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Jewish Bolshevism, Judeo-Bolshevism, Judeo-Communism, or in Polish, Żydokomuna, is an antisemitic conspiracy theory which blames the Jews for Bolshevism; it is an antisemitic political epithet.

The expression was the title of a pamphlet, The Jewish Bolshevism, and became current after the October Revolution (1917) in Russia, and spread worldwide in the 1920s with the publication and circulation of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It made an issue out of the Jewishness of Bolsheviks (most notably Leon Trotsky) during and after the revolution.

The label "Judeo-Bolshevism" was used in Nazi Germany to equate Jews with communists, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests and/or that all Jews were communists.

Nowadays, it is used in the antisemitic site Jew Watch.

The idea of linking Jewishnes with Bolshevism was elaborated by the Nazis in Nazi Germany. The claim was that Jewishness and Bolshevism are one. Laqueur asserts that the identification of Bolshevism with Jewry was perhaps the only truly original contribution which Nazism made to the study of Bolshevism or Communism:

"If Nazism made any original contribution to this field of study, it was the identification of world Jewry and Bolshevism;

a dogma it repeated time and again on every level of sophistication from the quasi-scientific to the most vulgar.

From the factual angle it was an uphill struggle; true, a fairly large percentage of the early Bolshevik leaders

had been Jewish by origin. But what the Nazis chose to ignore was the inconvenient fact that these Jewish Bolsheviks

had turned against their own religion and people and wanted nothing to do with them;

and the percentage of Jews in anti-Bolshevik political parties — such as the Mensheviks — was even higher.

They also ignored the fact that even within the Bolshevik party leadership the participation of Jews

had begun to decrease in the middle twenties, and had become quite insignificant after the big purges

of the late thirties; Kaganovich was in fact the only Communist of Jewish origin left

in the supreme party leadership.

...

Hitler and Rosenberg had decided, once and forever, that Communism was the revolt of the underlings;

a racial, not an ideological movement. Ideological discussions with Marxists, they said,

were not merely senseless and absurd but positively harmful;

it would imply that National Socialism accepted the Communists as more or less equal partners;

that the Communists had an ideology which deserved to be taken seriously;

what was important was to analyse the true (racial) sources of Communism.

As a Communist one could win an argument simply by provingthat one's ideas

conformed to those of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin.

As a Nazi any connection with Marx or Marxism was a priori evil,

for Marx had been born a Jew.|"Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). James Webb writes: "t is rare to find an anti-Semitic source after 1917 which does not stand in debt to the White Russian analysis of the Revolution."

Background

Walter Laqueur, in his seminal work, Russia and Germany, A Century of Conflict, traces this conspiracy theory to the most important Nazi ideologue and Baltic German, Arthur Rosenberg:

Rosenberg's obiter dicta about Russia and Communism are found in the Mythos and in countless brochures and booklets: Bolshevism is the revolt of the Jewish and Mongolian races against the Germans (aryan) element in Russia; it is the revolt of the steppe, the hatred of the nomads of everything great, heroic, racially healthy; all big things in Russian history had been achieved by Germans or those of German blood, but the revolution of 1917 had exterminated the aryan element. . . ., nor did the Jewish-Soviet Government represent the Russian people. To the Nazi ideologists, all leading Soviet statesmen were Jews: Lenin and Trotsky, Lunacharsky and Rakovsky, Kuibyshev and Krasin, Beria and Manuilsky among them. Whoever was not a Jew was a Chinese. Rosenberg developed an elaborate theory about the leading role of Chinese silk merchants in the Russian revolution. While other observers of the Soviet scene engaged in political speculation and social analysis, the Nazis' Russian experts were preoccupied with another kind of scientific investigation which hardly left them time for anything else. They tracked down the 'real' (Jewish) names of all Soviet leaders; Lunacharsky, for instance, became Mondschein - for who did not know that 'luna' was 'moon' in Latin? This, by and large, was the level of Nazi Sovietology.

— Laqueur, Ibid., pp. 21-22

Jews had been a persecuted minority in the Russian Empire. They had endured a form of physical segregation in the Pale of Settlement, as well as sporadic persecutions supported by Tsarist governments. More than two millions Russian Jews emigrated (in the period from 1881 to 1920, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire).

On the eve of the February Revolution, the Bolshevik party had about 10,000 members, of which 364 were ethnic Jews.

In 1924, the US Senate issued a report, titled Conditions in Russia, in which it reproduced the census results which the Soviet government had published in Pravda. Those results showed that the majority of Bolsheviks were Russian, with Ukrainians in second place. Nevertheless, no prominent expressions, such as "Russian Bolshevism," or "Ukrainian Bolshevism" had emerged.

Jewish Bolsheviks

A high percentage of ethnic Jews in comparison to the percentage of the total population took an active part in Bolshevik movement and revolutionary leadership before the revolution and for years after, see details below. Most of these Jews were hostile to traditional Jewish culture and Jewish political parties, and were eager to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party's atheism and proletarian internationalism, and committed to stamp out any sign of "Jewish cultural particularism".

Of the nine members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party in April 1917, three were of Jewish decent (Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov). Of the twelve committee members (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Sverdlov, Yakovleva, Oppokov, Zinoviev, Kamenev) who, during a historic meeting on October 10, 1917, agreed for the necessity of armed revolution (leading to the October Revolution), six were Jewish (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Uritsky, Sverdlov, and Sokolnikov, although Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed the revolution).

Out of Lenin's fifteen Peoples' Commissars (Narkoms) in 1919, six were Jewish (Trotsky, Uritsky, Isaac Steinberg, I. A. Teodorovich, Semyon Dimanstein and Sokolnikov). Among the 23 Narkoms between 1923–1930, there were twelve Russians, five Jews, two Georgians (Stalin and Ordzhonikidze), one Pole, one Moldavian, one Latvian, and one Ukrainian. The situation had clearly evolved, within a relatively short time, to the advantage of the Russian majority. In the 1930s, there was one person of Jewish descent in the Politburo (Lazar Kaganovich).

In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them) 7.1% were Jewish (65% were Russian).

The number of Jews in top administrative positions began to decline soon after 1917. It continued to shrink heavily in the 1930s when Stalin had his old comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev executed while in prison, after a rigged trial in 1936. Kamenev and Zinoviev had previously been expelled, in 1926 and 1927, from the top positions they shared with Stalin in the Soviet ruling elite. Leon Trotsky had concurrently been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1927 and was then assassinated in Mexico City in 1940, by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader. Thus by the year 1940, and after his rapprochement with Hitler's Germany, Stalin had eliminated virtually all Jews from very high level government positions inside the Soviet Union.

Walter Laqueur states in his book The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day:

To what extent did the presence of many Jews among the Communist leadership contribute to antisemitism? It certainly played an important role in antisemitic propaganda, and it is certainly true that during the 1920s Jews were heavily overrepresented in the ranks of party and state officials. With the rise of Stalin, Jews were removed from key positions and very often "liquidated." The fact that other minorities were also disproportionately highly represented did not greatly matter - there was no tradition of anti-Latvianism in Russia, nor were Latvians found in the very top positions. Nor did it matter that Jews were equally strongly represented among other anti-Communist parties of the left such as the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, or that the anti-Stalinist opposition was to a considerable extent of Jewish extraction.

In his 1938 book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery, based on his testimony at the Berne Trial, Vladimir Burtsev wrote:

"Antisemites... refused to acknowledge the important and indisputable fact that the Jews who participated in the Socialist and Anarchist movements around the world, including the Russian Jews in particular, were renegades of the Jewish nation who had no connection with Jewish history nor with Jewish religion nor with Jewish masses, but were rather exclusively internationalists, promoting the ideas shared by Socialists of other ethnicities, and were hostile to the Jewish nation in general."

Reactions and allegations

"The great majority of non-Jews reacted negatively to the intensification of Jewish political activity, and it became one of the important factors in the exacerbation of differences between Jews and their surroundings that cast its shadow over the two inter-war decades. ... It was apparently the emigrants who fled the Russian Revolution who brought to the West the claim that Bolshevism was a Jewish affair (the old anti-Semitic argument regarding 'Jewish domination' in new guise)."

Nazi Germany

In Nazi Germany, this term expressed the common perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its very origin: Karl Marx. The term was popularized in print by German journalist Dietrich Eckhart, who authored the pamphlet "Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin" in the early 1920s, thereby tying Moses and Lenin as both Communists and Jews. Alfred Rosenberg's 1923 edition of the Protocols "gave a forgery a huge boost". This was followed by Hitler's highly inflammatory statement in "Mein Kampf" (1924): "In Russian Bolshevism we must see Jewry's twentieth century effort to take world dominion unto itself".

According to Michael Kellogg, the author of The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945:

In his groundbreaking 1939 book, L’Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de la propagande allemande d’après des documents inédits (The Apocalypse of Our Times: The Hidden Side of German Propaganda According to Unpublished Documents), Henri Rollin stressed that “Hitlerism” represented a form of “anti-Soviet counter-revolution” which employed the “myth of a mysterious Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot.” Rollin investigated the National Socialist belief, which was taken primarily from White émigré views, that a vast Jewish-Masonic conspiracy had provoked World War Ⅰ, toppled the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and unleashed Bolshevism after undermining the existing order through the insidious spread of liberal ideas. German forces promptly destroyed Rollin’s work in 1940 after they occupied France, and the book has remained in obscurity ever since.

United States and Great Britain, 1920s

The American Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish. Also, in a report to the United States and other governments from British Intelligence, entitled "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", it is stated in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.

Captain Montgomery Schuyler, a military intelligence officer in Russia, reported regularly to the chief of staff of U.S. Army Intelligence (the Army handled intelligence before the CIA was established), who relayed the reports to the President. In one of these, declassified in 1958, Schuyler states:

It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States, but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning, guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type …

In another report on June 9, 1919, Schuyler cites Robert Wilton, who was then the chief correspondent in Russia for The Times. He writes the following, which the historical record shows, incidentally, to be mostly inaccurate:

A table made up in 1918, by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia, shows at that time there were 384 commissars including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number, 264 had come from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.

"Even Winston Churchill briefly joined this bandwagon, blaming the Russian Revolution on Jews." In his article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920, Churchill asserted:

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.

Churchill also declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". Such attitudes were not uncommon in the UK at the time of the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The British court of inquiry, appointed to investigate the Arab 1920 Palestine riots, associated Zionism with Bolshevism and identified Ze'ev Jabotinsky with a Labor Zionist party Poale Zion, which the court called "a definite Bolshevist institution." In reality he was a right-wing leader. "The association of the fiercely antisocialist Jabotinsky with a Marxist party was not the only nonsense in the report."

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

Iran, 2006

The allegation was revived in a December 28, 2006 interview by Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin who was appointed secretary-general of the new "World Foundation for Holocaust Studies" established at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust:

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

References

1. Walter Laqueur (1965): Russia and Germany (Boston: Little, Brown and Company)
2. ^ Walter Laqueur (1965): Russia and Germany (Boston: Little, Brown and Company) Cite error: The named reference "laqueur" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
3. James Webb (1976): Occult Establishment: The Dawn of the New Age and The Occult Establishment, (Open Court Publishing), p.295. ISBN 0-87548-434-4
4. ^ Political Activity and Emigration. Beyond the Pale. The History of Jews in Russia. (Exhibition by Friends and Partners Project)
5. Sergey Kara-Murza, Soviet Civilization, vol. 1 (The chapter about the growth of Russian political parties during February-October 1917 online) Template:Ru icon
6. Religions attacked in the USSR (Beyond the Pale)
7. Samson Madiyevsky, Jews and the Russian Revolution: whether there Was a Choice, an article in Lechaim (online)
8. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/10a.htm
9. Template:Ru icon The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery (Ch. 3) by Vladimir Burtsev
10. Ben-Sasson, H.H., ed. (1976): A History of the Jewish People. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge). ISBN 0-674-39730-4, p.944
11. ^ Daniel Pipes (1997): Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (The Free Press - Simon & Shuster) p.95. ISBN 0-684-83131-7
12. The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 by Michael Kellogg (excerpt)
13. Francis, David R. Russia From the American Embassy. New York: C. Scribner's & Sons, 1921. p. 214.
14. U.S. National Archives. Dept. of State Decimal File, 1910–1929, file 861.00/5067.
15. ^ U.S. National Archives. Record group 120: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces, June 9, 1919.
16. Churchill, Winston. "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People." Illustrated Sunday Herald. 8 February 1920.
17. Cover Story: Churchill's Greatness. Interview with Jeffrey Wallin. (The Churchill Centre)
18. ^ Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, Metropolitan Books, 1999. p.141
19. James Webb (1976): Occult Establishment: The Dawn of the New Age and The Occult Establishment, (Open Court Publishing), p.130. ISBN 0-87548-434-4
20. Mohammad Ali Ramin, Advisor to Iranian President Ahmadinejad: 'Hitler Was Jewish' (MEMRI Special Dispatch Series No.1408) January 3, 2007

See also

• History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union
• Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• Bolshevik
• Yevsektsiya
• History of antisemitism
• Komzet
  • OZET
• Red Latvian Riflemen
• Jewish Autonomous Oblast
  • Birobidzhan
• Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion)
• Jewish Communist Union (Poalei Zion)
• Poale Zion
• Jewish left

External links

• Stalin's Jews by Israeli journalist Sever Plocker (ynetnews.com)

Further reading

• Arkady Vaksberg: Stalin against the Jews, 1994, Vintage Books (a division of Random House, New York), ISBN 0-679-42207-2
• Yuri Slezkine: The Jewish Century, 2004, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-11995-3
• Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime, 1993, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, ISBN 0-394-50242-6
• Mikhail Agursky: The Third Rome.National Bolshevism in the USSR,1987,Westview Press, ISBN 08133-0139-4
• Robert Wistrich: Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, 1976, Harrap, London, ISBN 0-245-52785-0

• Articles to be merged from October 2007
• Antisemitic canards
• Communism
• Conspiracy theories
• Jewish Russian and Soviet history