Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

THE DIABOLIZATION OF JEWS
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ified non-Jews, he would oust the Jews from all the leading positions, as after
the war it was his boast that there were no Jews on the Party’s Central Committee.
During the war Stalin sought to rally world Jewry and the Western
powers to the cause of the Soviet Union through the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee. But the Holocaust and the struggle of the Jewish community in
Palestine to form the state of Israel stimulated a revival of national consciousness
among Soviet Jewry, which greatly angered Stalin (although the USSR
voted for the 1947 United Nations resolution creating Israel), who launched
a murderous campaign against “cosmopolitans,” those “people without origin
or affiliation,” and the like epithets for the ever-conspiring Jews. The Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded, its members and many Jews (Yiddish
writers especially) were killed or arrested. The official newspaper Pravda announced
the so-called Doctors’ Plot. Six of the nine physicians accused of
trying to poison Stalin and the Kremlin leadership at the behest of the CIA
and the Zionists were Jews. Pogrom-like attacks on Jews in the streets and
schools occurred; they were dismissed from positions and jobs; a mass deportation
of all Jews from European Russia to the Arctic or Siberia was underway.
Thereupon Stalin died and Pravda announced that the Doctors’ Plot was
all a “base fabrication” by the KGB and the danger abated, but antisemitism
did not ebb in the Soviet Union.
THE PROTOCOLS IN GERMANY
AND THE UNITED STATES
Germany’s defeat in World War I and a revolution that replaced the kaiser’s
government with an unpopular democratic republic made many Germans receptive
to the Protocols’ message. In their twisted view, the Protocols provided
convincing evidence that the Jews were responsible for starting the war—Jewish
bankers saw an opportunity to enrich themselves; for American entry on the
side of the Allies; for Germany’s defeat—the “stab in the back”*; and for the
revolution that toppled the monarchy. They saw further proof of Jewish power
and machinations in the first meeting of the Zionist World Congress (1897);
the Balfour Declaration (1917), which supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine;
the Bolshevik Revolution (1917); the newly established but short-lived
* Some 100,000 German Jews had served in the war and 12,000 had died in battle.
Medals for bravery had been awarded to 30,000 Jewish soldiers. But this meant nothing
to the extreme Right or to antisemites who held the Jews responsible for fostering a defeatist
attitude on the home front.