Jews and Communism

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Jews and Communism chronicles the complex and controversial connection and interaction between Jews and Communism. Inasmuch as there is egalitarianism in Judaism and in communism, there is a connection between them, and by the same token, a safe haven for Jews. On the other hand, the same disparity between ideology and actual policy that is studiously ignored by the whole world, leading to an understanding of Communism as equivalent to Purges, is in effect in the case of Anti-Semitism, to a certain extent: Stalin removed Jews from power but did not Purge them from the party or the USSR. The most fundamental question is not addressed in this article at all: Jewish ancestry or even denomination of a single individual is the vaguest indication of the extent to which that individual approaches, as no one person could ever be all of it, the vast and deep identity of Jewishness as a whole.

Much of the content of this article relies on a single source, so what remains clear is either that Yuri Slezkine lies a lot, or that there were a lot of Jews in the communist party. The degree by which Slezkine differs from other scholars on this question is great. For example, Slezkine claims that Jews were the most numerous nationality (itself a dubious, reaching distinction) in the NKVD, where Vadim Abramov has it that there were never more than 9% in all the intelligence services. The numbers of those who disagree are also large. For example, Slezkine claims that the man who disposed of the Romanov family Pyotr Voykov was Jewish, where scholars largely agree that Voykov was not.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the culmination of modern Jewish enlightenment and Jewish emancipationist trends among Central European Jews, who were attracted to a variety of reformist and revolutionary movements. These chiefly included forms of Liberalism and Socialism, and also the more radical option of Communism that attracted many members of previously politically marginalized minorities.

Drive to the Collective Farm!
Soviet Yiddish poster featuring a proud modern Jewish woman driving a tractor, contrasting a domestic vision of the traditional blessing over Shabbat candles

Among those active in later Communist movements, there was Jewish participation in both ethnic political parties of the Jewish left, and also as part of national Communist parties. Modern Communism emerged in its Marxist-Leninist form in the Russian and other post-World War I revolutions. Jewish participants were prominent in the early Communist leaderships of several countries. In 1919, two short-lived revolutionary states, Béla Kun's Hungarian Soviet and Eugen Leviné's Bavarian Soviet, had leaders of Jewish descent.

Marxist—Leninist atheism is generally viewed as incompatible with religion; Jewish Communists were Jewish by ancestry but not by faith. Support among the general Jewish public was limited; "while not a few Communists were Jews, few Jews were Communists."Template:sfn Jewish disillusionment with Communism increased through the later 20th century, prompted in part by Antisemitism in the Soviet Union.

The German philosopher Karl Marx, who founded scientific socialism and came to be regarded as the primary theorist of Communism and other Marxist movements, was a Christian of Jewish ancestry.

The Jewish left and Communist movements

In the early phase of the modern communist movement, a distinct tendency amongst Jewish communists emerged. This movement shared a common historical and socio-economic background with the other Jewish socialist movement of the era (Bundism, Labour Zionism, etc.), which emerged from the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), the growing importance of Yiddish as a language of literature and culture, the emergence of the working class in the Russian Pale of Settlement and the need to organize trade unions and other organizations to resist pogroms and oppression.

Jewish communism developed as a fusion of socialist thought and secular Jewish nationalism, though the Jewish national aspirations were often subdued. Jewish communists promoted a secular Yiddishkeit identity, in which proletarian Yiddish culture was portrayed as authentic Jewish culture. This identity stood in stark contrast to religious Judaism. Whilst a number of distinctly Jewish communist institutions developed, the Jewish communists remained firmly within the framework of the general Marxist-Leninist mainstream. The communist movement opposed Zionism and Jewish communists were organized in territorial parties along with non-Jewish communists as per the 21 conditions of the Communist International.

After the Russian Revolution, two minority factions of the Jewish left decided to align with the Communists: the Communist Bund and the Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion). These were dissolved by 1922, with many former members joining the Yevsektsiya.

Economic conditions

A Jewish landworker with every turn of the wheel of his tractor makes a contribution to building socialism and you will help him. (OZET)
Soviet propaganda promoted a shift in Jewish settlement from traditional shtetl market towns to kolkhoz collective farms.

Historically, Jews in East-Central Europe were highly urbanized, and were well-represented among petty burgeoisie in traditional shtetl market towns (a group disfavored by Communism), as well as among the industrial proletariat in the shift to large cities (a group favored by Communism). Some individual Jews acquired wealth as high bourgeoisie. There were few Jews in the peasantry, and in most countries they were virtually excluded from the landowning class.

Historically, Jews in East-Central Europe were highly urbanized, and were well-represented among petty burgeoisie in traditional shtetl market towns (a group disfavored by Communism), as well as among the industrial proletariat in the shift to large cities (a group favored by Communism). Also, there were growing numbers of individual Jews achieving wealth as modern capitalists in the high bourgeoisie. There were few Jews in the peasantry, and in most countries they were virtually excluded from the landowning class.

A stated goal of Communism was "normalization" and economic assimilation of the Jewish population, including encouraging a greater participation in agriculture. This agricultural emphasis was also shared by early Zionists as part of the Negation of the Diaspora.

Role in mainstream Communism

Whether Jewish communism is to be considered as a 'Jewish' phenomenon as such remains a controversial subject. According to philosopher Stanisław Krajewski, "Despite there having been Jewish communists, who like other communists may have been victimizers, there was no such phenomenon as Jewish communism." He and law professor Ilya Somin agree that "the vast majority of early 20th century Jews were not communists, and that most communists were not Jewish. Overrepresentation of a group in a political movement does not prove either that the movement was “dominated” by that group or that it primarily serves that group’s interests. The idea that communist oppression was somehow Jewish in nature is belied by the record of communist regimes in countries like China, North Korea, and Cambodia, where the Jewish presence was and is miniscule." David Aaronovitch argues that communism was inevitable with or without Jews. "Jewishness was not in any way essential to Communism. It would have happened had all the Jews in the world been living on Madagascar."

Stanislav Andreski says that a significant cause of Jewish over-representation within communist parties—while this may be understood merely as parallel to Jewish prominence in other fields —was the particular nature of Jewish communities within Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries.Template:sfn Andreski argues that Jews who deviated at all from the norms of these Jewish communities would be very much excluded from the rest of the communal life and from traditionally Jewish occupations. In turn, these "apostate" Jews would become associated with movements that offered an alternative—or even opposition—to traditional Jewish community life. Andreski claims that after this phenomenon took hold in Russia and Jews gained prominence within Soviet leadership, their position made such a political system more appealing to Jews elsewhere.Template:sfn Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher celebrated the apostate "non-Jewish Jew", transcending both Judaism and Jewish identity in a pursuit of universalist values, in a speech at the World Jewish Congress in 1958.

In 1941, the Encyclopaedia Judaica asserted that "Individual Jews played an important role in the early stages of Bolshevism and the Soviet regime." In addition, due to "the growing trend of oppressive antisemitism in the rest of Eastern Europe, Nazi and fascist influence in Central and Western Europe, and the economic crisis in the United States. Communism and support of the Soviet Union thus seemed to many Jews to be the only alternative, and Communist trends became widespread in virtually all Jewish communities. In some countries Jews became the leading element in the legal and illegal Communist parties and in some cases were even instructed by the Communist International to change their Jewish-sounding names and pose as non-Jews, in order not to confirm right-wing propaganda that presented Communism as an alien, Jewish conspiracy."Template:sfn

Religious opposition

Communism's atheistic outlook was inimical to Judaism. With the rise of some Jews to prominence in the Communist movements, there was Jewish opposition to other Jews who had become hostile communists. During 1918 Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev were excommunicated from Judaism by rabbis in a religious procedure known as a cherem (meaning "forbidden, taboo, off-limits, immoral"), while Ukraine was under German occupation. The rabbis of Odessa pronounced a cherem against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other Jewish Bolshevik leaders in a local synagogue. After he was denied a petition to Leon Trotsky for special assistance to protect Jewish communities in 1921, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow Jacob Mase observed, "The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills", playing off of Trotsky's original family surname.

Russian-based Hasidic Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950) the sixth Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch (Lyubavichi is in Russia) was an outspoken critic of the Communist regime. Opposing its goal of forcibly eradicating religion he set up Jewish religious schools. In 1924, based on reports from the Yevsektsiya to the Cheka (Russian secret police), Schneersohn was forced to leave Rostov and settled in Leningrad. In 1927 he was arrested, accused of counter-revolutionary activities and imprisoned in the Bolshoy Dom in Leningrad being sentenced to death. Pressure from Western governments, including US President Calvin Coolidge and the International Red Cross forced the Communists to commute the death sentence and banish him to Kostroma for three years that was commuted following outside political pressure. He was allowed to leave Russia for Riga, Latvia, from there he eventually traveled to the USA, received in the White House by US President Herbert Hoover who had lobbied for his release.

Marx on religion and Jewish identity

The philosopher Karl Marx is regarded as the "father of Communism".

The German philosopher Karl Marx, often regarded as the "father of Communism", was of Jewish ancestry on both sides (his paternal line included leading rabbis of Trier). He was raised as a Lutheran, and abandoned religion entirely in adulthood. Marx's father converted to the Evangelical Church of Prussia after Jewish emancipation had been revoked in Trier and Rhine Province, and Marx was baptized at age six along with his other siblings. Marx's views on faith in general were shaped by his negative experiences of the Prussian state church, the "only religion Marx would ever know." Marx saw religion as an alienation of the working classes, and an opium of the people cynically used to justify and legitimize the ruling classes.

Marx's main discussion of Jewish topics was On the Jewish Question, where he "suggested that the very same reasoning granting Jews equal rights led to the demand that society be transformed in a communist direction.". Marx wrote against a special emphasis on Jewish emancipation (and in favor of a universalist approach), and also metaphorically equated Judaism with his conception of bourgeois capitalism. This essay was significant in the development of Marx's economic theory, as it marks "the first signs of a shift to his later emphasis on the material and economic conditions of human life" and "suggests that the way to abolish the 'problem' of Judaism is to reorganize society so as to abolish bargaining." Like Marx, many later Communists of Jewish ancestry had a decidedly ambiguous Jewish identity; not just in the religious sense, but also often being socially estranged from the wider Jewish community.

Russian Empire / Soviet Union

In Soviet Russia, the concern voiced, was that if Jews were made equal to non-Jews, they would take over Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution created the recognition of Jewish nationality and provided civil equality for Jews.Template:sfn After the Bolshevik Revolution, since there was no preexisting social elite to discriminate against Jews, they rose quickly into the higher ranks.Template:sfn With "no discrimination of any kind,"Template:sfn Jews continued to hold leadership positions until the Great Purge in 1938.

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a large multi-national and autocratic state, with most of the Jewish population legally confined to the Pale of Settlement (in modern Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine), and also facing numerous other legal restrictions. An eruption of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, led to greater Jewish political engagement. The "Nationality Problem", among Jews and other minorities, played a role in the largely failed Revolution of 1905.

1917 Revolution

Leon Trotsky, founder and first leader of the Red Army, a central figure in the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War.

The 1917 Russian Revolution came in two parts, the February Revolution being a social democratic one, and the later October Revolution being a Communist one, with the Bolsheviks eventually seizing all power. Legal Jewish emancipation was passed by the social democratic government instituted by the February Revolution on April 4, 1917.

Slezkine claims that in June 1917, the number of Jewish Bolsheviks present at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets was a minimum of 31 percent.Template:sfn In total, 1090 deputies were registered for the Congress, of which Bolsheviks had 105 seats.

In the November 1917 election, the only free election of this period, Russian Jews voted for Zionists or for democratic socialist parties, rather than for the Bolsheviks.Template:sfn

In the 23 October 1917 Bolshevik Central Committee meeting that discussed and voted on a "armed insurrection", 5 of the 12 participants were Jews. Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Grigory Sokolnikov were three of the seven members of the Politburo, an ad hoc organ for political supervision of the armed uprising.Template:sfn This Politburo should not be confused with the "core of the core" Bolshevik organ with the same name established in 1919.

Bolshevik party

Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee

The All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VtsIK) formed during the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets contained 101 members of which 62 were Bolsheviks and included 23 Jews, 20 Russians, 5 Ukrainians, 5 Poles, 4 Balts, 3 Georgians, and 2 Armenians. According to Nahum Rafalkes-Nir, former head of Poale Zion, during the discussion of Bolshevik takeover of the congress all 15 speakers who participated as official representatives were Jews while historian Yuri Slezkine says that it was likely 14. Kamenev and Sverdlov were the first two VtsIK chairmen which lead the Soviet state. Sverdlov also served at the Party's chief administrator. The first Bolsheviks in charge of Moscow and Petrograd were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Zinoview also served as the chairman of the Communist International.Template:sfn Historian Albert Lindemann notes “it seems beyond serious debate that in the first twenty years of the Bolshevik Party the top ten to twenty leaders included close to a majority of Jews. Of the seven ‘major figures’ listed in The Makers of the Russian Revolution, four are of Jewish origin.”Template:sfn

Between 1917 and 1919, Jewish Bolshevik party leaders included Leon Trotsky,Template:sfn Grigory Zinoviev, Moisei Uritsky, Lev Kamenev, Yakov Sverdlov, and Grigory Sokolnikov. Lev Kamenev was of mixed ethnic Russian and Jewish parentage.Template:sfn Lenin's Plan for Monumental Propaganda, established in April 1918,Template:sfn was headed by Nathan Altman, a Jew, who was responsible for designing the first Soviet flag, state emblem, official seals, and postage stamps.Template:sfn Among the 23 council members between 1923 and 1930, five were Jewish.Template:sfn In April 1917, Petrograd Soviet's governing bureau had 24 members of which 10 (41.7 percent) were Jews.Template:sfn

Early on however, soon after seizing power, the Bolsheviks established the Yevsektsiya, the so-called "Jewish section" of the Communist party in order to destroy the rival Bund and Zionist parties, suppress Judaism and replace traditional Jewish culture with an artificial "proletarian culture" devoid of any traditional Jewish content.Template:page neededTemplate:vn

In the immediate post-revolution period, Jewish small traders were hurt by war communism (1918 - 1921), which included the nationalization of even small shops, and during this period "70 to 80 percent of Russian Jews had no regular income". Under the 1918 Constitution, nearly half of Jews were disenfranchised as part of the lishenets class. The Jewish community saw some economic relief under the more liberal New Economic Policy (1921 - 1928), which however evaporated with Collectivization (1928 - 1940).

Soviet Central Committee

Grigory Zinoviev, longtime head of the Communist International.

Between 1919 and 1921, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a consistent one-fourth Jewish. In 1918, Jews comprised 54 percent of "leading" Party officials in Petrograd, 45 percent of city and provincial Party officials, and 36 percent of Northern District commissars. In 1919, Jews represented three of the five members in Petrograd's trade union council presiduium, and in 1920 were 13 out of the 36 members of Petrograd Soviet's Executive Committee. In 1923, Jews in Moscow held 29 percent of the Party's "leading cadres" and 45 percent of the provincial social security administration. Moscow's Party organization was 13.5 percent Jewish, three times the general Jewish population percent.Template:sfn According to the 1922 party census, there were 19,564 Jewish Bolsheviks, comprising 5.21% of the total.Template:sfn In 1922, an estimated 40 percent of the top leadership of the Soviet Army was Jewish.Template:sfn In the mid-1920s, of the 417 members of the Central Executive Committee, the party Central Committee, the Presidium of the Executive of the Soviets of the USSR and the Russian Republic, the People's Commissars, 6% were ethnic Jews.Template:sfn In 1929, among members of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets there were 402 ethnic Russians, 95 Ukrainians, 55 Jews, 26 Latvians, 13 Poles, and 12 GermansTemplate:spaced ndashJewish representation had declined from 60 members in 1927.Template:sfn

Secret police

In 1918, Jews represented 3.7 percent of Cheka Soviet secret police officials in Moscow, 4.3 percent of commissars, and 8.6 percent of senior officials. The majority of the Jews in the Cheka (65.5%) were considered "responsible officials". Jews constituted 19.1 percent of central apparatus investigators and made up 50 percent (6 out of 12) of the investigators in the department responsible for quelling counter-revolution efforts. In 1923, the "leading" officials of the OGPU, the Cheka's successor, was 15.5 percent Jewish and 50 percent of the Collegium's Secretariat members were Jews. In 1920, 9.1 percent of all members of provincial Cheka offices was Jewish. Russians made up the majority of members, with Latvians being the most overrepresented group.Template:sfn In Ukraine, the leadership of the Cheka was "overwhelmingly Jewish" and in early 1919 the "Cheka organizations in Kiev were 75 percent Jewish".Template:sfn Zvi Gitelman observed: "The high visibility of Jews in the Bolshevik regime was dramatized by the large numbers of Jews in the Cheka [...] From the Jewish point of view it was no doubt the lure of immediate physical power which attracted many Jewish youths [...] Whatever the reasons, Jews were heavily represented in the secret police [...] Since the Cheka was the most hated and feared organ of the Bolshevik government, anti-Jewish feelings increased in direct proportion to Cheka terror."Template:sfn This despite 90% of the Cheka being NOT Jewish, and the Cheka hauling away people who were fighting to keep their wealth and power, against egalitarianism.

Vadim Abramov’s monograph "Jews in the KGB: Executioners and Victims" demonstrated that the total number of Jews in the security services at no point in history exceeded 9%, and from 1927 never exceeded 4%. Yuri Slezkine, however, has it that the NKVD, OGPU's successor, was "one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions."Template:sfn By 1934, he says, Jews were the most numerous in the “leading cadres” with 37 Jews compared to 30 Russians, 7 Latvians, 5 Ukrainians, 4 Poles, 3 Georgians, 3 Belorussians, 2 Germans, and 5 assorted others. Jews, he says, were in charge of twelve key NKVD departments and directorates which included the police, Gulag labor camps, counterintelligence, surveillance, and economic wrecking. Genrikh Yagoda, also a Jew, served as the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs.Template:sfn In January 1937, the top 111 NKVD officials was composed of 42 Jews, 35 Russians, 8 Latvians, and 26 others. At the time, Slezkine says, Jews still led twelve of twenty NKVD directorates and held seven of the ten departments that made up the Main Directorate for State Security, including the departments of Protection of Government Officials, Counterintelligence, Secret-Political, Special Army Surveillance, Foreign Intelligence, Records, and Prisons. He calls spying in Western Europe and in the United States and foreign service "an almost exclusively Jewish specialty", and claims Jews lead the Gulag since its founding in 1930 until near the end of the Great Purge in late November 1938.Template:sfn

Great Purge

Genrikh Yagoda in 1915 as a young revolutionary. He eventually became head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin from 1934 to 1936, and a central figure in the Great Purge trials.

Between 1936 and 1940, during the Great Purge and later the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, Stalin had largely eliminated Jews from senior party, government, diplomatic, security and military positions (many Jews in the leadership had been members of the Old Bolsheviks).Template:sfn The majority of Jews were "not directly affected by the Great Terror, and of those who were, most suffered as members of the political elite."Template:sfn Between 1937 and 1938, an estimated 1 percent of all Jews in the Soviet Union were arrested for political crimes in contrast to 16 percent of all Poles and 30 percent of all Latvians.Template:sfnTemplate:dubious In 1939, Stalin directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews".Template:sfn Although some scholars believe that this decision was taken for primarily domestic reasons,Template:sfn others argue it may have been a signal to Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.Template:sfnTemplate:sfn By early 1939, the Jewish proportion of people in the Gulag was "about 15.7 percent lower than their share of the total population."Template:sfn According to historian Yakov Etinger, many Soviet state purges of the 1930s were antisemitic in nature, and a more intense policy developed toward the end of World War II.Template:sfn Slezkine disputes this stating that "Jews were the only large Soviet nationality without its own "native" territory that was not targeted for a purge during the Great Terror."Template:sfn

Persecution and emigration

In his early years, Stalin adhered to the Leninist policy of equality, declaring as late as January 1931 that "Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism." and that "Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty." Nonetheless, in the context of Nazi claims about "Jewish Bolshevism" and negotiation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the environment in Russia changed to one in which far fewer Jews were appointed to senior positions, with their overall frequency dropping to 5% in 1940. The dismissal of Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov and directive to Vyacheslav Molotov, his successor, to "purge the Ministry of Jews" were intended as a signal that Russia was prepared to appease Hitler and enter into non-aggression talks.

Stalin initially supported the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Far East and the UN partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, followed by military support for Israel with Czechoslovakian weaponry in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. However, after Israel was founded in 1948, Stalin began to regard Jews as a disaffected "fifth column" aligned with an increasingly pro-American Israeli state. In 1948 Stalin carried out a purge against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He closed many Jewish cultural institutions in 1948 and early 1949. In the 1952 "Night of the Murdered Poets", he had thirteen of the USSR's most prominent Yiddish writers executed, and later that year he declared that "Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service." Jews were removed from leadership positions in security services in 1952-1953. In early 1953 accusations against a group of Jewish physicians of involvement in a "Doctors' plot" were aborted only due to the death of Stalin. In his Secret Speech, Nikita Khrushchev alleged that Stalin had intended to go much further, planning a special "Deportation Commission" to deport large numbers of Jews to prison camps. Poliakov, the secretary of the commission, said that Stalin had planned the deportation to begin in February 1953.

During the Cold War, Soviet Jews faced increasing antisemitism, suspected of being a "security liability" or possible "traitors". During a time of economic deterioration in the USSR during the 1960s, Jewish members of the Soviet party were used as a scapegoat by other members in order to deflect criticism of their own failures—this fueled purges of Jews from the party.Template:sfn Some government sectors were almost entirely off-limits to Jews. In addition, Soviet restrictions on Jewish education and expression prevented Jews from engaging in Jewish cultural and religious life. These restrictions led many Jews to seek emigration, requesting an exit visa was itself seen as an act of betrayal by Soviet authorities. Strong international pressure caused the Soviet authorities to significantly increase the emigration quota. In the years 1960 through 1970, only 4,000 people emigrated legally from the USSR. In the following decade, the number rose to 250,000.

Fall of Soviet Union

In the last half of the twentieth century Jews played important roles in the various human rights movements within Russia and the former Soviet Union that contributed to the downfall of the former USSR.

Many Jews played leading roles in the Soviet dissident movements that disagreed with the policies and actions of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet government and actively protested against these actions through either violent or non-violent means. Soviet dissidents incurred harassment, persecution, imprisonment or death by the KGB, or other Soviet government agencies.

Jews, such as Yelena Bonner (her mother Ruth Bonner was Jewish, and wife of Andrei Sakharov), Natan Sharansky, Naum Meiman and many others, played leading roles in the Moscow Helsinki Group that remains an influential human rights monitoring non-governmental organization, originally established in what was then the Soviet Union; and that still operates in Russia.

Middle East

Palestine / Israel

The precursor to the modern communist movement in Israel and Palestine was the Socialist Workers Party, founded in 1919. The party had an exclusively Jewish membership, but was in theory open for Arabs to join. This party was later split in communists and Zionists, with the communist group establishing themselves as the Palestine Communist Party and becoming a section of the Comintern in 1924. With the creation of the State of Israel, the communists regrouped as the Communist Party of Israel. In 1965 the party was split between a predominately Jewish faction led by Shmuel Mikunis and Moshe Sneh and a predominately Arab group. The latter established Rakah, which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union recognised as the 'official' Communist Party in the country. The Soviet media stated that the Mikunis-Sneh group had defected to the bourgeois-nationalist camp.

Egypt, Iraq

Jews were disproportionally represented in the early communist movements in Egypt and Iraq.

At the end of the Second World War the Iraqi Communist Party had a strong influence amongst the Jewish community in Iraq, and competed with the Zionist over dominance within the community. The communists, which argued for integration of Jews into Iraqi society, tended to gain more support from more affluent and better educated sectors of the community. A group founded by them was the Anti-Zionist League in Iraq.

Organizations in Egypt included the Jewish Anti-Zionist League, Iskra, and Egyptian Communist Organisation.

Central Europe

Hungary, Romania, and Poland

Béla Kun, leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

During the Communist regimes in Hungary, Romania, and Poland, Jews were in charge of a "high proportion of the most sensitive positions in the Party apparatus, state administration, and especially the Agitprop, foreign service, and secret police." The regimes in the countries "resembled the Soviet Union of the 1920s insofar as they combined the ruling core of the old Communist underground, which was heavily Jewish, with a large pool of upwardly mobile Jewish professionals".Template:sfn

In Hungary, Jews were "overrepresented in both socialist intellectuals and in communist militants."Template:sfn Jewish scholar Howard Sachar notes that 31 of the 49 commissars of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic existed were Jewish.Template:sfn The party leader was Béla Kun, child of "an assimilated Jewish father and a disinterested Protestant mother". According to Hungarian historian István Deák, Jews "held a near monopoly on political power in Hungary during the 133 days of the Soviet Republic in 1919 and again from, roughly, 1947 to 1953, and then again from 1955 to the fall of 1956" and that "political personalities of Jewish origin played a decisive role in 20th-century Hungary".Template:sfn Jewish scholar Louis Rapoport credits Kun as being a "cruel tyrant" and that he later served as "Stalin’s chief of terror in the Crimea."Template:sfn Jews constituted "95 percent of the leading figures" of Kun’s regime.Template:sfnTemplate:Contradiction-inline Tibor Szamuely lead all paramilitary efforts and Otto Korvin operated as the chief political prosecutor. A disproportionate number of Jews were judges, prosecutors, propagandists, and leaders of the youth and women wings.Template:sfn The rule of Kun's regime in 1919 became one of the major reasons many Hungarians backed the Final Solution in 1944, despite most Jews being unassociated with them.Template:sfn Amongst those of Jewish origin that ruled Hungary between late 1940s and early 1950s were Mátyás Rákosi, Ernő Gerő, Mihály Farkas, and József Révai.Template:sfn

In Poland, the Communist movement was the Polish political party most vehemently rejecting antisemitism, and frequently suggested similar solutions to issues facing Jews as the Bund, the Zionists, and Jewish religious parties did.Template:sfn Jewish Communists claimed that at the peak of their ballot success in the Sejm election of 1928, two-fifths of their supporters were Jewish. Despite significant Jewish presence in the Polish Communist movement they had little support in the wider Polish Jewish community and about 5 percent of all Jewish voters supported the Communist movement.Template:sfn The most popular party among Polish Jews was the Bloc of National Minorities, supporting the rights of Jews, Belarussians, and others.

In its early history, "7 out of about 10" of the original Polish Communist leadership was composed of Jews. During the 1930s, they composed between 22 to 26 percent of the overall Communist Party of Poland (KPP) membership, 51 percent of the youth wing (1930), about 65 percent of all Communists in Warsaw (1937), 75 percent of the propaganda wing, 90 percent of the International Red Aid (MOPR), and the majority of Central Committee members.Template:sfn In comparison, the Polish census of 1931 found a large and highly urbanized general Jewish population of about 30% in Warsaw and other cities, and about 10% overall (the Jewish population was about 75% urban, and Communism was primarily an urban political ideology).The proportion of Jews in the KPP was never lower than 22 percent countrywide, peaking at 35 percent in 1930. The Communist Party of West Belarus and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine had similar percentages. Jews accounted for 54 percent of the field leadership of the KPP in 1935 and 75 percent of the party's propagandists. Jews held the majority of the seats on the Central Committees of the Communist Workers Party of Poland (KPRP) and the KPP.Template:sfn Despite the fact that the Communists had limited support among the broader Jewish population, the prominence of Jews in Communist leadership led to the allegation of Żydokomuna which had claimed the existence of a Judeo-Communist conspiracy and had become prevalent in interwar Poland, especially after the death of Józef Piłsudski.Template:sfn

Weimar Republic

Rosa Luxemburg, principal founder of the Spartacus League, which grew into the Communist Party of Germany

Eugen Leviné, leader of the Bavarian Soviet Republic.

During the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Communist uprisings included Spartacus League members Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, and Paul Levi. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was headed by Eugen Leviné and had in it a minimum of seven other Jewish commissars which included Ernst Toller and Gustav Landauer.Template:sfn Sarah Gordan notes: "The prominence of Jews in the revolution and early Weimar Republic is indisputable, and this was a very serious contributing cause for increased anti-Semitism in post-war years. It is clear then that the stereotype of Jews as socialists and communists led many Germans to distrust the Jewish minority as a whole and to brand Jews as enemies of the German nation."Template:sfn

Austria

According to Howard Sachar, Jews played a "central role" in the failed attempt of a coup d'état by the Red Guards led by Egon Kisch on November 12, 1918.Template:sfn

English-speaking world

United States

According to Theodore Draper Jews made up about 15 percent of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in the 1920s.Template:sfn During this period about 4-5 percent of the total Jewish population in the US voted for Communist candidates and 10 percent voted for Socialist candidates.Template:sfn According to Slezkine, during the 1930s, in the United States, Jews, largely immigrants from Eastern Europe, accounted for about 40 to 50 percent of CPUSA's membership and at least a comparable proportion of the Party's leaders, journalists, theorists, and organizers.Template:sfn Medieval historian Norman Cantor notes that: "During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that — as 1930s anti-Semites claimed — Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role."Template:sfn

The Communists Julius Rosenberg (1918–1953) and Ethel Rosenberg (1915–1953) were American citizens of Jewish ancestry executed for espionage, having passed classified information about American nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. In the anti-Communist atmosphere of McCarthyism, both the publicity around the Rosenberg case, and also the violence of the Peekskill Riots spurred Jewish American fears of Antisemitism.

United Kingdom

Jason L. Heppell notes that: "Throughout the era of Communism, Jews were both influential and disproportionately represented in Communist parties. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) was no exception to this. By the 1960s, two out of the three most important positions in the party were held by Jews: Bert Ramelson as industrial organizer and Reuben Falber as head of the organization department. In the 1940s, nearly a third of all district party secretaries were Jewish. By the early 1950s, between 7 and 10 percent of the Communist party's activists (its cadres) were Jewish, even though Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of Britain's national population."Template:sfn

Australia, Canada

The United Jewish People's Order of Canada was originally a lefist Bundist offshoot that embraced the Soviet Union until J. B. Salsberg's report on Soviet Antisemitism led to a change of policy.

Jewish Communist activism is Australia was centered in the Melbourne immigrant community from the 1920s - 1950s.

Latin America

Cuba

Jewish communists founded the Sección Hebrea ('Hebrew Section') in 1924. In the following year, Sección Hebrea took part in the founding of the Communist Party of Cuba. In 1926 the Jewish communists set up Kultur Fareyn ('Cultural Association'), which was active amongst the Jewish proletariat.

Kultur Fareyn had a newspaper and did radio broadcasts in Yiddish. The repression against the communist movement was launched under the rule of Gerardo Machado affected the Jewish communists. Some were expelled from the country. Five Jewish communists were killed by police. Fabio Grobart, who was amongst those expelled from the island, returned and functioned as the liaison between the Cuban party and the Comintern. Kultur Fareyn was banned in 1931. Its leader were arrested and put on trial for revolutionary activism. In 1934 the Yiddishe Gezelshaft fur Kunst un Kultur ('Jewish Association for Art and Culture') was founded by Jewish communists, but this group was significantly smaller than what the Kultur Fareyn had been.

Later Jewish communists ran the Folks-tzenter ('People's Centre'). Folks-tzenter published the newspaper Kubaner Idish Wort from Havana 1942-1950.

The majority of Cuban Jews, however, were businesspeople, and departed the country after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, many joining the Cuban migration to Miami.

Mexico

In Mexico, Jewish Communist activism was focused in the Folks-Ligue.

Opinions about role of Jews

The prominence of some Jews in Communist and other revolutionary movements led antisemites to blame the Jews for the propagation of the Communism. "The myth of Jewish Communism was one of the most popular and widespread political prejudices in the first half of the 20th century, in Eastern Europe in particular." Polish philosopher Stanislaw Krajewski wrote that

"Despite there having been Jewish communists, who like other communists may have been victimizers, there was no such phenomenon as Jewish communism. The Jews who remained in Eastern Europe were often victims rather than victimizers. The number of Jewish communists was important, but not as large as antisemites asserted. The problem lies in the quasi-religious zeal of communists who were Jews. The message is that communism does pose a moral problem to Jews."

In the theses, Krajewski discusses how "Anti-Semites have grossly exaggerated the Jewish involvement in communism, distorted the facts, and interpreted them according to conspiracy theories. Jews were also victims of communism", how "Jewish communists rarely cared about Jewish concerns and often virtually stopped being Jewish." How "There is no distinctive Jewish radicalism. There is no ‘Jewish communism’. Jews became communists because of general mechanism" and that "It was not Judaism or Jewish traditions but the social situation that led Jews to involvement in communism." In his last two theses, Krajewski writes that "moral responsibility can be indirect. Reemerging Jewish communities in Eastern Europe should face the legacy of Jewish participation in communism. However, accepting a Jewish share of moral responsibility does not make non-Jews less responsible" and how "objective research is needed to clarify the extent and nature of Jewish participation in communism. The tragic consequences of the anti-Semitic myth of ‘Jewish communism’ should impose no taboo."Template:sfn

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "The prominence of individual communists of Jewish descent in the revolutionary regimes (Leon Trotsky in the Soviet Union, Béla Kun in Hungary, and Ernst Toller in Bavaria) confirmed to antisemites the "natural" attraction of Jews and international communism."

In a critical opinion column on Ynet by Israeli writer Sever Plocker, he wrote: "The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (in the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and 'Soviet people.'"

In The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation the historian André Gerrits, after reviewing interpretations that either maximize or minimize the Jewish role in the history of Communism, describes his view of the current scholarly consensus:

"A third interpretation rejects both the full identification of Jews with revolutionary politics as well as the conviction that the myth of Jewish Communism lacks any basis in reality. These historians do accept the susceptibility of a relevant part of the Jewish population to radical political beliefs as an important historical phenomenon. They consider it an important aspect of the history of communism and of the Jewish communities in East Central Europe. This explanation dominates the current historiographical debate".

See also

• Wikipedia::Category:Yiddish communist newspapers
• Wikipedia:The Communist Party USA and African Americans and Wikipedia:language federations in Communist Party USA
• Wikipedia:Korenizatsiya and Wikipedia:National delimitation in the Soviet Union

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