Among the plethora of antisemitic myths that pervade the public discourse in many continents, there is a common stereotype of Jews being “revolutionaries” who are always eager to bring down the national or even international establishment in order to advance their specific identitarian objectives.

The Bolshevik Revolution… Not All Jews?

Typically, this perception is associated with the dominance of ethnic Jews within the Bolshevik leadership, a fact that is highlighted by non-Jews (e.g. the famous example of Churchill) but also acknowledged in respected Jewish publications.

Maurice Samuel was a well-known writer in the Yiddish language back in the days, as well as an untiring activist against antisemitism. He wrote in his book You Gentiles (1924) that, while Jews did not display symmetry when it came to achievements in science and the arts, they showcased a revolutionary spirit that he describes as “iconoclastic” and “prophetic.”

Samuel writes (pp.141–142):

In a hundred years of modernity we, an able race, have given little more than mediocrity to your way of life […] in the arts we have been second-rate, third-rate. While in moral effort we have exceeded any living race and have produced an overwhelming number of revolutionaries and socialists and iconoclasts of the true prophetic type, we have, in science, belles-lettres and the plastic arts been a thoroughly minor people.

 

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We have joined your capitalistic world in deliberate emulation and rivalry: yet Jewish socialism and Jewish socialists are the banner bearers of the world’s “armies of liberation.” Three or four million modernized Jews, a ludicrously small number, have given to the world’s iconoclastic force its chief impetus and by far its largest individual contribution. America and England put together, with their almost two hundred millions, have not played that role in world iconoclasm which a handful of Jews have played. Had we produced as vigorously in art and science we should have flooded the art galleries and the libraries. But in these we have shown no special aptitude: we may have done as well for our numbers as England, as France or Germany though even this I doubt.

As a side point, how does the contemporary claim that Jews have higher IQ than everyone else because they’ve won some Nobel Prizes (at least, Ashkenazi Jews have) fare against this fact? Is this high IQ some sort of new phenomenon? Did something awaken within the DNA of (Ashkenazi) Jews within just the last century? It would be good if someone could answer these questions, as otherwise some ignorant antisemites might use this to try and suggest that (Ashkenazi) Jews might be being selected to receive Nobel Prizes disproportionately simply for being Jews.

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Seth J. Frantzman, the “senior Middle East correspondent and analyst” for The Jerusalem Post known for his hawkish attitude towards Iran, wrote in his 2017 article “Was the Russian Revolution Jewish?“:

The large number of Jews in leading parts of the party was not lost on those non-Jews around them. V.M. Molotov, the powerful foreign minister of the Soviet Union under Stalin, made many remarks about Jews to Felix Chuev in a series of conversations between 1969 to 1986 that became the basis for the 1991 book Molotov Remembers. He recalled that as Lenin lay dying “at the time Jews occupied many leading positions, though they made up only a small percentage of the country’s population.”

 

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When Theodor Herzl visited the Russian Empire in 1903, he met Count Witte, the minister of finance. According to Leonard Schapiro, who authored The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement in 1961, Herzl found that “50% of the membership of the revolutionary parties was Jewish.”

The name that comes immediately to mind when we speak of Jews among the Bolsheviks is of course that of Trotsky. In a book review of Trotsky and the Jews by Joseph Nedava (1972), Elias Schulman reminds us that Trotsky had grown up in a Jewish environment, which he was shaped by. He was even married by a rabbi in his adult life, when he was nominally an atheist.

He writes in the Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol.65, No.4 (April, 1975):

Leon Trotsky who together with Lenin destroyed the free democratic government of Russia, seized power by force and established the dictatorship of the Communist party, considered himself most of his life an internationalist. Occasionally he did speak up as a Jew especially during the Beilis trial with its accusation of ritual murder. This was natural. He was born a Jew and his youth he spent among Jews. His parents were simple Jewish folks, who spoke Yiddish although with their children they spoke a poor Russian. Trotsky even attended a Heder, he never became a Jewish scholar. Trotsky also understood Yiddish and he displayed knowledge of the language on a few occasion.

 

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The fact is that although Trotsky was a non believer, he was married by a rabbi. When he married his first wife they were both in a prison in Moscow, and since as Jews they could not be married any other way, Trotsky and his bride ignored their principles and were married according to the Law of Moses and Israel.

Among the lesser-known Bolsheviks of a Jewish ethnic background, we find Yakov Yurovsky, the chief executioner of the Romanov family who had assassinated not only Emperor Nicholas II of Russia but also his young children and even his servants. As a 2017 Moscow Times article reports, many antisemites among the Russian-Orthodox Christians still allege that Yuri’s Talmudic studies from his youth were to blame for what has been described as a “special ritual of revenge” and “sacral historic mission,” even involving a blood libel since “a local Jewish sect” had “burned the bodies [of the Romanovs] and drank the ashes with tea.”

The Bolshevik revolution was thus not quite a question of the triumph of some socialist ideology but, rather, identity politics centered around revenge for the historical persecution of Jews by the Tsars.

This was then weaponized by the monarchist groups, such as the Black Hundreds in Russia and other such groups elsewhere, with dire consequences for the Jews. In his award-winning book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe (2021), Jeffrey Veidlinger documents how the 1917 Bolshevik revolution triggered a series of pogroms from 1918 to 1921 that resulted in the loss of 100,000 Jewish lives, mainly in today’s Ukraine. Veidlinger puts forward the hypothesis that this mass violence led to the convergence of techniques and ideologies that had facilitated the Holocaust later on.

Veidlinger also highlighted the fact that not all Jews were supportive of the Bolsheviks, which is a no-brainer. Many were in fact plainly embarrassed and horrified by the implications that these communist revolutionaries were creating for Jews all over the world.

Albert Lindemann, in his book, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (1997), goes as far as to say that the association with the Bolsheviks gave a new sort of dynamism to the old European antisemitism. He also says that some who were still, as he puts it, “hesitant or inconsistent” until then, would become former adherents of antisemitism. As an example, Lindemann brings Wilhelm II, the last emperor of Germany (p.424). Lindemann also writes that, while many have thought of the Jews as “natural revolutionaries”—examples include Churchill as well as Jews such as Disraeli (PM of the UK in the mid-19th century)—, just as many considered the Jews to be “natural conservatives.” This includes the likes of Herzl and even Trotsky. In Paris and Berlin, some of the leading anti-Bolshevik newspapers were owned by Jews. Lindemann reproduces a quote from Arnold Margolin, a lawyer and himself a notable anti-Bolshevik Jew, where he says that “the number of Jews among the active anti-Bolshevist groups is much larger than in the ranks of the Bolshevist Government” (p.426).

Writing in The Jew and Communism (1959), Melech Epstein says that in the United States, the “Jewish public opinion was sharply antagonistic to the Bolshevik seizure of power” (p.64), and not only was the Orthodox press anti-Bolshevik but the liberal Jewish press was even more so, having actually called for military interventionism.

Many academics have also divided the Ashkenazi-Jews into different groups based on their approach to socialist revolution. In Eastern Europe and Russia, they lived in a state of utter misery and were legally discriminated against, so they had everything to gain and not much to lose by destroying the status quo. However, in Western Europe, in countries such as Germany and France, they were relatively well-off, and post-emancipation they were considered equal citizens. Thus there was no need for them to become revolutionary. (In the Frantzman article that we had discussed earlier, his line of reasoning is pretty similar—basically a socioeconomic reading to analyze the Jewish over-representation in Bolshevism.)

That’s why the “revolutionary socialist” Jews who lived in Germany were quite a peculiar bunch. Karl Marx was a descendant of rabbis, but his father converted to Christianity for his job. Marx himself showed himself to be quite the antisemite in his 1844 short piece, On the Jewish Question. Moses Hess, considered a forerunner of Marxism and someone who frequented Engels, was not representative of the trend. Unlike most Jews of Germany, he was a Zionist—in fact, he was also a forerunner of Zionism. And then you have Rosa Luxemburg, who was active in Germany but only became a German citizen as an adult. Previous to this, she had lived in Poland, therefore fitting more closely into the category of oppressed Eastern European Jews rather than that of the emancipated Jew of Germany.

The other Jewish socialists of Germany were more like Eduard Bernstein, embracing incremental reformism within the “bourgeois liberal democracy” over revolutionary changes.

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But… Is the Revolution Only Bolshevik?

But the association between Jews and revolution predates the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. This is evident from the works of Bernard Lazare, who passed away in 1903—coincidentally the year the Bolshevik faction was formed by Lenin, following the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. It is worth adding here that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was Jewish. Thus, from a traditional Jewish perspective, he himself was Jewish and would have been eligible to benefit from Israel’s “Law of Return” if he were alive today.

Bernard Lazare, born into a secular Jewish family, was a literary critic and journalist who is best remembered today for his involvement in the Dreyfus affair, which is named after a Jewish military officer who was accused of having provided information to the then enemy, Germany, thus implicating all the Jews residing in France of having an alleged “dual loyalty.”

Lazare defended him and became an activist against antisemitism, and it is within the context of these efforts that he produced his most famous book, Anti-Semitism, Its History and Causes (1894).

It is an erudite and nuanced work and, considering the topic of the article at hand, chapter 12 is worth pondering over, even if only for its name, “The Revolutionary Spirit in Judaism.” Lazare writes that it is the “quest of justice” and that in this life it justifies the Jews’ “revolutionary spirit”:

Thus the conception the Jews formed of life and death furnished the first element of their revolutionary spirit. Starting with the idea that good, that is justice, was to be realized not beyond the grave for beyond the grave there is sleep, until the day of the resurrection of the dead but during life, they sought justice, and never finding it, ever dissatisfied, they were restless to get it.

 

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Notwithstanding their long bondage, despite the years of martyrdom which have been their lot, in spite of the centuries of humiliation, which have debased their character, depressed their brains, cramped their intelligence, changed their tastes, their customs, their aptitudes, the debris of Judah have not abjured their so vivid dream, which had been their support and inspiration during the wars for independence.

 

The funeral-piles, massacres, spoliations, insults, everything contributed to make dearer to them the justice, the equality and the liberty which during many long years were for them the emptiest words.

In the subsequent chapter, Lazare writes about the “transformative” effects of Jews on society, and here’s what he mentions about religion:

Exegesis and freedom of investigation are powerful destroyers, and it is the Jews who originated biblical exegesis, just as they were the first to criticize the forms and doctrines of Christianity.

 

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Their activity was such as to give rise to a general belief in the existence of a secret society sworn to the destruction of Christianity. During the thirteenth century, a century which witnessed the rapid development of that complex of humanism, skepticism and paganism which we call the Renaissance, at a time when the Hohenstaufen defended the cause of science against dogma, and showed themselves the protectors of Epicureanism, the Jews occupied the first place among scholars and rationalist philosophers. At the Court of the Emperor Frederick II, “that hotbed of irreligion,” they were received with favour and respect.

 

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If, therefore, the Jews were not solely responsible for the destruction of religious doctrine and the decay of faith, they may at least be counted among those who helped to bring about such a state of desuetude and the changes which followed.

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Further on, within the same chapter, he writes about “secret societies”:

It is true, of course, that there were Jews connected with Free Masonry from its birth, students of the Kabbala, as is shown by certain rites which survive. It is very probable, too, that in the years preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution, they entered in greater numbers than ever, into the councils of the secret societies, becoming, indeed, themselves the founders of secret associations. There were Jews in the circle around Weishaupt, and a Jew of Portuguese origin, Martinez de Pasquales, established numerous groups of illuminati in France and gathered a large number of disciples, whom he instructed in the doctrines of reintegration.

 

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This, too, then, would tend to show that though the Jews might very well have been active participants in the agitation carried on by the secret societies, it was not because they were the founders of such associations, but merely because the doctrines of the secret societies agreed so well with their own.

 

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During the [French] Revolution the Jews did not remain inactive, considering how few their numbers were in Paris; the position they occupied as district electors, officers of legion, and associate judges, was important.

He then provides a sort of conclusion to the chapter:

Thus have I briefly depicted the Jew in his character as a revolutionist, or at least have attempted to show how we might approach the subject. I have described his achievements both as an agent in the dissemination of revolutionary ideas, and as an actual participant in the struggle, and have shown how he belongs to both those who prepare the way for revolution through the activity of the mind, and those who translate thought into action. The objection may be raised that, in joining the ranks of revolution, the Jew as a rule, turns atheist, and ceases practically to be a Jew. This, however, is true only in the sense that the children of the Jewish radical lose themselves more easily in the surrounding population, and that as a result the Jewish revolutionist is more easily assimilated. But as a general thing, the Jew, even the extreme Jewish radical, can not help retaining his Jewish characteristics, and though he may have abandoned all religion and all faith, he has none the less received the impress of the national genius acting through heredity and early training. This is especially true of those Jews who lived during the earlier half of the nineteenth century, and of whom Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx may serve as fitting examples.

We thus see, via the pen of a Jewish journalist, that the association between Jews and revolution is something that predates the Bolsheviks. In fact, it also predates the earlier forms of socialism and even socialism itself. Of course, like with the Bolsheviks, it would be unjust for someone to argue that all of these excerpts apply to all Jews. And just as we wouldn’t want to be made to feel collectively responsible for the actions of just a few individuals (e.g. the liberal-secular rulers in our native lands), in the same way, not all Jews would consider this “revolutionary spirit” to be any sort of positive qualification.

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