Intrigued by the lasting power of the vision of a civilization at war against an ethno-ideological enemy, A Specter Haunting Europe aims to understand how the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, that is the belief that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy, has circulated and what it has meant at different times and in various contexts. Interested in both the content and function of a key element of counterrevolutionary, antidemocratic, and racist ideologies, Paul Hanebrink convincingly shows how the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism embodied threats to national sovereignty and expressed general anxieties about the future of European and Western civilization even as it was repeatedly reshaped by shifts in international regimes of anti-Communist politics.

The author devotes, beyond the perhaps most obvious candidate of Germany, prominent attention to the cases of Poland, Hungary, and Romania while extending his coverage both westward and eastward. To focus on the aforementioned and somewhat lesser-known three countries proves an excellent choice as it allows Hanebrink to reinterpret the unfolding of an eminently controversial and highly complex story over an entire century. The book has a logical and coherent structure: it begins with the emergence of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, and then explores how fascist movements made use of it and how traditional conservatives tried to mobilize it. It covers the changing function of this idea after the Second World War in East and West and closes with a dissection of how the myth was resurrected in post-89 contests over remembrance.

Laconically and appropriately stating that “some Jews were Communists” (20), the book refrains from futile polemic over the precise extent to which Jews played a role in Communist movements and regimes. Hanebrink focuses instead on what the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism meant to those who employed it. Logically, he begins with how the perception of Jews as leaders and principal beneficiaries of revolutions was constructed. He argues here that the connection between Jews and revolution rested on three pillars of anti-Jewish thought: that of associating Jews and Judaism with heresy, misrule, and social disharmony; beliefs in an international Jewish conspiracy; and fears of (secularized) Jewish fanaticism.

The book convincingly shows that the Judeo-Bolshevik myth was ubiquitous already during the latter phases of the “long First World War” when—amid imperial collapse, border conflict, and counterrevolution—wartime suspicions of Jews as spies and saboteurs were transformed into fears of Jews as revolutionaries. Hanebrink is right to highlight that this paranoid generalization proved especially salient in Central and Eastern Europe: due to its interrelated meanings and sheer malleability, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth could emerge as a central feature during the political turmoil that produced the new nation-states. In Central and Eastern Europe, the spread of this myth was inseparable from physical violence against Jews; it was employed as an argument to fuel and rationalize mass violence just when the West celebrated the return of peace.

Hanebrink subsequently explicates how the nationally specific versions of “Jewish Bolshevik enemies” soon intersected with another variation on the same theme: that espoused in Nazi Germany. In the latter case, the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism was employed to wage a ruthless war of preemptive defense against racialized threats to national security; it was used to consolidate power at home in murderous fashion and then launch a genocidal international war. While parts of the book’s discussion of Nazi Germany appear well rehearsed, Hanebrink's chapter on the interwar years adds intriguing remarks on the acute dilemmas that emerged for antisemitic nationalists and Europe's Christians as Judeo-Bolshevism was ever more closely associated with Hitler's racist vision and as the Nazis fused their anti-Communism and antisemitism with the agenda of colonization.

The chapter on World War II shows that the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism was crucial to the genesis of the Final Solution and that it was far from an exclusively German obsession at the time: as the Nazis came to control most of Europe, they encountered fully formed local variations of the Jewish Bolshevik stereotype. Even as the political experiences and goals of German and non-Germans differed, the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism helped forge consensus between them, tightening links between antisemitism, counterinsurgency, and the deportation of unwanted aliens. As Hanebrink explains, as the Axis powers started to lose the war, their pan-European crusade was recalibrated, with increasingly separate foci on “Jewish conspiracy” and “Asiatic hordes” (206).

The author perceptively notes that the way the Judeo-Bolshevik idea outlived Hitler's empire depended entirely on which army arrived to defeat it: in the West, anti-Communism was propelled in new directions whereas in the East visions of Jewish Bolshevik revenge shaped the way many understood the Soviet occupation and subsequent Sovietization. In the postwar West, references to Judeo-Bolshevism were soon practically erased from Western anti-Communist politics. In the United States, the idea of Judeo-Christian civilization in fact became a key pillar of anti-Communist thought; specifically, Jews were being depicted as an ideological ally against the secular totalitarian evil of Communism. In Germany, change was much more gradual and ambivalent as mainstream Christian conservatives continued to plead for the defense of the Christian West—and the separation of references to Asian hordes from explicitly antisemitic language partly continued what was already began in the late stages of the war.

In the East, the fusion of fear and anger in reaction to the brutality of Soviet occupations, the sudden return and heightened visibility of some Jews, and the power exercised by Communist parties shaped how the new political realities were interpreted—often through the filter of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth. Communist parties felt the need to respond to this influential manner of stigmatization but tended to answer the challenge in narrowly ethnic terms. As Hanebrink rightly notes, any critical examination of how the Judeo-Bolshevik myth functioned during the war and how it came to be manipulated afterward tended to remain outside the political mainstream.

As the author argues in one of the most perceptive and intriguing parts of his book, this has had consequences in the post–Cold War age. He shows that as the theory of twin totalitarianism was revived in an age of Holocaust memory in countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Romania, the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism moved to the center of debates on how to remember the twentieth century. In other words, the myth was translated into memory: who committed the crimes of Europe's Communist regimes, what bearing those crimes have on the genocide of European Jews, and how memories of suffering and victimization by other national groups could or should be set alongside public memory of the Holocaust emerged as hotly contested questions. The association of Jews with Communism was now mobilized to downplay the importance of the Holocaust for national history, undermine critical self-reflection, and challenge liberal civil ideas.

Paul Hanebrink masterfully weaves together numerous threads to uncover several unexpected and disturbing connections. The argumentation is wide-ranging, precise, and nuanced. Being sensitive to contents, contexts, and functions, the book makes an original and convincing case as to how and why the specter of Judeo-Bolshevism has haunted Europe.