accompanied by a relatively limited anticosmopolitanism campaign, which would finally seal the fate of some of the country’s most prominent communists: Pauker, Vasile Luca, minister of Finance, and Teohari Georgescu, minister of Interior and head of the security service (although often included in the list of Romania’s Jewish communist leaders, neither Luca nor Georgescu were Jewish). Pauker’s demise did not, however, put an end to the presence of Jewish communists in the Party leadership. The full expulsion of practically all minority elements from the Party (Hungarians and Jews in particular) happened only under Nicolae Ceauseşcu, as part of the anticosmopolitanism drive which began in the mid-1960s. No Jews or Hungarians were present in the Standing Presidium elected at the July 1965 Party congress. Among the 21 full members of the Executive Committee (an intermediary between Presidium and Central Committee) were three Jewish and one Hungarian communist (Lendvai 1971: 341). The last prominent Jewish communist in the Romanian leadership was 164

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Leonte Rautu, one of the Party’s chief ideologues. He was forced into retirement in 1981. By the end of the 1940s, Poland’s Stalinists had launched their own “anti-nationalist offensive”. It did not immediately lead to extensive purges of Jewish communists. To maintain overall stability, the Bierut leadership and the Kremlin were apparently reluctant to press for widespread and open anti-Jewish action in Poland (Volokitina 2002: 549, 551). Only by 1952, as Checinski reports, were all Party committees at the central and local levels instructed not to promote or appoint Jews to nomenklatura position (Checinski 1982: 41). Officials from Fejgin’s Tenth Department arrested twelve communists of Jewish origin in relation with the Noel Field affair. Field was the alleged American spymaster who was arrested in Prague in 1949. He was imprisoned without trial and released only in 1954. Noel Field was a key figure in various show trials. In the early 1950s purges were initiated in all branches of the Polish Party and state. They remained limited in scope, though, and made little noise. Poland’s communist leaders abstained from massive propaganda campaigns and major public trials. Legal cases were prepared against the leaderships of various Jewish communist organisations, but were never held. Stalin’s sudden death might have prevented it. When the wave of arrests was reconsidered under Gomulka, communists of Jewish descent figured prominently among those who were called to account. Roman Romkowski, Jacek Rozanski, and Fejgin were specifically mentioned with regard to an investigation into the activities of the Tenth Department. Yet none would be put on public trial. Investigations into the Polish armed forced, conducted under close Soviet supervision, began before Stalin’s death in March 1953. The first dismissals and arrests, however, occurred only after March. Of the officers taken into custody, the majority was Jewish. They were “badly born” Poles (an euphemism for “Jewish” Poles), as Edward Ochab, secretary of the Central Committee and a member of the investigative commission, put it. Of the 22 prominent defendants standing trial, 19 were sentenced to death (in camera) and subsequently executed in May 1953. An official commission would later conclude that there had been no proof of any conspiracy among the Polish military (Toranska 1987: 51). By the close of 1953, additional Jewish officers in the Polish armed forces were removed, as were prominent communists of Jewish descent in the press and propaganda departments of the communist Party. The strategy to further “nationalise” the Party’s leadership and apparatus were intensified during and after the political crisis of 1956-1957. The disproportionate presence of Jewish comrades in the party state was openly discussed and criticised at the seventh Central Committee ple165

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nary meeting in July 1956, the same Party gathering which re-instated Gomulka as first secretary. Various speakers advocated more “balanced” cadre policies, including measures to seriously limit the number of Jewish activists. This would not only serve the broader interests of Party and state, as the argument went, it would also eliminate one of the principal causes of Polish anti-Semitism (Silberner 1983: 253). The purge of Jewish communists intensified. This time, however, real political differences were at stake. Even though both the Puławska and the Natolin factions of the Communist Party welcomed the de-Stalinisation efforts in the Soviet Union due either to conviction or for reasons of expediency, only the former was generally identified with (careful) reform. By contrast, Natolin was thought to stand for the continuation of the orthodox Stalinist line. Initially, communists of Jewish stock could be found at either side of the barricade. Gradually, however, the Natolin faction availed itself of anti-Semitic arguments to such an extent that even the most conservative Jewish communist had little choice but to bid farewell to his former comrades and, possibly, join the Puławska faction. The mechanisms enabling the purging of Jewish communists in Poland and other communist countries in the late 1940s cannot be explained by a simple reference to anti-Semitism, whether of a traditional grassroots nature, a more elitist type, or both. Communists of Jewish descent fell victim to Stalinist and post-Stalinist repression within the communist movement for a variety of reasons. Some of these motives were directly related to the Jewish background of the old communists. Others, however, were not, or were indirectly at best. The political elimination of these Jewish communists occurred in a wider context than the anti-Semitic considerations of the (post)-Stalinist leaderships alone. The needs to conceal mistakes and failures, to look for scapegoats and enemies, to assure political survival, and the quest for political legitimacy were all crucial variables in explaining intra-party struggles and purges, as well as the extra-party campaigns and propaganda witnessed in the middle of the 1950s. There was ample reason for political, economic, and personnel change after Stalin’s death. This, at any rate, was the emerging consensus in Moscow. The local communist regimes faced not only unprecedented political uncertainty following Stalin’s demise and the subsequent power struggles in the Kremlin; they were also challenged by violent expressions of popular dissatisfaction and anger at home. In May 1953 hundreds of workers engaged in strikes and demonstrations in various Bulgarian cities. There were minor disturbances in Romania and Hungary. Riots broke out in the Czech city of Plzen in June, after the authorities issued a highly damaging law on monetary reform. Demonstrations, mostly by blue-collar workers, quickly 166

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took an anti-communist and anti-Soviet turn. Control of the city was transferred to the demonstrators. Soviet leaders feared that unless reforms were adopted, unrest would spread to neighbouring countries (Kramer 1999: 14, for full references see: 31, notes 99, 100). Meanwhile, disturbances in the German Democratic Republic had come to a head. Workers protested the increased work norms the authorities had issued en masse. The first demonstrations occurred in June 1953, in Berlin, after which they quickly multiplied to other cities throughout the country. It caught the East German authorities completely off guard. The communist regime actually staggered. Was it a mere coincidence that Jewish communists were victimised disproportionately during the late-Stalinist and post-Stalinist purges? Given the region’s anti-Jewish traditions, the mythical dimensions of Jewish internationalism and the conspicuous role of a substantial number of Jews in the (early) communist regimes, anti-Semitism (part of the nationalistic matrix) served the communist regimes’ objectives better than most other ideological notions. Deliberate political engineering is only part of the explanation, however. Jewish communists were obvious targets for other reasons as well. Firstly, the early party history of many Jewish communists made them particularly vulnerable to Stalinist and post-Stalinist repression. Often among the older party rank and file, they were disproportionately present among the old comrades, the “Spaniards” (members of the Republican camp during the Spanish Civil War) and the “Westerners” (communists who had spent some time in interwar Western Europe and who had often joined the local communist parties). These were dangerous categories during late Stalinism. In October 1949 the secretariat of the Central Committee of the SED launched a detailed verification campaign of all communists who had returned to Germany from western emigration or imprisonment. The operation sought to stress the Party’s unity against external threats, and was regarded as the East German “answer” to the Rajk case in Hungary (Hartewig 2000: 317-128). In time, and in line with developments in other countries, especially the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, the campaign proliferated and took a nastier turn. It would include the propaganda, mobilisation, denunciations, self-criticism and all other essential components of a political inquisition. The East German authorities’ response to the Prague verdict was immediate: in November 1952 they arrested Paul Merker. Merker, a non-Jewish western emigrant who had been previously (in August 1950) expelled from the Party, was accused of leading the German “chapter” of the “Zionist criminal conspiracy” against the socialist states – a lesson drawn from the Slánský trial, as the party authorities in Berlin stressed. Merker was tried in March 1955. He would serve only ten 167

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months of his eight years sentence, and was released from prison in January 1956 (Hartewig 2000: 354-356). Merker was the most prominent victim of the Stalinist purges in the GDR. He was the German Slánský, the most notable difference being his survival. Merker’s apparent deviations with regard to the Jewish question (support for Wiedergutmachung and the establishment of the State of Israel) were extensively covered in the East German press, which otherwise duly repeated the anti-Zionist propaganda heard throughout the whole communist world. “Rette-sich-wer-kann”, every man for himself, became the prevailing mood among most Jews in those days, including many of communist persuasion (Hartewig 2000: 338). An unknown number of Jewish communists were removed from their positions, but only few were prosecuted, and none was physically eliminated. Even if they would have been favourably disposed to the openly anti-Semitic state propaganda and policies of their comrades elsewhere in the communist world, the East German leaders probably lacked the freedom of scope to act accordingly. The National-Socialist past was still too fresh, Hartewig concludes, and West Germany was too close. Secondly, if communists of Jewish descent were over-represented in some of the most conspicuous and sensitive branches of the Stalinist apparat, it may not seem very surprising that they were also overrepresented amongst the victims of the purges that were at least partly aimed at the de-Stalinisation of the very same party apparatus. However, in this case over-representation is an understatement. Very few prominent Jewish communists politically survived these events. This had less to do with de-Stalinisation, than it did with the more far-reaching goal of achieving “proportionate national representation”, a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of the ruling party. Although Jewish communists could be found on either side of the barricade during the intra-party conflicts sparked by Stalin’s death, de-Stalinisation would ultimately entail the defeat of the Jewish communists as a political “generation”. Most of the old guard was either demoted or forced into retirement. Many left politics. A substantial minority adopted reformist positions, but most survived only briefly. There were good reasons to arrest, try, and imprison Stalinists like Anatol Fejgin, Isosif Chisinevschi, or Gábor Péter – not because they were Jewish, but because they were personally involved in hideously repressive activities. They were politically and morally responsible for the crimes committed by the Stalinist regimes in their countries. But so, too, were many others, including most of those who had ordered their arrests. Fejgin, who was appointed head of the Tenth Department briefly after it was established in 1949, was expelled from the Party and removed from all his posts in 1954. He was arrested in 1956, tried in 168

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camera, and sentenced to twelve years for employing “unauthorised methods of investigation” (Toranska 1987: 366). He was released in October 1964. Chisinevschi, born in Bessarabia in 1905, was a communist activist of the interwar years, secretary of the Central Committee, and member of the Politburo. He was removed from the supreme Romanian leadership in June-July 1957. Chisinevschi, and his codefendant, Miron Constantinescu, were denounced as “Stalinists”, at that time a serious disqualification. They were charged with “grave antiparty expression of opinion directed against the unity of the Party and against its leadership”. Both were linked to the “anti-party factionist group” of Luca and Pauker. Chisinevschi was finally sentenced in October 1961. He died the following year. Péter, chief of the ÁVH, was among the prominent Hungarian Jews who fell victim to Rákosi’s anti-Semitic campaign. He was arrested, together with his wife, Rákosi’s secretary, on the night of January 3, 1953. Both had been summoned to the Party leader’s villa where they were arrested, kept in a cellar, and interrogated for an undetermined period of time. Péter was held in preliminary custody for almost a year. A military court behind closed doors finally tried him in December 1953. Péter was found guilty of gross abuse of political authority, including physical maltreatment of innocent suspects, and conspiracy. In March 1954, the sentence was finally pronounced: Péter received life imprisonment. Péter became the Hungarian variant of the proverbial Jewish Stalinist. Many of the wrongs committed by the early communist regime were hung on his shoulders, either by fellow-Stalinists (Rákosi included) or by the first generation of post-Stalinist leaders. Péter received amnesty on April 1, 1960, after spending six years in prison. Former Hungarian Prime Minister Hegedüs, asserts that Péter was arrested on the explicit orders of Stalin, precisely because he was Jewish (Hegedüs 1986: 142). Conclusive evidence is lacking, however. Fejgin, Chisinevschi, and Péter were only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the prominent, leading communists of Jewish descent were purged in the wake of Stalin’s death. Rákosi was forced to step down in July 1956. Gerö followed in October. He fled to the Soviet Union. In April 1955, Farkas had been removed from the Party leadership. He was tried for his complicity in the terror of the Stalinist regime and was sent to prison. He would be released during Kádár’s first wave of amnesty. Farkas spent his last years as editor in a publishing house. Of Hungary’s once ruling quintet of Jewish communists, only József Révai politically survived the first years of de-Stalinisation. In Poland, Berman, the country’s most prominent and compromised Stalinist apparachik, was forced to relinquish his political positions in May 1956. Following his earlier demotion to the vice-premiership in 1954, he was eliminated 169

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from the Politburo and just a few months later was expelled from the Central Committee (Toranska 1987: 204). His name was removed from the Party’s register in 1957. He also spent his days as editor of a publishing house, Książka I Wiedza. Around the same time, Berman’s comrade-in-arms, Hilary Minc, left for the Soviet Union for medical treatment. He did not escape arrest though, pleading guilty to various “errors and distortions”, and was subsequently dismissed from all his positions. He was forced into retirement that same year. Only two communists of Jewish origins (Jerzy Morawski and Zambrowski) were among the nine members of the Politburo elected after the dramatic seventh plenary meeting of the Polish United Workers Party in October 1956. Morawski subsequently lost his Party positions in 1959, having been accused of revisionism. Zambrowski, a member of the Puławska group in 1956, met a similar fate some years thereafter. He, too, stood accused of revisionism. Zambrowski was removed from the Party’s leadership in 1963 and from the Party itself in 1968, during that year’s anti-Semitic campaign. The efforts of Poland’s post-Stalinist leaders to further “nationalise” the ranks of the Party was fully supported by the new Soviet leadership. Popular anti-Jewish prejudices were not foreign to Stalin’s successor, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Khrushchev had never hidden his anxiety about the conspicuousness of Jewish communists in the party apparatuses of the Soviet Union and its allies (For Khushchev’s opinions see: Fejtö 1967: 45; Flegon 1968: 70; Schatz 1991: 267; Toranska 1987: 343; Weinryb 1972: 91). Briefly after the war, during his leadership of the Ukraine, he reportedly warned a Jewish worker in his office that “in our Ukraine we don’t need Jews […] we are not interested that the Ukrainian nation should identify the return of the Soviet regime with the return of Jews”. If you want to keep your position, you had better change your name and hide your Jewish identity, Khrushchev advised his fellow-communist (Flegon 1968: 91). Ten years later, after becoming the Soviet Union’s supreme leader, Khrushchev exhibited greater optimism. His concerns had been were largely dispelled. “In the beginning Jewish intellectuals occupied the most important administrative positions in the Soviet Union, when there was no Russian intelligentsia yet”, he confided to a delegation of French socialists. “But today, this shortcoming has been eliminated; we can do without those Jewish officials” (“Réalités”, August 1955, quoted in Fejtö 1967: 45). Khrushchev was well aware of the risks posed by the close identification of Jews with communism, in Poland in particular. “I believe that in Poland, you too are suffering from an abnormal composition of the leading cadres, as we have suffered from it”, he told the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party upon their return from the 170

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funeral of Bierut (March 1956). And while he glanced at Roman Zambrowski, a member of the Polish Politburo of Jewish descent, he continued, “Yes, you have many leaders with names ending in -ski, but an Abramovich remains an Abramovich, and you have too many Abramoviches in your leading cadres” (Anonymous 1971: 20; Pinkus 1988: 220). During the same meeting Khrushchev reportedly vetoed the candidacy of Zambrowski as Bierut’s successor (Brzezinski 1967: 259; Schatz 1991: 267). For a Jew to reach the highest post in the Polish People’s Republic would have been impossible regardless of Khrushchev’s veto, as the prominent Polish communists Stefan Staszewski and Berman would later admit (Brzezinski 1967: 259; Schatz 1991: 267). Paradoxically, the death of Stalin and the ensuing period of deStalinisation offered the first real opportunities for the Polish communist leadership, supported by their new masters in the Kremlin, to “nationalise” Party cadres and in so doing, to neutralise the association of communism with Jews. The opportunity was eagerly seized. By the end of 1957, all Jews were reportedly removed from the local and provincial Party committees. Many communists of Jewish descent were also expunged from the central apparatus. The Jewish communists who survived the purges would be expelled during the intra-party struggle and anti-Semitic campaign of 1967-1968 (Włodzimierz Rozenbaum, “The Jewish Question in Poland Since 1964”, in Simmonds 1977: 335). Burks points to an interesting detail: five of the non-Jewish members of the 1956 Polish Politburo had Jewish wives (Burks 1961: 169, note 40). It is a minor, but telling aspect of the history of Jews and communism in Eastern Europe. It is indicative of the relatively close, and in this case, even intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews among the (early) communist activists in East Central Europe. And it was not unique to Poland. A comparably high level of intermarriage could also be observed in the leaderships of other communist parties, including that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – even after the Great Terror of the 1930s. “Stalin was surrounded by Jewesses”, Simon Montefiori writes (Montefiori 20003: 237). The wives of Molotov, Svanidze, Poskrebyshev, Voroshilov, and Yezhov, among others, were Jewish. Concerning the Stalinist and post-Stalinist political purges and trials, the differences between the Soviet satellite countries were at least as remarkable as were the similarities. Various factors may have played a role, including the hesitations or courage of individual communist leaders, personal antipathies, envy and hatred, and real or perceived political differences within the communist leaderships. Poland offers an interesting example again. The country had a strong recent tradition of anti-Semitism, and the idea of Jewish Communism played an evident 171

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role in anti-communist propaganda during the interwar years and in the first post-war decade. Notwithstanding denunciations, arrests, and trials, the anti-Jewish campaigns and purges in Stalinist Poland never assumed the dimensions they did in most other countries. Poland (and the German Democratic Republic) remained the only satellite states in which no prominent communist leader was ever publicly tried and subsequently executed. Did Polish leaders resist Soviet pressure to organise the kind of political witch-hunts held in other communist countries? Does this explain the absence of extensive purges and public show trials in Stalinist Poland? This is what former Stalinist leaders, including Jakub Berman, would like us to believe. Berman’s thoughts remain rather vague and inconsistent though. On the one hand he asserts that the struggle against “cosmopolitanism” in the communist countries was never discussed with the Soviet leadership. On the other hand, however, he also claims that both he and Bierut did their best to “curb and restrain” the post1949 Soviet-imposed drive against cosmopolitanism. He recollects how they resisted the preparations for a Slánský-like show-trial in Poland, despite heavy Soviet pressure. An element of self-interest was certainly involved. Berman must have known that he himself, being the most prominent Polish communist leader of Jewish origin, would be a “perfect candidate for a Slánský” (Toranska 1987: 319, 321). “This was when Bierut displayed real toughness of character, firmness and loyalty towards me”, Berman gratefully remembers. “He would not succumb to pressure, and to the end he continued to defend me against the accusations although Stalin tried to break him” (Toranska 1987: 319). Berman survived the Stalinist regime he had so eagerly helped to establish, but he may have been right; it was but a narrow escape. Adam Rayski, who occupied various leading journalistic positions in Stalinist Poland, recalls the atmosphere of fear and anxiety which spread among prominent party functionaries at that time. He vividly remembers a cold night in February 1950, when at 3 am the doorbell rang and a car waited to bring him to the Central Committee building. An anxious Berman received him. Berman had just read the report of the Central Committee meeting of the day before, published in the official Party organ Trybuna Ludu, which included severe criticism of former Party leader Gomulka. Among the charges against Gomulka mentioned in the article were the services he had allegedly offered to a foreign country. Berman was highly disturbed by the report. Nothing, he asserted, would alarm the Kremlin more than references to Gomulka as a foreign agent. His agricultural policies could be criticised, as could his wartime record, but any indication of betrayal would only strengthen the Soviet leaders’ determination to redouble the hunt for “agents” in Poland and to exten172

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sively purge the Communist Party. It would certainly tip the fragile balance between Warsaw and Moscow, as Berman put it. This seemed to be exactly what the Soviet leaders wanted, and, subsequently, what the Polish Stalinists feared. Rayski concludes: the “cautious but firm political will” shown by the Polish leaders was the main reason why there were no extensive anti-Jewish purges in his country during the years of Stalinism (Rayski 1987: 158-159). Schatz’s view concurs with Rayski’s conclusion. In the early 1950s, large anti-Jewish trials were being prepared in Poland, he reports. The fact that these never took place was due not only to Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953, but also to the “passive resistance”, as he writes, to the procrastination of the Polish leadership (Schatz 1991: 224; Hodos 1988: 210, holds the same opinion). Ray Taras is even more specific. He suggests that the absence of (anti-Semitic) trials and purges in Poland during the Stalinist years “may well have been the result of a Jewish presence in the security organs” (Taras, “Gomulka’s ‘RightistNationalist Deviation’”: 124). The validity of such interpretations is difficult to ascertain. Given the tense and historically loaded relationship between Poland and Russia, Stalin may well have exercised more restraint in Poland than he did elsewhere. Indeed, Poland’s communist leaders of Jewish descent had ample reasons to fear the unforeseen consequences of an explicitly anti-Jewish political crusade in their country. A show trial against Władysław Gomulka could easily have offered the excuse to start the anti-Semitic political witch-hunt that Bierut, Berman, and others fearfully anticipated. Today’s executioners could become tomorrow’s victims. Poland’s Stalinist leaders may have spared Gomulka in order to spare themselves (Checinski 1982: 75). They saved their own skin by sacrificing a large number of smaller fish. Not coincidentally, Bierut showed less resolve after Stalin’s death. When the Soviet embassy in Warsaw issued an official démarche to dismiss Stefan Staszewski, a communist of Jewish descent and the head of the press section of the Party’s Central Committee, and some other eminent workers in the press and propaganda sphere (Leon Kasman, editor in chief of the Party’s newspaper Trybuna Ludu and Artur Starewicz, head of the Central Committee’s propaganda department), Bierut acquiesced. “It pains me, but it’s not our decision”, he reportedly told Staszewski (Toranska 1987: 145).

3.4. Communist Anti-Semitism Communist regimes not only developed their own solutions to the Jewish question, but also their own variants of anti-Semitism. Communist anti-Semitism was rather unique in coupling traditional Christian anti-Jewish sentiments with an extreme variant of “rationalist” thought 173

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(anti-Judaic, but pro-assimilation and -emancipation) and specific political concepts (anti-Zionism and anti-cosmopolitanism). Whether the enemy was a rootless cosmopolitan, a capitalist exploiter, a Zionist conspirator, or a Jewish Stalinist, in all cases he fit the traditional “conspiracy theory of history, society and politics” (Wistrich 1991: xxiv). Communism invented its own variant of the Jewish world conspiracy. It is not necessary to delve deeply into Marxist thinking to explain the ideological roots of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in communist ideology. With few exceptions, there was little reason for those who adhered to the radical variant of socialism (or actually, to socialism as such) to question Karl Marx’ rather unsophisticated and for some, antiSemitic, idea (Silberner 1983: 41; Teller 1954: 50, 137-138) that modern Jewry be considered the product of bourgeois society. In Marx’s perception therefore, the emancipation of the Jews demanded society’s emancipation from the Jews and Judaism. Essentially, the Jewish question was perceived as an ephemeral issue (as was anti-Semitism), which could and would be solved within the general context of socialist construction. The Austrian communist, Otto Heller, paraphrased Marx’ argument as follows: Die Verknüpfung des Schicksals der Juden mit der Entwicklung der menschlichen Produktionsverhältnisse bietet der Schlüssel, den einzigen Schlüssel für das gesamte Schicksal der Juden, für alle Wechselfälle ihres Zusammenlebens, ihrer Konflikte mit der Umwelt […] das scheinbar paradoxe, aber notwendige Schicksal des jüdischen Ostens: er kann nur durch den restlosen Untergang seiner bisherigen ökonomischen und sozialen Basis vor dem Untergang bewahrt worden (Heller 1931: 19, 177).

As a combination of orthodox Marxist thinking and new Soviet experience, Heller’s book Der Untergang des Judentums (The Decline of Jewry) was among the most influential studies on the Jewish question written from a communist perspective and published during the interwar period. Heller was born in a well-to-do Viennese family in 1897. He entered the Social Democratic Party of Austria around the time of the Great War, and became one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He would later run into party-political difficulties due to his alleged “rightist deviations”. A professional journalist, he travelled the places of Jewish colonisation in Soviet Russia, including Birobidzhan. He published the first impression of his book in 1931. Heller believed the “dissolution” (Auflösung) of the Jewish people to be both inevitable and desirable. Under the forces of capitalism, the Jewish community would lose its homogeneity and cohesion, ultimately becoming as pauperised and declassed as the non-Jewish proletariat. Given the fact that it could never be in the interest of the proletariat to encourage any nation’s (or in the Jewish case, caste’s) specifically “national” 174

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development, the Jewish working class’ had little choice but to fully assimilate into the non-Jewish proletariat. Yet Heller was not particularly optimistic. In Western Europe, he believed, Jewish assimilation was a foregone conclusion. In Eastern Europe, however, the Jewish masses would not easily merge into larger society. Only socialism, i.e. Soviet power, offered a real solution. Heller distinguished between two possible variants of assimilation: forced assimilation (zwangsmässige Assimilierung) and natural assimilation (zwangläufige Assimilierung). To follow the first line would be counter-productive, he believed; not to follow the second approach would be reactionary (Heller 1931: 218). “What bourgeois liberalism achieved for Jews in Western Europe”, as Deutscher would write, and Heller could not have put better, “only Bolshevism was able to achieve for them in Eastern Europe” (Deutscher 1968: 187). Most other communist exposés on the Jewish question and antiSemitism followed a similar logic. In 1932 the German Communist Party (KPD) published a pamphlet, Der Jud ist schuld? (The Jew is Guilty?), which essentially contained the Party’s reaction to the antiSemitic and anti-communist propaganda of the NSDAP. As was previously mentioned, Jews comprised only a tiny portion of the KPD’s rank and file. Of the 143,000 Party members in 1927, approximately 1,000 were Jewish (less than 1 percent). Figures for the Party apparatus were higher – around 10 percent during the second half of the 1920s – but Jews had all but disappeared from the Party leadership and the communist caucuses in the national and Prussian parliament by the end of the decade (Knütter 1971: 203-204). Communist activists repeatedly publicly countered the argument that the Party was under Jewish control. This also seemed to have motivated the anonymous author of The Jew is Guilty?, although he refrained from giving any specifics as to the actual participation of Jews in the Communist Party. He confined himself to vague commonplaces. The brochure dutifully expressed the Stalinist standard line on the Jewish issue, and relied heavily on Heller’s Der Untergang des Judentums. Who engaged in the class struggle against capitalism – whether they be Jews, Christians or from any other group – was irrelevant, the author complained. Fascism, as he called it, availed itself of racial hatred and anti-Semitism to obscure class differences and to confuse and split the working masses. It is nonsense to portray the Jews as the exploiters of the German proletariat. Anti-Semitism was a typical petit-bourgeois sentiment and should be rejected as a diversionary tactic to move the theatre of revolutionary war from class to race. The idea that anti-Jewish violence was in any way beneficial to the cause of the proletariat was explicitly repudiated, as was the Jewish-

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national or Zionist response to anti-Semitism (Der Jud ist Schuld?: 273275). As ambivalent as Marx’ self-styled followers may have been with respect to the Jewish question, few ever encouraged or condoned specifically anti-Jewish ideas or policies. Instead, they neglected the issue. Their wavering position was aptly illustrated by a letter August Bebel, a prominent member of the German Social Democratic Party, wrote to his equally respected fellow-Party member, Karl Kautsky (dated August 1901). Bebel voiced his concerns about the role and reputation of illustrious Jewish socialists of East European origin, including Rosa Luxemburg and Israel Helphand-Parvus, within the Party. Likely motivated in part by internal political disagreements, he wrote: “You cannot imagine the intense animosity among the rank and file against Rosa and Parvus. I do not say that it should influence us, but it would be difficult to disregard it altogether” (Quoted in Scharlau 1964: 111). Bebel was worried and so were others. A great many German socialists felt little affinity, even antipathy towards these prominent, conspicuous party comrades; not only because they were radicals but also, one may probably add, because they were foreign radicals, Jewish adventurers, and cosmopolitans from Eastern Europe. What could be done? To give in to the sentiments among the Party’s ranks would be politically and morally unacceptable; to openly resist them, however, would harm the Party. In the end, Bebel and most other prominent socialists, ignored the issue in an attempt to minimise the Jewish question altogether. Anti-Semitic views were present in all variants of the modern workers movement – mostly on an “individual” basis, among the leadership and rank and file, and sporadically “politically”, reflecting official positions. At times, anti-Semitism among the masses was tolerated so as to avoid alienating part of the grassroots support. Occasionally it may have been tacitly accepted as a potentially and objectively revolutionary force, but generally it was neglected. Anti-Semitism essentially belonged to the pre-Marxist and non-Marxist radical movement. The Jewish question, and the notion of Jewish Communism in particular, achieved a new kind of urgency however when communist parties reached positions of power. Anti-Semitism became an increasingly important instrument of anti-communist propaganda and agitation. It directly affected the regimes’ power and legitimacy. Initially, communists had approached anti-Semitism (including the equation of communism with Jews) from a basically defensive position. They either denied or minimised the affinity between Jews and communism. Later they would actually appropriate anti-Semitic reasoning, and mobilise it in an offensive and aggressive manner, as a means to settle intra-party struggles, to fight anti-party opposition, or to acquire political legitimacy in 176

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society at large. Later, they just kept silent. Any reference to “Jews and communism” became taboo. Why Jews? Why were Jews, of all the minorities in communist Eastern Europe, the prime and continuous object of political machinations? First of all, it is unwise to assume that the Jewish question dominated the political agenda of all communist regimes at all times. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Jewish issues became increasingly irrelevant in most countries. The main exceptions will be discussed below. Moreover, state-sponsored anti-Semitism in those countries where the Jewish question remained alive and well offered a rather unique example of the interpretation criticised above. Anti-Jewish sentiments often had little to do with the behaviour or even the presence of Jews themselves. At least by the mid-1950s, it had become increasingly difficult to couple the motivation of anti-Semitism with the Jewish communities in these countries. The “Jew” was a useful image and an ideal scapegoat. That Jews were frequently targeted as scapegoats is largely explained by the conveniently multi-facetted nature of anti-Semitism. Finally, despite the fact that society was not immune to this rhetoric, anti-Semitic arguments rarely met the expectations of those who employed them. In countries such as Poland, anti-Semitism would have provided a much more powerful basis for political legitimacy had it not been used by the communist leaders. In post-war Europe anti-Semitism and the communist variant of nationalism were both products of an official political culture, carefully prescribed in form and content. They had to correspond to the specific interests of those in power. Communist regimes’ anti-Semitic propaganda was unlikely to be fully responsive to the sentiments and aspirations of large parts of society. People were neither expected nor allowed to participate freely in anti-Semitic, or for that matter nationalist, manifestations. This explains why communist antiSemitic campaigns evoked only a limited response, even in those societies where anti-Jewish feelings were traditionally strong. And when antiSemitic sentiments, condoned or provoked by communist regimes, exceeded the specific political parameters of the communist order (as was the case in Poland in the immediate post-war period, during regimesponsored solidarity meetings, and during the crises of 1956 and 1968), this was primarily considered to be a “security” issue for the communist state, rather than a moral problem for the nation. As was stressed above, after the purges of the mid-1950s, the Jewish question gradually lost its relevance in communist Eastern Europe. Neither in the German Democratic Republic, where a tiny Jewish minority enjoyed a fair measure of autonomy, nor in Bulgaria, which lacked an anti-Semitic tradition, would it ever become a prominent issue again. In Hungary, where the higher ranks of Party and state were closed to 177

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Jews, the issue would remain marginal. Few communists of Jewish origin would ever again play a prominent role in Czechoslovakia, the brief interregnum of the Prague Spring excluded. In the wake of the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops, the Czechoslovak authorities conducted a brief but vicious anti-Semitic campaign. In all of these communist countries, the Jewish issue disappeared from public discourse and communist propaganda, with the exception of course of the ritual references to the twin evil of imperialism and Zionism. The Jewish contribution to the history of the nation, including that of the communist movement and the Holocaust as specifically Jewish, were generally ignored. The Jewish question retained its political relevance in both the Soviet Union and Romania due primarily to foreign policy. The rather benevolent attitude of the communist-dominated regimes in East Central Europe towards the Jewish communities in the immediate post-war years cannot be isolated from the regimes’ aspirations to make a decent and moderate impression on Western European and American public opinion. In foreign politics and East-West relations in particular, the Jewish question had always been the most critical of any minority issue. From an early stage communist regimes recognised the propaganda value, negative or positive, of the Jewish question (See the brochure The Jewish Question in Hungary (1946), which includes a list of 38 legal acts restoring the formal rights of the Jews of Hungary) – even if they did not always act accordingly. Official Jewish organisations became a strategic part of the foreign policy effort. “Peace” was the catch phrase. In Romania the “nationalisation” of the highest Party ranks by the communist leadership was not accompanied by extensive anti-Semitic propaganda, nor did it lead to a marked deterioration of the status of the Jewish community. Romania, different from most other communist countries, had never severed its diplomatic ties with Israel. Amidst an increasingly oppressive environment, the Jewish community continued to enjoy a certain measure of cultural and religious autonomy. Jewish community life was tolerated as a necessary evil, the price to be paid for the country’s standing in the West. It did not prevent anti-Semites from venting their opinions to the official press, as was increasingly the case during the final years of Nicolae Ceauscescu’s reign. This eclectic attitude was a product of Romania’s aspiration to secure room to manoeuvre within the Soviet bloc, while keeping domestic political orthodoxy intact. Moses Rosen, Chief Rabbi of Romania from 1948 until the end of the communist era, actively participated in Romanian political life as a member of parliament. He had access to high Party officials and was always prepared to promote the Romanian case abroad. First Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej confided to Rosen in 1962: “We have had fourteen ambassadors and 300 diplomats in the United States since 178

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1945, but all of them together did not do as good a job for us as you did” (Rosen 1990: 205). It was an opportunistic alliance, a business transaction, as Rosen put it. The Chief Rabbi remained a controversial figure. Although Rosen may well have done his utmost to secure the wellbeing of Romania’s Jews under extremely difficult circumstances, his legacy as a collaborator would always haunt him. In no other communist country did the spectre of anti-Semitism emerge so frequently or with such dramatic consequence as it did in Poland in 1956, in 1968 and, although only marginally, in 1980-1981. Anti-Jewish propaganda may have found a willing ear among an unknown number of Poles, but grassroots anti-Jewish sentiments were not – and under the conditions of the communist party state – could not have been the decisive issue. Anti-Semitic propaganda was meant to serve the interests of (parts of) the communist authorities. Anti-Semitic arguments were still used by disparate elements both within and without the Party to discredit the incumbent communist leadership (Myant 1982: 218; Holzer 1985: 373). Anti-Semitism was adopted to mobilise support among the Party elite to make or break the positions of individual leaders. They were employed to gain legitimacy among the Party’s rank and file and the wider population. Jews were routinely blamed for the mistakes that others had made. Anti-Jewish rhetoric was used to discredit the non-Party opposition and to emphasise loyalty to the Soviet line on anti-Zionism. On this issue the Polish regime displayed considerably more enthusiasm than most other allies. The Jewish question and anti-Semitism retained a paradoxical duality: they were at the same time “real” and “virtual”. Anti-Semitism was virtual in so far as it functioned as a means to realise political aims and goals which had little, if anything, to do with the Jews of Poland. Yet anti-Semitism was also painfully real, if only because it heavily impacted the remaining Jews in Poland, irrespective of how these people “defined” themselves. In 1956, after the death of Bierut, the Natolin faction within the Central Committee of the PUWP, engaged in a struggle for power with the Puławska group. It tried to capitalise on the relatively high number of Jews among the latter, arguing that “Jewish” leaders of the Stalinist regime were responsible for the many “mistakes and deviations” of the first decade of communist rule in Poland (Eisler 1991: 191; Jedlicki 1962: 14-18, 20). Michael Checinski reports that the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Natolin communists had only a minor impact on society. However, considering the number of alarming press articles reporting on anti-Semitic incidents in the country and the fact that the Central Committee ordered all Party organisations to stand against the anti-Jewish propaganda and the atmosphere of panic as incited by “Jewish nationalist elements”, the dimension of popular anti-Semitism (within and 179

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without the Communist Party) must have been considerable, and, in a certain way, very troublesome (For the Central Committee circular, see Checinski 1982: 268-271; see also Paweł Machcewicz, “Antisemitism in Poland in 1956”, in Polonsky 1996: 176). Former first Party secretary Władysław Gomulka did not publicly commit himself to either camp. This helped him to regain his Party leadership in 1956. Despite his initial popularity, Gomulka proved unable to maintain the legitimacy of his rule beyond the early years of his renewed Party leadership. In this respect there is a clear causal link between the power struggle of 1956 and the anti-Semitic campaigns of 1967-68. Frustration over a persistent lack of popular support, anxiety about the enthusiasm which Israel’s victory in the Six Days’ War had generated among parts of the population and the armed forces, and the political ambitions of various powerful adversaries (of which the minister of Internal Affairs, Mieczysław Moczar, was the most dangerous) encouraged party leaders, including Gomulka, to redeploy the weapon of anti-Semitism. Both Gomulka and his challengers played the anti-Jewish card to discredit their opponents within and without the Communist Party. Both openly disputed the loyalty of Poland’s remaining Jews. On June 19, 1967, Gomulka gave a speech before the Trade Union Congress in Warsaw, in which he referred to a “fifth column” in Poland. Some of the other Politburo members present were unpleasantly surprised, if not dismayed by Gomulka’s ominous remarks. His unilateral move had broken the unwritten rule that official speeches given by the Party’s first secretary first be reviewed and endorsed by other Party leaders. Gomulka agreed to alter the text. The tone of the published version of the speech was softened and the reference to a fifth column deleted (Stola 2006: 184). Gomulka’s speech was another desperate attempt to combine traditional Polish nationalism and anti-Semitic arguments with communist ascendancy (Schatz 1991: 308). As in 1956-1957, the Gomulka leadership underestimated the spontaneous effects of their propaganda, which included the proliferation of anti-Semitism within the Party. They hastened to state that Zionism was not the real issue. Communist revisionism was. The damage was already done, however. In 1967-1968 between 8,000 and 9,000 Jews reportedly left or were forced to leave the Communist Party. Another 10,000 to 15,000 Jewish members remained – for the time being (Kenneth C. Farmer (with the assistance of David Crowe (Jews) and Richard Blanke (Germans), “National Minorities in Poland, 1919-1980”, in Horak 1985: 56). The head of state, nine ministers, and four members of the Politburo were removed. In a notorious, oft-quoted piece in a literary monthly, Andrzej Werblan, head of the department for Culture and Science of the Party’s Central Committee, gave a quasi-official analysis of how the 180

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“Jewish problem” had developed within the Polish communist movement (Werblan 1968). Werblan interpreted the history of the Party in “racist terms” (Jaff Schatz, “The Last True Communists”, in Huttenbach 1994: 147). His analysis and phraseology were extraordinary explicit, but the gist of his argument could also be found in numerous other Party publications. Werblan asserted that due to the relatively large number of Jews in the early history of the movement, the Party’s ideological positions had been seriously distorted. Due to its unbalanced social and ethnic composition, the Party had exhibited leftwing and rightwing political extremism, sectarianism, and dogmatism. Power lay in the hands of a small minority, a minority which had shown painful insensitivity to Polish patriotism and the attributes of sovereignty and national independence. Cosmopolitanism and simplistic internationalism reigned supreme. The interests of the Polish nation and state, and therefore the interests of the Polish workers, were consistently neglected. The Jewish communists who occupied crucial positions after the 1948 events (the fall of Gomulka) were unable to extricate themselves from these false positions, from these “cosmopolitan derivations”, as Werblan put it. The patriotic wing of the Party had therefore rightfully opposed this all too powerful minority. Werblan freely used the kind of associative thinking typical of conspiracy theories. He coupled the Party’s current crisis with the Jewish communists of the Stalinist era (guilt by association, revisionism added by Zionism), and created an eclectic mix of negative sentiments, including anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual, anti-Polish, and anti-Western views. Poland’s Jewish Stalinists had become revisionists, and their sons and daughters were supposedly guided by the same kind of non-national, non-Polish thinking. Anti-Semitism wrapped in anti-Zionist arguments peaked in Poland after the student protests of March 1968. By then it had also acquired a new dimension. In combination with an unsophisticated kind of Polish patriotism and anti-intellectualism it was used as an instrument to fight the opposition outside of the Party. Former Stalinist rulers and young radical students were heaped together as non-Polish, anti-Polish, and Jewish. The Episcopate opposed the anti-Semitic campaign – which was more than they had done after the Kielce pogroms – although it labelled the political turmoil as a “family quarrel”, a struggle among communists. Despicable though the anti-Semitic drive was, the Church leaders stressed, it could not be compared with the injustice done by the communist regime to the Polish nation, a regime in which so many Jews had participated (Smolar 1987: 57). The 1968 campaign would be the last state-sponsored anti-Semitic offensive in Europe. The Jewish question, however, would continue to haunt the communist leadership in Poland. Suspicion had become 181

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chronic. After the Party leadership had been cleansed of Jewish members, the rank and file would follow. The mounting anti-Jewish purge from the early 1960s intensified considerably. In 1961 or 1962 the Politburo of the PUWP reportedly decided to place every communist official of Jewish origin under permanent surveillance. By 1964 the ministry of Interior had compiled a list of Polish Jews, including “hidden” Jews. In 1965, a decision was secretively made to remove all Jews from those positions in the administrative bureaucracy, armed forces, and media for which afirmacja narodowa, national confirmation, was necessary. The issue had to be solved before 1970-1971 (Anonymous 1971: 22-23; Checinski 1982: 201; Schatz 1991: 290). It was very close. By the mid-1970s, almost 20,000 Jews had left Poland. Most of them were “Jews by force, not by choice” (Lendvai 1971: 3). They were fully assimilated, or so they believed, into Polish society. Many of them probably did not even consider themselves to be Jewish. They were the victims of the notorious aphorism which says that in the end it is the anti-Semite who decides who is Jewish and who is not. During the crisis of the early 1980s in Poland, which posed an unprecedented threat to the communist system, the Party’s leadership did not resort to anti-Semitic arguments. It used a different language, equally nationalistic perhaps, but less ideology-ridden and largely free of anti-Jewish references. Moreover, it was only during Wojciech Jaruzelski’s leadership that a real, open and critical discussion on the Polish-Jewish past, during the Second World War in particular, took place. None of the communist regimes had ever allowed such a debate to be held. The Holocaust had always been extremely controversial in communist Eastern Europe, a taboo. The genocide of the Jews spoiled the official interpretation of the war: Nazi invaders fought against by a united nation under communist guidance and with Soviet support. The Holocaust raised embarrassing questions about guilt and responsibility for the murder of millions of compatriots. Officially professed sympathy with the fate of the Jews of Europe contradicted the anti-Israel, antiZionist, even anti-Western foreign policy line. In Poland, for the first time, the communist authorities broke with the paradoxical condition that, on the one hand, Jews were everywhere, hidden in political discourse and propaganda, social remembrance, myths, and jokes; while on the other hand, they were practically nowhere, with every official reference to the Jewish past and present having been carefully omitted, with the exception of a few token, officially sanctioned Jewish institutions, events, and personalities (Smolar 1987: 31 points at this remarkable paradox). Censorship was gradually relaxed during the 1980s. The documentary film Shoah by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann triggered a 182

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nation-wide debate. Many Poles, including the communist authorities, responded to it with horror and indignation. Lanzmann’s interviews with Polish eyewitnesses of the genocide cast an image of a nation which at best had shown complete indifference to the disaster that befell their Jewish compatriots and neighbours. The debate gained momentum after the publication of a critical, self-reflective essay of Polish-Jewish relations during the war by a literary historian, Jan Bloński. “We must stop haggling, trying to defend and justify ourselves”, Bloński writes. “We must stop arguing about the things which were beyond our power to do, during the occupation and beforehand. Nor must we place blame on political, social and economic conditions. We must say first of all – Yes, we are guilty.” Bloński argued for a “moral change” in the attitude towards the Polish-Jewish past: Instead of haggling and justifying ourselves, we should first consider our own faults and weaknesses. This is the moral revolution which is imperative when considering the Polish-Jewish past. It is only this that can gradually cleanse our desecrated soil (Jan Blonski, “A Poor Pole Looks at the Ghetto”, in Polonsky 1990: 44, 45).

Bloński’s article in the Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny generated more than one hundred reactions, most of them negative. There is no need to delve into this debate here (For Jan Bloński’s article and the discussion it provoked, see Polonsky 1990). The most important thing is that the discussion took place at all. It proved that it was possible to have a public debate on the relationship between Poles and Jews which went beyond the limited political parameters of the post-war communist order and was not immediately smothered by the politically-inspired, false dichotomies between Jews and Poles, which had always either coloured or prevented serious discussion.

3.5. Communists as Jews Let me finally return to one of the most uncomfortable and bitter questions related to the communists of Jewish heritage in Russia and Eastern Europe: their responsibility for the anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic policies of the regimes they served. Is there a causal link between the prominent and conspicuous role of Jewish activists and the sometimes openly and ostentatiously anti-Jewish nature of communist policies? Did communists of Jewish origin favour a more severe, a harsher, more uncompromising policy vis-à-vis the Jewish communities in their country than did their non-Jewish comrades? Why were Jewish communists so anti-Jewish? It has been one of the most widely discussed and hotly debated questions among contemporary (Jewish) observers and historians. The wider context of the non183

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Jewish Jew seemed to offer the most convenient answer to this question: the anti-Jewish ideas and policies of Jewish communists could only be explained by the fact that these communists were non-Jews, that they were fully estranged from and antagonistic to the Jewish communities. The most radical variant of the non-Jewish nature of most Jewish communists is the notion of Jewish Selbsthass. To be fully accepted in the communist movement, Jews had to give up and deny their very Jewishness. Communism, or socialism for that matter, could not have functioned otherwise. It could not exist without anti-Jewish hostility, because Jewish communists themselves carried it (Bloch 1966: 43). As an explanation for the political radicalism of individual Jews, Jewish selfhatred is an extreme, reversed variant of the existential interpretation of Jewish radicalism. The Jewish radicals, as Teller opines, were not so much conditioned by their own traditional environment or traditions, as by a “perverse identification” with or internalisation of the anti-Jewish ideas of the larger non-Jewish community (Teller 1954: 161; Wolfe 1994: 346; Wistrich 1976: 8 refers to the “Jewish anti-Semitism of SelfHatred”). Obviously, Jewish self-hatred is a far more complex phenomenon than such emotionally loaded references suggest. It originates from the (post-)enlightenment conviction among many assimilated Jews that the Jewish community itself had to change and to abandon its premodern characteristics if they wanted to be accepted by the non-Jewish population. These judgements mirrored or, as others would argue, internalised negative anti-Semitic stereotypes – the prime reason of course why expressions of “self-hatred” are so controversial. Jews’ criticism of aspects of Jewish life and tradition are a permanent feature of modern Jewish history, especially by those Jews who, for various reasons, distanced themselves from these “traditions”. Assimilated Jews despised the lifestyle of their orthodox brethren, which they believed was an important cause of anti-Semitism. Jewish left-wingers went further: Jewish traditions, their religious and socio-economic features in particular, contradicted and frustrated everything they politically stood for. And many Jewish communists took the ultimate, Marxist position: the only true service to the Jews (i.e. to the Jewish workers) was the dissolution of the Jewish community. Jewish self-hatred played a pivotal role in early explanations for the anti-Jewish policies of the Bolshevik regime. Salo Baron singles out Trotsky, whose “revulsion from the Jewish past bordered on outright self-hatred and greatly contributed to the Revolution’s destructive methods in dealing with the established Jewish communities”. The estrangement of these Jewish radicals from their own community, as Baron asserts, “helped to set the course of the revolutionary regime’s policies in a direction running counter to the wishes of the Jewish 184

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majority” (Baron 1964 (a): 204-205). Many similar arguments have been brought forward: non-Jewish Jews have always been haunted by their ambiguous status, insecurity, negative Jewish identity, Jewish minority complex, even self-hatred. It was for precisely these reasons that they developed their radical non-Jewishness (Gitelman 1972: 110). The explanatory relevance of the concept of Jewish self-hatred should not be overstretched, however. It seems rather farfetched to attribute Jewish Bolshevik leaders’ virulent opposition to the Bund or other chapters of the Jewish labour movement to self-hatred. Rather, their opposition was rooted in politics. Bolshevik Jews were first and foremost Bolsheviks. Jewish Bolsheviks fought the members of the Bund not because they were Jewish, but because they Bundists. It seems evident that the force of communist ideology alone cannot explain the political zest of Jewish communists. The enthusiasm with which many a communist of Jewish heritage repressed and dismantled the values and institutions of the Jewish community owed much to their pre-revolutionary experiences (Gitelman 1972: 14). The ideas and policies of Jewish communists may not have been inspired by communist ideology alone, but neither did they necessarily reflect Jewish selfhatred. First and foremost, they reflected the assertive, occasionally aggressive world outlook of many enlightened, secularised, and assimilated Jews. Anti-Jewishness, however, was not the distinguishing features of all Jewish communists. This would be an unwarranted generalisation. The attitudes of Jewish communists towards the Jews and Jewish life in their countries in general are too complex and multifaceted to draw simple, one-dimensional conclusions. Many communists of Jewish descent were uninterested in the Jewish question. And why should they have been? The premises of communism largely defined their beliefs and behaviour, more so than did any Jewish particularistic sympathies or antipathies. Their Jewish background may have been largely irrelevant in explaining their ambition to eliminate all traces of traditional cultural, religious, political, and economic life – whether Jewish or not. If Jewish communists in East Central Europe implemented policies that can objectively be defined as anti-Semitic, it probably had less to do with anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic convictions, than it did with the related issues of ideology, legitimacy, and power. Having said this, one might add an important caveat: the identification of Jews with communism proved so harmful and so subversive that it “forced” communist leaders to counter all appearances of having served the specific interests of the Jewish population, to do everything in their power to hide or deny their Jewish background (Kenez 2006: 157), and to be ostentatiously tough on all matters Jewish (Mevius 2005: 96). 185

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We do not need the idea of self-hatred to explain the anti-Jewish radicalism of Jewish communists. Actual circumstances suffice. The isolated position of many Jewish communists may have forced them to act against the interests of their fellow Jews. As “renegades” they had been ostracised from Jewish society. As communists, full integration into a non-Jewish environment remained rather unlikely. Worst of all, as many would come to discover, it was not self-evident that Jewish communists would be accepted by their fellow party members. Many communists of Jewish origin continued to feel rootless and alienated. Their social and political predicament not only stimulated their aversion to being associated with Jews (their conscious or unconscious Jewish selfnegation); it also forced them, as it were, to prove themselves; to be even more radical than were their non-Jewish comrades; to be more Catholic than the pope (This argument can be found in many studies on the history of the Jews in the communist world: Baron 1964 (a): 204, 208; Bloch 1966: 43; Brym 1978: 122, note 13; Duschinsky, “Hungary”: 84; European Jewry 1956: 39, Hegedüs 1986: 144; Hertz 1988: 128-129; Nossig, “Bolschewismus und Judentum”, in Roditschew n. d.: 29; Prager 1985: 61; Sartre 1976: 92, 94-95; Wistrich 1976: 9; Wolfe 1994: 346). Checinksi asserts that among the relatively large group of Jewish officials of the Tenth Department of the post-war ministry of Public Security, “no traces of ‘Jewish solidarity’” could be found. “On the contrary”, he writes, “they represented a distorted conception of “internationalism”, which could be described as “Jewish anti-Semitism’.” Checinski mentions fear and instincts of political survival as motives for the anti-Jewish behaviour of Jewish communists. “Undoubtedly”, as he reports on the purging of Jews from the Polish Party and state apparatus during 1953-1954, “many of the Jewish executors of this policy hoped that by purging their ranks of Jews they would reduce anti-Semitic tensions and thereby safeguard their own position” (Checinski 1982: 7172). If the concept of Jewish Communism stands for anything at all, it stands for those revolutionaries of Jewish stock – a small minority among communists of Jewish descent – who were active within the Jewish sections of communist parties and governments. Their activities were specifically geared to the Jewish communities. They were particularly active among the Jewish masses. They were Jewish communists in the true sense of the word – consciously Jewish and convincingly communist. Many may have considered their participation in the new communist regimes as the ultimate contribution to the creation of a new Jewish identity: self-assured, strong, and powerful; everything that traditional Jewish society presumably lacked. Their interest in the 186

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Jewish question stemmed primarily from their Jewish background, while their solution to the Jewish problem was based on their communist worldview. The distinction in terms of personnel, mission, and ideological conviction which Zvi Gitelman (Gitelman 1972: 9) makes between the Jewish institutions of the Soviet state during the 1920s on the one hand, and those of the Party on the other, is also applicable for the postwar communist regimes in East Central Europe. The early Jewish organisations of the communist state were not only expected to weaken the traditional institutions and bonds of the Jewish community (in order to integrate Jews into the new society), but were also engaged in all sorts of social and cultural work, including the reconstruction or rehabilitation of Jewish life. By contrast, Jewish sections of the communist party held more radical political ambitions and exhibited decisively more ideological zeal. They attempted to fully implement the modernisation and communisation of Jewish society. Generally, though, both types of organisations coped with largely identical challenges and difficulties. They would also meet the same fate: suspicion, marginalisation, and ultimately, defeat and liquidation. The position of the communist Jewish agencies and sections was inherently ambivalent. On the one hand, they engaged in activities aimed specifically at the group interests of the Jewish population. On the other hand, they functioned as instruments for the integration of Jewish communities in the communist party state. In the eyes of communist authorities, both aims coincided. Full integration was considered to be in the true interest of the Jewish population. Ultimately, full integration would imply full control. Thus, the Jewish organisations of the communist party and state were by definition temporary. Indeed, the more successful they would be, the less they would be needed. Many of the Jewish communists who staffed the Jewish sections of party and state, however, held more complex views with regards to the relationship between the building of communism and the integration of the Jewish community. They believed in the creation of a new type of society, as well as the “modernisation” of their fellow Jews. Yet they also believed in preserving a Jewish identity. This option made them increasingly suspect to their non-Jewish comrades. Why should there have been any organisation within the communist party and state whose activities were specifically aimed at the interests of Jews? Why would communists bother with the cultural and linguistic concerns of the Jewish community, which they considered as anachronistic and backward? Would the integration of Jewish activists with dubious antecedents not infect the organisation (and therefore the party) with deviant, particularistic ideas? Most activists in Jewish communist organisations loyally formulated and executed the party line on collective Jewish existence under com187

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munism. Irrespective of their national differences and particularities, Jewish communists played a crucial role in the process of Gleichschaltung – the destruction of the pre-war model of Jewish community life – just as they would in its subsequent reconstruction on a secular and socialist basis. They replaced the autonomous institutions of the Jewish community with organisations loyal to and closely supervised by the new communist regime. They dismantled religious life, closed most cultural and educational institutions, and redefined and sanctioned a new, secular Jewish culture. They eliminated autonomous political life (Zionism in particular), cut the links with foreign organisations, and instituted new communist-dominated political institutions under strict national control. The Jewish agencies of the communist party state, and particularly the activists who staffed these institutions and concerned themselves with the Jewish communities in their countries, boasted a very poor reputation among both their (Jewish) contemporaries as well as historians. Their conspicuousness as the most direct intermediary between the party and the Jewish community and their apparent zealousness made them among the most despised and most feared representatives of the new order by many of their fellow Jews (European Jewry 1956: 39; Rosen 1990: 56-7, 66. See also Baron 1964 (a): 208). Many of the labels often applied to communists of Jewish descent are particularly applicable to these communist activists in the Jewish sections and related institutions of the communist party-state. Still, generalisations are dangerous. Policies and personalities varied considerably. The organisations were rife with internal dissent and disagreements. Moreover, as much as their approach was determined by the general prerequisites and priorities of communist parties and regimes, Jewish communists occasionally exhibited a real interest and sensitivity to the needs and concerns of Jewish communities (Gregory Aronson, “Communism”, in Vlavianos n. d.: 258-259 and Gitelman 1972 about the Jewish Section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the NEP years; Auerbach 1965 and Schatz 1991: 123, about the Central Jewish Bureau of the Polish Communist Party during the interwar years). The more rigid and coercive the general line, the less room for manoeuvre they had. The Jewish sections of the communist parties in East Central Europe before the war operated differently than did their successor organisations after the war, when the communist party were primarily concerned with the establishment of communist control over society. But generally, given their specific personal background, their ideological make-up, and their occupational interest, Jewish communists were practically forced to demonstrate that they were more consistent, more

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dedicated, and more faithful to “true” communism, than were their nonJewish comrades. The ambivalent, if not contradictory aims of the communist Jewish organisations during the early years of communist rule created grave dangers for these Jewish activists. Many ultimately faced political failure and personal tragedy. Despised by most of their fellow Jews and distrusted by many of their non-Jewish comrades, most of the leading officials of the Yevsektsiia, the Jewish Section of the Bolshevik Party, were victimised during the Great Purges of the 1930s (figures are given by Silberner 1983: 149). As in the Soviet Union, the Jewish sections of the communist parties and comparable front organisations in East Central Europe were for the most part abolished after the Gleichschaltung. The dismantling of traditional Jewish community life was thus largely complete. The need for activities geared towards specific minority groups had lost its initial relevance. The Jewish communist institutions shared their fate with many other particularistic organisations. It were not so much the success, or lack thereof, of their activities which would ultimately decide their fate, but rather the reformulated priorities of the communist regimes, namely the decision to subordinate local and particularistic conditions and interests to the unambiguous goal of establishing a monolithic communist party and state, a strongly centralised economy, and a homogeneous, national culture (See Gitelman 1972). The Jewish Commissariat or Yevkom, led by Dimanshtein, established in February 1918, was dismantled six years later in April 1924. The Party formally liquidated the Yevsektsiia, the Jewish Section, in January 1930. “Viewed in historical perspective”, as Gitelman does, the dissolution of the Yevsektsiia itself did not profoundly affect the course of Soviet Jewish history, nor did it mark a sudden change in Soviet policy. [It] did, however, clearly signal the refusal of the Party leadership to tolerate even the mildest form of Jewish separatism or political autonomism (Gitelman 1972: 480).

The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the Soviet satellite countries. The Cultural Jewish Committee of the Fatherland front in Bulgaria was abolished in April 1948. The Jewish Democratic Committee in Romania was liquidated in 1952. The communist-controlled Central Committee of Jews in Poland merged in October 1950 with the Jewish Cultural Society to form the Social and Cultural Society of Jews in Poland. None of these changes greatly affected the Jews and their community life. By then the political parameters of communist rule had already been strictly determined – for Jews and non-Jews alike.

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Conclusion The Jewish communities of East Central Europe have shrunk to historically low figures. As much as the burden of history weighs on the remaining Jews in the region, they were probably less affected by the collapse of communism than were other ethnic or national minorities (Gitelman 1989). Even before the fall of the communist regimes, Jews in many countries had a legal outlet or safety valve: emigration. Postcommunism offered unforeseen opportunities and new dangers, and Jews suffered and enjoyed all of its adverse and ambivalent consequences. Political democratisation created the necessary conditions for the revival of Jewish community life. It was the basis requirement for the preservation of a collective identity that went beyond the consciousness of a mere Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a community of fate. However, the disintegration of the authoritarian party-state and the rise of political pluralism added a new dimension to anti-Semitism. Democracy put an end to discrimination by the state but it also created the opportunity to openly manifest grassroots anti-Jewish sentiments. The anti-Semitic incidents which occurred in East Central Europe, including Russia, were significant, but they should not be exaggerated. Generally, they did not differ from those in most (other) democratic countries: the desecration of tomb stones and of places of worship, the vandalism of Jewish property or places of commemoration, the disturbance of meetings, the circulation of anti-Semitic leaflets and literature, and the anti-Jewish remarks made by minor political and intellectual figures. Given the dramatic changes the countries of East Central European underwent and the considerable impact these had on the daily lives of ordinary citizens, the fact that few politicians and other public figures persisted in antiJewish paranoia and myth-making may be unpleasant, but it is neither surprising nor particularly dangerous. “What we currently encounter in Poland”, the journalist Konstanty Gebert observed after the 1990 presidential elections in his country, “is not mass anti-Semitism but mass tolerance of anti-Semitism” (Gebert 1991: 727). This is an important differentiation. Although one should not play down the significance of anti-Semitism in Poland or elsewhere, it helps to explain the discrepancy between the considerable degree of anti-Jewish prejudices in society and the marginal role it plays in politics. 191

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The most important feature of post-communist anti-Semitism is the role it continues to play, however marginally, in politics. According to a Polish joke, popular after the establishment of the first non-communist government; “There are almost no Jews in Poland, but why do all of them have to be in the government?”. The obsession with Jewish omnipresence and omnipotence (the myth of the “hidden Jew”) is a classic anti-Jewish prejudice. It also lay at the basis of the myth of Jewish Communism. Occasionally after the fall of communism, extreme nationalist forces as well as mainstream politicians displayed anti-Jewish ideas or attitudes. Among radical nationalists, anti-Semitism was part of their political Weltanschauung, among the mainstream politicians they served primarily tactical purposes. Apparently, both extremist and moderate politicians understood that popular anti-Semitism could still be politically exploited, if carefully and obliquely. The words Jews and Jewishness are mostly used as epithets aimed against political ideas, parties, and personalities that often share little in common with anything Jewish but are identified as such to signify disagreement or disapproval. They are “political Jews” – an indispensable category in a region where few real Jews remain. Anti-Semitic arguments tend to be used implicitly. Politicians declare themselves as “true” Poles, “true” Hungarians, or “true” Russians. The fact that these sentiments are rarely voiced explicitly confirms the fact that publicly expressed anti-Semitism has been all but de-legitimised in political discourse. Openly anti-Semitic political groups remain marginal and politically irrelevant. For most of these organisations, anti-Semitism is only one part of their ideological baggage, and generally not amongst the most important. Finally, prominent politicians may not always have had the courage or will to unequivocally distance themselves from the political use of anti-Semitism (some even permitted the use of such arguments against their opponents, while others occasionally depended on the parliamentary support of anti-Semitic parties), but there have been no anti-Jewish state policies in post-communist East Central Europe. The Jewish question has lost most of its political volatility. It has become a historical question, although one with strong moral connotations. Jewish Communism is history. Communism is gone, and so too are many of the political emotions, controversies and polemics it caused, including its identification with the corporate Jew. Jewish communism is history; its real as well as its mythical dimensions. The World Wide Web offers a treasure chest of anti-Semitic ideas and organisations, but one needs to descend deep into the shadowy world of extreme rightwing (and now and then, self-declared leftwing) politics to find any reference to communism as a Jewish conspiracy. The primary emotions stirred by the old men and women who sell their anti-Semitic booklets in the halls 192

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of Moscow’s metro-station are not concern or anxiety, but pity and empathy. Jewish Communism is history, indeed, but it still occasionally returns, and with a vengeance. In 2003, Martin Hohmann, a member of the German Bundestag for the Christian Democratic Union, decided to add lustre to a speech commemorating October 3rd, Germany’s national holiday. Hohmann complained about the “second-class” treatment Germans received in their own country. Why is it always “others first, and then only us”, Hohmann asked. He found the answer in Germany’s history, or actually in the way Germans deal with their own history: their guilt complex, Germany’s original sin, and Germans as a nation of perpetrators (Tätervolk). Hohmann was not the only German politician or publicist who expressed frustration over this history which never seems to pass (read: the fifteen years of National-Socialism). But Hohmann made a serious mistake. If the Germans are a nation of perpetrators, he provocatively asked, then so too are the Jews. Jewish activists were so overwhelmingly present in the revolutionary regimes of Europe, he asserted, that they share at least part of the collective responsibility for the crimes of communism. Hohmann compared Nazi atrocities to the participation of the Jews in Russia’s October Revolution (Der Wortlaut der Rede von MdB Martin Hohmann zum Nationalfeiertag, 31.10.2003, http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/15981/1.html). His words caused a tremendous row. By the time he concluded that neither Germans nor Jews can actually be considered as Tätervölker, nobody was listening anymore – it was lost behind the massive impact of his unfortunate comparison. Hohmann’s analogy was historically flawed and politically clumsy. German politicians may allow themselves a sloppy knowledge of history, but not in the realm of German-Jewish relations. Shortly thereafter, Hohmann was expelled from the Party’s parliamentary caucus. Even his Party membership was up for discussion. It is rather unusual for a politician to run into such major problems owing to a flawed historical comparison. It is even more remarkable that a politician stumbles over an analogy of mostly historic relevance. The notion of Jewish Communism still ignites hefty political emotions. The Hohmann affair is revealing, but it is also exceptional. Generally, Jewish communism remains confined to history. It is finally where it belongs: in the realm of professional historiography. It may still spark controversy and dispute – and not only among historians – but there is no longer any reason to avoid it as the waif or foundling described by J. L. Talmon. Historians can indeed now claim the issue for its own sake. My modest ambition was to write a historical interpretation of a once powerful anti-Semitic stereotype: the myth of Jewish Communism. I was struck by the discrepancy between the myth’s historical significance 193

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as one of the most destructive anti-Semitic myths of the last century, and the limited attention it had been given by professional historians. Jewish Communism was too controversial a topic for most historians to seriously and extensively deal with. The contentiousness of Jewish Communism as an object of history writing is twofold: it is both an emotionally or morally, and an empirically sensitive issue. The former is related to the fact that Jewish communists in power deviated so fundamentally from what I consider to be the long-time dominant paradigm of the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe, Leiden und Lernen; whilst the latter reflects the lack of reliable data. Speculation was unavoidable, not only with regards to the number of Jewish communists, but also with respect to their ideas, motives, ambitions, and behaviour. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe relieved the issue of most of its contentiousness. Jewish communism lost its taboo status and many of the politically inspired barriers for historical research were removed. The democratisation of the former communist countries enabled historians to access archives and to dig up data on the actual participation of Jews in the communist parties and regimes, which was previously regarded as a state secret. In general, the results of their research confirm earlier analyses: Jews were disproportionately present in the apparatuses of the early communist regimes in East Central Europe and Russia, in some parts of these regimes more than in others. Most research on Jewish communists is relatively recent. This has to do with the political changes Eastern Europe underwent in the late 1980s, as well as the more general changes and shifting paradigms in the historiography of European Jewry. It remains extremely difficult to position and explain the role and conspicuousness of Jews in the (early) communist regimes within the traditional interpretation of European Jewish history. The distinguishing features of this interpretation sit awkwardly with the role of Jewish revolutionaries in communist parties and regimes. Communist Jews neither learned nor suffered. They were at the other side of the dividing line. They ruled; they oppressed. Jewish communists denied many of the features of traditional (Jewish) historiography: passivity over responsibility, powerlessness over power; contingency over choice. Contemporaries and historians have tried to get around the unwelcome issue of Jewish communists in various ways. Many preferred to ignore it. Most Jewish contemporaries and a fair share of historians excluded Jewish communists from the history of the Jews. Communist ideologues exhibited the same reaction: they cleansed the history of communism from Jews. Other contemporary observers and historians denied the Jewishness of Jewish communists. They developed the notion of the non-Jewish Jew. There were good reasons to deny some 194

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communists of Jewish descent their Jewishness. Many no longer considered themselves as Jews. Some never had. The notion of the non-Jewish Jew may apply to some Jewish communists, but certainly not to all. It is a loose generalisation. It cannot explain the different and often paradoxical motivations and ambitions of many radical Jews. It fails to recognise the different identities Jewish radicals combined, amongst them the combination of being both Jewish and communist. Jewish publicists and historians who took the identification of Jews with communism more seriously, did not so much accept the Jewish nature of Bolshevism, as they acknowledged the susceptibility of many (young) Jews to political radicalism. Two explanations dominate the debate. A largely circumstantial interpretation focuses on the restrictive environment many Jews faced. It includes the constraints of the traditional Jewish community as well as the anti-Semitism of the Christian world. The existential explanation considers the similarities, the congeniality of the Jewish tradition (mostly religion) and political radicalism as a crucial variable. This interpretation was more popular among Jewish contemporaries than it was among historians, with the caveat that many Jewish observers made a strict distinction between socialism (which may have born the imprint of the Jewish Geist) and Bolshevism (which was alien to the spirit of Judaism). The myth of Jewish Communism was one of the most popular and widespread political prejudices of the first half of the 20th century, in Eastern Europe in particular. The myth conveniently elaborated on traditional anti-Jewish images: Jews as a mystical, subversive sect, set on undermining and controlling Christian society. But the myth was more than just the modern variant of an ancient prejudice. The notion of Jewish Communism combined traditional, religiously inspired antiJewish sentiments with radical 19th and 20th century anti-Semitic ideas. Moreover, the Jewish Communism myth came in various shapes and forms: from the most banal and viciously racist interpretations to more sophisticated, even quasi-scholarly explanations. It appealed to many different people, not only to the lunatic fringe. The myth of Jewish Communism derived its ultimate strength and vigour from very real and for many Europeans, unforeseen and threatening, changes. Idealtypically, research on anti-Semitism falls into two categories: firstly, studies in which anti-Semitism is presented as an illusion or chimera. Supposedly, anti-Semitism tells us everything about anti-Semites, but little about Jews. Secondly, there are other studies in which anti-Semitic ideas and behaviour are seen as relating to people’s behaviour, including Jews, and to the relations between Jews and non-Jews. The relationship between history and myth is far more complex than a categorical denial suggests. One may easily reject the mythical dimensions of Jewish 195

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Communism, yet still recognise the element of reality from which the myth stems. According to my interpretation, the historical relevance of Jewish Communism can only be explained in the context of the dramatic social and political change ongoing in Europe during the first decades of the last century. This does not diminish the mythical features of this antiSemitic stereotype, but it does provide insight into its prevalence and persistence. The question as to why the myth proved to be so tenacious in the eastern part of Europe cannot be answered with a simple reference to the strength of anti-Semitism in the region. Anti-Semitism was not necessarily stronger in the Eastern than in the Central or Western Europe. Neither was it equally prominent throughout the region. The strength of the Jewish Communism stereotype can only be explained by a combination of factors. The force of traditional anti-Jewish beliefs is a crucial variable, if only to account for the fact that Jewish Communism was a powerful argument in some countries, while absent in others, but so too were the dramatic political changes and conflicts in the eastern part of the continent. The size of the Jewish community and the force of anti-Jewish traditions are important variables to explain the strength of the myth of Jewish Communism in various countries of East Central Europe during the interwar years. But it does not suffice. Attitudes towards the revolutionary Soviet state and the traumatic experiences with Bolshevik rule seem to have been crucial too. Jews could be credibly linked to aggression from Soviet Russia. The Jewish World Conspiracy and from 1917 onwards, the myth of Jewish Communism, flourished in a wider European context. From the mid-19th century the traditional worlds of East Central European Jews and non-Jews came under increasing pressure. These pressures generated enormous changes, within and between both parts of the population. The legal emancipation of the Jews in Central Europe, and later in most of Eastern Europe, emigration, urbanisation, economic modernisation, the growth of a Jewish middle-class and of heavily Jewishdominated professions coincided with unsettling political developments such as the increase of nationalism, the formation of national states, as well as the advance of leftwing politics (liberalism, populism, socialism). Jews entered non-Jewish society in unprecedented large numbers. The Great War and its immediate aftermath would intensify the impact of these changes: Europe’s old empires fell apart and individual Jews reached positions of high political power. No event would be as crucial to the dissemination and popularity of the Jewish Communism stereotype as would the October Revolution in Russia. It all came together. The traditional order in Europe was not so much on the brink of collapse; it had already come apart. Conservative Europe grew obsessed 196

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with the threat of revolt and revolution, as well as with those who seemed to be the chief beneficiaries of such changes: the Jews. In Western Europe and in the United States, the myth of Jewish Communism did not survive the Second World War (or actually, the Holocaust). With perhaps the partial exception of the red scare of McCarthyism in the United States during the 1950s, the anti-Semitic stereotype which identified communism with the corporate Jew was no longer taken seriously beyond the lunatic fringe: National Socialists, white supremacists, and other xenophobes. Eastern Europe, however, tells a different story. One of the most interesting aspects of the myth of Jewish communism is how the communist regimes dealt with it. Communists in Eastern Europe, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, were acutely conscious of the political volatility of the notion, which combined anti-Semitism and anti-communism. They generally considered it (albeit in some countries more so than in others) to be a crucial variable of their legitimacy. However, not only Jews but also other ethnic minorities tended to be over-represented among the communists in the region. Moreover, Jewish presence was not equally extensive in all parties, at all times. It varied considerably, in time and between countries. Furthermore, of greater important than the actual number of Jewish communists was their conspicuousness. Jewish communists were very visible, especially for those who wanted to see them. Relatively many communists of Jewish descent were employed in sensitive branches of the party and state: culture, propaganda, and security. Finally, the participation of Jews in the communist parties rapidly diminished after communist rule was firmly established. In other words, Jewish communists were especially prominent during the first years of communist rule: in Russia until the mid-1930s and in East Central Europe until the mid-1950s and the onset of de-Stalinisation. The role of Jewish comrades was rarely discussed in public. The anti-anti-Semitic campaign of the late 1920s in Soviet Russia, during which the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiments in Soviet society was partly explained by the disproportionate presence of Jews in the communist apparat, was truly exceptional. Otherwise, the issue was discussed only behind closed doors. On the few occasions in which communist authorities publicly suggested a connection between communism and Jews, it was practically always within the context of fierce political struggle and with powerful anti-Semitic overtones – either within the communist party (the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, the 1968 events in Poland), or against the anti-communist opposition (in Poland in 1968). The first post-war decade was a mixed experience for the Jews of East Central Europe. The new communist order offered unprecedented 197

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opportunities as well as unforeseen dangers. Jewish returnees from the camps were never really welcome anywhere, but their reception in some of the countries of East Central Europe was particularly unfriendly. Jewish survivors were met with outright hostility and violence. They were wholly dependent on the authorities to guarantee their physical security. However Jews also enjoyed unique possibilities for social mobility and political emancipation. For the first time in history they entered the state bureaucracy and the upper echelons of the political hierarchy in relatively large numbers. It was a striking paradox: immediately after their moment of greatest grief and disaster, Jews reached what they had never reached before: formal positions of supreme political power. Meanwhile the communist regimes held on to the traditional idea that only full assimilation would ultimately solve the Jewish question. After a brief period during which the dual track of autonomy and assimilation was followed, the assimilation drive would predominate. Jewish autonomous community life, the Jewish religion and the traditional economy – they would be destroyed or come under full communist control, as would most other, non-Jewish expressions of autonomy and pluralism. Neither in the Soviet Union nor in communist East Central Europe did the communist regimes take the disproportionate presence of Jews in their ranks for granted. The early communist regimes were very much aware of their unbalanced ethnic composition. It was an embarrassment. Non-Jewish and Jewish communists considered it as an unwelcome, though inevitable and hopefully ephemeral phenomenon. The conspicuous presence of Jews would negatively impact upon parties’ popular support and legitimacy, the party leaderships worried. It was considered to be one of the primary reasons for the continuation, if not the resurgence, of anti-Semitism among the communist rank and file. The argument that Jewish over-representation should primarily be explained as a negative choice, a lesser evil, on the part of the communist leaderships, is supported by the post-factum observation that the upper bureaucracy was largely cleansed of Jews when the communist regimes felt secure enough to do so. There is no reason to believe that communists of Jewish descent were deliberately positioned, either by the local regimes or by the Kremlin, in the specifically sensitive sectors of the party and state apparatus, such as state security. All early communist regimes struggled with a lack of reliable cadres. The party was in urgent need of its Jewish comrades. There were few other options. By the late 1940s, purges occurred in all communist parties in East Central Europe. Not all communists of Jewish descent suffered equally under Stalinist or post-Stalinist purges. The purges and trials with anti-Jewish or anti-Zionist overtones in Poland, Hungary, and Romania never 198

Conclusion

reached the magnitude of the viciously anti-Semitic trial against Slánský in Czechoslovakia. Communists of Jewish heritage were victims of Stalinist and post-Stalinist repression for a variety of reasons. Some of these motives were directly related to their Jewishness, other were not, or only indirectly. The post-Stalinist purges in particular occurred in an atmosphere of great turmoil, general uncertainty, and vicious intra-party conflicts. Jewish communists may not have been specific targets, but to the extent that data allow us to draw this conclusion, they were victimised disproportionately. Deliberate political engineering is only part of the explanation though. Obviously, Jewish communists functioned as scapegoats. From the mid-1950s, leading communists would present their own variant of Jewish Communism: the notion of Jewish Stalinism. Post-Stalinist leaders blamed the old guard, among them quite a few comrades of Jewish descent, for the problems and failings of the early communist years. However, Jewish communists were easy targets for other reasons as well. Their early party history made them vulnerable. Many were among the old rank and file, among the “Spaniards” and the “Westerners” in the communist parties. Moreover, if communists of Jewish descent had been disproportionately present in various sectors of the Stalinist party and state apparatus, it should not come as a surprise that they were also over-represented amongst the victims of deStalinisation. The point, however, is that very few communists of Jewish background survived the purges. The challenge and ambition to “nationalise” the party leadership and rank and file was taken up with great determination. Within ten years of the war’s end, the prominent role of Jewish communists was over. Jewish communism did not outlast the Stalinist era. Disassociation from their Jewish comrades became a major concern of almost all post-Stalinist communist leaders. It was a desperate attempt by hard-pressed communist leaders to acquire national legitimacy through the use of the very same arguments which their anticommunist opponents had used against them before. Nasza wladza is how communists of Jewish descent viewed the new post-war regime in Poland: our regime! How cruel this regime, their communist comrades, treated them; how tragic their fate would be. The very same communist order which had promised them full emancipation and assimilation, in which they had invested their hope and aspirations, pushed them aside when it felt the necessity and had the capacity to do so – less than a decade after its establishment. Yet the worst was yet to come: in 1968 – their total and existential defeat, as Jaff Schatz, the biographer of Poland’s Jewish communists, writes, “the sudden slide down the social ladder, the bankruptcy of their moral, ideological and political life investment, and, in the end, their forced emigration” (Schatz 1991: 308). It must have been a traumatic experience. No 199

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defence was possible against the denunciations and the stigmatisation by their former comrades. The Jewish communists were old and tired, they were vulnerable, and they were ultimately helpless. The Jewish communists, as Jaff Schatz observes, were not only “the triumphant builders” of communism but also the ultimate “victims of its wrath” (Schatz 1991: 1). They had been among the leading instigators of the communist revolutions in Eastern Europe, and they were also its primary victims.

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220

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