- A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink
The myth of an international Jewish communist conspiracy, often called Judeo-Bolshevism, has long been a central diet of anti-Semitic agendas, most notably in Hitler’s programme of ideological genocide. This ambitious book by American historian Paul Hanebrink provides an integrative history of this myth by analysing key chronological episodes from the aftermath of World War I to the present day.
His basic thesis is that the wandering Jew, who travelled from one country to another to escape persecution, was constructed as a transnational threat to established national social and economic orders. This threat built on long-standing anti-Jewish religious prejudices that were modernised by newer political conspiracy theories such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that alleged a Jewish threat to rule the world.
Hanebrink attempts to address what he calls “the measure of truth” (20) in the Judeo-Bolshevism argument. He acknowledges that some leading Communists were Jews, but then proceeds to imply that communism, and socialism more generally, was a marginal phenomenon amongst Jews. He presents two false outliers: the Hungarian Communist leader Bela Kun whose complete lack of Jewish identity was not even typical of most Jewish communists; and the erroneous assumption of Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) that the Bavarian communist leader Max Levien was Jewish, whilst failing to add that almost all the other leaders of the 1918–19 Bavarian revolutionary governments were in fact Jewish. In seriously understating the extent of Jewish involvement in the international Left as one major strategy for Jewish self-defence against violent right-wing anti-Semitism (for example, the famous Jewish socialist Bund attracts only three small references in this long book), he arguably leaves one key part of this political puzzle unravelled.
Nevertheless, much of the historical overview is impressive. He traces the early spread of the Judeo-Bolshevism idea via the British journalist Robert Wilton, Alfred Rosenberg, who would later become one of the key ideologues of the Nazi movement, and the two French writers Jerome and Jean Tharaud, who presented the short-lived Hungarian Communist regime as an example of Jewish tyranny. He relates the sad story of how this idea propelled the horrendous massacre of Jews in 1919 Ukraine and contributed to major anti-Semitic violence in other Eastern European countries with strong traditions of popular anti-Semitism such as Poland, Hungary and Romania.
Hanebrink provides a thorough analysis of the centrality of Judeo-Bolshevism to Nazi anti-Semitism and the prosecution of the Holocaust, particularly in Russia. He documents how the alleged fear of Judeo-Bolshevism, and associated exaggerated claims of Jewish collaboration [End Page 233] with the Soviet occupation forces from 1939–41, were used to encourage and justify major pogroms in Eastern European countries under Nazi rule. Even the famous Warsaw Ghetto uprising was misrepresented by radical Polish nationalists as a communist activity.
The post-World War II Soviet takeover in Eastern Europe produced a renewed fear of Jewish revenge via the imposition of communist governments. There were indeed a number of Jews in the communist leadership in Poland, Hungary and Romania, but they were mostly long-time communist functionaries with little connection to any Jewish culture. Additionally, their influence amidst continuing popular anti-Semitism, as reflected in a number of pogroms, most notably in the Polish city of Kielce, was short-lived. The anti-Jewish show trial of Slansky and other leading Jewish communists in Czechoslovakia and the associated Doctors’ Plot in the Soviet Union sent a clear message that communism was not Jewish.
In contrast, the defeat of Nazism compelled leading anti-communists within Germany and Austria, many of whom had earlier endorsed Nazi anti-Semitism, to repudiate any association of Jews with communism. This about-face was driven by American Cold War philosophy, which placed Jews and Christians as allies in the war against communism.
However, the Judeo-Bolshevism theory was revived much later by right-wing German and French historians who contended alternatively...