Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an antisemitic, anti-communist conspiracy theory, and myth that claims that a Jewish conspiracy was behind the Russian Revolution of 1917, controlled the Soviet Union and international communist movements, and had a secret plan to control or destroy Western civilization; or, more generally, it is the antisemitic myth that Bolshevism was fundamentally Jewish. It was one of the main Nazi beliefs that served as an ideological justification for the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.
After the Russian Revolution, the catchword was the title of the pamphlet The Jewish Bolshevism, which featured in the racist propaganda of the anti-communist White movement forces during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922). During the 1930s, the Nazi Party in Germany and the German American Bund in the United States propagated the antisemitic theory to their followers, sympathisers, and fellow travellers. Nazi Germany used the trope to implement anti-Slavic policies and initiate racial war against the Soviet Union, portraying Slavs as inferior humans controlled by Jews to destroy Aryan people.
In Poland, was a term for the antisemitic opinion that the Jews had a disproportionately high influence in the administration of Communist Poland. Although a sizeable minority of Polish Communists were Jewish, Polish Jews were equally supportive of Communism as Catholics at around 7% by vote, and much of the party's support came from Belarusians and Ukrainians. In far-right politics, "Jewish Bolshevism", "Jewish Communism", and the ZOG conspiracy theory are catchwords asserting that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy.
Origins The conflation of Jews and revolution emerged in the atmosphere of destruction of Russia during World War I. When the revolutions of 1917 crippled Russia's war effort, conspiracy theories developed far from Berlin and Petrograd. Some commentators in Britain ascribed the revolution to an "apparent conjunction of Bolsheviks, Germans and Jews".Fromkin (2009) pp. 247–248.
In 1917, many Russian Jews were manual workers, artisans, or petite-bourgeoisie, and most were not Bolsheviks. Most Jewish socialists tended to go for the Jewish Labor Bund or Menshevik gradualism. As epitomized by Simon Dubnow, the majority of Russian Jews believed Leninism would lead to bloodshed. However, in the Soviet leadership, literate, urban Jewish people were able to obtain more representation than in the average European cabinet. By December 1917, five of the twenty-one members of the Communist Central Committee were Jewish, the commissar for foreign affairs, the president of the Supreme Soviet, the deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, the president of Petrograd Soviet, and the deputy director of the Cheka secret police. During the 1920s, 15 to 20 percent of party delegates were Jewish, as were many technocrats such as clerks, researchers, teachers, and administrators. During the Russian Civil War, Jews sought protection from the Red Army as massacres were perpetrated by anti-Bolshevik forces such as Symon Petliura and those carried out by Anton Denikin, even though in some cases the Red Army itself committed atrocities against Jews. But, these were atypical as Lenin issued orders of protection, leading to young Jews volunteering for the military. While Jews were overrepresented in Bolshevism relative to their proportion of the population, so were Latvians and Caucasians. The children of Orthodox priests, generally well-educated and lacking economic opportunities, were also overrepresented in the ranks of the revolutionary organizations. Jews were the most important ethnic group after Russians politically and numerically, but Bolshevism was not "Jewish." The majority of revolutionaries were non-Jewish. Later, Bolshevism Russianized and Jews were among the first of the ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union to suffer from it as Jews, like all non-Russians, were killed disproportionately in Stalin's purges.
The worldwide spread of the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory in the 1920s is associated with the publication and circulation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent document that purported to describe a secret Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination. The expression made an issue out of the Jewishness of leading Bolsheviks, such as Leon Trotsky. Daniel Pipes said that "primarily through The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Whites spread these charges to an international audience." James Webb wrote that it is rare to find an antisemitic source after 1917 that "does not stand in debt to the White Russian analysis of the Revolution".
Jewish involvement in Russian Communism
Antisemitism in the Russian Empire existed both culturally and institutionally. The Jews were restricted to live within the Pale of Settlement, and they also suffered pogroms.
As a result, many Jews supported gradual or revolutionary changes to the Russian Empire. Those movements ranged among the far left (Jewish Anarchism, Bundists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,) and moderate left (Trudoviks) and constitutionalist (Constitutional Democrats) parties. According to the 1922 Bolshevik party census, there were 19,564 Jewish Bolsheviks, comprising 5.21% of the total, and in the 1920s of the 417 members of the Central Executive Committee, the party Central Committee, the Presidium of the Executive of the Soviets of the USSR and the Russian Republic, the People's Commissars, 6% were ethnic Jews. Between 1936 and 1940, during the Great Purge, Yezhovshchina and after the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, Stalin had largely eliminated Jews from senior party, government, diplomatic, security and military positions.
Some scholars have grossly exaggerated Jewish presence in the Soviet Communist Party. According to Alfred Jensen, in the 1920s "75 per cent of the leading Bolsheviks" were "of Jewish origin". According to David Aaronovitch, "a cursory examination of membership of the top committees shows this figure to be an absurd exaggeration".
In 2013, speaking about the Schneerson Collection at the Moscow Jewish Museum and the Center for Tolerance, Russian President Vladimir Putin erroneously said: "The decision to nationalize the library was made by the first Soviet government, and Jews were approximately 80–85% members". According to historian Vladimir Ryzhkov, Putin's ignorant statement about the predominance of Jews in the Council of People's Commissars is due to the fact that "during the years of perestroika, he read the low-quality nationalist tabloid press". Some media outlets also criticized the statements of the President of the Russian Federation. So the editors of the newspaper Vedomosti, condemning the head of state for marginality, posted the following statistics:"If we discard the speculations of pseudoscientists who know how to find the Jewish origin of every revolutionary, it turns out that in the first composition of the Council of People's Commissars of Jews there were 8%: of its 16 members, only Leon Trotsky was a Jew. In the government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic of 1917–1922 Jews were 12% (six out of 50 people). Apart from the government, the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) on the eve of October 1917 had 20% Jews (6 out of 30), and in the first composition of the political bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – 40% (3 out of 7)".— Vedomosti (dated 17 June 2013).
Nazi Germany
Background Walter Laqueur traces the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theory to Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, for whom Bolshevism was "the revolt of the Jewish, Slavic and Mongolian races against the German (Aryan) element in Russia". Germans, according to Rosenberg, had been responsible for Russia's historic achievements and had been sidelined by the Bolsheviks, who did not represent the interests of the Russian people, but instead those of its ethnic Jewish and Chinese population.
Michael Kellogg in his Ph.D. thesis argued that the racist ideology of Nazis was to a significant extent influenced by White émigrés in Germany, many of whom, while former subjects of the Russian Empire, were of non-Russian descent: ethnic Germans, residents of Baltic lands including Baltic Germans, and Ukrainians. Of particular note was their Aufbau organization (Aufbau: Wirtschafts-politische Vereinigung für den Osten (Reconstruction: Economic-Political Organization for the East), whose leader was instrumental in making The Protocols of The Elders of Zion available in German. He argues that the early Hitler was rather philosemitic, and became rabidly antisemitic after 1919 under the influence of White émigré convictions about a conspiracy of Jews, an unseen unity from financial capitalists to Bolsheviks, to conquer the world. Therefore, he concluded, White émigrés were at the source of the Nazi concept of Jewish Bolshevism. Annemarie Sammartino argues that this view is contestable. While there is no doubt that White emigres were instrumental in reinforcing the idea of 'Jewish Bolshevism' among Nazis, the concept is also found in many early post–World War I German documents. Also, Germany had its own share of Jewish Communists "to provide fodder for the paranoid fantasies of German antisemites" without Russian Bolsheviks.
Adolf Hitler primarily viewed Bolshevik Revolution as an usurpation of power from Nordic-Germanic elites by Jews. Hitler classified Slavs as among the inferior races and believed that they lacked an independent ability for statecraft. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the Russian Empire had been dominated by an Aryan Germanic aristocracy who ruled over Russian masses, whom he viewed as primitive. During the 1920s, Hitler declared that the mission of the Nazi movement was to destroy "Jewish Bolshevism". Hitler asserted that the "three vices" of "Jewish Marxism" were democracy, pacifism and internationalism, and that Jews were behind Bolshevism, communism and Marxism. Nazi propaganda also used the trope to advance anti-Slavic racism, depicting Slavs as primitive hordes controlled by Jews to attack Aryans. Hitler ordered Operation Barbarossa with firm convictions of an inevitable German victory, due to his beliefs that Judeo-Bolshevism had liquidated Russia's Aryan aristocracy, which in his view, made the country into a failed state.
In Nazi Germany, this concept of Jewish Bolshevism reflected a common perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its origin. The term was popularized in print in German journalist Dietrich Eckhart's 1924 pamphlet "" ("Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin") which depicted both Moses and Lenin as Communist and Jewish. This was followed by Alfred Rosenberg's 1923 edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1925, which saw Bolshevism as "Jewry's twentieth century effort to take world dominion unto itself".