At the end of the nineteenth century, conversion to communism or Zionism among the newly emancipated Ashkenazi Jews was associated with the rejection of the Talmud. But the split led to two divergent options and two visions of history. Chaim Weizmann recounts in his autobiography (Trial and Error, 1949) that Jews in Russia in the early twentieth century were divided, sometimes within single families, between revolutionary communists and revolutionary Zionists. These divisions, however, were relative and changeable; not only were the pioneers of Zionism often Marxist, but many communist Jews became ardent Zionists throughout the twentieth century. The borderline was all the more vague as the powerful General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, better known as the Bund, inscribed in its revolutionary agenda the right of the Jews to found a secular Yiddish-speaking nation. Moreover, some financiers in Europe and America supported the two movements jointly, to make them the two jaws of the same pincers that would clutch Europe: Jacob Schiff, one of the richest American bankers of the time, financed Herzl and Lenin simultaneously.
Russia and the Jews
Before analyzing the impact of Zionism and communism in Europe during what Yuri Slezkine calls “the Jewish century,”273 we need to look back at the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe. From the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, the Jewish community in Poland was the largest in the world. Its origin remains difficult to explain, but immigration from the Rhine countries at the end of the Middle Ages is the most plausible hypothesis. In the seventeenth century, Poland was governed by an oligarchy that concentrated all the wealth in its hands, and relied on the Jews for the exploitation of the peasants. Totally unassimilated, speaking Yiddish and hardly any Polish, the Jews lived under the control of their own administrative and judicial system, the kahal, which maintained the cohesion of the community by prohibiting competition among its members. But the Jews were also important players in the national economy. They were the landowners’ administrators and tax collectors. As legal middlemen in the grain trade, they manipulated prices at will. Their complicity in the oppression of the peasant masses by the nobility inevitably generated resentments that were expressed in explosions of violence. When the Cossacks led by Bogdan Chmielnicki revolted against the Polish nobles in 1648, the Jews were the first to be massacred.274
After the annexation of part of Poland by Russia between 1772 and 1795, these Ashkenazi Jews lived mainly in Russia, cantoned in their “Pale of Settlement.” They numbered six hundred thousand on the eve of the first partition (1772), and nearly six million by 1897.275 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most still spoke neither Polish nor Russian. In 1801 a memoir written by the senator and writer Gabriel Romanovich Derjavin for Tsar Paul I after an observation mission in the Pale of Settlement, revealed that a majority of Jews made their living from the manufacture and sale of vodka, to which they were granted exclusive rights by the Polish nobility. By combining this activity with their second specialty, lending money at interest (i.e., selling alcohol on credit), they encouraged alcoholism among the peasants and indebted them to the point of ruin: “The Jews out of greed were exploiting the drinking problems of the peasants to cheat them out of their grain, in order to turn the grain into vodka, and as a result were causing famine.” Derjavin also denounced the Polish landowners, who did not administer their properties directly but instead used Jewish tenants: “Many greedy farmers ruin the peasants through back-breaking labors and impositions, and render them bereft of land or family.” Several efforts were made to put an end to this situation, but the lack of continuity in the policy of the successive tsars rendered them ineffective. A parallel policy of encouraging Jews to become farmers, through the granting of fertile lands, material, and animals, also failed and was abandoned in 1866.276
Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881), who emancipated the serfs in 1861, also abolished most of the restrictions imposed on the Jews and facilitated their access to Russian education. Between 1876 and 1883, the proportion of Jews in the universities increased considerably. Emancipated and educated, many young Jewish intellectuals became revolutionaries. While rejecting the Talmudism of their parents, they inherited their hatred of Christian and peasant Russia, while the Tsar remained in their eyes an avatar of Pharaoh. The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881, by a group of anarchists including Jews, triggered violent pogroms. Noting that more than 40 percent of law and medicine students at Kharkov and Odessa universities were Jewish, the new Tsar imposed a numerus clausus, which only reinforced the sense of injustice and revolutionary spirit among Jewish youth.277
The revolutionary forces that forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate in February 1917 were far from being exclusively Jewish. There was great discontent in all underprivileged classes, especially among the peasants. However, both opponents and advocates of Bolshevism have noted the high proportion of Jews among the Bolsheviks who overturned the February Revolution and Aleksandr Kerensky’s provisional government by their own October Revolution.278 Jewish historian Angelo Rappoport wrote in his seminal work: “The Jews in Russia, in their total mass, were responsible for the Revolution.”279 Winston Churchill wrote in a famous article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald published February 8, 1920: “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 atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.” In this article titled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,” Churchill sided with the Zionist cause, referring to Bolshevism as “this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.”280
On the other side, the official gazette of Hungarian Jewry Egyenlöség (Equality) proclaimed: “Jewish intellect and knowledge, Jewish courage and love of peace saved Russia and perhaps the whole world. Never has world historical mission of Jewry shone so brightly as in Russia. Trotsky’s words prove that the Biblical and prophetic Jewish spirit of Isaiah and Micah, the great peace-makers, with that of the Talmudic Elders, is inspiring the leaders of Russia to-day.”281 The September 10, 1920 edition of The American Hebrew magazine pompously bragged: “The Bolshevik Revolution eliminated the most brutal dictatorship in history. This great achievement, destined to figure in history as one of the overshadowing results of the World War, was largely the product of Jewish thinking, Jewish discontent, Jewish effort to reconstruct.”282 “Jewish financing” should be added to the list, for the Bolshevik Revolution was largely financed by Wall Street bankers such as Jacob Schiff, who gloated: “The Russian revolution is possibly the most important event in Jewish history since the race was brought out of slavery.”283
The American Hebrew had also published, October 31, 1919, an article titled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” warning of “this threatened holocaust of human life” on “six millions” of European Jews, who “are being whirled toward the grave by a cruel and relentless fate,” “six million men and women [a figure repeated seven times in one page] are dying from lack of the necessaries of life […] through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood.”284 “Jewish blood” here refers to the Russian civil war, when the counter-revolutionary struggle of the Russian and Ukrainian peasants gave rise to anti-Jewish pogroms (6,000 victims in 1919). The New York Times also distinguished itself in postwar propaganda designed to convince readers that the Jews had been the main victims of the First World War. In The New York Times of September 29, 1919, Felix Warburg, Chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for Jewish War Sufferers (founded in 1914 and still in existence with the shortened name of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), wrote that the Jews “were the worst sufferers in the war.” “The successive blows of contending armies have all but broken the back of European Jewry and have reduced to tragically unbelievable poverty, starvation and disease about 6,000,000 souls, or half the Jewish population of the earth.”285
Despite the many Russian pseudonyms adopted by the officers of the Bolshevik system, Russians were well aware that they had been conquered by a foreign people. A 1926 Agitprop report to the Central Committee secretariat expresses concern about a wave of anti-Semitism resulting from “the sense that the Soviet regime patronizes the Jews, that it is ‘the Jewish government,’ that the Jews cause unemployment, housing shortages, college admissions problems, price rises, and commercial speculation—this sense is instilled in the workers by all the hostile elements.” Repression of this “bourgeois anti-Semitism” was all the more brutal in that, as Yuri Slezkine notes, “the Soviet secret police—the regime’s sacred center, known after 1934 as the NKVD—was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions. […] Out of twenty NKVD directorates, twelve (60 percent, including State Security, Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement [deportation]) were headed by officers who identified themselves as ethnic Jews. The most exclusive and sensitive of all NKVD agencies, the Main Directorate for State Security, consisted of ten departments: seven of them […] were run by immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement.”286 Robert Wilton, a Moscow correspondent for the London Times for seventeen years, provided precise indications as to the proportion of Jews among Bolshevik apparatchiks as early as 1920. The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which exercised supreme power, included 9 Jews and 3 Russians. (Lenin was counted among the Russians, although his maternal grandfather, born Srul [Israel], was Jewish). All the Central Committees of the parties represented included 41 identifiable Jews out of 61 members. The Council of People’s Commissars comprised 17 Jews out of 22 members. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik State officially published in 1918–1919, 458 were identifiable as Jews.287
The Bolshevik Revolution pulled the rug out from under the Zionist propaganda machine, which had hitherto been based on reports of the Russian pogroms, amplified by the Western press. On March 25, 1906, The New York Times could evoke the fate of “Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews”: “the Russian Government’s studied policy for the ‘solution’ of the Jewish question is systematic and murderous extermination.” But such alarmist propaganda was no longer possible in 1917, since one of the first measures taken by the Bolsheviks was a law criminalizing anti-Semitism. The Russian Civil War did provide some space for a new narrative: on July 20, 1921, during the Russian Civil War, the same New York Times could still publish the headline “Massacre Threatens All Jews as Soviet Power Wanes. Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination.”288 A few years later, Chaim Weizmann, who had used the pogroms of Russia as a diplomatic lever in 1917, was forced to contradict himself: “Nothing can be more superficial and nothing can be more wrong than that the sufferings of Russian Jewry ever were the cause of Zionism. The fundamental cause of Zionism has been, and is, the ineradicable national striving of Jewry to have a home of its own—a national center, a national home with a national Jewish life.”289 Only when Hitler’s coming to power posed a new threat to the Jews, could Jewish suffering become again the main argument for the creation of Israel.
Ironically, the Jewish character of the Bolshevik Revolution was one of the main causes of the German anti-Semitism that brought Hitler to power. The Red Terror was a very close threat to the Germans. In 1918 there was a Bolshevik Revolution in Bavaria led by the Jew Kurt Eisner, who had established a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. “What is most essential in National Socialism,” according to German historian Ernst Nolte, “is its relation to Marxism, particularly to communism, in the form it took through the Bolshevik victory during the Russian Revolution.”290 It is often forgotten that in 1933, when Hitler came to power, the Soviets had just committed genocidal massacres followed by organized famine in Ukraine, at the gates of Germany, killing nearly eight million people, or one-third of the population. This crime against humanity, carried out by a predominantly Jewish NKVD, would never be mentioned in the Nuremberg trials, and still today is hardly ever discussed. (When in 2009, Ukraine opened a tribunal to prosecute the crime, Aleksandr Feldman, the chairman of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, forced the cancellation of the proceedings on the pretext that it would constitute an incitement to hatred, since the names of almost all the Soviet officers charged were Jewish.)291
The second enemy designated by Hitler was international finance, which was responsible for the depression of the 1930s. Banking was heavily dominated by Jews. In Berlin before the First World War, thirty private banks out of fifty belonged to Jewish families, and the proportion increased after the war.292 Thus, many Germans equated the horrors of Bolshevism with a Jewish plot, and the dominant position of the Jews in the capitalist economy—the revolution and the bank—were the two crucibles of Nazi anti-Semitism. This reminds us of Theodor Herzl’s assessment of the root of anti-Semitism: “When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.”293 To all this was added the well-known role of the Jews in the defeat and annihilation of Germany at the end of the First World War, as the English Zionist Samuel Landman acknowledged in a 1936 memoir: “The fact that it was Jewish help that brought the USA into the War on the side of the Allies has rankled ever since in German—especially Nazi—minds, and has contributed in no small measure to the prominence which anti-Semitism occupies in the Nazi programme.”294
Of course, “the Jews” of Germany were not responsible for the intrigues of a handful of elites in the circles of power. These elites, however, claim to speak in the name of the Jews, and derive some of their power from this claim of representing their people. They pretend to speak for the community, while, to its misfortune, the silent majority of the Jews is taken hostage. Thus, as early as the 1920s, Judeophobia spread in Germany, hindering the process of assimilation of even the most German-speaking Jews. The case of Theodor Lessing is exemplary: from a family whose Judaism was no more than a remnant, he departed still further from the Jewish community in 1899 and married a young woman of the Prussian aristocracy. But his in-laws refused to meet their Jewish son-in-law, and he returned to the Jewish faith, henceforth with an ethnic conception of Jewishness. He expressed his rejection of assimilation in Jewish Self-Hatred, published in Berlin in 1930. Lessing psychologically analyzes the tragic journey of certain Jews who have broken with their Jewishness, while curiously avoiding the question of his own narcissistic wound that led him to break with his desire for assimilation.
Zionism and Nazism
German Judeophobia was radicalized by the racialist theories of the time and turned into an extremely virulent anti-Semitism. Jewish intellectuals largely contributed to this ideological climate. The Struggle of the Races (Der Rassenkampf) published in 1883 by Ludwig Gumplowicz, a Jew from Cracow and professor of political science in Graz for twenty years, had a considerable influence on Germanic racism: “The perpetual struggle of the races is the law of history, while ‘perpetual peace’ is only the dream of the idealists,” he wrote. According to Gumplowicz, individuals of the same race are interconnected by “syngeneic feelings” that make them “seek to act as a single factor in the struggle for domination.”295 The term “race” at the time had a rather vague meaning, synonymous with “people,” and Gumplowicz, who expressed no particular sympathy for the Jews, included in the formation of syngeneic feeling not only consanguinity, but also education, language, religion, custom, and law. But the theoreticians of Jewish nationalism developed a narrower conception of race, which would directly influence, through mimetic rivalry, the ideology of the Aryan race. Recall that for Benjamin Disraeli, “language and religion do not make a race—there is only one thing that makes a race, and that is blood” (Endymion, 1880). As early as 1862, Moses Hess had emphasized the purity of his race: “The Jewish race is one of the primary races of mankind that has retained its integrity, in spite of the continual change of its climatic environment, and the Jewish type has conserved its purity throug
h the centuries.” “The Jewish type is indestructible.” Therefore, “a Jew belongs to his race and consequently also to Judaism, in spite of the fact that he or his ancestors have become apostates.”296 The editor of Jewish World, Lucien Wolf, an influential historian and politician, insisted on the racial definition of Jewishness. He proclaimed the racial superiority of the Jews in an influential 1884 article titled “What is Judaism? A Question of To-Day”: “It is too little known that the Jews are as a race really superior, physically, mentally, and morally, to the people among whom they dwell.”297
Thus, in nineteenth- to twentieth-century Germany, Jewish racism precedes Aryan racism, just as in sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Spain the Marranos’ pride in their blood had provoked a reaction: the Iberian statutes of “purity of blood.” The parallel was made by Yitzhak Fritz Baer in Galut, published in Berlin in 1936. In both cases, we have Jewish communities suddenly emancipated (by baptism between 1391 and 1497, by European laws between the end of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century), who rapidly acquire an economic, political, and cultural power disproportionate to their number, and who express racial pride offensive to the Gentiles, generating in the latter a hostility that turns into “race war.”298 “A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German custom, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish. […] A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity.” These words were not written by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, but twenty years earlier, in 1904, by the Zionist Zeev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky in his “Letter on Autonomy.”299 At the time of Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, the Jewish community had been subjected to racial indoctrination of the völkisch type for half a century, especially from the Zionists. It was the Jew Haim Arlosoroff who, after the First World War, invented the term Volkssozialismus as the ideology of the Zionist party Hapoel Hatzair (“Young Workers”).300
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