By, Robert Philpot
5 min read
The unveiling of a statue in a church is rarely the cause of demonstrations or media comment. But the decision of a Calvinist church in central Budapest last November to thus honour the country's wartime dictator, Admiral Miklós Horthy, provoked both.
Outside the church, hundreds of demonstrators, many of them wearing yellow stars, protested as Horthy's admirers paid their respects to the Axis ally who, after the Nazis invaded in 1944, stood aside as 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Neither was this event an aberration. There have been at least a dozen other statues and plaques erected, and streets renamed, in the dictator's honour. Nor is it unique to Hungary. In Romania, there were attempts to rehabilitate the fascist dictator, Ion Antonescu, and in Slovakia the pro-Nazi puppet, Father Jozef Tiso. Both men, who were heavily implicated in the deportation of Jews, were executed after the war.
When the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago this month, few would have anticipated that the arrival of democracy would have been accompanied by such misplaced nostalgia. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the apparent triumph of liberal democracy as the "end of history". But, as the Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri has argued, 1989 might also be said to mark "the return to history".
Certainly, the rise of antisemitism together with the growth of far-right parties and attempts to diminish the number of Holocaust victims or prove the innocence of local authorities in their murder, seems to confirm this.
Despite their deep-seated antisemitism, the Soviets hoped that Israel would soon become a communist country
The reopening of this dark chapter in Eastern Europe's past has not been wholly negative. Around the time that the statue of Horthy was unveiled, Hungary's deputy prime minister offered an unprecedented admission of the nation's wartime guilt. Romania's government had previously done likewise.
Explanations for the apparent reawakening of old hatreds are not hard to come by. But, as Leon Volovici, the late head of research at the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, maintained, "the dominant and most popular theme" in East European antisemitism after the fall of the Wall, was the promotion of "the image of the Jews as the importers of communism and the establishment of pro-Soviet regimes in Eastern countries". The power of the association between Jews and communism in Eastern Europe comes from the fact, claims André Gerrits of Leiden University, that it is "based on elements of fiction and reality".
The reality is that a small number of Jews were, particularly in the immediate post-war period, prominent in both local communist parties and their security apparatus. In the wake of the horrors that had befallen their community during the previous five years, many Polish Jewish organisations, argues Stanisław Krajewski of the University of Warsaw, "saw the communists as the force that could bring security and stabilisation". In postwar Hungary, the association was, perhaps, even starker with the heads of the communist party, cultural life and the notorious State Protection Agency all of Jewish origin.
But, contrary to popular antisemitic myth, most Jews neither supported communism, nor served it as functionaries. Only a quarter of the Jewish population voted for the communist party in Hungary's elections in 1945. It is estimated that, at its highest point prior to 1948, the proportion of Poland's secret police leadership who were Jewish was about one in three.
As Anne Applebaum writes in her book, Iron Curtain, "the majority of Polish Jews did not join the secret police. How could they have done? Most of them had left, or were planning to leave, the country." Indeed, by 1955 more than two-thirds of Jewish Poles who had survived the Holocaust had departed, mainly for Israel. Similar numbers left elsewhere: Hungary, where only a quarter emigrated, was, perhaps, the exception.
Part of the narrative of the "rule of Jews", argues Krajewski, reflected the fact that Jews had hitherto been seen as "victims, only victims and nothing but victims". Of Poland, he writes: "The image of Jews participating in the power elite and… participating in the state administration incomparably more than had been the case in pre-war Poland, was so strange to Poles that it was seen as suspicious."
The greatest myth in the story of Jewish experience in postwar Eastern Europe is, however, the attempt, as Gerrits put it, "to purposefully muddle the presence of Jewish communists with the notion of 'Jewish communism'." No such concept existed. In reality, moreover, Jews were as much victims of communism as their compatriots, for one simple reason: even where there were comparatively large numbers of Jews in the leadership of communists parties, there is scant evidence that they showed a concern for, or a bias towards, their fellow Jews.
This "red assimilation" reflected a desire, suggested the late Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik, to "convince Stalin that they were first and foremost communists rather than Jews".
The Hungarian Communist Party, for instance, refused to advocate the return of seized Jewish property after the war, appealing instead for returning Jews to "reach an agreement" with those who now inhabited their homes. At the same time, it expressed concern that the anti-fascist trials of the time were too focused on "people who did something to the Jews".
In a bid to consolidate their rule in the late 1940s, believes Applebaum, the communists attempted to "combat the stereotype" that their Soviet-backed rule was somehow elitist or alien.
At times, this took the form of attempting to appropriate "traditional national, religious and ethnic symbols". At others, it clearly spilled over into the exploitation of antisemitism.
As early as 1946, for instance, the Hungarian communists attempted to shift the blame for the country's economic difficulties on to "speculators". Predictably, pictures of the aforementioned on posters conformed to Jewish caricatures and, tragically, led to an outbreak of anti-Jewish rioting in the town of Miskolc .
Themselves fearing the myth of "Jewish communism", many communist parties engaged in antisemitic purges. In 1948, Poland's communist leader, Władysław Gomułka, wrote to Stalin about the necessity to "not only stop increasing the percentage of the Jewish element in the state and party apparatus but rather to gradually decrease this percentage".
Perhaps the most notorious antisemitic purge came in 1952 when, after Tito broke away from the Soviet bloc, Stalin instigated show trials throughout his satellite regimes. In Czechoslovakia, the party's general secretary, Rudolf Slánský, and 13 others were arrested as "Titoists". Both Slánský and 10 of his co-defendants were Jewish. After a short trial, heavy with antisemitism, Slánský was found guilty of "Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist activities in the service of American imperialism" and executed. Later, Gábor Péter, was arrested and tried in Hungary, accused of having co-operated with Slánský as "an agent of Zionism".
The accusation of "Zionism" appears a curious one in that, Yugoslavia aside, every East European state voted at the UN for the partition of Palestine in 1947, reflecting Soviet hopes that Israel would become a communist state. Training camps for the Haganah were opened in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and Jewish emigration to Israel was facilitated. But this enthusiasm soon waned as the Jewish state proved resistant to Stalin's charms.
Henceforth, opposition to "Zionism" allowed communist regimes to tap latent antisemitism, while attacking America's Middle Eastern ally. Infamously, during student protests against communist rule in March 1968, Gomułka's regime unleashed an attack on "Zionism" in order to divert attention from their unpopularity on to the remaining Jewish population. An antisemitic press campaign, together with orchestrated workplace demonstrations, police harassment, and their removal from party jobs and teaching posts, led 14,000 Jews to leave Poland and relinquish their citizenship. Although not as extreme, such tactics were employed elsewhere: the Czech communists, for instance, attempted to brand the dissident group Charter 77 as controlled by "Zionist centres".
It is, of course, ironic, but nonetheless telling, that this is the very language appropriated by those modern-day antisemites who wish to blame the Jews for the dark valley through which Eastern Europe was forced to pass for four decades under communism.