The so-called Jewish question is key to understanding the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. I have in mind much more than Nazism and the Holocaust. As Paul Hanebrink argues in this sobering book, the belief that Jews, intent on global domination, employed Bolshevism to achieve their goals, has been a mainstay of many political and intellectual movements across the political spectrum from World War I through the collapse of communism. A Specter Haunting Europe is a compelling and nuanced account of how the fear of Jews and communists acting in concert has grabbed hold of the hearts and minds of many gentiles for the past century. The book explores the persistence and longevity of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth—the canard that has more lives than the proverbial cat. Hanebrink's book is a first-rate account of how European intellectuals, politicians, and governments demonized Jews and communists in the service of ethno-nationalist agendas in a transnational context. They targeted the “Jewish Bolshevik” as an existential threat to national sovereignty who deserved political persecution and social death. Hanebrink lays bare how the fear of outsiders fueled fanciful conspiracy theories, which threatened social and political stability and set in motion events that had cataclysmic and tragic consequences.

In the first three chapters, Hanebrink traces the evolution of the myth from the aftermath of the Great War and the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 through the interwar years. In a Europe reeling from the combined impact of world war, revolution, civil war, and political reconfiguration, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth helped explain the myriad problems facing Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and cultivated fertile soil for the emergence of fascist movements intent on ridding the world of the perceived dual threat of Jews and communists. The myth reached its apotheosis with the Third Reich's assault on Jews and the Soviet Union. Chapters 5 through 7 cover post-1945 Europe, when the myth continued to resonate among many Europeans who found themselves living under the thumb of Soviet power. Not surprisingly, Judeo-Bolshevism still loomed large for frustrated nationalists who blamed the time-worn but very much alive international Jewish bogeyman for their problems. But the Jewish question also found a welcome reception among communists, who played the antisemitic card to purge their ranks of those they found politically unreliable. In the penultimate chapter, Hanebrink analyzes how the Cold War gave rise to liberal politics in the United States and western Europe, which viewed communism, no longer linked with international Jewry, as a global threat to the Judeo-Christian world.

One would expect the myth to die out after 1989, as the Soviet empire crumbled and new regimes professing a commitment to liberal democracy and market capitalism emerged. But the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy once again reared its ugly head, this time in the context of Holocaust history and memory and the bizarre fixation on whether Jewish suffering was worse than the experiences of those who endured several decades of communist oppression. The belief that Jews and Bolsheviks had conspired to enslave east and east-central Europe energized postcommunist nationalists and populists and weakened efforts to create a Europe devoted to liberal civic values and multicultural tolerance. Hanebrink concludes his analysis with a discussion of how the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism continues to shape contemporary politics by serving as a model for today's ultra-nationalist, populist regimes that fixate on immigration and issue screeds against the undermining of “Western” culture by Muslims.

The book contains few revelations for readers well versed in twentieth-century European history. This reviewer believes that reading knowledge of Russian and other Slavic languages would have expanded the book's source base and hence enriched its analysis. But this is a minor quibble given the time and energy the author would have had to devote to learning even more languages. Paul Hanebrink deserves praise for assembling in one book a cogent overview and discussion of how thinkers and politicians across the political spectrum vilified Jews at different times and in different places since the end of World War I. The book is well suited for adoption in courses about twentieth-century history. In particular, it is useful in exploring nationalist politics, especially in east and east-central Europe, and provides students with the historical background in which to understand the treatment of immigrants in recent years. Finally, A Specter Haunting Europe reveals how and why conspiracy theories have endangered social and political stability in the hundred years since the end of World War I, a sad but telling commentary on the nature of politics in 2020.