Bolshevik. The charge that Jews had engineered the November revolution
in an international conspiracy for world domination was not confined to
Russian Whites. Gaining credence from the fact that some Jews were
prominent in Bolshevik councils, it was picked up in western Europe and
the United States. The Jew=Bolshevik charge quickly became a common
theme in popular parlance and a major weapon in the hands of anti-
Semites. The more it was repeated, the broader it became; limited at first
to the Russian Revolution, it easily grew into claims, heard on both sides of
the Atlantic, that Jews worldwide were Bolsheviks who plotted the over-
throw of Western countries. It mattered not that the older stereotype of
the Jew as unscrupulous capitalist logically conflicted with the new image.
In fact, the two images were harnessed for the same purpose. Whether in
the guise of capitalist or Bolshevik, the Jew was bent primarily on destroy-
ing Christian civilization. An article in the staid London Times, for exam-
ple, combined the two images when it linked Leon Trotsky with Jewish fi-
nanciers of New York.
In the United States similar statements abounded. Following the visits
of Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin to New York during the war and the flood
of new members into the foreign-language Socialist federations after the
Bolshevik revolution, the Jews (non-Socialists as well as Socialists) became
favorite targets of American nativists. An anti-Semitic journal in Brooklyn,
the Anti-Bolshevist, called itself “A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the De-
fense of American Institutions against the Jewish Bolshevist Doctrines of
Morris Hillquit and Leon Trotsky.” More respectable sources followed
suit: An official of the American Red Cross, Robert Davis, wrote in
McClure’sthat the Russian problem was essentially a Jewish problem and
that Bolshevism paved the way for Jewish control of economic life; com-
munal leaders in Philadelphia warned that Jewish identification with the
Bolsheviks would cause an anti-Semitic backlash in the United States; a
businessmen’s organization in Iowa spread the image of the “Jewish
Bolshevik” among Rotary Clubs. The alacrity with which average Ameri-
cans latched onto the Bolshevik image and refused to question its accuracy
suggests that it was more anti-Semitic—“an innate prejudice,” as Louis
Marshall put it—than anti-Bolshevist. Directed against the “international”
Jew, the Jew=Bolshevik equation generally ignored class distinctions within
the Jewish community. The established German Jew no less than the im-
migrant Russian Jew was fair game for attacks.^13
Desperately searching for an effective defense, the AJC appointed a
committee on Jews and Bolsheviks in the fall of 1918 to consider the mat-
ter. The best it could come up with was a statement, to be drafted by the
AJC but issued by the State Department, dissociating Jews from Bolshe-
vism. No action was taken, suggesting that the committee was afraid of a
public stand that might boomerang against the Jews. The organization
The End of an Era 243