To this day, loyal Marxists claim that “true” Marxism is free of antisemitism.
Jewish history and culture argue powerfully against this claim, with particularly strong evidence from writers including Ahad Ha’am, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Peretz Markish.
Though the Russian Revolution of 1917, carried out in the name of Karl Marx, led to a ban on antisemitism, hatred of Jews and contempt for Judaism were widespread among socialists.
Marx identified Judaism with the hated capitalist system, an antisocial force of alienation. “Real” emancipation meant doing away with Judaism. Marx’s antisemitic prejudices were later cited with relish by the Nazis, including Hitler.
Marx wrote: “What is the worldly basis of Judaism? Practical necessity, selfishness. What is the worldly culture of the Jew? Commerce. What is his worldly God? Money. All right! The emancipation from commerce and from money, from the practical real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our age.”
In Marx’s Kapital, the model of the hated capitalist exploiter is Shylock, the Jewish moneylender. Marx’s view of the Jews was close to the mainstream in Germany, as antisemitic views of French socialists such as Fourier and Toussenel were widespread in 19th century France.
Even so, the Revolution brought Russian Jewish emancipation and equal rights, abolished the Pale of Settlement, outlawed antisemitism (Stalin rejected antisemitism as “cannibalism”, though he himself could be described as a “cannibal”), and brought unrestricted admission of Jewish pupils to Russian schools. The collapse of traditional Jewish society was hastened by the emergence of the Russian atheist state.
During the Russian civil war (1918–21), while the White Army committed anti-Jewish atrocities, the Red Army largely refrained from doing so.
Jews previously subject to antisemitic residence restrictions streamed into Soviet cities where, unusually literate and loyal, and untainted by association with the tsarist regime, they became, in the words of the historian Yuri Slezkine, the “backbone of the new Soviet bureaucracy”.
In the interwar years, Russia was widely seen as a model of a progressive secular state. Jews in Russia and elsewhere were inspired by the ideals of the 1917 Revolution, just as 19th century Jews were by French revolutionary ideals.
The Soviet state opposed Judaism as it opposed all religions, and many Jews were sympathetic to this view.
Soviet Jews in large numbers gave up Jewish culture for Marxist atheism in the belief that emancipation and the rise of a Russian atheist state made Judaeophobia obsolete, for Jews were now accepted as equal citizens in the new order.
Among leading Soviet writers were assimilated Jews such as Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Ilya Ehrenberg, and Boris Pasternak.
Babel expressed in his stories the new sense of freedom, “that warm, passionate state of mind that can only be spawned by this wondrous land…”, while warning in stories like Gedali of the excesses of the Revolution.
By 1922, Jews reached their maximum representation in the Bolshevik party, 15 per cent, second only to ethnic Russians at 65 per cent.
Many Russian Jews in the early years of the Soviet Union shared the devotion of Russians to the Revolution, to pravda — truth and social justice — and rejected their seemingly-antiquated Yiddish shtetl culture for Russian culture.
Zionists learned from Marx not only a socialist ideology but also the notion that Marxism was a solution to antisemitism.
In Palestine, most halutzim in the early years of the British Mandate were Russian Jews who often knew Russian literature better than the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. Their ideology, which found expression in the kibbutz, the collective farm, came less from Jewish texts than from revolutionary works such as Das Kapital.
The relationship between labour Zionists and the Soviet Union was, according to the historian Anita Shapira, “a drama of unrequited love”. Ben Gurion declared in 1928: “The Russian Revolution is the force that fructified our work during the Second Aliyah and during the Third.”
For decades after their arrival in the land of Israel, many socialist Zionists saw the Soviet Union — the first country in history to ban antisemitism — as their second homeland, “the source of their moral and revolutionary legitimacy”; and as a model for building a just society based on Jewish labour in accordance with the precepts of the Second or Third International.
Their favourite anthem was The International and Joseph Stalin was “the Sun of the Nations” (Shemesh ha-Amim). Many could not accept that a state built on Marxist principles could be antisemitic, and they played down or ignored news of the banning of Zionism and of Hebrew and Yiddish in the Soviet Union. Some Palestinian Zionists, disgusted with capitalistic British rule and the “bourgeois” aliyah from Poland, returned to Russia: most of them vanished in the purges.
How did the Soviet Union, having banned antisemitism, come to adopt antisemitic policies from the early 1920s until its demise 70 years later?
In the doctrine established by Lenin and Stalin, the Jews, having no territory or language (Yiddish being considered a “jargon” destined to die out after two or three generations), were not a nation but merely a passing phenomenon, a catalyst for the disappearance of national differences.
This meant in practice that although racist antisemitism was condemned as counter-revolutionary, opportunistic antisemitism was tolerated if it greased the wheels of the Revolution.
Tsarist policy in effect continued, and worsened, under the Soviets — except that the tsarist government had never pretended to be anything other than antisemitic: even Tsar Nicholas II had belonged to an antisemitic organisation.
Stalin, in contrast, was deeply suspicious of Jews, many of whom he had imprisoned and murdered, but it could be argued that he treated everyone equally.
Soviet antisemitism pre-dates Stalin’s dictatorship, originating in the early years of the Revolution. In 1919, Hebrew was banned in Russia, and Hebrew writers, including Bialik and Tchernichowsky, were forced to leave.
On the Jewish New Year in 1921, Judaism was put on trial in the same courtroom in Kiev where in 1913 Mendel Beilis had been tried on the charge of ritual murder; by 1925 an estimated 800 synagogues had been closed. Most Jews who wanted to leave were prohibited from doing so.
The Jews were never seen as genuine Russians. As in Christian Europe, where Jewish persecution and suffering “bore witness” to the truth of Christianity, so also in atheist Russia the torment of Jews “proved” the fallacy of national and religious identity as opposed to the truth of Marxist communism.
And like Christianity, the ideology of Marxism, Isaiah Berlin observed scathingly, forced people to be free in the name of “historical inevitability” consigning them to a life of repression and fear, slavery and death.
It made little difference that Jews under Soviet rule tended to be loyal to the state and grateful for the revolutionary ideology that had led to their emancipation and freed them from tsarist antisemitism. Russian cultural figures devoted to the Revolution, writers and scholars, experts on Pushkin and Russian history, and hostile to Judaism, were still aliens if they were Jews.
Pasternak, a Nobel laureate for literature, author of Doctor Zhivago, was torn by Russian antisemitism. “He longed to be considered an authentic Russian patriot and to have his work accepted as the true voice of the Russian people,” writes Michael Ignatieff, “Yet, as a Jew, he was never allowed to feel authentically Russian.”
The Revolution did not end widespread popular antisemitism in Russia: to most Russians and Ukrainians, the legal prohibition of antisemitism was a charade.
Among Bolshevik representatives of national minorities, Jews were singled out for abuse. By the mid-1920s, Stalin’s anti-Trotsky vilification became openly antisemitic as he claimed that the opposition to Communism was led by Jews, alien to Russia. On 4 March 1926, Trotsky wrote incredulously to Bukharin: “is it true, is it possible that in our party, IN MOSCOW, in WORKERS' CELLS, antisemitic agitation should be carried out with impunity?’
By the late 1930s, most Russian institutions of higher learning had an unofficial quota, and antisemitic racism became official policy: those with one Jewish grandparent could not hold positions in the party and state hierarchy; even via intermarriage, a Jew could no longer escape official classification as a Jew, and children of mixed marriages were treated as Jews; the Russian elite could not marry non-Russians and keep their privileged positions. In Stalin’s purges, the Jews were largely defenceless against exclusion, isolation and persecution.
Some Soviet Jewish writers fought back, confronting the Orwellian doublespeak by which Stalin and the Soviet regime disguised their crimes. Committed to truth, they were among the main victims.
Osip Mandelstam, in the famous Stalin Epigram, mocked Stalin as “the Kremlin mountaineer” with worm-like fingers and cockroach moustache, an avuncular psychopath surrounded by the scum of grovelling half-men, as he pronounces countless death sentences on fellow Russians - including, in consequence of this poem, Mandelstam himself.
By the early 1940s, Peretz Markish, the leading Soviet Yiddish poet, expressed his shock at the murderous Soviet regime, which had made an alliance with Hitler: “like a mirror smashed on a stone is my heart”. Markish was one of many Yiddish writers murdered by Stalin.
Russian Hebrew writers were fortunate in having been banned and expelled by Lenin; yet their warnings already in the tsarist era came back to haunt the Soviet Jews. Even in a “liberated” Russia, the Jews would still be victims of antisemitism: those who trusted in a coming revolution were making a fatal mistake. They were perversely ready to abandon Jewish national interests, ignore the suffering of their people, and throw themselves into the cause of liberating the oppressed peoples of Russia – all except their own.
In Russia, political Zionism from its inception in 1897 until the Holocaust was a less attractive alternative to the hopes and incentives of emancipation: most Jews preferred civic patriotic loyalty (if not full national identification) to their countries of citizenship, however antisemitic, rather than a serious commitment to Jewish nationalism.
Some Jews, in Russia and elsewhere, remained loyal Marxists even after the cruel realities of Soviet antisemitism were fully exposed in the years following the death of Stalin in 1953. But to most Jews today, Marxism is a god that failed.
Daivd Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies in Montreal, Canada
