A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (41 page)

As World War I was coming to an end, Jewish civilians in eastern Europe found that the dangers they faced were intensifying rather than diminishing. Three of the great empires that had controlled eastern and central Europe and western Asia had begun to break apart during the war. Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire were each home to dozens of ethnic groups who were determined to take advantage of the collapse. As these groups jockeyed for power and independence, revolutions and civil wars broke out almost everywhere. And almost everywhere, Jews were caught in the middle.

Soon after the Bolsheviks gained control in Russia in 1917, they gave the country both a new name—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or the Soviet Union)—and a Communist government based on
the ideas of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who lived from 1818 to 1883. Marx believed that the struggle between workers and manufacturers and other industrialists would end only when workers owned all land and other resources not as individuals but as a community. In his view, only then would everyone be equal.

Because of his belief in communal, or shared, ownership of land and other resources, the system Marx envisioned became known as Communism. It was a radical form of socialism based on the idea of taking from each person according to his or her ability and giving to each according to his or her needs. This meant that a communist government “took” work and other contributions from its citizens and “gave” them support based on their needs rather than on their status in society, efforts, education, or talent. Marx also advocated a dictatorship of the proletariat (the workers), or rule by the majority class in society. Such rule would be a step toward a new classless society.

V. I. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, agreed with most of Marx’s ideas, but he quickly realized that the real world did not always match Marx’s theories. Almost as soon as the Communists took power, they found themselves at war with the White Army, which was made up mainly of Russians who hoped to restore the deposed tsar to power. The White Army had the support of Britain and the Allies, now that the Bolshevik government in Russia had made its own peace agreement with Germany. The Bolsheviks also faced opposition from nationalist groups who wanted their own independent countries and from bands of outlaws who simply saw an opportunity to acquire wealth and power amid the confusion. As a result, in some parts of the old Russian Empire, no one was in control.

The situation was particularly treacherous in the Ukraine. Like other ethnic groups in the old Russian Empire, Ukrainians wanted independence. As a result, the Bolsheviks’ Red Army there faced not only the White Army, but also gangs of bandits and thugs, and a newly organized Ukrainian national army. With the exception of the Communists, these armies all targeted Jews, in the belief that in doing so they were attacking Bolsheviks. To them, all Jews were Communists and all Communists were Jews.

In fact, most Jews were not Communists, although some Jews did belong to the Communist Party and a few held high positions in the party. Many Russians believed Jews were all Communists because Karl Marx was of Jewish descent. Perhaps the best known Jew in the Russian Communist party was Leon Trotsky, who organized and led the Red Army. Like Marx and other Communists, he had no interest in Judaism
or any other religion, and he rejected any connection to Jews as a people. Nevertheless, non-Jews in Russia viewed him and other Communists of Jewish descent as Jews and increasingly regarded Communism as a Jewish creation, even though the vast majority of Communists were non-Jews.

About 60 pogroms against Jews took place in the Ukraine in November and December 1917, and attacks continued off and on for another two years. One of the most horrific took place in February 1919 in the town of Proskurov, about 175 miles south of Kiev. At the time, the town was ruled by an independent Ukrainian government known as the Directory. Early on the morning of February 15, local Communists, including a number of Ukrainians and Jews, tried to regain control of the city by attacking a rail yard where Directory soldiers were encamped. The Ukrainian officer in charge was a man known only as Semosenko. Within a few hours, he and his men had put down the uprising and killed those responsible.

Later that day, Semosenko, who apparently believed that all Jews were Communists, decided to take revenge for the attack by slaughtering all the Jews in the town. He warned his officers that their men were not to loot or steal; they were simply to kill every Jew in Proskurov. He explained that the attack was a matter of honor.

One Ukrainian officer refused to participate in the massacre; he would not allow his men to kill unarmed civilians. The officer and the soldiers under his command were promptly sent out of town. Everyone else obeyed. The men marched through the center of town in battle formation, with the band in front. They then “dispersed into the side streets which were all inhabited by Jews only.”
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It was the Sabbath, and most Jews knew nothing about the early-morning uprising against the Directory or its outcome. They went to synagogue as usual and then returned home for their Sabbath meal. They learned of the attack only when soldiers burst into their houses, unsheathed swords, and “calmly proceeded to massacre the inhabitants without regard to age or sex. They killed alike old men, women, children, and even infants in arms.”
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Among the dead was a local Catholic priest who begged the soldiers to stop. He was killed at the door to his own church. A town councilor begged Semosenko to stop the killing but was ignored. So the councilor sent a telegraph to Semosenko’s commander, who immediately ordered an end to the massacre. Only then did the slaughter stop. As soon as the soldiers heard a prearranged signal, “they fell in at the place previously appointed, and, in orderly ranks, as on a campaign, singing regimental
songs, marched to their camp behind the [train] station.”
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In three hours, they had killed 1,200 infants, children, women, and men.

Before leaving town, Semosenko issued a proclamation blaming the Jews for the massacre and warning that he would return if they dared to cause trouble again. He and his troops then headed for a nearby town, where they carried out yet another pogrom.

Despite atrocities like this one, Ukrainian officials insisted that they were not hostile to Jews. But their words did not keep Ukrainian nationalist troops from continuing to target Jews. When a survivor of one massacre protested that neither he nor his neighbors were Communists, he was told, “We aren’t after Communists; we are after Jews.”
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Once again, neither truth nor logic was a match for deep-seated beliefs.

The White Army also participated in pogroms in the territories under its control, and, by late summer of 1919, these forces had taken the lead in attacking Jews. John Ernest Hodgson, a British journalist who traveled with White Army troops, explained why:

The officers and the men of the army laid practically all the blame for their country’s troubles on the Hebrew. They held that the whole [catastrophe] had been engineered by some great and mysterious secret society of international Jews who, in the pay and at the orders of Germany, had seized the psychological moment and snatched the reins of government.
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Those ideas (except for the part about the secret society being in the pay of Germany) came straight from
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. The
Protocols
had disappeared from view during the world war, but the brutal murder of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children at the hands of the Bolsheviks in July 1918 had turned new attention to the document. A week after the killing, White Army soldiers found a copy of the
Protocols
among Alexandra’s possessions. They also discovered that she had drawn a swastika on one wall. For the tsar’s supporters, the two discoveries had great meaning.

Historians have found letters suggesting that Alexandra’s copy of the
Protocols
was probably not a treasured possession but rather a gift she received just before she was taken into custody. Her letters also indicate that she regarded the swastika as a good luck symbol, as many people
did at the time. The symbol, which is at least 3,000 years old, had been used in countries around the world to signify life, power, strength, or good fortune. But in the early 1900s, the symbol had begun to take on a new meaning in Germany. Some Germans now regarded it as a sign of the purity of “Germanic blood” and the struggle of “the Aryans” against “the Jews.” That view of the swastika, as a symbol of a fight against “the Jews,” was also popular among some of the tsar’s supporters. They now imagined that the book and the swastika were signs from the tsarina that the White Army was engaged in an epic battle against the evil Red Army, controlled by “the Jews.”

The news that the tsarina had owned a copy of the
Protocols
spread quickly through the army. Before long, many officers and ordinary soldiers were convinced that the fact that she had carried the book with her was proof that it was true. However, as early 1905, the tsar, and possibly the tsarina, knew that the
Protocols
was a hoax. Not long after the tsar first read the document, he had been told that it was a forgery created by his own secret police. He immediately halted plans for mass distribution. “One cannot defend a pure cause,” he wrote, “by dirty methods.”
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But despite his stand, the
Protocols
had remained in print and spread throughout the Russian Empire.

Did the leaders of the White Army know the work was a forgery? Some clearly did. They had held high positions in the secret police and in the tsar’s army. But most of the men who served in the White Army probably believed it was true because it seemed to provide an explanation for the terrible things that had happened to Russia over the past ten years. Hodgson writes that among the White Russians, the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy became “an obsession of such terrible bitterness and insistency as to lead them into making statements of the most wild and fantastic character.”
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Statistics reveal that as a result of that “fierce and unreasoning hatred,” more than 2,000 pogroms took place in eastern Europe between 1917 and 1921. About 75,000 Jews were killed, many more were injured, and at least half a million were left homeless.

During World War I, Jews throughout the world had tried to help their fellow Jews in Europe. After the war, their aid continued and even expanded. Jewish organizations set up soup kitchens, created clinics, and built orphanages in Poland, Hungary, and other eastern and central European countries. They also gathered information about attacks on Jews,
particularly in Poland and other newly independent nations in the region. Many were eager to find a way to protect Jews from further violence.

As the war ended in November 1918, Louis Marshall, a prominent American lawyer and a founder of the American Jewish Committee, sent a series of memos to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He argued that the Allies should require newly formed nations in the region to accept a treaty guaranteeing the rights of all minorities in exchange for international recognition. It was not a new idea. In 1878, Jews in the West had tried to protect Romanian Jews with a similar treaty at the Congress of Berlin (see
Chapter 10
). The Romanian government signed the pact but refused to enforce key provisions, and the major powers were unwilling to require it to do so.

In 1878, the major powers had not been fully convinced of the need to protect minorities. After the war, however, they had a better understanding of why it was essential to do so. In 1919, even as world leaders gathered in Paris to write the treaties that would officially end the war, much of eastern Europe was still engulfed in violence. That violence exposed the dangers that Jews and other minorities faced in a region where every newly independent nation had sizeable minority populations. If those populations were not guaranteed political and social equality, the fighting was almost certain to continue.

In a speech to Congress in January 1918, President Wilson had listed 14 points he considered essential to a lasting peace. Many of them dealt with the “frustrated nationalism” that he believed had been responsible for the world war. Therefore he supported the division of the old multinational empires into independent nations. In Wilson’s view, his 14th point was the most important. It called for a league of nations to keep the peace and guarantee the independence of “great and small States alike.” In a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918, Wilson claimed that all 14 points were based on a single principle:

It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation, no part of the structure of international justice can stand
.

In 1919, almost every minority group in Europe, including many Jewish groups, understood the importance of that principle, which is why each sent a delegation to the peace conference in Paris. They demanded not only civil rights but also “self-determination”—the right to maintain their own languages and to govern themselves.

Some Jews in the West were troubled by the calls for self-determination. They believed that demands for “national rights” could backfire. Henry Morgenthau, a Jew who had served as the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, shared that view. He argued:

under this plan, a Jew in Poland or Romania, for example, would soon face conflicting duties, and… any American who advocated such a conflict of allegiance for the Jews of central Europe would perhaps expose the Jews in America to the suspicion of harbouring a similar desire.
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