Provoked paranoia

On a debunking of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Marina Gerner on a fine extension of diplomacy

lifetime’s project — lies the crucial historical and psychological distinction between reality and fantasy.

While it is true that, for 50 years in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, those with a Jewish background wielding the levers of power were an outsized presence numerically in relation to the Jewish population of these countries, the existence of something called “Jewish Communism” or “Judeo-Bolshevism” is an old fantasy — except in the popular mind.

And there’s the rub. What Hanebrink calls the “myth” — i.e. what people believe, fear, react against — is often more powerful than the boring facts.

In Germany, the paranoia about a transnational Jewish plot to undermine the nations of Europe was part of an older pattern of antisemitic prejudice but it developed its own deadly potency when characterised, in Nazi propaganda, as “Judeo-Bolshevism”.

After the fall of Communism, the image of the “Jewish Bolshevik” figured prominently in debates among those who had suffered under Communism in Eastern Europe and were looking for someone to blame. The mythic Jew, whether global Jewish Communist or global Jewish capitalist — as is evident in the demonisation of George Soros within Hungarian ethnic nationalism today — fitted the bill.

And, in Europe and the US, as Hanebrink points out in the epilogue to this lavishly detailed, scholarly survey, the fantasy of a transnational threat to national ways of life has been transposed on to another “outsider” group, Muslim immigrants, Islamic culture having replaced “Judeo-Bolshevism” as the big threat to “our” way of life.

Howard Cooper is a rabbi and psychotherapist Early 20th-century JC editor Leopold Greenberg — “furore” — and, left, Paul Hanebrink