History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  By contrast, Rosa Luxemburg never referred to her Jewishness, if she could possibly help it. She tried to ignore anti-Semitic attacks on her, and this was often difficult for the most odious caricatures of her appeared in the German press. Moreover, there was a strong anti-Semitic tinge to the attacks on her by German trade unionists and socialists with working class backgrounds. They disliked her tone of intellectual superiority and her confident assertions of what ‘the workers’ wanted. She brushed this aside. ‘For the followers of Marx,’ she wrote, ‘as for the working class, the Jewish question as such does not exist.’ Attacks on the Jews, in her view, were confined to ‘small, remote villages in southern Russia and Bessarabia—namely, where the revolutionary movement is weak or non-existent’. She hardened her heart to those who claimed her sympathy for atrocities against Jews. ‘Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?’ she wrote. ‘I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victims in Putumayo, the negroes in Africa…. I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto.’53

  Rosa Luxemburg’s moral and emotional distortions were characteristic of an intellectual trying to force people into a structure of ideas, rather than allowing ideas to evolve from the way people actually behaved. The Jews of eastern Europe were not an artificial creation of the capitalist system. They were a real people, with their own language, religion and culture. Their sorrows were real enough too, and persecutions were inflicted on them because they were Jews and for no other reason. They even had their own socialist party, the Bund (abbreviation of General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), created in 1897. The Bund campaigned vigorously for full civil rights for Jews. But Bundists were divided on whether Jews should be accorded an autonomous state when the ‘Workers’ Republic’ came into existence. They were confused, too, about Zionism, and their ranks were constantly depleted by emigration. Hence they tended to close their ranks around a defence of Yiddish national culture.

  This insistence on the uniqueness of Jewish culture made them peculiarly detestable to those Jewish socialists, like Rosa Luxemburg, who denied the Jews any social or cultural particularity at all. They were vehement in repudiating Bundist claims. And their hostility to separate political organizations of Jews shaped the orthodoxy of the revolutionary left. Lenin, in particular, became a fierce opponent of specifically Jewish rights. ‘The idea of a Jewish “nationality” is definitely reactionary,’ he wrote (1903), ‘not only when expounded by its consistent advocates (the Zionists) but likewise on the lips of those who try to combine it with the ideas of social democracy (the Bundists). The idea of a Jewish nationality runs counter to the interests of the Jewish proletariat, for it fosters among them, directly or indirectly, a spirit hostile to assimilation, the spirit of the “ghetto”.’ Again, in 1913, he wrote: ‘Whoever directly or indirectly puts forward the slogan of a Jewish “national culture” is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of the old and of the caste position of the Jews, an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie.’54

  Hence the whole philosophy of the proletarian revolution was based on the assumption that the Jew, as such, did not exist except as a fantasy promoted by a distorted socio-economic system. Destroy that system and the caricature Jew of history would vanish, like an ugly nightmare, and the Jew would become an ex-Jew, an ordinary man. It is hard now for us to get back inside the minds of highly intelligent, well-educated Jews who believed this theory. But many thousands of them did. They hated their Jewishness, and to fight for the revolution was the most morally acceptable means to escape from it. It gave to their revolutionary struggle a peculiar emotional vehemence, because they believed its success would involve a personal liberation from their Jewish burden, as well as a general liberation of humanity from autocracy.

  At all events, such non-Jewish Jews were prominent in every revolutionary party, in virtually every European country, just before, during and immediately after the First World War. They took leading roles in the insurrections which followed the defeat of Germany and Austria. Bela Kun (1886-1939) was dictator of the Communist regime which held power in Hungary between March and August 1919. Kurt Eisner (1867-1919) led the revolutionary rising in Bavaria in November 1918 and ran the republic until his murder four months later. Rosa Luxemburg, the brains behind the revolutionary ‘Spartacist’ group in Berlin, was murdered a few weeks before Eisner.

  It was above all in Russia that Jews were most prominently and spectacularly identified with revolutionary violence. There, the architect of the putsch which placed the Bolshevik government in dictatorial power in October 1917 was a non-Jew, Lenin. But the executive agent was Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. His father was what he later learned to call a kulak, a Ukrainian farmer, but Trotsky himself was a product of Odessa cosmopolitanism (his school was Lutheran). He claimed that neither Judaism nor anti-Semitism had any effect on his development. It clearly did: there was something unnatural, close to hatred, in his hounding of the Jewish Bundists at the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democrats (held in London), which drove them out of the meeting and so prepared the way for the Bolshevik victory. He denounced Herzl as a ‘shameless adventurer’, a ‘repulsive figure’. Like Rosa Luxemburg, he averted his face from specifically Jewish sufferings, however appalling. When in power, he always refused to see Jewish delegations. As with other Non-Jewish Jews, the suppression of feelings which his political posture involved spread to his own family circle: he took no interest in the miseries of his father, who lost all in the revolution and died of typhus.

  Trotsky compensated for his indifference as a Jew by his volcanic energy and ruthlessness as a revolutionary. It is most unlikely that the Bolshevik Revolution could have succeeded or endured without him. It was Trotsky who taught Lenin the significance of workers’ soviets and how to exploit them. It was Trotsky who personally organized and led the armed uprising which actually overthrew the provisional government and placed the Bolsheviks in power. It was Trotsky who created, and until 1925 controlled, the Red Army, and who ensured the physical survival of the new Communist regime during the Civil War which came close to destroying it.55 More than anyone else, Trotsky symbolized the violence and daemonic power of Bolshevism and its determination to inflame the world. More than anyone, he was responsible for the popular identification of revolution with the Jews.

  The consequences for the Jews, both immediate and long-term, both locally and world-wide, were appalling. The White Russian armies, seeking to destroy the Soviet regime, treated all Jews as enemies. In the Ukraine, the Civil War developed into the most extensive pogrom in Jewish history. There were more than 1,000 separate incidents involving the killing of Jews. Over 700 communities in the Ukraine were involved and several hundred more in Russia. Between 60,000 and 70,000 Jews were murdered.56 In other parts of eastern Europe, a similar identification of Jews with Bolshevism led directly to murderous attacks on harmless Jewish communities. They were particularly bloody in Poland after the failure of the Bolshevik invasion and in Hungary after the fall of the Bela Kun regime. They occurred intermittently in Rumania throughout the 1920s. In all three countries the local Communist Parties had been largely created and run by Non-Jewish Jews, and in each case it was the unpolitical, traditional, observant Jews of the ghettos and villages who paid the penalty.

  To add to the tragic irony of it all, the ordinary Jews of Russia derived no benefit from the revolution. Quite the reverse. They had stood to gain a great deal from the provisional government of Kerensky, which gave them full voting and civil rights, including the right to organize their own political parties and cultural institutions. In the Ukraine, they took part in the provisional government; a Jew ran a separate Ministry for Jewish Affairs; they would have been covered by the minorities provisions of the Versailles treaty. In Lithuania, which the Soviets did not dare annex until 1939, these minority guarantees worked very well, and the large Jewish community there was perhaps the most co
ntented in eastern Europe between the wars.

  Hence for Jews, Lenin’s putsch put the clock back, and ultimately the Communist regime was a disaster for them. It is true that, for a time, the Leninists equated anti-Semitism with counter-revolution. The Council of People’s Commissars, in a decree of 27 July 1918, directed ‘all soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers’ delegates to take such steps as will effectively destroy the anti-Semitic movement at its roots’. The government circulated a gramophone record of a speech by Lenin, denouncing anti-Semitism.57 But this somewhat feeble effort was wholly cancelled out by Lenin’s vicious attacks against the category of ‘exploiters and profiteers’ he termed ‘bagmen’, which was intended to refer to Jews, and interpreted as such. A regime based on Marxism, itself rooted (as we have seen) in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, a regime which set about its business by identifying whole categories of people as ‘class enemies’ and then persecuting them, was certain to create a climate hostile to Jews. In fact Jewish traders were among the chief victims of Lenin’s general policy of terrorism against ‘anti-social groups’. Many were ‘liquidated’; others, perhaps 300,000 in all, slipped across the borders into Poland, the Baltic States, Turkey and the Balkans.

  It is true that Jews were prominent in the Bolshevik Party, in the top echelons as well as among the rank and file: at party congresses, 15-20 per cent of the delegates were Jewish. But these were Non-Jewish Jews; the Bolshevik Party itself was the only post-Tsarist party which was actively hostile to Jewish objectives and interests. Indeed ordinary Jews suffered on account of Jewish involvement with the regime. Jewish Bolsheviks were numerous in the Cheka (secret police), as commissars, tax inspectors and bureaucrats. They took a leading part in the raiding parties organized by Lenin and Trotsky to gouge grain out of hoarding peasants. All these activities made them hated. Thus, as often happened in Jewish history, the Jews were attacked for contradictory reasons. They were ‘anti-social bagmen’ on the one hand and ‘Bolsheviki’ on the other. The only Soviet archive ever to reach the West, dealing with Smolensk 1917-38, reveals that, to the peasants, the Soviet regime and the Jewish middlemen were identical. There were threats in 1922 that if the commissars took gold ornaments from the churches, ‘not one Jew will survive: we will kill them all during the night’. Mobs roamed the streets: ‘Beat the Jews, save Russia.’ In 1926 there was even a revival of ritual murder charges. Yet the archive shows that Jews also feared the regime: ‘the militia is feared as was the Tsarist gendarme’.58

  Jewish fear of the soviets was well founded. In August 1919, all Jewish religious communities were dissolved, their property confiscated and the overwhelming majority of synagogues shut for ever. The study of Hebrew and the publication of secular works in Hebrew were banned. Yiddish printing was permitted, but only in phonetic transcription, and Yiddish culture, though tolerated for a time, was placed under careful supervision. The supervising agency consisted of special Jewish sections, Yevsektsiya, set up in Communist Party branches, manned by Non-Jewish Jews, whose specific task was to stamp out any sign of ‘Jewish cultural particularism’. They broke up the Bund, then set about destroying Russian Zionism. In 1917 it had become by far the strongest political feature of Russian Jewry, with 300,000 members and 1,200 branches. It was much stronger, numerically, than the Bolsheviks themselves. From 1919 onwards, the Yevsektsiya attacked the Zionists frontally, using Cheka units commanded by Non-Jewish Jews. In Leningrad they took over the Zionist central headquarters, arresting its staff and closing down its paper. They did the same in Moscow. In April 1920, the all-Russian Zionist Congress was broken up by a Cheka squad led by a Jewish girl, who had seventy-five of the delegates arrested. From 1920 onwards, many thousands of Russian Zionists were in the camps, from which few ever emerged. The Zionist Party, said the regime (26 August 1922), ‘under the mask of democracy, seeks to corrupt the Jewish youth and to throw them into the arms of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie in the interests of Anglo-French capitalism. To restore the Palestine state, these representatives of the Jewish bourgeoisie rely on reactionary forces [including] such rapacious imperialists as Poincaré, Lloyd George and the Pope.’59

  Once Stalin, who was deeply anti-Semitic, took power, the pressure on the Jews increased, and by the end of the 1920s all forms of specifically Jewish activity had been destroyed or emasculated. He then dissolved the Yevsektsiya, leaving supervision of the Jews to the secret police. By this time, Jews had been eliminated from nearly all senior posts in the regime, and anti-Semitism was once more a powerful force within the party. ‘Is it true,’ wrote Trotsky in rage and astonishment to Bukharin, 4 March 1926, ‘is it possible, that in our party, in Moscow, in Workers’ Cells, anti-Semitic agitation should be carried out with impunity?’60 Not with impunity: with encouragement. Jews, especially within the Communist Party, were to constitute a wholly disproportionate percentage of Stalin’s victims.

  One of them was Isaac Babel (1894-1940?), perhaps the only great Jewish writer the Russian Revolution produced, whose personal tragedy is a kind of parable of the Jews under the Soviets. Like Trotsky, he was a product of Odessa, where his father kept a shop. In one of his stories he describes how, aged nine, he saw his father, humble and submissive, the archetype ghetto Jew through the centuries, kneel at the feet of a Cossack officer during a pogrom. The officer, said Babel, wore lemon-yellow chamois gloves and ‘looked ahead with a distant gaze’. Odessa produced Jewish prodigies, especially performing ones, and Babel was afraid, being clever, that his father would turn him into a ‘musical dwarf’, one of the ‘big-headed, freckled children with necks as thin as flower-stalks and an epileptic flush on their cheeks’. Instead like Trotsky he wanted to become a Non-Jewish Jew, a man of violence, like the notorious Jewish gangsters from the Moldavanka, the Odessa ghetto, or better still like the Cossacks themselves. He fought in the Tsar’s army; then, when the revolution came, served in the Cheka and as a Bolshevist thug raiding the farms for food. Finally he got his wish, to fight alongside the Cossacks under General Budënny. From his experiences he produced a masterpiece, Red Cavalry (1926), a volume of stories describing in brilliant and often dismaying detail his efforts to acquire, as he put it, ‘the simplest of proficiencies, the ability to kill my fellow men’.

  The stories succeed, but the effort itself failed. Babel could not become a man for whom violence was natural. He remained the typical Jewish intellectual, ‘a man’, as he put it in a memorable phrase, ‘with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart’. The difficulty a Jew finds in escaping from his cultural background, especially in dealing out death, is a recurrent, poignant theme of his stories. A young man dies because he cannot bring himself to shoot a wounded comrade. An old Jewish shopkeeper will not accept that the revolutionary end justifies the means, and calls for an ‘International of Good Men’. A young Jewish soldier is killed, leaving in his meagre belongings portraits of Lenin and Maimonides. The two did not consort together, as Babel found from bitter personal experience. The concept of the Non-Jewish Jew did not work. To Stalin, he was a Jew like any other; and in Stalin’s Russia, Babel slipped out of favour into limbo. He appeared at the 1934 Writers’ Congress, to make a mysterious, ironic speech, claiming that the party, in its infinite benevolence, deprived the writers of only one freedom—the freedom to write badly. He himself, he said, was practising a new literary genre and was becoming ‘a master of silence’. ‘I have so much respect for the reader’, he added, ‘that I am dumb.’61 In due course he was arrested, and disappeared for ever, probably being shot early in 1940. His alleged offence was taking part in a ‘literary conspiracy’, but the real reason was simply that he had once known the wife of Nicholai Yezhov, the disgraced NKVD boss. In Stalin’s Russia, that was enough—especially for a Jew.62

  In the outside world, however, little was known about the survival of anti-Semitism, in new forms, in Soviet Russia, the destruction of Jewish institutions and the growing physical threat to Jews under Stalinism. It was simply assumed that, since
the Jews were among the principal instigators of Bolshevism, they must be among its principal beneficiaries. The all-important distinction between the great mass of Jews, who were observant, assimilationist or Zionist, and the specific group of Non-Jewish Jews who had actually helped to create the revolution, was not understood at all.

  But then it had always been an axiom of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that apparent conflicts of interest among Jews were mere camouflage for an underlying identity of aim. It was the commonest of all anti-Semitic smears that Jews ‘worked together’ behind the scenes. The notion of a general Jewish conspiracy, involving secret meetings of Jewish sages, was inherent in the medieval blood libel and had reached written form on numerous occasions. Napoleon I’s summoning of the Sanhedrin gave it an unfortunate impetus. Thereafter it had become part of the stock-in-trade of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. It was one of the grievances of this body that the Tsars were not sufficiently assiduous in putting down radical conspiracies, especially Jewish ones. At some point in the 1890s, one of their Paris agents was asked to concoct a document which could be used to demonstrate to Nicholas II the reality of the Jewish threat. The forger, whoever he was, used a pamphlet by Maurice Joly, written in 1864, attributing to Napoleon III ambitions to dominate the world. The original had no reference to Jews at all, but for the monarch was now substituted a secret conference of Jewish leaders who stated that, by exploiting modern democracy, they were close to attaining their objectives. This was the origin of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.