STALIN’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS
JEWS AS A HOSTILE ELITE IN THE USSR
The Jewish Century
Yuri Slezkine
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004
$29.95 (cloth)
x + 438 pages
Reviewed by Kevin MacDonald
A persistent theme among critics of Jews—particularly those on the
pre-World War II right—has been that the Bolshevik revolution was a
Jewish revolution and that the Soviet Union was dominated by Jews.
This theme appears in a wide range of writings, from Henry Ford’s International
Jew, to published statements by a long list of British, French, and American
political figures in the 1920s (Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and David
Lloyd George), and, in its most extreme form, by Adolf Hitler, who wrote:
Now begins the last great revolution. By wresting political power
for himself, the Jew casts off the few remaining shreds of disguise
he still wears. The democratic plebeian Jew turns into the blood Jew
and the tyrant of peoples. In a few years he will try to exterminate the
national pillars of intelligence and, by robbing the peoples of their
natural spiritual leadership, will make them ripe for the slavish lot of a
permanent subjugation. The most terrible example of this is Russia.1
This long tradition stands in sharp contradiction to the official view,
promulgated by Jewish organizations and almost all contemporary historians,
that Jews played no special role in Bolshevism and indeed were specifically
victimized by it. Yuri Slezkine’s book provides a much needed resolution
to these opposing perspectives. It is an intellectual tour de force, alternately
muddled and brilliant, courageous and apologetic.
APOLLONIANS AND MERCURIANS
One of the muddled elements, apparent at the beginning and present
throughout The Jewish Century, is Slezkine’s claim that the peoples of the world
can be classified into two groups. The successful peoples of the modern world,
66 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
termed Mercurians, are urban, mobile, literate, articulate, and intellectually
sophisticated. Distinguished by their ability to manipulate symbols, they pursue
“wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both
wealth and learning for their own sake” (p. 1). Since Slezkine sees Jews as the
quintessential Mercurians, he regards modernization as essentially a process
of everyone becoming Jewish. His second group, which he calls Apollonians,
is rooted in the land and in traditional agrarian cultures, and prizes physical
strength and warrior values.
Slezkine conceptualizes Mercurianism as a worldview, and therefore a
matter of psychological choice, rather than as a set of psychological mechanisms,
the most important of which is general intelligence.2 As a result of this
false premise, he exaggerates the similarity among Mercurians, underestimates
the power of ethnocentrism as a unifying factor in Jewish history, and fails to
understand the roots of Western social and economic institutions.
Slezkine views Judaism as one of many Mercurian cultures—peoples that
dwell alone in Diasporas, living among strangers and often acting as economic
middlemen: the Overseas Chinese, Indians, and Lebanese, and the Gypsies and
Irish Travelers. Their common denominator, in Slezkine’s view (and mine3), is
their status as strangers to the people they live among—sojourners who, above
all else, do not intermarry or socialize with the locals. Their interactions with the
local Apollonians involve “mutual hostility, suspicion and contempt” (p. 20) and
a sense of superiority. Moreover, a “common host stereotype of the Mercurians is
that they are devious, acquisitive, greedy, crafty, pushy, and crude” (p. 23). The
Mercurians possess greater kin solidarity and internal cohesion than the people
they live among; they are characterized by extended families and patriarchal
social organization.
So far, so good, although I would stress that the family organization of such
groups derives more from the long-term adaptation to the culture areas they
originate from than from an adaptation to the nomadic, middleman niche.4 But
Slezkine maintains that Mercurians are above all smarter than the people they
live among: They are said to possess “cunning intelligence,” but it is surely a
mistake to consider such disparate groups as Jews (or the Overseas Chinese)
and Gypsies (or the Irish Travelers) as having in common a particular set of
intellectual traits. After all, the Jews, as Slezkine shows, have repeatedly become
an academic, intellectual, cultural, and economic elite in Western societies,
while Gypsies have tended toward illiteracy and are at best an economically
marginal group.
Slezkine imagines that the Gypsies and literate middleman groups like the
Jews or Overseas Chinese differ not in intelligence but only in whether they
express their intelligence through literacy or an oral culture: “Businessmen,
diplomats, doctors, and psychotherapists are literate peddlers, heralds,
healers, and fortune-tellers” (p. 29)—a formulation that will not stand the test
of current psychometric data. In fact, the general patterns of Gypsies are the
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 67
opposite of Jews: a low-investment, low-IQ reproductive style characterized
by higher fertility, earlier onset of sexual behavior and reproduction, more
unstable pair bonds, higher rate of single parenting, shorter interval of birth
spacing, higher infant mortality rate, and higher rate of survival of low birth
weight infants.5 Intelligence, for Slezkine, is a lifestyle choice, rather than a set
of brain processes underlying information processing and strongly influenced
by genetic variation. As we shall see, this formulation is very useful to Slezkine
as he constructs his argument later in the book.
In his attempt to paint with a very broad brush, Slezkine also ignores
other real differences among the Mercurians, most notably, I would argue,
the aggressiveness of the Jews compared to the relative passivity of the
Overseas Chinese. Both the Jews and the Overseas Chinese are highly intelligent
and entrepreneurial, but the Overseas Chinese have not formed a hostile
cultural elite in Southeast Asian countries, where they have chiefly settled,
and have not been concentrated in media ownership or in the construction
of culture. We do not read of Chinese cultural movements disseminated in
the major universities and media outlets that subject the traditional culture of
Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical critique, or of Chinese
organizations campaigning for the removal of native cultural and religious
symbols from public places.6 Slezkine paints Jews as deeply involved in the
construction of culture and in the politics of the host societies, but the role of
the Chinese was quite different. The following passage describing the political
attitudes of the Overseas Chinese in Thailand could never have applied to
Jews in Western societies since the Enlightenment:
But few seem to know or indeed to care about the restrictions on
citizenship, nationality rights, and political activities in general, nor
are these restrictions given much publicity in the Chinese press. This
merely points up the fact, recognized by all observers, that the overseas
Chinese are primarily concerned with making a living, or amassing a
fortune, and thus take only a passive interest in the formal political life
of the country in which they live.7
Moreover, Slezkine pictures the middlemen as specializing in “certain
dangerous, marvelous, and distasteful” (p. 9), but nevertheless indispensable,
pursuits (p. 36)—a formulation that carries a grain of truth, as in places where
natives were prohibited from loaning money at interest. However, he ignores,
or at least fails to spell out, the extent to which Jews have been willing agents
of exploitative elites, not only in Western societies, but in the Muslim world as
well.8 This is the overarching generalization which one can make about Jewish
economic behavior over the ages. Their role went far beyond performing tasks
deemed inappropriate for the natives for religious reasons; rather they were
often tasks at which natives would be relatively less ruthless in exploiting
their fellows. This was especially the case in Eastern Europe, where economic
68 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
arrangements such as tax farming, estate management, and monopolies on
retail liquor distribution lasted far longer than in the West:
In this way, the Jewish arendator became the master of life and death
over the population of entire districts, and having nothing but a short-term
and purely financial interest in the relationship, was faced with
the irresistible temptation to pare his temporary subjects to the bone.
On the noble estates he tended to put his relatives and co-religionists
in charge of the flour-mill, the brewery, and in particular of the lord’s
taverns where by custom the peasants were obliged to drink. On the
church estates, he became the collector of all ecclesiastical dues, standing
by the church door for his payment from tithe-payers, baptized infants,
newly-weds, and mourners. On the [royal] estates…, he became in effect
the Crown Agent, farming out the tolls, taxes, and courts, and adorning
his oppressions with all the dignity of royal authority.9
Jewish involvement in the Communist elite of the USSR can be seen as a
variation on an ancient theme in Jewish culture rather than a new one sprung
from the special circumstances of the Bolshevik Revolution. Rather than being
the willing agents of exploitative non-Jewish elites who were clearly separated
from both the Jews and the people they ruled, Jews became an entrenched
part of an exploitative and oppressive elite in which group boundaries were
blurred. This blurring of boundaries was aided by four processes, all covered by
Slezkine: shedding overt Jewish identities in favor of a veneer of international
socialism in which Jewish identity and ethnic networking were relatively invisible;
seeking lower-profile positions in order to de-emphasize Jewish preeminence
(e.g., Trotsky); adopting Slavic names; and engaging in a limited amount of
intermarriage with non-Jewish elites.10 Indeed, the “plethora of Jewish wives”
among non-Jewish leaders11 doubtless heightened the Jewish atmosphere of
the top levels of the Soviet government, given that everyone, especially Stalin,
appears to have been quite conscious of ethnicity.12 For their part, anti-Semites
have accused Jews of having “implanted those of their own category as wives and
husbands for influential figures and officials.”13
By emphasizing the necessity and distastefulness of traditional Jewish
occupations, Slezkine also ignores the extent to which Jewish competition
suppressed the formation of a native middle class in Eastern Europe. (This
has also occurred throughout Southeast Asia, because of competition from
the Overseas Chinese.) Instead, Slezkine sees Eastern Europeans, through
stereotypic lenses, as quintessential Apollonians, some of whom became
Mercurian modernists when forced to by circumstances, rather than as
containing elements that would have naturally aspired to and competently
performed the economic and cultural functions that instead came to be
performed by Jews because of their ability to create ethnic monopolies
in goods and services. When Jews won the economic competition in early
modern Poland, the result was that the great majority of Poles were reduced
to the status of agricultural laborers supervised by Jewish estate managers in
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 69
an economy in which trade, manufacturing, and artisanry were in large part
controlled by Jews.14 On the other hand, in most of Western Europe Jews had
been expelled in the Middle Ages. As a result, when modernization occurred,
it was accomplished with an indigenous middle class. If, as in Eastern Europe,
Jews had won the economic competition in most of these professions, there
would not have been a non-Jewish middle class in England. Whatever one
imagines might have been the fortunes and character of England with predominantly
Jewish artisans, merchants, and manufacturers, it seems reasonable
to suppose that the Christian taxpayers of England made a good investment
in their own future when they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of
£116,346 in return for expelling two thousand Jews in 1290.15
While Slezkine’s treatment overemphasizes middlemen as a societal
necessity rather than as ethnic outsiders competing for scarce resources, he
does note that the rise of the Jews in the USSR came at the expense of the
Germans as a Mercurian minority in Russia prior to the Revolution. (Jews
were excluded from traditional Russia apart from the Pale of Settlement, which
included Ukraine, Lithuania, Byelorussia, Crimea, and part of Poland.) Germans
manned the imperial bureaucracy, formed a large percentage of professionals,
entrepreneurs, and artisans, were more literate than the Russians, and had a
sense of cultural superiority and ethnic solidarity:
And so they were, mutatis mutandis, head to the Russian heart, mind
to the Russian soul, consciousness to Russian spontaneity. They stood
for calculation, efficiency, and discipline; cleanliness, fastidiousness,
and sobriety; pushiness, tactlessness, and energy; sentimentality, love of
family, and unmanliness (or absurdly exaggerated manliness)…. Perhaps
paradoxically, in light of what would happen in the twentieth century,
Germans were, occupationally and conceptually, the Jews of ethnic Russia
(as well as much of Eastern Europe). Or rather, the Russian Germans were
to Russia what the German Jews were to Germany—only much more so.
So fundamental were the German Mercurians to Russia’s view of itself
that both their existence and their complete and abrupt disappearance
have been routinely taken for granted (pp. 113–114).
Although the replacement of Germans by Jews was well under way by
the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, a key consequence of the Revolution
was the substitution of one Mercurian group, the Germans, by another, the
Jews. The difference between the Jews and the Germans was that the Jews
had a longstanding visceral antipathy, out of past historical grievances, both
real and imagined, toward the people and culture they came to administer.
Indeed, Russians on the nationalist right admired the Germans, at least up to
World War I. For example, a statute of one nationalist organization, Michael
the Archangel Russian People’s Union, expressed “particular trust in the
German population of the Empire,”16 while its leader, Vladimir Purishkevich,
accused the Jews of “irreconcilable hatred of Russia and everything Russian.”17
Jews disliked the Christian religion of the vast majority of Russians because
70 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
of the antagonistic relationship between Judaism and Christianity over the
ages; Jews distrusted the peasants, who “fell from grace” (p. 140) with the
intelligentsia after the numerous anti-Jewish pogroms, especially after 1880;
and Jews blamed the tsar for not doing enough to keep the peasants in check
and for imposing the various quotas on Jewish advancement that went into
place, also beginning in the 1880s—quotas that slowed down but by no means
halted Jewish overrepresentation in the universities and the professions. In
this respect, the Germans were far more like the Overseas Chinese, in that
they became an elite without having an aggressively hostile attitude toward
the people and culture they administered and dominated economically. Thus
when Jews achieved power in Russia, it was as a hostile elite with a deep
sense of historic grievance. As a result, they became willing executioners of
both the people and cultures they came to rule, including the Germans.
After the Revolution, not only were the Germans replaced, but there was
active suppression of any remnants of the older order and their descendants.
Jews have always shown a tendency to rise because their natural proclivities
(e.g., high intelligence) and powerful ethnic networking, but here they also
benefited from “antibourgeois” quotas in educational institutions and other
forms of discrimination against the middle class and aristocratic elements of
the old regime that would have provided more competition with Jews. In a
letter intercepted by the secret police, the father of a student wrote that his
son and their friends were about to be purged from the university because
of their class origins. “It is clear that only the Jerusalem academics and the
Communist Party members generally are going to stay” (p. 243). The bourgeois
elements from the previous regime, including the ethnic Germans, would have
no future. Thus the mass murder of peasants and nationalists was combined
with the systematic exclusion of the previously existing non-Jewish middle
class. The wife of a Leningrad University professor noted, “in all the institutions,
only workers and Israelites are admitted; the life of the intelligentsia is
very hard” (p. 243). Even at the end of the 1930s, prior to the Russification that
accompanied World War II, “the Russian Federation…was still doing penance
for its imperial past while also serving as an example of an ethnicity-free
society” (p. 276). While all other nationalities, including Jews, were allowed
and encouraged to keep their ethnic identities, the revolution remained an
anti-majoritarian movement.
Slezkine is aware of the biological reality of kinship and ethnicity, but he
steadfastly pursues a cultural determinist model. He argues that biological
models of ethnic nepotism are inappropriate because some nomadic groups
are not kin groups but rather “quasi-families” like the Sicilian mafia (p. 35).
But this is a distinction without a difference: Why are “natural” kinship groups
significantly different from groups composed of families that band together?
Each is characterized by internal cohesion and external strangeness, the traits
Slezkine deems essential, but there are also kinship connections and a genetic
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 71
divide between themselves and surrounding peoples. Cultural badges of group
membership and a culturally generated ideology of kin-group membership are
age-old ways of cementing kinship groups and setting up barriers that mark real
biological differences—the evolved psychology described by modern research
in social identity theory.18 And in any case, the demonstrable genetic differences
between Slezkine’s prototypical Mercurians—the Jews, Gypsies, and Overseas
Chinese—and the surrounding peoples cry out for a biological analysis.
Moreover, Slezkine underestimates the power of ethnocentrism as a unifying
factor in Jewish history. This is most apparent in his discussion of Israel, which
he describes as a radical departure from the Jewish tradition, because Israel is a
quintessentially Apollonian society. Long after Western societies had rejected
ethnic nationalism:
Israel continued to live in the European 1930s: only Israel still belonged
to the eternally young, worshiped athleticism and inarticulateness, celebrated
combat and secret police, promoted hiking and scouting, despised
doubt and introspection, embodied the seamless unity of the chosen,
and rejected most traits traditionally associated with Jewishness…. After
two thousand years of living as Mercurians among Apollonians, Jews
turned into the only Apollonians in a world of Mercurians (or rather, the
only civilized Apollonians in a world of Mercurians and barbarians)”
(pp. 327, 328).
But Israelis certainly did not reject traditional Jewish ethnocentrism and
sense of peoplehood. Slezkine portrays Israelis as simply choosing to be
ethnocentric nationalists, but ethnocentrism (like intelligence) is a biological
system, not a lifestyle choice, and traditional Diaspora Jews were certainly
deeply and intensely ethnocentric above all else.19 There can be little question
that Israel and Zionism have been and are promoted and spearheaded by the
most ethnocentric elements of the Jewish community.20
For Slezkine, as for so many Jews, the moral debt owed to Jews by Western
societies justifies the most extreme expressions of Jewish racialism: “The
rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in
the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life…. It is true that no other
European nation is in a condition of permanent war; it is also true that no other
European state can have as strong a claim on the West’s moral imagination”
(pp. 364–365). Slezkine sees the moral taboo on European ethnocentrism,
the creation of Nazism as the epitome of absolute evil, and the consecration
of Jews as “the Chosen people of the postwar Western world” (p. 366) as
simply the inevitable results of the events of World War II (pp. 365–366). In
fact, however, the creation and maintenance of the culture of the Holocaust
and the special moral claims of Jews and Israel are the result of Jewish ethnic
activism. These claims have a specific historical trajectory, they are fueled by
specific key events, and they are sustained by specific forces.21 For example,
the Holocaust was not emphasized as a cultural icon until the late 1960s and
72 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
early 1970s, when images of the Holocaust were deployed on a large scale in
popular culture by Jewish activists specifically to rally support for Israel in
the context of its wars of 1967 and 1973.
Similarly, Slezkine sees the United States as a Jewish promised land precisely
because it is not defined tribally and “has no state-bearing natives” (p. 369). But
the recasting of the United States as a “proposition nation” was importantly
influenced by the triumph of several Jewish intellectual and political movements
more than it was a natural and inevitable culmination of American history.22
These movements collectively delegitimized cultural currents of the early
twentieth century whereby many Americans thought of themselves as members
of a very successful ethnic group. For example, the immigration restrictionists
of the 1920s unabashedly asserted the right of European-derived peoples to
the land they had conquered and settled. Americans of northern European
descent in the United States thought of themselves as part of a cultural and
ethnic heritage extending backward in time to the founding of the country,
and writers like Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race) and Lothrop
Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy) had a large
public following. At that time both academia and mainstream culture believed
in the reality of race; that there were important differences between the races,
including in intelligence and moral character; and that races naturally competed
for land and other resources.23
JEWISH SUPERIORITY
The assertion that Israel is the only civilized Apollonian society, despite its
acknowledged racialism and open discussion of ethnic deportations, reveals
Slezkine’s belief in Jewish moral and intellectual superiority. Indeed, Slezkine
regards both European individualism and the European nation-state as imitations
of preexisting Jewish accomplishments: “Europeans imitated Jews not
only in being modern [by becoming individualists interacting with strangers],
but also in being ancient” [i.e., by developing ethnically based nation-states] (p.
44). So we read condescending passages such as “among the most successful
[of the European Mercurians] were Max Weber’s Protestants, who discovered a
humorless, dignified way to be Jewish” (p. 41). This act of intellectual gymnastics
depends on the following analogy: Jews act as an ethnically based tribe within
societies, seeing non-Jews as strangers; Europeans establish tribal nation-states
while behaving as individualists within their societies (seeing other Europeans
as strangers). The sweeping conclusion: Jews are the progenitors therefore of
both aspects of modernity: economic individualism and the ethnically based
nation-state. The Holocaust then occurred because the European nation-state,
although an imitation of Judaism, failed somehow to be sufficiently Jewish:
“In the hands of heavily armed, thoroughly bureaucratized, and imperfectly
Judaized Apollonians, Mercurian exclusivity and fastidiousness became
relentlessly expansive. In the hands of messianically inclined Apollonians,
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 73
it turned lethal—especially to the Mercurians. The Holocaust had as much to
do with tradition as it did with modernity” (p. 46).
But it is a huge stretch to argue from an analogy—and a loose one at that—to
actual imitation and influence. (And one just doesn’t know what to say about
his claim that Europeans perpetrated the Holocaust because they had become
imperfect Jews.) Slezkine fails to provide any evidence that there is anything
but a hazy and forced logical connection between European individualism
and the Jewish role as a Diaspora people living among strangers. The reality
is that by becoming individualists, Western Europeans returned to distinctive
roots buried in their primeval past,24 whereas Judaism, because of its deepseated
tribalism, was widely regarded by Enlightenment intellectuals as an
outmoded relic. Indeed, several Jewish commentators have noted that the post-
Enlightenment forms of Judaism have essentially been responses to the corrosive
effects of European civilization, with its emphasis on individualism and ethnic
assimilation, on Judaism as an ethnically based collectivist group—what early
Zionist Arthur Ruppin described as “the destructive influence of European
civilization” on Judaism because of its tendency to break down group barriers
and lead eventually to assimilation and intermarriage.25 Moreover, as Slezkine
notes, Jews are not really individualists at all. Even in the modern world, the
tribal approach of the Jews in economic enterprises employs ethnic kinship as
a central component, whereas the individualistic approach of the Europeans
sees this as illegitimate (p. 43). The bottom line is that it is ridiculous to claim
that Jews are individualists because they treat outsiders as individuals while
acknowledging that they retain a powerful ingroup consciousness and are
masters of ethnic networking.
It is no stretch at all, however, to show that Jews have achieved a preeminent
position in Europe and America, and Slezkine provides us with statistics of Jewish
domination only dimly hinted at in the following examples from Europe in the
late nineteenth century to the rise of National Socialism. Austria: All but one bank
in fin de siècle Vienna was administered by Jews, and Jews constituted 70% of the
stock exchange council; Hungary: between 50 and 90 percent of all industry was
controlled by Jewish banking families, and 71% of the most wealthy taxpayers
were Jews; Germany: Jews were overrepresented among the economic elite by a
factor of 33. Similar massive overrepresentation was also to be found in educational
attainment and among professionals (e.g., Jews constituted 62% of the lawyers
in Vienna in 1900, 25% in Prussia in 1925, 34% in Poland, and 51% in Hungary).
Indeed, “the universities, ‘free’ professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls,
and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest became so heavily Jewish that
liberalism and Jewishness became almost indistinguishable” (p. 63).
Slezkine documents the well-known fact that, as Moritz Goldstein famously
noted in 1912, “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of Germany.”
However, he regards Jewish cultural dominance, not only in Germany but
throughout Eastern Europe and Austria, as completely benign: “The secular
74 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
Jews’ love of Goethe, Schiller, and the other Pushkins—as well as the various
northern forests they represented—was sincere and tender” (p. 68). Their
only sin was that their love of cultural icons transcended national and ethnic
boundaries in an age of popular nationalism—for example, their promotion
of German culture among the Czechs, Latvians, and Romanians. But this is far
from the whole story. Jews were not simply lovers of Pushkin and Goethe. A
major theme of anti-Jewish attitudes was that Jews were deeply involved in
creating a “culture of critique”—that Jewish cultural influence was entirely
negative and shattered the social bonds of the peoples they lived among.
Slezkine cites Heinrich Heine as a prime example of a Jewish intellectual with
sincere and tender love for German culture, but the Germans, from Wagner to
von Treitschke to Chamberlain and Hitler, didn’t see it that way. For example,
Heinrich von Treitschke, a prominent nineteenth-century German intellectual,
complained of Heine’s “mocking German humiliation and disgrace following
the Napoleonic wars” and Heine’s having “no sense of shame, loyalty, truthfulness,
or reverence.”26 Nor does he mention von Treitschke’s comment
that “what Jewish journalists write in mockery and satirical remarks against
Christianity is downright revolting”; “about the shortcomings of the Germans
[or] French, everybody could freely say the worst things; but if somebody dared
to speak in just and moderate terms about some undeniable weakness of the
Jewish character, he was immediately branded as a barbarian and religious
persecutor by nearly all of the newspapers.”27 Such attitudes were prominent
among anti-Jewish writers and activists, reaching a crescendo with the National
Socialists in Germany.
Yet for Slezkine, if Jews did battle against various national cultures—and in
the end, he acknowledges that they did—it was only because they realized that
their Mercurian worldview was superior: “Did they really want to transform
themselves into thick-skulled peasants now that the actual peasants had, for
all practical purposes, admitted the error of their ways?” (p. 74). Jews were
not recognized as legitimate curators of the national culture, but their lack of
acceptance means only that they are truly modern: “Deprived of the comforts
of their tribe and not allowed into the new ones created by their Apollonian
neighbors, they became the only true moderns” (p. 75)—a statement that accepts
at face value the idea that the secular Jews who had become the custodians
and main producers of culture had ceased to have a Jewish identification.
Slezkine fails to provide any evidence at all for this claim, and in fact there is
overwhelming evidence that it is false.28
The main weapons Jews used against national cultures were two quintessentially
modern ideologies, Marxism and Freudianism, “both [of which]
countered nationalism’s quaint tribalism with a modern (scientific) path to
wholeness” (p. 80). Slezkine correctly views both of these as Jewish ideologies
functioning as organized religions, with sacred texts promising deliverance
from earthly travail. While most of his book recounts the emergence of a
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 75
Jewish elite under the banner of Marxism in the Soviet Union, his comments on
psychoanalysis bear mentioning. Psychoanalysis “moved to the United States to
reinforce democratic citizenship with a much-needed new prop…. In America,
where nationwide tribal metaphors could not rely on theories of biological
descent, Freudianism came in very handy indeed” by erecting the “Explicitly
Therapeutic State” (pp. 79–80). The establishment of the Explicitly Therapeutic
State was much aided by yet another Jewish intellectual movement, the
Frankfurt School, which combined psychoanalysis and Marxism. The result was
a culture of critique which fundamentally aimed not only at de-legitimizing
the older American culture, but even attempted to alter or obliterate human
nature itself: “The statistical connection between ‘the Jewish question’ and
the hope for a new species of mankind seems fairly strong” (p. 90).
And when people don’t cooperate in becoming a new species, there’s always
murder. Slezkine describes Walter Benjamin, an icon of the Frankfurt School and
darling of the current crop of postmodern intellectuals, “with glasses on his nose,
autumn in his soul and vicarious murder in his heart” (p. 216), a comment that
illustrates the fine line between murder and cultural criticism, especially when
engaged in by ethnic outsiders. Indeed, on another occasion, Benjamin stated,
“Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice…are nourished by the image of enslaved
ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”29 Although Slezkine
downplays this aspect of Jewish motivation, Jews’ lachrymose perceptions of
their history—their images of enslaved ancestors—were potent motivators of
the hatred unleashed by the upheavals of the twentieth century.
Slezkine is entirely correct that Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt
School were fundamentally Jewish intellectual movements. However, he fails
to provide anything like a detailed account of how these ideologies served
specifically Jewish interests, most generally in combating anti-Semitism and
subverting ethnic identification among Europeans.30 Indeed, a major premise
of his treatment is that Jewish radicals were not Jews at all.
WERE JEWISH RADICALS JEWS?
Slezkine recounts the vast overrepresentation of Jews in the radical left in
Europe and America. His attempts to explain this cover some familiar ground:
Jewish intellectual opposition to the status quo resulting from their marginal
social status (Thorsten Veblen); Jewish leftism as a secular, universalized form
of traditional Jewish messianism and rationalism in which Jewish leftists are
descendents of the Old Testament prophets calling for social justice (Lev
Shternberg, dean of Soviet anthropologists); Jewish Communists as recreating
traditional Jewish culture forms—especially scriptural interpretation and
intense teacher-student relationships—in a Communist setting (historian Jaff
Schatz). Slezkine’s own contribution is to argue that Jewish radicals were
in revolt against their families, “rejecting the world of their fathers because
it seemed to embody the connection between Judaism and antisocialism
76 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
(understood as commercialism, tribalism, and patriarchy)…the real reason
for their common revulsion was the feeling that capitalism and Jewishness
were one and the same thing” (pp. 96, 98). “Most Jewish rebels did not fight
the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become
free of Jewishness—and thus Free” (p. 152).
This is a very useful theory, of course—useful because it denies that Jewish
radicals were Jews at all, that in fact they were anti-Jews (if not anti-Semites—and
there’s the rub). When Slezkine then goes on to recount the Jewish role as an
elite in the most murderous regime in European history, we are led to believe
that the only connection of those Jews with Jewishness is genealogical: Russian
Jewish radicals, lovers of Pushkin and Tolstoy (as their counterparts in Poland,
Hungary, and Germany loved Adam Mickiewicz, Sandór Petőfi, and Goethe),
idealistically and selflessly set out to fashion a secular utopia of social justice
by overcoming Apollonian backwardness even as they rejected their Jewish
origins and all things Jewish.
His evidence for this is rather thin, but even in the examples Slezkine uses
to illustrate his point it is clear that these Jewish radicals hated everything
about their national cultures except for one or two literary figures. The rest
would have to go. As Exhibit A, Slezkine presents Georg Lukács, the son of a
prominent Jewish capitalist, who describes his profound discontent with his
father’s way of life. But Lukács also expresses his hatred for “the whole of official
Hungary”—how he extended his unhappiness with his father to “cover the
whole of Magyar life, Magyar history, and Magyar literature indiscriminately
(save for Petőfi)” (p. 97). Ah, yes. Save for Petőfi. All else—the people and the
culture—would have to go, by mass murder if necessary. (Lazar Kaganovich,
the most prolific Jewish mass murderer of the Stalinist era, is pictured at
the end of his life reading Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgenev [pp. 97–98].) But
rather than see this as an aspect of traditional Jewish hatred for non-Jews and
their culture, souped up and rationalized with a veneer of Marxism, Slezkine
explains these radicals as enlightened Mercurians who wished to destroy the
old culture except for a few classics of modern literature. We may give thanks
to know that Shakespeare would have survived the revolution.
Another of Slezkine’s examples is Lev Kopelev, a Soviet writer who
witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine as “historical necessity” (p.
230). Slezkine states categorically that Kopelev did not identify as a Jew, but
his own material indicates the complexity of the matter. Kopelev identified
himself on Soviet documents as “Jewish” but claimed that was only because
he did not want to be seen as a “‘cowardly apostate,’ and—after World War
II—because he did not want to renounce those who had been murdered for
being Jewish” (p. 241). To the external world, Kopelev is a proud Jew, but to
his close associates—in his “heart of hearts”— he is only a Communist and
Soviet patriot. But of course many of his close associates were ethnic Jews, and
he shed no tears for the Ukrainian and Russian peasants and nationalists who
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 77
were murdered in the name of international socialism even as he mourned
the loss of Jews murdered because they were Jews. By World War II he had
become a “leading ideologue of Russian patriotism” (p. 279), developing “an
acute sense of hurt and injustice on behalf of Russia, Russian history, and the
Russian word” (p. 280) as he attempted to rally the Russians to do battle with the
Germans. Russian patriotism had suddenly become useful—much as, I would
argue, harnessing the patriotism and high regard for military service among
Americans has been useful for Jewish neoconservatives eager to rearrange the
politics of the Middle East in the interests of Israel. Ideology is a wonderfully
effective instrument in the service of self-deception (or deception).
Probably more typical of the Jewish identity of the Bolsheviks is the account
of Vitaly Rubin, a prominent philosopher and an ethnic Jew, who recounted
his career at a top Moscow school in the 1930s where over half the students
were Jewish:
Understandably, the Jewish question did not arise there. Not only did
it not arise in the form of anti-Semitism, it did not arise at all. All the
Jews knew themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with
Jewishness a thing of the past. I remember thinking of my father’s stories
about his childhood, heder [Jewish elementary school], and traditional
Jewish upbringing as something consigned to oblivion. None of that had
anything to do with me. There was no active desire to renounce one’s
Jewishness. The problem simply did not exist (pp. 253–254).
These Jews clearly have a Jewish identity but they have been removed from
traditional Jewish religious cultural forms. In such a predominantly Jewish
milieu, there was no need to renounce their Jewish identity and no need to
push aggressively for Jewish interests because they had achieved elite status.
And yet, just prior to World War II, as Russians started replacing Jews among
the political elite and Nazism emerged as an officially anti-Jewish ideology,
overt Jewish identity reemerged. Following World War II, Israel began exerting
its gravitational pull on Jews, much to the chagrin of a suspicious Stalin. The
visit of Golda Meir in 1948 and the outpouring of Jewish support for Zionism
that it aroused was a watershed event for Soviet Jewry. Stalin reacted to it by
initiating a campaign against public Jews and Yiddish culture.
It is interesting in this regard that the leading Soviet spokesmen on anti-
Semitism were both ethnic Jews with non-Jewish sounding names, Emilian
Yaroslavsky (Gubelman) and Yuri Larin (Lurie). Both refer to Jews in the third
person (p. 245), as if they themselves were not Jews. But when Larin tried to
explain the embarrassing fact that Jews were “preeminent, overabundant,
dominant, and so on” (p. 251) among the elite in the Soviet Union, he mentioned
the “unusually strong sense of solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual
help and support” (p. 252)—ethnic networking by any other name.
Obviously, “mutual help and support” require that Jews recognize each
other as Jews. Jewish identity may not have been much discussed, but it operated
nonetheless, even if subconsciously, in the rarefied circles at the top of Soviet
78 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
society. An example not presented by Slezkine is recounted in a report of 1950 to
the central committee on Jewish activities at an aircraft production facility:
In a number of extremely important departments of the Central Aero-
Hydrodynamic Institute there are workers due to be substituted for
political reasons. They gather around themselves people of the same
nationality, impose the habit of praising one another (while making
others erroneously believe that they are indispensable), and force their
protégés through to high posts.31
Indeed, there is no other way to explain the extraordinary percentages of
Jews throughout elite institutions, which became apparent when the purges
began in the late 1940s (see below). High IQ and achievement motivation
can only go so far, and cannot explain why, for example, in the late 1940s
Jews made up 80% of the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of Literature
(Pushkin House) (p. 302), 42% of the directors of Moscow theaters, over half of
Soviet circus directors (p. 301), or eight of the top ten directors of the Bolshoi
Theater.32 In the case of Pushkin House, the opponents of the dominant clique
stated that it had been forged “by long-lasting relationships of families and
friends, mutual protection, homogeneous (Jewish) national composition, and
anti-patriotic (anti-Russian) tendencies.”33
The reality is that Jewish identity always becomes more salient when
Jews feel threatened or feel that their interests as Jews are at stake, but Jewish
identity becomes submerged when Jewish interests coincide with other interests
and identities.34 (This is a human universal and presumably accounts for the
fact that the American Founding Fathers felt no need to carefully define the
cultural and ethnic parameters of their creation; they assumed the racial and
cultural homogeneity of the Republic35 and perceived no threat to its control
by themselves and their descendants.) The relative submergence of Jewish
identity within the Jewish milieu in elite circles of the Soviet Union during the
1920s and 1930s is a poor indicator of whether or not these people identified
as Jews or would do so when in later years Jewish and Soviet identities began
to diverge, when National Socialism reemphasized Jewish identity, or when
Israel emerged as a beacon for Jewish identity and loyalty. A similar stance
may be observed among present-day Jewish neoconservatives, who argue that
the United States has a deep interest in democratizing the Middle East. The
confluence of their interests as Jews in promoting the policies of the Israeli right
wing and their construction of American interests allows them to submerge
or even deny the relevance of their Jewish identity while posing as American
patriots.36 But if Israeli and American policy began to diverge significantly,
Jewish interests would almost certainly control their attitudes and behavior.
Indeed, since neoconservative Zionism of the Likud Party variety is well known
for promoting a confrontation between the U.S. and the entire Muslim world,
their policy recommendations best fit a pattern of loyalty to their ethnic group,
not to America.37
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 79
In a previous work I advanced several reasons for supposing that Jews
continued to identify as Jews in the USSR, none of which is challenged by
Slezkine’s treatment: (1) Persons were classified as Jews depending on their
ethnic background, at least partly because of residual anti-Jewish attitudes;
this would tend to impose a Jewish identity on these individuals and make it
difficult to assume an exclusive identity as a member of a larger, more inclusive
political group. (2) Many Jewish Bolsheviks, such as those in Evsektsiya (the
Jewish section of the Communist Party) and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,
aggressively sought to establish a secular Jewish subculture; these phenomena
are virtually ignored by Slezkine. (3) Very few Jews on the left envisioned a
postrevolutionary society without a continuation of Judaism as a group; indeed,
the predominant ideology among Jewish leftists was that postrevolutionary
society would end anti-Semitism because it would end class conflict and the
peculiar Jewish occupational profile. (4) The behavior of American Communists
shows that Jewish identity and the primacy of Jewish interests over Communist
interests were commonplace among individuals who were ethnically Jewish
Communists. (5) The existence of Jewish crypsis in other times and places was
combined with the possibility that self-deception, identificatory flexibility, and
identificatory ambivalence are important components of Judaism as a group
evolutionary strategy.38
And in the end, despite the rationalizations of many Soviet Jews and
Slezkine on Jewish identity, it was blood that mattered. By the time of World
War II, most Jews
knew that they were, in some sense, Jews. They may never have been to
a synagogue, seen a menorah, heard Yiddish or Hebrew, tasted gefilte
fish or indeed met their grandparents. But they knew they were Jews
in the Soviet sense, which was also—in essence—the Nazi sense. They
were Jews by blood (p. 286).
They reemerged as Jews to fight the Nazis and to solicit the support of
American Jews to pressure their government to enter the war and provide
aid to the Soviet Union. Jewish spokesmen visited New York proclaiming that
“the Jewish people—‘ethnic’ or religious, Communist, Zionist, or traditionalist—
were one family” (p. 290).
Moreover, Slezkine leaves out an enormous amount of evidence that conflicts
with his Jewish radicalism-as-patricide thesis, evidence indicating that in general
Jewish radicals did identify as Jews and acted to promote specific Jewish interests.
Certainly Jewish radicals often rejected their fathers’ religion and their way of
life, but all the evidence points to their identifying in different ways as Jews,
not losing their Jewish identity to become de-ethnicized moral crusaders against
capitalism. Slezkine uses Franz Boas to illustrate his patricide theory, because
Boas was a radical Jew who recognized “the shackles of tradition” (p. 98). But
he fails to note that Boas was hardly in rebellion against his own family. Boas
was reared in a “Jewish-liberal” family in which the revolutionary ideals of
80 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
1848 remained influential,39 and there is ample evidence of his strong Jewish
identification and concern with anti-Semitism.40
Besides a few individual cases like Lukács and Boas, the only general
evidence that Slezkine provides for the patricide thesis comes from Jaff
Schatz’s study of the generation of Jewish Communists who dominated the
Communist movement in Poland beginning in the 1930s. But he provides a
mangled account of Schatz’s work.41 These Jews did indeed reject their parents’
religion, but the result of their Yiddish upbringing was “a deep core of their
identity, values, norms, and attitudes with which they entered the rebellious
period of their youth and adulthood. This core was to be transformed in the
processes of acculturation, secularization, and radicalization sometimes even
to the point of explicit denial. However, it was through this deep layer that
all later perceptions were filtered.”42 Most of these individuals spoke Yiddish
in their daily lives and had only a poor command of Polish even after joining the
party. They socialized entirely with other Jews whom they met in the Jewish
world of work, neighborhood, and Jewish social and political organizations.
After they became Communists, they dated and married among themselves,
and their social gatherings were conducted in Yiddish. Their mentors and
principal influences were other ethnic Jews, including especially Luxemburg
and Trotsky, and when they recalled personal heroes, they were mostly
Jews whose exploits achieved semimythical proportions.
In general, Jews who joined the Communist movement did not first reject
their ethnic identity, and there were many who “cherished Jewish culture…[and]
dreamed of a society in which Jews would be equal as Jews.”43 It was common
for individuals to combine a strong Jewish identity with Marxism as well
as various combinations of Zionism and Bundism (a movement of Jewish
socialists). Moreover, the attraction of Polish Jews to Communism was greatly
facilitated by their knowledge that Jews had attained high-level positions of
power and influence in the Soviet Union and that the Soviet government had
established a system of Jewish education and culture. In both the Soviet Union
and Poland, Communism was seen as opposing anti-Semitism. In marked
contrast, during the 1930s the Polish government enacted policies which
excluded Jews from public-sector employment, established quotas on Jewish
representation in universities and the professions, and organized boycotts of
Jewish businesses and artisans.44 Clearly, Jews perceived Communism as good
for Jews, and indeed a major contribution of Slezkine’s book is to document
that Communism was good for Jews: It was a movement that never threatened
Jewish group continuity, and it held the promise of Jewish power and influence
and the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism. And when this group achieved
power in Poland after World War II, they liquidated the Polish nationalist
movement, outlawed anti-Semitism, and established Jewish cultural and
economic institutions.
Fall 2005 / MacDonald 81
Slezkine also fails to note that in the United States a strong Jewish identification
was typical of Jewish radicals and that Jewish support for the left typically waxed
and waned depending on specifically Jewish issues, particularly those related to
anti-Semitism and support for Israel.45 The Jewish Old Left was a recognized
part of the Jewish community, and American Jewish leftists during the 1960s
were the only leftists who didn’t reject their parents—they really were “red
diaper babies.”
It is also remarkable that the revolutionary movement in tsarist Russia
ceased being anti-Jewish when Jews attained highly visible and prominent
positions in the movement, even though workers and peasants participated
in anti-Jewish pogroms from 1880 to 1905 and continued to harbor anti-Jewish
attitudes. As Slezkine himself notes, Jews were the only group that was not
criticized by the revolutionary movement (p. 157), even though most Russians,
and especially the lower classes whose cause they were supposedly championing,
had very negative attitudes toward Jews.46 When, in 1915, Maxim Gorky,
a strong philosemite, published a survey of Russian attitudes toward Jews,
the most common response was typified by the comment that “the congenital,
cruel, and consistent egoism of the Jews is everywhere victorious over the
good-natured, uncultured, trusting Russian peasant or merchant” (p. 159).
There were concerns that all of Russia would pass into Jewish hands and that
Russians would become slaves of the Jews. In the end, as Slezkine shows, as
a result of the Revolution this prediction was not far off the mark. But in any
case, one would think that if radical Jews had ceased being Jews, they would
have been severely critical of the Jewish role in the pre-Soviet economy.
The other huge lacuna in Slezkine’s presentation is that he portrays Jewish
radicals as typically the offspring of successful Jewish capitalists—like Georg
Lukács—who scorn their fathers and wish for nothing more than to destroy
Judaism in order to achieve personal freedom and make the world safe for
humanity: “Marxism attributed [Jewish patricide] to the proletariat and
urged the killing (more or less metaphorical) of the bad fathers, so as to
emancipate the world from Judaism and make sure that no sons would
have to kill their fathers ever again” (p. 100). Because he wishes to portray
Jews as quintessentially modern Mercurians, Slezkine repeatedly shows
how Jews dominated the economy, the universities, and the culture of
Eastern Europe—indeed, his book is probably the best, most up-to-date
account of Jewish economic and cultural preeminence in Europe (and
America) that we have. But that is far from the whole story. A prime force
resulting in Jewish radicalism was the grinding poverty of most Jews in Eastern
Europe. Jews had overshot their economic niche: The economy was unable to
support the burgeoning Jewish population in the sorts of positions that Jews
had traditionally filled, with the result that a large percentage of the Jewish
population became mired in poverty (along with much higher percentages of
the non-Jewish population). The result was a cauldron of ethnic hostility, with
82 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
governmental restrictions on Jewish economic activity and representation in
educational institutions, rampant anti-Jewish attitudes, and increasing Jewish
desperation.47
The main Jewish response to this situation was an upsurge of fundamentalist
extremism that coalesced in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth
century, in political radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish problems.
Slezkine devotes one line to the fact that Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had
the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth
century (p. 115), but this was an extremely important part of Eastern Europe’s
“Jewish problem.” Anti-Semitism and the exploding Jewish population, combined
with economic adversity, were of critical importance for producing the great
numbers of disaffected Jews who dreamed of deliverance in various messianic
movements—the ethnocentric mysticism of the Kabbala and Hasidism, Zionism,
or the dream of a Marxist political revolution. Jews emigrated in droves from
Eastern Europe but the problems remained. And in the case of the Marxists, the
main deliverance was to be achieved not by killing Judaism, as Slezkine suggests,
but by the destruction of the traditional societies of Eastern Europe as a panacea
for Jewish poverty and for anti-Semitism.
In fact, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were hardly the modern Mercurians that Slezkine
portrays them as being. Slezkine does note that well into the twentieth century
the vast majority of Eastern European Jews could not speak the languages of the
non-Jews living around them, and he does a good job of showing their intense
ingroup feeling and their attitudes that non-Jews were less than human.48 But
he ignores their medieval outlook on life, their obsession with the Kabbala (the
writings of Jewish mystics), their superstition and anti-rationalism, and their
belief in “magical remedies, amulets, exorcisms, demonic possession (dybbuks),
ghosts, devils, and teasing, mischievous genies.”49 These supposedly modern
Mercurians had an attitude of absolute faith in the person of the tsadik, their rebbe,
who was a charismatic figure seen by his followers literally as the personification
of God in the world. (Attraction to charismatic leaders is a fundamental feature of
Jewish social organization—apparent as much among religious fundamentalists
as among Jewish political radicals or elite Jewish intellectuals.)50
BOLSHEVISM AS A JEWISH REVOLUTION
Slezkine’s main contribution is to summarize previously available data
and to extend our understanding of Jewish dominance of the revolutionary
movements before 1917, and of Soviet society thereafter. (Oddly, he makes
only a passing reference to Albert Lindemann’s important Esau’s Tears, which
makes many of the same points.) Not only were Jews vastly overrepresented
among revolutionaries, they “were particularly well represented at the top,
among theoreticians, journalists, and leaders” (p. 155). Radical Jews, like other