41845358-Antisemitism

102 ANTISEMITISM
Bolsheviks colluded in global conspiracy, claiming that the Rothschilds, Schiffs,
and Warburgs financed the Bolsheviks. In retrospect, the bogus Jewish-
Bolshevik formulation is one of the great hoaxes of the age. It ignores the facts
that at least as many Jews opposed the Bolsheviks as supported them and Jews
were much more prominent in the Bund and in the Menshevik and Cadet parties.
As one Briton remarked: The “Jews in Russia are the bourgeoisie not the
Bolsheviki” and the proportion of Jews in the British government was greater
than in the Soviet. 49 As so often in the annals of antisemitism, the Jews were depicted
as indivisible and monolithic, an absurd assumption in light of the kaleidoscopic
diversity that characterizes Jews, variegated and never of one mind.
Such obvious points are nullified by a will to believe any evil of Jews.
The defeat of the Whites in the civil war and the securing of the Soviet
regime provided opportunities for the Jewish intelligentsia. Persecuted and
marginalized under the tsars, they now entered the civil service and government
posts en masse, filling the vacuum left by defections or condemnations of
the imperial bureaucracy. From pariah status into high public positions, the
universities, and the liberal professions was one jump for the Jewish intelligentsia,
and was, according to the historian Enzo Traverso, “a decisive element
in inspiring the Jewish population in its entirety toward an attitude of
support for the Soviet regime.” 50 For a decade or so the promise of an antisemitism-free
Soviet Russia and the prospects for an autonomous working
men’s Yiddish culture (the Bund’s program) seemed bright, even though at the
same time the atheistic regime was engaged in the repression of religion and
Judaism in particular, condemned Hebrew as counterrevolutionary in a policy
of “de-Hebrewizing,” and expropriated the numerous Jewish tradesmen and
petty bourgeois—so-called proletarianization—in the communist transformation
of society and economy.
Because they were neither workers nor peasants, these “bourgeois” Jews
fell into the category of lishentsy, those who were automatically deprived of all
citizenship rights and means of livelihood; they also suffered refusal of medical
care, exclusion of their children from school, expulsion from their homes,
and denial of ration cards in a time of food shortages and famine. In the mid-
1920s the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (a relief organization
often considered to be an agent of the Jewish global conspiracy)
endeavored to settle these desperate 800,000 displaced Jews in agricultural
colonies in Ukraine and the Crimea. 51 From 1928, under Joseph Stalin, the
Joint’s much-heralded plan was abandoned, and antisemitism and murderous
purges were the norm until Stalin’s dying day in 1953. It was Stalin’s boast at
the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 that as soon as he had enough qual-