Paul Hanebrink elegantly synthesizes a polyglot literature on one of the west's most destructive delusions. He traces continuities—but also transmogrifications—in the Judeo-Bolshevik myth's passage from the not-so-belle époque, through the world wars’ fires and the Cold War's chill, beyond 1989–1991's fall of Bolshevism's bastions to our own day, when millions tremble before a specter of “Islamism”—anti-communist antisemitism's Frankensteinian son.
Hanebrink offers two paradoxes that will jolt readers accustomed to thinking of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as defeated fascism's broken spear. One, looming over post-1945 eastern Europe, is that among the newly puissant parties tied to Moscow—and widely hated for being, in antisemitic eyes, Trojan horses of Jewish despotism—“the ‘Jew’ would emerge as the face of the enemy within their own ranks” (182). The other, the book's self-proclaimed central problem, is that “Communism is gone, but the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism”—the belief that “Communism was a Jewish plot”—“refuses to go away” (4).
Hanebrink rejects explanations fixed on the empirical presence of Jewish communists—that is, of people of Jewish heritage (for Bolshevism exacted sacrifice of cultural-religious identities). Some Jews embraced communism, for reasons Hanebrink is content to allow Yuri Slezkine's Jewish Century (2004) to define, but—as among the Christian-born—large majorities did not. It is too much to say that Jewish Bolsheviks’ presence—as a “fact”—“signified nothing,” but Hanebrink is right that “its meaning had to be made” (16).
Hanebrink declines to house the Judeo-Bolshevik Myth in the conceptual dungeon of transhistorical antisemitism, even if it evokes “medieval fables about Jewish devils intent on subverting the Christian order” (6). This would obscure its crystallization of “political and cultural anxieties. . .that other antisemitic stereotypes did not” (6). These were, preeminently, fears of Bolshevik immolation of western, Christian civilization. Instead, Hanebrink reads the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as, in Shulamit Volkov's sense, a “cultural code,” projecting antisemitic panic about the course of history—why apocalyptic Bolshevism?—onto revolutionaries labeled Jewish (6).
In tracing the myth's emergence from volcanic Russian revolution and other soon-smothered post-World War I eruptions, Hanebrink judiciously synthesizes recent literature in western languages, including Hungarian. If for seasoned workers in these tragedy-strewn fields no unexpected events or ideas appear, the book wisely joins antisemitic paranoias to western stereotypes of eastern—even “Asiatic”—“barbarism,” “Unkultur” and “Untermenschentum,” just as Adolf Hitler did (as in publicly justifying September 1939's aggression).
The book's originality shines in exploring the profoundly cynical deployment of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth by eastern Europe's communists, both under Stalinism and, as the Polish Party's 1968 “anti-Zionist campaign” infamously showed, thereafter too. Jewish-born comrades of greatest devotion fell victim, sometimes even to Jewish-born Stalinists, to pillorying as agents of shadowy Zionist or other western conspiracies, in efforts to lend the Communist Parties ethnocentric credibility (as Władysław Gomułka attempted), and—after Iosif Stalin—to find scapegoats for socialism's shabbiness in promises of reform in societies cleansed of Judeo-Bolshevik wreckers and traitors. Equally important was the Soviet bloc's imposition of antifascist doctrine on the official interpretation of World War II, obscuring recognition that Hitlerism was an engine, not of fascist-clad western capitalism, but of genocidal German imperialism. The minds of many, thus befogged, continued to harbor the anti-Jewish paranoia that surfaced after 1989.
In the west, post-1945 antisemitism in establishment circles underwent “strange erasure,” not only in Germany, as the concept of “Judeo-Christian civilization,” subsuming humanistic liberalism, gained ideological hegemony, with the Holocaust standing for its morally most indefensible counter-icon (210). When the Soviet empire collapsed, “the correlation” proved fateful “between Holocaust commemoration and neoliberal expansion” eastward (259). Post-communist acceptance of marketized democracy required acknowledgement of the Holocaust's toll and significance at the same time that east Europeans were finally free to express their pain over the suffering communism had inflicted on them. While Arendtian and other theories of totalitarianism stood as bridges upon which Hitler's and Stalin's unwilling victims could shake hands, those who harbored antisemitism in their hearts as explanations for their communist-era humiliations refused to take this step. Instead they hold now mostly long-dead “Jewish Bolsheviks” responsible, while fighting neoliberal globalism's hegemonic claims with antisemitic weaponry, aimed, for example, at George Soros.
Worse still, the historically-dead but still unburied specter of “Judeo-Bolshevism” as western civilization's gravedigger finds reanimation—by a process Hanebrink's self-imposed limits cannot adequately document—in today's widespread anti-Islamic panic, whose ideological skeleton, if not clothing, closely resembles that of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” commissars.
Hanebrink's book will be found an admirably lucid and brisk read by serious readers of history. More should have been said about Russia, as fountainhead of antisemitic lava, and about the Bolsheviks, as (imperfect) defenders of the physical lives of the multitudinous Jews who looked for protection from them in tsarism's and Hitlerism's darkness. That popular violence against Jews should figure so largely as plunder-driven, or understood by perpetrators as just revenge, raises the question whether thousand-fold pogrom victims or the burning of whole communities in barns are adequately understood in such terms. Yet Hanebrink's accomplishment is wholly impressive, and especially valuable in “western civilization's” present parlous state.
