To the Editor:

I want to commend you on Jerry Z. Muller’s excellent, long-overdue article, “Communism, Anti-Semitism & the Jews” [August 1988]. . . . Mr. Muller would no doubt be pleased to learn that his thesis was fully corroborated by almost all the papers presented at my session, “Christian Attitudes and Responses to the Jewish Plight in Eastern Europe 1933-1945 and After,” of the recent Holocaust conference at Oxford, entitled “Remembering for the Future.” . . .

There are, however, two points, with which I must disagree. The first concerns Mr. Muller’s contention that “the image of the Jew in the mind of America was never that of a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’” and that in the U.S. the “entanglement of Jews and Communism merits hardly a footnote.” While certainly not as important a factor as in Eastern and Central Europe, the image of the Jew as Communist had a long-lasting impact in the U.S. during the interwar period. The influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on the “Red Scare” of 1919, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s “raids” caught a considerable number of Jewish radicals, is obvious. What is less so is the impact of the publicity the raids engendered on the movement to restrict immigration, which culminated in the anti-Semitic Reed-Johnson Act of 1924. During the congressional hearings on this act, the radicalism of the Jews and their inability to become good American citizens were constantly cited. As a result, low quotas were set for immigration from Eastern Europe, which effectively eliminated the opportunity for Jews from those countries to come to America during the critical Hitler era.

Even more surprising is Mr. Muller’s ignoring of the widespread circulation and long-range influence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the bible of modern anti-Semites. This fabrication, introduced into Western Europe by White Russian émigrés in 1919, soon spread all over the world. The Protocols purported to expose the Judeo-Bolshevik plot to foment worldwide revolution. Not only did the work reinforce the “Red Scare” in the U.S., it quickly inspired an English translation, The Jewish Peril (1919), that was seriously reviewed by the London Times. This and related articles in other respected English papers make comprehensible the uncharacteristic anti-Semitic remarks by Winston Churchill which Mr. Muller cited in his article. Only after the Times publicly reversed itself in August 1921, and showed the Protocols to be a forgery, was its impact in Britain diminished. . . .

In the U.S., however, the Protocols met with greater success, especially owing to Henry Ford, the auto magnate, who serialized a version in his paper, the Dearborn Independent (circulation 300,000), and later published the compilation in a book entitled The International Jew in an edition of half-a-million; it was subsequently translated into many languages, including Japanese. Despite Ford’s public apology to American Jewry seven years later, in 1927, his version became the most powerful vehicle for disseminating the Protocols image of the Jewish Bolshevik throughout the U.S. as well as the rest of the world. The damage continued unabated. Hitler so admired Ford that he is supposed to have kept Ford’s photo on his office wall, and The International Jew became a staple item in Hitler’s worldwide propaganda against the Jews. In the U.S. during the late 30’s it was to show up as well in Father Coughlin’s highly popular anti-Semitic radio programs and his newspaper, Social Justice. Coughlin justified anti-Semitism in America by noting that “the people sense a closely interwoven relationship between Communism and Jewry.” . . . Coughlin’s activities so unnerved American Jews that they became a factor in the inadequate response of American Jewry to the plight of European Jewry. One could therefore hardly call the effective dissemination and influence of the image of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” during this period a footnote to American Jewish history.

David Kranzler
Brooklyn, New York

_____________

To the Editor:

Jerry Z. Muller’s article is excellent and penetrating. However, there is one error of fact. While it is true Mendel Beilis was tried on the basis of fabricated evidence and tremendous pressure was exerted by the czarist government to obtain a conviction, he was actually acquitted in 1913. There was some degree of autonomy for the judiciary under the czar, and enlightened public opinion, non-Jewish as well as Jewish, was horrified and repelled by the miscarriage of justice in the Beilis case.

Paul M. Beigelman
Encino, California

_____________

To the Editor:

“Communism, Anti-Semitism & the Jews” by Jerry Z. Muller has many facts but proves nothing. What is most disturbing is that the article seems designed to show that Jewish activity in leftist and Communist causes gave and gives fodder to anti-Semitism.

Mr. Muller clearly does not know Jewish history. In 1881 there were over a hundred pogroms throughout Russia in which thousands of Jews were killed. In 1882 the May Laws were passed which destroyed whatever economic security there was for the Jews of czarist Russia. The official policy of the czarist regime toward the Jews was to kill one-third, convert one-third, and deport one-third. But there was no Communist scare then, the Russians simply did not like Jews.

The story Mr. Muller tells of the chief rabbi of Moscow saying “The Trotskys make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills” sounds apocryphal to me. Before the revolution Jews were not officially allowed in Moscow except on a limited basis. And who was this “chief rabbi”? Moscow was a rabbinic backwater!

There was more anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, but this has no relation to Jewish activity in Communist parties. Anti-Semitism existed for centuries prior to the birth of modern Communism. . . .

What is surprising in the course of modern history is that so few Jews actually joined the parties of the Left, given the overwhelming pressure of anti-Semitism. The reason for this was the tremendous desire (to the chagrin of Orthodox rabbi and anti-Semite alike) of the Jew to assimilate. Wherever the Jew was given the chance, he became a model citizen of his country. . . .

Mr. Muller’s article tries to explain too much. In his zeal, he comes close to repeating the nauseating canard, heard all too often, that somehow the Jews are in part responsible for their misfortunes. . . .

[Rabbi] Eugene A. Wernick
Temple Beth El
Allentown, Pennsylvania

_____________

Jerry Z. Muller writes:

My purpose in writing “Communism, Anti-Semitism & the Jews” was to call the attention of historians and interested readers to what appears to have been a shared pattern in the history of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. What I termed the “dialectic of disaster” was the tendency of religious and anti-capitalist forms of anti-Semitism to result in the attraction of a small minority of Jews to revolutionary Communist parties, a minority which tended to rise disproportionately into positions of salience; that in turn added the image of the Jew as Bolshevik to the ideological inventory of the interwar European Right, where it took its place alongside the older stereotypes of the Jew as deicide and as capitalist plutocrat; that stereotype was a factor in the collaboration of indigenous groups in the murder of the Jews of Eastern Europe during World War II, a fact which led Jews to be overrepresented in the Communist governments of the postwar era, which in turn led to new anti-Semitism, which those governments tried to harness for their own ends.

I deliberately focused upon the history of Jews and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe because the history of the Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union is better known, while the pattern of interaction among Jews, anti-Semitism, and Communism in Western Europe was significantly different, for reasons which I alluded to in my article. The topic merits a larger work; within the compass of an article (even a long article) I could merely demonstrate the plausibility of this pattern or paradigm, without accounting fully for significant national variations or for analogous phenomena elsewhere. There was much of potential interest and relevance which had to be left out.

I also hoped that the article would prompt others with greater expertise in the history of the Jews in the various nations of Eastern and Central Europe and elsewhere to test the explanatory power and limits of this pattern in each national context. All too often there has been a propensity among historians of the various nations of Eastern Europe to accept at near face value the stereotype of the Jew as Bolshevik as representative of the political behavior of Jews as a whole. On the other hand, Jewish historians, precisely because the myth of the Jew as Bolshevik has been so historically pernicious, have sometimes been loath to deal with the topic, hence underrating the consequences of the actions of Communists of Jewish origin. Among the most notable exceptions is the article, “Jews Between Revolution and Counter-Revolution,” by the late Jacob Talmon in his Israel Among the Nations (1970). In the long run, historical understanding is better served by sober and accurate demythologizing than by ignoring a subject because it is liable to polemical abuse.

Of course no author can fully protect himself from misconstruction by his readers. The letter from Rabbi Eugene A. Wernick is a case in point. That anti-Semitism predated the salience of Jews in Communist movements is an obvious fact discussed repeatedly in my article, though that cannot be gleaned from Rabbi Wernick’s letter. My article comes close, he tells us, to claiming “that somehow the Jews are in part responsible for their misfortunes. . . .” What I actually maintained was that the actions of some Jews (the small minority of Jewish Communists) were one factor (though never the primary and rarely the most important factor) which contributed to the misfortunes of many other Jews, toward whose fate the former were in principle indifferent. I trust that most readers of COMMENTARY can distinguish between these two claims. The first is a canard; the second is history. Whether such facts prove anything depends upon the disposition of the reader to consider evidence in formulating his judgments.

David Kranzler’s letter confirmed some of my hopes and apprehensions about publishing the article. Because of the need for compression, I could only allude to some relevant facts. Thus, I did not ignore the Protocols of the Elders of Zion but rather summarized the impact of its message when I wrote that “To conclude that the Jewish revolutionary and the Jewish capitalist were actually partners working both sides of the street on their road to the conquest of Christian civilization may have required a skewed vision, but this in fact was how the interwar Right viewed the Jewish question.” Mr. Kranzler’s information regarding the role of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth on the development of American immigration restrictions has added to my knowledge of the subject, and does indeed convince me that it merits a larger place than I had recognized in the history of American Jewry. He and I agree that its impact was less important in the U.S. than in Central and Eastern Europe.

Paul M. Beigelman is of course quite right about the fact that Mendel Beilis was tried on charges of ritual murder but eventually found innocent by a jury in Kiev. This was due in part to the testimony of defense witnesses who refuted the contentions of the government prosecutor regarding the purported role of ritual murder in Judaism. Among the key experts for the defense was Rabbi Jacob Mazeh, a man versed not only in traditional Jewish learning but in Russian culture as well. Mazeh was elected to the post of the official rabbi of Moscow in 1893, was reelected as “nasi” (“president”) after the February Revolution, and served until the position was abolished by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920’s. He died in 1925.

The earliest source I have found for the oft-repeated story of Mazeh’s remark to Trotsky in 1921 that “The Trotskys make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills” is an article in the American Jewish journal, the Reflex, of November 1927.

Is the story of Mazeh’s statement to Trotsky apocryphal, as Rabbi Wernick surmises on the basis of his superior knowledge of Jewish history? We cannot know for sure, since Rabbi Mazeh’s four volumes of memoirs, Zikhronot, published in Palestine in 1936, are literary and incomplete, and as his biographer Ze’ev Aryeh Rabiner notes in his Sefer Harav Yitzhak Mase (Tel Aviv, 1958), they barely touch upon Mazeh’s “last, tragic years.” Yet the alleged statement tallies with what we do know about Mazeh and his role in the fate of Russian Jewry in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Rabiner’s biography of Mazeh and Mazeh’s Zikhronot contain moving accounts of the hope and joy with which Mazeh and the Jews of Moscow celebrated the overthrow of the czar during the February Revolution, and the apprehension and fear with which they reacted to the Bolshevik Revolution. When the Bolsheviks closed his synagogue shortly after the Revolution, Mazeh intervened successfully with Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment, to have the synagogue reopened, by reminding him that the czarist regime had ordered the same synagogue closed during the abortive revolution of 1905. But the reprieve for Jewish institutions was short-lived. Mazeh was a leading supporter of the Hebraist Tarbut organization, founded in Moscow in the spring of 1917. Within a few years, the institutions of Hebrew culture were liquidated by the Evsektsii, the branch of the Bolshevik party devoted to Jewish affairs. On Rosh Hashanah of 1921, in the very auditorium in Kiev in which Beilis was tried and acquitted in 1913, a theatrical show trial was staged in which the Jewish religion was tried and sentenced to death. It is no wonder then that when the Bolsheviks organized a declaration by representatives of various religions which denied the claim of foreign critics that religion was persecuted in the. Soviet Union, Mazeh refused to sign. The Trotskys helped make the revolutions; the Bronsteins and Mazehs paid the bills; the Wernicks should not forget the costs.

_____________