History of the Jews (81 page)

In the outside world, however, little was known about the survival of anti-Semitism, in new forms, in Soviet Russia, the destruction of Jewish institutions and the growing physical threat to Jews under Stalinism. It was simply assumed that, since the Jews were among the principal instigators of Bolshevism, they must be among its principal beneficiaries. The all-important distinction between the great mass of Jews, who were observant, assimilationist or Zionist, and the specific group of Non-Jewish Jews who had actually helped to create the revolution, was not understood at all.

But then it had always been an axiom of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that apparent conflicts of interest among Jews were mere camouflage for an underlying identity of aim. It was the commonest of all anti-Semitic smears that Jews ‘worked together’ behind the scenes. The notion of a general Jewish conspiracy, involving secret meetings of Jewish sages, was inherent in the medieval blood libel and had reached written form on numerous occasions. Napoleon
I
’s summoning of the Sanhedrin gave it an unfortunate impetus. Thereafter it had become part of the stock-in-trade of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. It was one of the grievances of this body that the Tsars were not sufficiently assiduous in putting down radical conspiracies, especially Jewish ones. At some point in the 1890s, one of their Paris agents was asked to concoct a document which could be used to demonstrate to Nicholas
II
the reality of the Jewish threat. The forger, whoever he was, used a pamphlet by Maurice Joly, written in 1864, attributing to Napoleon
III
ambitions to dominate the world. The
original had no reference to Jews at all, but for the monarch was now substituted a secret conference of Jewish leaders who stated that, by exploiting modern democracy, they were close to attaining their objectives. This was the origin of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.

The forgery failed in its original object. The Tsar was not deceived, writing on the document: ‘A worthy cause is not defended by evil means.’ The police then planted it in various quarters and in 1905 it first attained published form as an additional chapter in Serge Nilus’ book
The Great in Little
. But it aroused little interest. It was the Bolshevist triumph in 1917 which gave the
Protocols
a second, and far more successful, birth. The association of Jews with Lenin’s
putsch
was widely reported at the time, especially in Britain and France, now in the most desperate phase of a long war which had drained their manhood and resources. Kerensky’s provisional government had done its best to keep Russia actively in the war against Germany. Lenin reversed its policy and sought an immediate peace on almost any terms. This fearful blow to the Allied cause, which led almost immediately to the transfer of German divisions from Russia to the Western Front, revived in some people’s minds the identification of the Jews with Germany. There was in Britain, for example, a small but bellicose group of writers, led by Hilaire Belloc and the brothers Cecil and G. K. Chesterton, who had waged a ferocious campaign, with anti-Semitic undertones, against Lloyd George and his Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, over the Marconi case (1911). They now seized on the events in Russia to link the Jews with pacifism in Britain. Early in November 1917, in a speech, G. K. Chesterton issued a threat: ‘I would like to add a few words to the Jews…. If they continue to indulge in stupid talk about pacifism, inciting people against the soldiers and their wives and widows, they will learn for the first time what the word anti-Semitism really means.’
⁶³

The rapid circulation of the
Protocols
in the light of the October Revolution had, for a time, a devastating impact even in Britain, where anti-Semitism was a drawing-room, not a street, phenomenon. Both
The Times
’ Russian correspondent, Robert Wilton, and the
Morning Post’
s, Victor Marsden, were fiercely anti-Bolshevik and inclined to be anti-Semitic too. Both accepted the versions of the
Protocols
they saw as authentic.
The Times
ran a correspondence under the heading ‘The Jews and Bolshevism’, which included a contribution from ‘Verax’, 27 November 1919: ‘The essence of Judaism…is above all a racial pride, a belief in their superiority, faith in their final victory, the conviction that the Jewish brain is superior to the Christian brain, in short, an attitude corresponding to the innate conviction that the Jews
are the Chosen People, fated to become one day the rulers and legislators of mankind.’ The
Jewish World
commented: ‘Verax’s letter marks the beginning of a new and evil era…. We cannot say any more that there is no anti-Semitism in this country that loved the Bible above everything.’
⁶⁴
Early the next year, the editor of the
Morning Post
, H. A. Gwynne, wrote an introduction to an unsigned book called
The Causes of World Unrest
, based on the
Protocols
. They might or might not be genuine, he wrote. ‘Their chief interest lies in the fact that, while the book which contains them was published in 1905, the Jewish Bolsheviks are today carrying out almost to the letter the programme outlined in the
Protocols
.’ He noted that ‘over 95 per cent of the present Bolshevik government are Jews’. The publication gave a list of fifty of its members, with their ‘pseudonyms’ and ‘real names’, and claimed that of these only six were Russian, one German and all the rest were Jews.
⁶⁵
The Times
published an article, 8 May 1920, entitled ‘The Jewish Peril’, based on the assumption that the
Protocols
were genuine. Had Britain, it asked, ‘escaped a
Pax Germanica
to fall into a
Pax Judaica
?’

The agitation was continually refuelled by reports of Bolshevik atrocities. Churchill, a lifelong friend of the Jews, had been badly shaken by the murder of the British naval attaché in the Russian capital. The Jews were the most remarkable race on earth, he wrote, and their religious contribution ‘is worth more than all other knowledge and all other doctrines’. But now, he said, ‘this amazing race has created another system of morality and philosophy, this one saturated with as much hatred as Christianity was with love’.
⁶⁶
Victor Marsden, who had been held in a Bolshevik prison, returned with gruesome tales. ‘When we besieged Mr Marsden with questions’, reported the
Morning Post
, ‘and asked him who was responsible for the persecution he had suffered…he answered with two words: “The Jews.” ’
⁶⁷
Wilton, the
Times
man, published a book claiming that the Bolsheviks had erected a statue to Judas Iscariot in Moscow.
⁶⁸
Yet in the end it was
The Times
, in a series of articles published in August 1921, which first demonstrated that the
Protocols
was a forgery. After that, the wave of British anti-Semitism subsided as quickly as it had risen. Belloc had taken advantage of the scare to produce a book,
The Jews
, claiming that the Bolshevik outrages had created real anti-Semitism in Britain for the first time. But by the time it appeared, in February 1922, the moment had passed and it was coolly received.

In France, however, it was a different matter, for there anti-Semitism had deep roots, a national culture of its own, and was to yield bitter fruits. The great victory in the Dreyfus case had given
French Jews a false sense of final acceptance, reflected in the extraordinarily small number of legal requests by French Jews to change their names: a mere 377 in the entire period 1803-1942.
⁶⁹
Leaders of Jewish opinion in France argued strongly that hatred of the Jews was a foreign, German, import: ‘Racism and anti-Semitism are a treasonable work,’ argued a pamphlet put out by Jewish ex-soldiers. ‘They come from abroad. They are imported by those who want civil war and are hoping for a return of foreign war.’
⁷⁰
In 1906, at the height of the Dreyfus triumph, the Union Israélite pronounced anti-Semitism ‘dead’. Yet it was only two years later that Maurras’ Action Française and an equally anti-Semitic group, Les Camelots du Roi, came into existence. In 1911, the Camelots organized a violent demonstration against the play
Après Moi
at the Comédie Française; it was written by Henri Bernstein, an army deserter in his youth, and it had to be abandoned as a result of the rioting.
⁷¹
In France, unlike Britain, there seems to have been a natural constituency for anti-Semitic agitators. They seized eagerly on the Bolshevik scare and the mythology promoted by the
Protocols
, which went into many French editions. The focus of French anti-Semitism switched from the Jews as ‘money power’ to Jews as social subversives.

Jewish socialists, like Léon Blum, made no attempt to refute the notion. Blum gloried in the messianic role of Jews as social revolutionaries. The ‘collective impulse’ of the Jews, he wrote, ‘leads them towards revolution; their critical powers (and I use the words in their highest sense) drive them to destroy every idea, every traditional form which does not agree with the facts or cannot be justified by reason.’ In the long, sorrowful history of the Jews, he argued, ‘the idea of inevitable justice’ had sustained them, the belief that the world would be one day ‘ordered according to reason, one rule prevail over all men, so that everyone gets their due. Is that not the spirit of socialism? It is the ancient spirit of the race.’
⁷²
Blum wrote these words in 1901. In the post-war context they became more dangerous. Yet Blum, by far the most notable figure in French Jewry between the wars, continued to insist that it was the role of Jews to lead the march of socialism. He seems to have thought that even rich Jews would join it. In fact, while the anti-Semitic right saw Blum as the personification of Jewish radicalism, there were many on the left who abused him as the covert agent of the Jewish bourgeoisie. One-third of the Paris bankers were Jews, and it was a favourite assertion on the left that Jews controlled government finance whoever was in power. ‘Their long association with banking and commerce’, said Jean Jaurès, ‘has made them peculiarly adept in the ways of capitalist criminality.’
⁷³
When, in the
post-war years, the socialist left became the French Communist Party, an anti-Semitic element, albeit coded, became part of its bristling armoury of abuse, much of which was directed at Blum personally. The fact that Blum, along with most leading French Jews, consistently underestimated French anti-Semitism, whether from right or left, did not help matters.

It was in the United States, however, that the Bolshevik takeover, and its association with radical Jews, had the most serious consequences. In France, Jews might be assailed from right and left, but the country continued to be generous in receiving Jewish refugees throughout the 1920s and even during the 1930s. In America, however, the Bolshevik scare effectively ended the policy of unrestricted immigration which had been the salvation of east European Jewry in the period 1881-1914, and which had enabled the great American Jewry to come into existence. There had been efforts to impose immigrant quotas even before the war, successfully resisted by the American Jewish Committee, founded in 1906 to combat this and other threats. But the war ended the ultra-liberal phase of American democratic expansion. Indeed it introduced a phase of xenophobia which was to last a decade. In 1915 the Ku-Klux Klan was refounded to control minority groups, including Jews, who (it claimed) challenged American social and moral norms. The same year a book called
The Passing of the Great Race
, by Madison Grant, achieved instant notoriety by its claims that America’s superior racial stock was being destroyed by unrestricted immigration, not least of east European Jews. America’s intervention in the war was followed by the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), which had the effect of associating aliens with treason.

The Bolshevization of Russia put the capstone on this new edifice of fear. The result was the ‘Red Scare’ of 1919-20, led by the Democratic Attorney-General, Mitchell Palmer, against what he called ‘foreign-born subversives and agitators’. He claimed there were ‘60,000 of these organized agitators of the Trozky doctrine in the US’, ‘Trozky’ himself being ‘a disreputable alien…this lowest of all types known to New York City’. Much of the material circulated by Mitchell and his allies was anti-Semitic. One list showed that, of thirty-one top Soviet leaders, all but Lenin were Jews; another analysed the members of the Petrograd Soviet, showing that only sixteen out of 388 were Russians, the rest being Jews, of whom 265 came from New York’s East Side. A third document showed that the decision to overthrow the Tsar’s government was actually taken on 14 February 1916 by a group of New York Jews including the millionaire Jacob Schiff.
⁷⁴

The result was the 1921 Quota Act, providing that the number of immigrants admitted in any one year was not to exceed 3 per cent of their existing ethnic stock in the US in 1910. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act cut the figure to 2 per cent and pushed the base-date back to 1890. The net effect was to cut total immigration to 154,000 yearly, and reduce the Polish, Russian and Rumanian quotas, almost entirely of Jews, to a total of 8,879. It was effectively the end of mass Jewish immigration to the US. Thereafter the Jewish organizations had to fight hard to prevent these quotas from being scrapped completely. They considered it a triumph that in the nine difficult years 1933-41 they managed to get 157,000 German Jews into the US, about the same number as entered in the single year 1906.