Interestingly, though, during this period of murder and mayhem, Jews were a protected class, so much so that the Communist Party took the unprecedented step of making expressions of anti-Semitism a counter-revolutionary offense, and thus punishable by death.2

The Jewish Voice in January, 1942, stated: “The Jewish people will never forget that the Soviet Union was the first country — and as yet the only country in the world — in which anti-Semitism is a crime.”3 The Congress Bulletin (Publication of the American Jewish Congress) stated:4 5 6

Anti-Semitism was classed as counter-revolution and the severe punishments meted out for acts of anti-Semitism were the means by which the existing order protected its own safety.

The Russian Penal Codes of 1922 and 1927 even went so far as to make anti-Semitism punishable by death. The book Soviet Russia and the Jews by Gregor Aronson and published by the American Jewish League Against Communism (1949 NY) quotes Stalin remarking on the policy in an interview in 1931 with the Jewish Telegraph Agency:

…Communists cannot be anything but outspoken enemies of anti-Semitism. We fight anti-Semites by the strongest methods in the Soviet Union. Active Anti-Semites are punished by death under law. 7

The Beginning of an Ethnic War

In school, I brought these fascinating facts up with some of my teachers. They in turn were as incredulous as I had been. One suggested that the Jewish involvement in the Communist revolution might have been a result of the long-running historical persecution of Jews by the Czars and, indeed, by much of the Russian intelligentsia. For instance, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and many other prominent Russian writers had criticized Jewish machinations in their books and articles. Russians didn’t like it that the Jews used the Russian language for doing business among Gentiles but spoke Yiddish among themselves. Jews were also accused of having an “us versus them” mentality rather than assimilating with the Christian majority.

There had been a running feud between the Russians and the Jews for centuries, and from these conflicts arose “pogroms” to suppress the Jews. This war without borders can be illustrated by the Jewish reaction in the 1880s to the anti-Semitic Russian May Laws. The May Laws of 1882 attempted to restrict Jews from some professions and mandate resettlement of most Jews to their original area of the empire, the Pale of Settlement (a huge area, originally set up in 1772, encompassing an area about half the size of Western Europe, extending from the Crimea to the Baltic Sea, to which the Jews had been restricted).

In retaliation, Jewish international financiers did their best to destroy the Russian economy. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the happenings this way:

The Russian May Laws were the most conspicuous legislative monument achieved by modern anti-Semitism…. Their immediate result was a ruinous commercial depression which was felt all over the empire and which profoundly affected the national credit. The Russian minister was at his wits end for money. Negotiations for a large loan were entered upon with the house of Rothschild and a preliminary contract was signed, when…the finance minister was informed that unless the persecutions of the Jews were stopped the great banking house would be compelled to withdraw from the operation….1

In response to the economic and other pressures put upon Russia, the Czar issued an edict on September 3, 1882. In it he stated:

For some time the government has given its attention to the Jews and to their relations to the rest of the inhabitants of the empire, with a view of ascertaining the sad condition of the Christian inhabitants brought about by the conduct of Jews in business matters….

With few exceptions, they have as a body devoted their attention, not to enriching or benefiting the country, but to defrauding by their wiles its inhabitants, and particularly its poor inhabitants. This conduct of theirs has called forth protests on the part of the people,… thought it a matter of urgency and justice to adopt stringent measures in order to put an end to the oppression practiced by the Jews on the inhabitants, and to free the country from their malpractices, which were, as is known, the cause of the agitations.2

So, Jews had ample reason to attempt to overturn the Czarist government of Russia, and there is direct evidence they did just that. The Jewish Communal Register of New York City of 1917-1918, edited and published by the Jewish community, profiles Jacob Schiff, who at that time was one of the wealthiest men in the world as head of the huge banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company. In the article it states how the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company “floated the large Japanese War Loans of 1904-1905, thus making possible the Japanese victory over Russia.” It also goes on to say,

Mr. Schiff has always used his wealth and his influence in the best interests of his people. He financed the enemies of autocratic Russia and used his financial influence to keep Russia away from the money market of the United States.1

Jacob Schiff actually gave somewhere between $17 million and $24 million to finance the Jewish-Communist revolutionaries in Russia, a sum that would be the equivalent of many hundreds of millions of dollars by today’s value. Rabbi Marvin S. Andelman, in his book To Eliminate the Opiate, cites two sources documenting Schiff’s financial support of the Communist revolution and ultimate repayment by them.

Jacob Schiff and Leon Trotsky, two key players in the Russian Revolution, both found their base of support in New York City.

Jacob Schiff is credited with giving twenty million dollars to the Bolshevik revolution. A year after his death the Bolsheviks deposited over six hundred million rubles to Schiff’s banking firm Kuhn & Loeb.2 3

It was initially puzzling that the violently anticapitalist Communist Party would be supported by some of the most prominent capitalists in the world. But I finally realized that Russian Revolution was not ultimately about the triumph of an economic ideology, it was about the settling of an age-old struggle between two powerful peoples - the Jews and the Russians - in an ethnic war that tragically ended in the totalitarian tyranny of the Communist dictatorship. Even worse, the score was ultimately settled in the terror of the blood-washed cellars of the Cheka and the frozen death of the Gulags.

The fact that super-capitalists such as Jacob Schiff could support a nakedly socialist regime such as Communism made me question whether there was something more to Communism than met the eye. What was it about Communism that made it so attractive to Jews, who were largely well-educated non-proletarians, when Communism was supposed to be, in Lenin’s words, “a dictatorship of the proletariat”? Obviously, by-and-large, Jews were nothing like Marx’s “workers of the world,” for no group was more involved in capitalism or the manipulation and use of capital than the Jewish community.

I checked out the Communist personalities that Mattie Smith told me were in the Jewish Who’s Who. Atheist Leon Trotsky as well as atheist Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, are proudly listed in the directory of famous Jews compiled by the leading Jewish rabbinical groups of the world.

Winston Churchill, in his eloquent article “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” had argued that Communism and Zionism were distinct ideologies that were competing, as he put it, “for the soul of the Jewish people.” But something didn’t seem quite kosher in this supposed titanic struggle, for it appeared that many Zionists also supported Communism and, at least in the early years, many Communists were sympathetic to Zionists. Millions of Jews, even super-capitalists such as Jacob Schiff, supported the Communist revolution in Russia. The struggle seemed to be like that of two brothers who might sometimes argue amongst themselves but who always stand together against their common enemies.

In 1975, I read a book called Trotsky and the Jews, written by Joseph Nedava and published by the Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia, 1971). The book points out that before the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) used to play chess with Baron Rothschild of the famous Rothschild banking family.

A Jewish journalist (M. Waldman) who knew Trotsky from the period of his stay in Vienna (”when he used to play chess with Baron Rothschild in Cafe Central and frequent Cafe Daily to read the press there”).1

What could the Rothschilds, the biggest banking house in Europe, possibly have in common with a leader who wanted to destroy capitalism and private property? Conversely, why would a dedicated Communist be a close friend of the most powerful “capitalist oppressor” in the world? Could it be that they saw Communism and Zionism as two very different avenues to a similar goal of power and revenge against the Czars?

A number of questions arose: 1) Could Communism simply have been a tool they adapted to defeat and rule their Russian antagonists? 2) Were there other peoples with whom the Jews believed they were in conflict? 3) Was Communism originally part of a strategic imperative that reached far beyond the confines of Soviet Russia? These were important questions. I thought that I might find their answers in the philosophical origins of Communism.

I resolved to investigate the ideological roots of Communism. I found Das Kapital2 and the Communist Manifesto,3 in my public library. Karl Marx’s books were obtuse, especially the parts developing the Hegelian dialectic, but they made some sense if one believed mankind had a machine-like nature that Marx described. One of my teachers made the poorly thought out comment that Communism was great in theory but faulty in practice. To my way of thinking, to be a great idea it must work in practice, and Communism obviously doesn’t. There has never been a theory that has promised more human happiness yet delivered more poverty, mental and physical oppression, and more human misery and death.