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NY Review, FEBRUARY 21, 2019 ISSUE
The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism
Christopher R. Browning
A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
by Paul Hanebrink
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 353 pp., $29.95
One of the great merits of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe is
its demonstration of how Europe’s most pervasive and powerful
twentieth-century manifestation of anti-Semitic thought—the myth of
Judeo-Bolshevism—emerged before the rise of National Socialism and has
continued to have a curious life long after the Holocaust and the defeat
of Nazi Germany. Hanebrink’s approach is not to repeat what he considers
an error of the interwar era—the futile attempt to refute a myth on the
basis of historical facts and statistical data. A small kernel of truth
underpinned the stereotype of the Jewish Bolshevik: a number of
well-known early Bolshevik leaders (Béla Kun, Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek,
and others) were of Jewish origin. That Stalin killed almost all of
them, that overall a very small percentage of Jews were Bolsheviks, and
that many prominent non-Jewish revolutionaries (Lenin and Karl
Liebknecht, for example) were mistakenly identified as Jewish had no
countervailing impact, because, Hanebrink writes, the Jew as “the face
of the revolution” was a “culturally constructed” perception.
Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know
all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks
instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic”
of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through
different phases. Ultimately Judeo-Bolshevism embodied, in the form of
“Asiatic barbarism,” an imagined threat to national sovereignty, ethnic
homogeneity, and Western civilization conceived as traditional European
Christian hegemony. It fused, in short, political, racial, and cultural
threats into a single “specter haunting Europe.”
Hanebrink notes that amid the exhaustion, defeat, and political
dissolution of many European countries at the end of World War I, the
threat of the spread of Bolshevik revolution from Russia into Europe
caused not only widespread fear and loathing but fear and loathing that
identified Jews as the real cause of Bolshevism. He is correct, I think,
to point out that this pervasive identification required more than the
prominence of Jewish revolutionary leaders, and that Judeo-Bolshevism
was constructed from the “raw materials” of earlier anti-Semitism. For
Hanebrink the “three venerable pillars” of anti-Jewish thought were the
attributions to the Jews of social disharmony, conspiracy, and
fanaticism, which made Judeo-Bolshevism both a coherent idea and a
ubiquitous, self-evident assumption.
Here I think that Hanebrink could have been more concrete; in particular
he could have shown how easily the negative stereotype of the Jew that
had originated in the Middle Ages could be updated for the twentieth
century. Even before the crisis of 1918–1919, which combined the
experiences of defeat and revolution for many Europeans, Jews were
invariably disproportionately represented in liberal and socialist
parties because they were not welcome to participate in conservative and
Catholic political parties. The tendency to stigmatize anything to the
left of conservative as Jewish was already evident in 1912, when the
electoral victory in Germany of the liberal democrats, Social Democrats,
and Catholics—who also made up the “Weimar Coalition” of 1919 that was
largely responsible for drafting the Weimar Constitution, so despised by
German conservatives—was dubbed the “Jew election.”
The Jew of the Middle Ages, an infidel, became the Jew of the twentieth
century, a political subversive. With emancipated Jews being the most
visible beneficiaries of the modern commercial and industrial economy by
the end of the nineteenth century, the medieval epithet of Jewish usury
had already been replaced with that of rapacious Jewish capitalism, and
after 1914 the image of the Jew as an economic threat was only
intensified by accusations of Jewish war profiteering and black
marketeering. The Jew as a clannish outsider in medieval Christendom was
easily transformed into the Jew as an unassimilable minority and alien
internal threat, at a time when other European nationalities were
striving to construct new nation-states out of the ruins of multiethnic
empires.
As a result of the postwar flood of refugees and the return of prisoners
of war (like Béla Kun) from a Russia wracked by revolution and civil
war, the “wandering” Jews among this mass of dislocated people were
easily seen as an invading horde and source of revolutionary contagion.
With the Bolsheviks in Russia preaching the primacy of international
revolution over loyalty to one’s own nation-state and threatening social
revolution and nationalization of property, the basis for the “cultural
construction” of Judeo-Bolshevism, Hanebrink argues, was all too readily
available. In April 1919 Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio in Munich
(and future Pope Pius XII), reported to the Vatican that the
communist-led Bavarian Soviet (which existed for less than a month
before it was crushed by the counterrevolutionary Freikorps) was
composed entirely of Jews. One of its leaders, Max Levien, was described
as “also a Russian and a Jew,” “dirty,” “vulgar,” “repulsive,” and
“sly.” Levien was in fact a Russian émigré to Germany, a four-year
veteran of the German army, and a non-Jew. This did not, as Hanebrink
observes, signify an exceptionally anti-Semitic disposition on the part
of Pacelli but simply reflected the “utterly typical” consensus of
virtually all European conservatives at that time.
From the beginning of World War I, tsarist Russia had treated its
Jewish subjects as unreliable and potentially disloyal. Its military
forcibly displaced some 500,000 to one million Jews from combat zones.
The very approach of the Russian army thus also instigated the flight of
many other Jews from the eastern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
to the presumed safety of cities like Vienna and Budapest. The Russian
Revolution erupted amid already existing fears about Jewish loyalty and
floods of displaced Jews, and intensified those fears. The “panic” over
Judeo-Bolshevism, Hanebrink argues, “flourished in ground that had been
prepared by wartime paranoia about Jewish loyalty.” In what Hanebrink
calls the “long World War I” in Eastern Europe, including the Russian
civil war, the Soviet-Polish war, and the Romanian ouster of the Béla
Kun regime and Miklós Horthy’s subsequent White Terror in Hungary,
“sovereignty panic” intensified the catastrophic consequences for Jews,
particularly in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine.
Atrocities against Jews led to Jewish appeals to the Allies and the
subsequent imposition of minority rights treaties on Eastern European
nations. In a vicious circle, these regimes in turn resented Jews as the
cause of this infringement on their sovereignty, which they saw as
further evidence of Jewish disloyalty. They insisted even more
vehemently on the Judeo-Bolshevik connection to justify their past
mistreatment of Jews and successfully exploited the Allies’ desire for a
cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe to prevent the further spread of
Bolshevism. For instance, the Polish army received crucial military aid
to help it resist the Soviet invasion of 1920 even as it interned many
of its own Jewish soldiers. All of this, it must be emphasized, took
place before history’s most notorious purveyor and champion of the myth
of Judeo-Bolshevism had emerged from obscurity on the streets of Munich.
Adolf Hitler combined his belief in that myth with a race-based theory
of history and a vision of German Lebensraum in the East, which
culminated in his war of territorial conquest, ideological crusade
against Bolshevism, and campaign of genocide against Jews. As Hanebrink
notes, adherents of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth now had to reconcile
themselves with Hitlerian and German hegemony. They did so in different
ways. Hungary allied with Germany for territorial gain (Hitler’s return
of northern Transylvania), sent troops to the Eastern Front, intensified
its discrimination against its Jewish population, and expelled foreign
Jews to the killing fields of Ukraine, but did not surrender its own
Jews to the Final Solution until the German overthrow of the Hungarian
government in March 1944. Romania not only fought alongside Germany and
gained territories to the east but directly killed more Jews (over
300,000) than any other of Hitler’s allies, stopping only when its
leaders sensed that German victory was no longer inevitable.
For Poles the situation was much more complicated. Having turned down
Hitler’s offer before the war of a junior partnership based on shifting
Poland’s borders eastward, they were partitioned by Germany and the
Soviet Union. However, the experience of both Polish and Jewish
victimization under the Nazi occupation did not alter predominant Polish
views about their Jewish neighbors. The flight of many Jews from western
to eastern Poland, the obvious relief of Jews in eastern Poland that
they had been occupied by Stalin rather than Hitler, and ultimately the
desperate hope of Polish Jews for rescue and liberation by the Red Army
only confirmed for many Poles their belief in Judeo-Bolshevism.
Within Germany the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism was crucial for cementing
the complicity of the military in Hitler’s “war of annihilation” against
the Soviet Union, portrayed as a “preventive defense” of German and
Western civilization. The myth also played “a crucial role in the
origins of the Final Solution.” Hanebrink cites the notorious order of
General Walter von Reichenau, the commander of the Sixth Army on the
southern front, less than two weeks after the Babi Yar massacre in
Ukraine in 1941: “The fundamental goal of the campaign against the
Jewish-Bolshevik system is the total defeat of its means of power and
the extermination of the Asiatic influence in the European sphere of
culture.” Thus the “hard but just punishment” meted out to “Jewish
subhumans” was necessary “to free the German Volk from the
Asiatic-Jewish danger once and for all.”
Reichenau’s order did not simply reflect the unhinged rantings of one
ideologically zealous Nazi general, and Hanebrink could have offered far
more evidence of the impact of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth on German
military thought and behavior, if this had been the main point of his
book. For instance, further north, sixty-one German army officers were
invited to meet with top SS officers (including Arthur Nebe, commander
of Einsatzgruppe B, and Higher SS and Police Leader Erich von dem
Bach-Zelewski) in Mogilev on September 24–26, 1941, for orientation on
the partisan threat. The gist of the presentations was the equation
Jew=Bolshevik=partisan, accompanied by a demonstration killing of
thirty-two Jews in a nearby village by members of Police Battalion 322.
Subsequently, military units behind the central front were among the
Wehrmacht’s most lethal killers of Jews. And the fatal linkage between
Jews, Bolsheviks, and partisans was most catastrophically demonstrated
in Himmler’s December 29, 1942, report to Hitler on the results of the
“anti-partisan campaign” for the preceding four-month period of
August–November. It listed the killing of 1,337 “bandits” in battle, 737
immediately after battle, and 7,828 after interrogation. Furthermore, it
listed the execution of 14,256 “accomplices and suspects” and finally
363,211 Jews.
The total defeat of Nazi Germany and exposure of its crimes did not
entirely discredit the notion of Judeo-Bolshevism. One of the most
fascinating aspects of Hanebrink’s book is his discussion of its strange
post-1945 afterlife. In Western Europe, anti-communism, a term that
increasingly supplanted “anti-Bolshevism” beginning in the 1930s, took a
new direction, but in Eastern Europe the Judeo-Bolshevik myth continued
to shape how local populations remembered the war and understood the
Soviet imposition of Communist regimes.
The Allied occupation, the war crimes trials and denazification, but
above all the division of Germany and the onset of the cold war led to
the emergence in Western Europe of an anti-communism that was
pro-democratic, pro-American, and not anti-Semitic. Underlying this
transformation were two concepts. The first was that of totalitarianism,
by which discredited and defeated fascism was equated with communism.
The German churches in particular—previously highly nationalistic,
authoritarian, and anti-Semitic, and thus all too often fellow travelers
of the Nazi regime’s campaigns against liberalism, Marxism, and Jews—now
portrayed themselves as resisters to and victims of that regime, which
like the Soviet Union had manifested the evils of the secular,
materialistic, ungodly state run amok. West Germany’s new self-image of
Christian Democracy pitted against totalitarianism dovetailed with the
second concept—the American notion of Judeo-Christian values as the
basis of both democracy and Western civilization in its cold war
opposition to godless communism. By embracing the cold war,
assimilationist American Jews finally severed the old identification
between Jews and Bolsheviks, but at the cost of giving priority to
anti-communism over Holocaust memory. It was not until the late 1970s
that the Holocaust began to obtain the position it currently holds in
American consciousness.
In the countries of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army and
subjected to communist regimes, a very different dynamic occurred. The
populations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary
in particular continued to see what happened after 1945 through the lens
of Judeo-Bolshevism. The installation of Communist Party rule was seen
as bringing the Jews to power, and the trial and punishment of Nazi
collaborators was seen as Jewish revenge, not justice.
Both Moscow and local Communists were eager to shed the stigma of
identification with Jews. Most of the remaining Polish Jews, for
instance, were allowed to leave the country after the Kielce pogrom in
July 1946, so the regime would not have to protect them. Prominent
Jewish Communists, like Rudolf Slánský and his colleagues in Prague,
were tried and executed; Ana Pauker in Romania and the non-Jewish but
philo-Semitic Paul Merker in East Germany were purged. Only Stalin’s
timely death in 1953 prevented the “doctors’ plot” from exploding into
anti-Jewish terror in the USSR. A communist anti-Semitism in the guise
of anti-Zionism and anti-cosmopolitanism was employed both in intraparty
rivalries (most famously by Władysław Gomułka in Poland in 1968) and as
international propaganda. Public memory of the Holocaust was silenced.
In the 1970s and 1980s an emerging consciousness and memory of the
Holocaust transformed it in the West into the paradigm of radical evil
and the civics lesson that toleration, human rights, and respect for
religious and racial difference were essential values of liberal
democracy. The resulting “hegemony of Holocaust memory,” which eclipsed
the concept of totalitarianism by giving primacy to the crimes of Hitler
over those of Stalin and the suffering of Jews over that of the victims
of Communism, was challenged from two directions. The German scholar
Ernst Nolte tried to portray the horrors of Asiatic Bolshevism as the
factor that elicited a rational defensive response in the form of
National Socialism. The American historian Arno Mayer tried to portray
communism as the primary target of Nazism, with the Holocaust (or
“Judeocide,” as he termed it) as a secondary aim—a byproduct. Both were
dismissed as attempts to relativize or trivialize the Holocaust.
Post-1989 Eastern Europe took a different turn, however, with many
countries resisting the “hegemony of Holocaust memory” as the ticket of
admission into the Western European community of liberal democracies. In
that memory, Jews were the quintessential innocent victims, while the
populations of Eastern Europe, afflicted by anti-Semitism and the myth
of Judeo-Bolshevism that they shared with the Nazis, had been
accomplices and beneficiaries of the Holocaust. But in the memory of
many Eastern Europeans, they were the innocent victims of the “double
occupation” of Hitler and Stalin, while the not-so-innocent Jews had
been the accomplices and beneficiaries of Communist rule.
In short, Judeo-Bolshevism had returned as an essential component of the
memory wars, and the Holocaust scholarship and civics pedagogy of the
West were seen as national defamation in countries like Poland, Hungary,
Romania, and the Baltic States. The explosive impact in Poland of Jan
Gross’s book Neighbors (2000), which documented the participation of
Polish villagers in the massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne, the bitter
public debate and discomforting historical research by younger Polish
scholars that followed, and the notorious 2018 law banning the
attribution of Nazi crimes to the Polish nation illustrate this dynamic
of reacting to Holocaust scholarship as national defamation.
In his conclusion Hanebrink argues that the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is
no longer a threat driving Europeans to panic, but rather has been
relegated to the politics of contested memory. Unfortunately, I fear
that the rantings and conspiracy theories disseminated by the likes of
Viktor Orbán against George Soros and the allegedly Jewish forces of
globalization, and the chants of “Jews will not replace us” by white
supremacists in Charlottesville, demonstrate that anti-Semitism, even if
not specifically in the form of Judeo-Bolshevism, still has traction.
But Hanebrink is correct, I think, to argue that the myth of
Judeo-Bolshevism has been supplanted by another perceived threat
likewise constituted from a fusion of race, culture, religion, and
political ideology. This is the “Islamization of the West,” embodied in
the influx of Muslim immigrants who are considered dangerous, alien,
disloyal, extremist, and unassimilable, and thus once again threaten the
survival of national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western
civilization. In place of Judeo-Bolshevism, a new hybrid
specter—“radical Islam” or “Islamic terror”—is haunting Europe.
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