Making a Revolution, 1908 were considered “the most revolutionary national group in the Russian
Empire,” like the Dönme in the Ottoman Empire. Nearly two-thirds
of those who returned from Switzerland through Germany with Lenin
by sealed train in 1917 were Jews; a revolutionary millionaire of Jew-
ish background named Alexander Parvus (Israel Lazarevich Gelfand, or
Helphand), who resided for a period in Istanbul and had close relations
with the Young Turks, arranged Lenin’s return.^138 The Bolshevik leaders
closest to Lenin in the beginning were Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev,
and Yakov Sverdlov, all of Jewish origin. Among the men entrusted to
carry out Lenin’s order to murder the royal family were Sverdlov and
two other men of Jewish origin, including the man who claimed to have
shot the tsar.^139 The share of men and women of Jewish origin in lead-
ing army, party, soviet, and secret police positions during the Civil War
following the revolution was greater than their proportion, not only in
the population, but in the party itself.^140 What is important is that none
of these prominent communists wanted to be Jewish; not considering
themselves Jewish, they believed they had left their Jewishness—a thing
of the past—behind them. Trotsky declared his nationality to be “So-
cial Democratic.”^141 Dr. Nâzım can in some respects be considered the
CUP’s Trotsky. If the other leading CUP ideologue, Bahaettin Şakir,
had been Dönme, the comparison would have been even more fitting.
The prominent role of people of Jewish heritage in the former USSR
masks other realities, namely, that most party members after the revolution
were ethnic Russians, and that Latvians were the most overrepresented
group. Nevertheless, as Yuri Slezkine points out, “Jewish participation in
radical movements of the early twentieth century is similar to their partic-
ipation in business and the professions: most radicals were not Jews and
most Jews were not radicals, but the proportion of radicals among Jews
was, on average, much higher than among their non-Jewish neighbors.”^142
Without subscribing to paranoid plots, it can be asserted that the same
can be said of the Dönme, who also converted commercial and educa-
tional networks “of people, books, money, and information,” along with
practices of mobility and secrecy, into revolutionary ones.^143 Moreover,
scholars have argued that although Jews, the group Muslims confused
with Dönme, played a part in the CUP before and after 1908 , they could
not have manipulated the CUP as a front for Jewish aims. Rather, Jews
wholeheartedly supported the CUP because they were politically inclined
toward Ottomanism.^144 Moreover, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and