Communism and the Jews

by Ilya Somin on October 29, 2011 10:09 pm in Communism, Jewish

Culture
Co-blogger David Bernstein links to Polish Jewish scholar Stanislaw
Krajewskis article on the relationship between Jews and communism in
Eastern Europe. As Krajewski emphasizes, this is an extremely sensitive
subject. Right-wing anti-Semites have long claimed that communism was
really just a Jewish conspiracy intended to subjugate gentiles for the Jews
benefit.
I agree with most of Krajewskis analysis. It cannot be denied that Jews were
disproportionately represented among early Eastern European communists.
Several prominent early communist leaders were Jewish, most notably Leon
Trotsky. At the same time, Krajewski is also right to emphasize that the vast
majority of early 20th century Jews were not communists, and that most
communists were not Jewish. Overrepresentation of a group in a political
movement does not prove either that the movement was dominated by
that group or that it primarily serves that groups interests. The idea that
communist oppression was somehow Jewish in nature is belied by the record
of communist regimes in countries like China, North Korea, and Cambodia,
where the Jewish presence was and is miniscule.
At the same time, I am not entirely convinced by Krajewskis claim that
Jewish communists became communists because of general social trends
rather than because of any distinctively Jewish factors. Obviously, such
general trends played a role. But the overrepresentation of Jews in the
movement was also caused by at least two specifically Jewish factors. First,
communism disproportionately appealed to intellectuals generally. They
liked its utopian nature and its seeming logical rigor. While the vast majority
of Jews are not professional intellectuals, Jews are disproportionately
represented in that group. Any movement that appeals to intellectuals will
also tend to have a relatively high proportion of Jewish members.
Second, Jews status as an oppressed minority in early 20th century Eastern
Europe also played a major role. The government of the Russian Empire
(which ruled over most of Eastern Europes Jews until World War I) was
highly anti-Semitic and oppressed Jews in innumerable ways. It also
encouraged anti-Jewish violence, such as pogroms. Krajewski briefly
mentions employment discrimination against early 20th century Jews; but
that was only one small part of the prevailing anti-Semitism.
Because of this persecution, Jews were more likely to be attracted to radical
anti-regime movements than most other groups. A movement that seeks to
overthrow the government that oppresses you and promises ethnic and
racial equality has obvious appeal to persecuted minorities. Obviously, the
communists were far from the only opposition movement in early 20th
century Russia that was attractive to Jews. Many of the others also had
disproportionate Jewish representation. For example, the Constitutional
Democratic Party, which sought to transform Russia into a Western-style
liberal democracy, had a number of Jewish leaders, including the majority of

Jews elected to the Russian parliament. Before 1917, there were many more
Jewish Kadets than Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia.
The fact that many Jewish communists joined the movement in part because
of anti-Semitism does not excuse them. There were far more constructive
ways to oppose anti-Semitism than by joining a brutal totalitarian party. It
does, however, help explain their actions, even if it does not justify them.
Although Jews were disproportionately represented among early
communists, they were also (as Krajewski points out) disproportionately
represented among the victims of communist regimes once the latter seized
power. Unfortunately, Krajewski neglected to mention that in the 1970s and
80s, Jews were also disproportionately represented among the anticommunist dissidents in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Several of them
played key roles in the eventual overthrow of communist rule (e.g. Adam
Michnik, one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland). Ironically,
Jews were disproportionately represented among anti-communist dissidents
for much the same reasons as an earlier generation had been
disproportionately represented among communists: the dissident movement
appealed to intellectuals, and it opposed highly anti-Semitic regimes.

THE FLOURISHING OF YIDDISH COMMUNISM

Two recent books, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture: 19181930 and In Harness: Yiddish Writers Romance With Communism by
David Sneer and Gennady Estraikh respectively, make clear the extremely
important role that the Yiddish language played in the heavily Jewish
dominated Soviet Union of the 1920s and mid-1930s. The old Czarist
Empire succeeded by the Bolsheviks was multi-national in character.
According to Communist doctrine, each of these national groups, Ukrainians,
Jews, Russians, Belorussians or White Russians, etc. was to be considered
a distinct nation within a union of federated socialist republics, defined
primarily by its language. Yiddish was the preferred language of Soviet Jewry
because it was the language of the Jewish working masses. Hebrew, the
ancient language of the Jews and the revived language of the Zionists, was
deliberately suppressed in the Soviet state. Synagogues and other Jewish
institutions using Hebrew as a language of discourse or instruction were
shut down. However, a vast publishing industry of newspapers, journals,
poetry and novellas published in Yiddish began to flourish in Soviet Russia
beginning around 1925, following Lenins New Economic Policy (NEP) and
the the end of the chaos of the Civil War.
David Shneer is quite candid about the milieu in which all this took place. In
setting the context of the Yiddish Revolution in Red Russia, he writes:
Jews were also different because they were overrepresented in the Soviet
professions, in Soviet cities, in the Soviet bureaucracy, in the Russianlanguage intelligentsia, and in the Communist Party until and even after
World War Two. The Soviet Union treated the Jews well by giving them social,
economic, and political opportunities that the conservative tsarist
government, and even neighboring countries in Eastern Europe, denied

them. Jews were also not like any other minority, because the fight against
anti-Semitism was a defining policy in the 1920s. The Communist Party
interpreted anti-Semitism as a backward relic of capitalist economic
relationships, and stridently fought populist anti-Semitism. Hatred against
other ethnic groups was not marked as a separate category in the same
way. (p.11)
Gennady Estraikh in his book makes the point that Yiddish Communist
literature was a world wide phenomenon, not just an internal Soviet
development. He writes:
It is hardly an overstatement to define Yiddish literature of the 1920s as
the most pro-Soviet literature in the world, one of the strongholds of
Yiddish Communist literati emerged in Argentina, where as early as 1919 a
group of Jewish left-wingers, led by Menachem Rosen, accepted the
Comintern program. On 7 November 1923, or the fifth anniversary of the
Bolshevik revolution, Argentine Jewish Communists launched their
newspaper, Der royter shtern ((Red Star). Later the Communists began to
publish a few journals, one of which, Der Yiddisher payer, (Jewish peasants),
was dedicated to Jewish agricultural projects in the Soviet Union. PROCOR,
the organization which agitated and raised money for Soviet projects,
welcomed in Argentina the high-ranking Soviet Jewish functionary Yankel
Levin and helped a couple hundred local enthusiasts to emigrate to the
Soviet Union. In 1931-1932 two Yiddish writers, exiled from Argentina for
their communist activities, settled in the Soviet Union; Hirsch Blostein and
Moshe Goldstein. In 1930 the proletarian writer Salvador Borzhas (Bezabel
Borodin) emigrated from Brazil to the Soviet Union and settled in
Birobidzhan. Communist literati were active also in other Latin American
countries. Thus, in Uruguay they grouped around the newspaper Undzer
fraynd (Our Friend), sponsored by the Soviet embassy and edited by Ben
Halpern, later a Soviet writer (and a prisoner of the gulag). A group of proSoviet Yiddishists was active in South Africa, where they controlled a few
organizations, including the Yiddisher Literarishes Fareyn (Yiddish literary
union). (pp.65-66)
In Soviet Russia itself, a huge number of Yiddish literati flourished. Among
the more prominent were Moshe Olgin, David Hofshtein, Peretz Markish,
Moshe Taitz, David Bergelson, Shmuel Godiner, Yasha Bronstein, Itsik Fefer,
Boris Pilnyak, Nakhman Meisl, Leyb Kreitko, Moshe Litvakov and Israel
Singer. Gennady Estraikh goes over these Communist literati in detail in his
study. The main centers of Yiddish Communist publishing were Kiev,
Kharkov, Minsk and other cities outside of Moscow. Journals came and went
in vast profusion. Always the glories of the proletarian revolution were sung.
The new Soviet man was arising and the We trumped the I. The age of
the machine would liberate the worker. Counter-revolutionary behavior was
everywhere and it had to be ruthlessly suppressed. The Jew was now a man
of the people and not an exploiter, as previously. These were some of the
favorite themes of the time.
The first Yiddish Communist journals to come out of Moscow were organized
by an umbrella organization known as the Moscow Circle of Yiddish Writers
and Artists (MCYWRA). These Communist literati concentrated on Yiddish

letters and Party propaganda. Two of their chief journals were Der Emes
(The Truth) and The Stream. (The latter was devoted mainly to literature
with a Communist slant.) In 1929 the Party came up with an international
Yiddish Communist literary society called PROLETPEN. This served as an
international umbrella organization for Communists writing in Yiddish. To
extend the reach the Party created in Paris in 1937 the Yiddisher Culture
Farband to appeal to Jewish Communists around the world. The Communist
world of Yiddish was, of course, ever changing and the interested reader
may consult the Shneer and Estraikh books for further details. The Yiddish
Communist literary factions were torn by factional disputes and ideological
conflicts. The intricate details are somewhat boring for the average reader
but do show the usual Talmudic genius for intricate nitpicking.
By the late 1930s the golden age of Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union
was in decline. Stalins great terror was raging and the Yiddish literati were
hit like every one else. One of the victims was the very famous David
Bergelson. Over a decade later, the even more famous Itzhik Fefer suffered
a similar fate in 1953. Yiddish literature recovered somewhat in the mid1950s to early 1960s in the Soviet Union but the heyday was gone. Outside
the Soviet Union Yiddish Communist literature declined rapidly in the postWorld War Two era. Jewish upward mobility in America and the raising of a
new generation trained in English reduced the readership for the old Yiddish
Communist press. The remaining hold out was, of course, the old Morning
Freiheit, founded by Moshe Olgin and Shakhne Epstein. It remained the
largest circulation Communist newspaper in America, far outstripping in
circulation the English language Daily Worker and New Masses.
The implications of Yiddish Communism are indeed great. Although the
Soviet press was published in many other languages, particularly Russian
and Ukrainian, the extremely prominent role given to Yiddish in both the
Soviet Union and the Communist press internationally, raises disturbing
questions. If Communism was not a Jewish movement, as apologists like to
pretend, then why was the language of the Communist press so frequently
the language of the Jews? If Communism had a lingua franca in the preWorld War Two days, it was certainly Yiddish. The Yiddish language
background of Communism is corroborated by the extremely
disproportionate number of Jews involved in Communism, not just in Soviet
Russia but in the Communist parties of all lands. Jews now portray
Communism as anti-Semitic based on the late Communist era where
Zionism was harshly suppressed. They thereby cover up the preponderant
Jewish role in pre-World War Two Communism and the flourishing of Yiddish
literature for twenty years in the 1920s and 1930s. Jews and Communism
have always been a sensitive subject, made even more sensitive by Adolf
Hitler and the mythical Holocaust. Distortions on the real status of the Jews
in the U.S.S.R. abound, both because of the propaganda of the Zionists and
the Jewish defense agencies and the over-simplifications of ill-informed right
wing scribblers. David Shneer and Gennady Estraikh have written
meticulously documented studies of the inner workings of Yiddish culture in
Soviet society, and have thereby cleared up much confusion.
john thames 5 years ago

This article is important because it epitomizes all the standard Jewish

"explanatory" techniques for whitewashing the overwhelming Jewish
culpability for Communism. The author sets the tone for his apologia by
claiming that Jewish overrepresentation in Communism proves nothing per
se. I suppose by the same logic, a disproportionately high black crime rste
and drop out rate from school proves nothing about black cognitive and
behavioral inferiority.
The next technique is the shop worn excuse that because the Jews were
"oppressed" by the Czar, that this excuses the mass murders of the Jewish
commissars. I'm sure the Nazis also reasoned that the Jews "had it coming"
for the crime of Communism. The one argument is as good as the other. As
to the Czarist anti-Jewish measures, they were basically a response to Jewish
economic crimes against Russians. The Jews had the charming habit of
inducing primitive peasant populations to take out unrepayable loans and
then foreclosing on everything the peasant had.Jewish sex slave traders
regularly kidnapped poor girls into prostitution and then sold them into
slavery all over the world, as in the case of the Zwi Migdal. Jewish tavern
owners sold vodka at exorbitant prices to drunk oafs and then robbed them
blind. Jewish absentee landlords worked Ukrainians to the bone for Polish
absentee land lords, etc. Small wonder that the Czarist government took
measures against such abuses.
When Communism first erupted onto the world scene in 1917, Jews all over
the world praised it to the skies. A notable example was Leopold Greenberg,
the editor of the Jewish Chronicle of London, who stasted that the ideals of
Communism and the ideals of Judaism were "one and the same". Now Jews
find it expedient to pretend that Communist Jews were "non-Jewish Jews"
who had repudiated the religion of their fathers.Since the Talmudic
scriptures teach that non-Jews are animals in human form fit only to be
enslaved or exterminated by God's "Chosen People" I rather doubt the
assertion that Communism was incompatible with Jewish "ethical principles".
Jews all over the world sang the praises of Communism during the 11920's
through 1940's when the terror of the Jewish commissars was at its height.
The Communist press was overwhelmingly published in Yiddish, the
language of the Jews. All these facts indicate a Jewish controlling element in
Communism that goes far beyond the rehearsed and rehashed
"explanations" proferred by the author.Soviet Russia in its heyday was
known as the land where anti-Semitism had been abolished. Jewish journals
boasted of the overwhelming advancement of Jews in the Soviet
bureaucracy.This fact was evidently more important to Jews than the goy
animals in human form being liquidated by enlightened commissars like
Yagoda, Berman, Solts, Reichmann and dozens of others.
Now Jews wish to pretend that this Jewish love affair with the workers
paradise never happened. They wish to send Ana Pauker, Hilda Benjamin,
Matyas Rakosi and Bela Kun down the memory hole as they wail about
Soviet anti-Semitism. Sorry, boys, but you are guilty as sin. Screaming
"Nazi!" and claiming that only a small minority of Jews were involved will not
cut it. Jews promoted Communism all over the world and enthusiastically
praised it. When Jews were given a choice between Adolf Hitler and Joseph

Stalin they chose the greater evil every time.(The only exception I can think
of was Eugene Lyons, who preferred Hitler to Stalin.)
Yes, Jews have been involved in political movements other than
Communism, in Russia and elsewhere. I know of Maxim Vinaver, Baron
Ginsburg and the Society for the Enlightenment of Russian Jews. But the
execution of the Rosenbergs and the hysterical weeping of New York's Jews
still stands. ("They killed them, those dear, dear people!, sob and weep.)
Communism was a crime of the Jewish people, world wide. You stand before
the bar of history, guilty and yet to pay for your crime.
What is the connection between Communism and
Jews? (self.DebateFascism)
submitted 12 meses ago * by NotEqual15National Socialist
Lets start with some quotes from various sources that deal with the subject.
1. "In his 1920 article, "Zionism vs. Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul
of the Jewish People," Winston Churchill stated his belief that
"International jews" were seeking "a world-wide communistic state
under Jewish Domination."
2. "On July 2, 1922, in an interview while in exile with a reporter from
the Chicago Tribune, Kaiser Wilhelm 2 said: " The Jews are responsible
for Bolshevism in Russia, and Germany too. I was far too indulgent
with them during my reign, and I bitterly regret the favors I showed to
prominent Jewish bankers." British intelligence had discerned a
coordinated Jewish, Communist revolutionary effort even before the
beginning of World War One. In the July 16, 1913 issue of the "Great
Britain Directorate of Intelligence," a monthly review of the progress
of revolutionary movements abroad, an article stated: " There is now
definite evidence that Bolshevism is an international movement
controlled by Jews; communications are passing between leaders in
America, France, Russia, and England, with a view to concerted
action. " The Jews had traditionally maintained well established,
highly efficient, international networks through which information of
interest to jews was quickly passed"
3. " " Jews comprised less than 2 percent of the Russian population, yet
they now came to have taken total control of every branch of the
government as well as the armed forces."
4. " In 1919, the Soviet Press provided a list of 556 important figures of
the Soviet Government, identifying their ethnicity. Wilton obtained
this list and reported it back to London. he also included it as an
"appendix' in his book, " The Last Days of the Romanovs," 1920, of
which this author has a copy. The list included 17 Russians, 2
Ukrainians, 11 Armenians, 35 Letts, 15 Germans, 1 Hungarian, 10
Georgians, 3 Poles, 3 Finns, 1 Czech, 1 Karaim ( Jewish sect) and 457
Jews. This list is provided below so there can be no refuting the fact
that Jews dominated the Communists government of the Soviet
Union." ( I won't provide the list for obvious reasons)

Those quotes above are taken from " The Myth of German Villainy" by
Benton L. Bradberry.
Heres a couple more for good measure:
1. " The most ancient source of jewish tradition is the 'Torah," the Mosaic
Law, the 'Deuteronomy' or Fifth Book, attributed to Moses, although it
is certain Moses never wrote it. Here are several paragraphs: " You
are a Holy People before the Lord. He has chosen you to be his own
people among all peoples of the earth." " I will make you a great
people, I will bless thee and thy name shall grow and thou shall be
blessed and I shall bless those who bless thee and I shall curse those
who curse thee." " Thou shall take the kings of other peoples in thy
hand and thou shall extirpate their names beneath the sky. None shall
oppose thee to thy face, until thou shall have destroyed them." "
Thou shall lend to many people, but shall never lend anything. The
lord shall take thee by the head, never by the tail. thou shall always
be above, never below." " Devour all the peoples that the lord shall
give thee... Today I shall begin to sow fear among the nations beneath
the sky, so much so that they shall be terrified even to hear thy
name."""
2. " The Jew Moritz Cohn confessed: " Without our consent not a
potentate in the world can make a decision. No word we do not want
can be published and broadcast because we control the press. No
idea with which we disagree can penetrate the intellectual world. For
some time we have had dominion over the world." ( These words
were cited by G. Zur Beek in " Die Geheimnisse der Wesson von Zion,
" 3rd edition, 1919, p. 27)."
3. " We transcribe the following from the Jew Marcus Eli Ravage,
appearing in the two articles in numbers 3 and 4 of "Century
Magazine," of 1928: "They accuse us of having made the communists
revolution. Well, we accept that charge. And what of that? Compared
with that the Jew Paul of Tarsus did in Rome, the Russian Revolution is
no more than a small palace scandal. They cry about the Jewish
influence in our theatre and in our films. Very well! Accepted, Your
laments are just. But, what can this mean compared with our
unlimited influence we exercise in your church, in your schools, over
your governments and way of life, over all your intellectual world?...
We assume the "protocols of the Elders of Zion" are authentic. What
can this mean in the face of the undeniable historical action of
conspiracies we have developed? You are not capable of recognizing
the beginning of the initiation of our guilt. We are invaders,
destroyers, subverters. We have taken possession of your natural
world, of your ideas, of your destiny and made a game of all that. We
have not only been the instigator of the last war but of almost all your
wars. We have not only been the instigators of the Russian
Revolution, but of all other great revolutions. We have caused and
continued promoting the unrest in the cities ( the current terrorism),
in the streets and in your private life. We have changed the course of
your entire history. And all this without the use of weapons. We
achieved it with only the use of propaganda. Our tiny country of one

time has become your holy land. Our national literature has become
your bible. A young Jewess, your ideal of maternity and femininity. A
jewish rebel prophet is at the center of your devotion... The modern
revolutions, the French, the American and the Russian, what are they
if not a triumph of the Jewish idea?... And with relief, we recognize
that the goyim has never discovered the gravity of our guilt... """"
These quotes come from Miguel Serrano.
So lets hear it. What is it with Jews and communists in your view? Is there a
connection? If so why?