In 1967 I met a Polish diplomat in Cambodia whose communist family had immigrated to Palestine when he was a child. Like many Jewish (and other) communists the family was plunged into an emotional ideological quandary by the Soviet pact with the Nazis in 1939. The diplomat told me that one morning he awoke to music. When he looked out of his window he saw his parents and their communist neighbours dancing and singing. It was 22 June 1941 and the German army had just crossed the border into the Soviet Union. All the tortured explanations for Stalin’s ‘wise decision’ for the alliance now vanished.
Jonathan Frankel, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the authors of the introduction to this fascinating collection of essays, writes:
I declare an interest. My own very left, or possibly communist, family in New York, although different from communist Poles in Palestine, shared with them a faith in the brotherhood of man and internationalism, together with a self-blinding ability to ignore or explain ‘the extreme pragmatism of a ruthless [Soviet] revolutionary code’.The Red Army alone now stood between the Jews of Europe and annihilation. For Jewish communists and fellow travellers this was the time of their greatest acceptance within the Jewish sub-world and society in general. The massive purges carried out by the communist state during the 1930s sank into near oblivion.
Put bluntly, this meant ignoring — or justifying — Lenin’s and Stalin’s persecution of Party comrades, many of whom were of Jewish origin although divorced from religious belief or practice. Put even more bluntly, when it came to condemnation of Zionism and other aspects of Jewishness, had these American leftists not been of Jewish descent, some of them could be described as anti-Semitic. A shocking example is the anti-Zionist cartoon, dated 1929, included in this book, by a communist artist, the Jewish-American William Gropper. It shows ‘a fat Jew, with a huge nose, whose hands are dripping with blood’. On his clothes are a swastika, the Hebrew word ‘kosher’, a Jewish star, and a dollar sign. A Nazi cartoonist could not have done worse. It symbolises the struggle between the extreme Jewish Left and the ‘bourgeois’ Jews of the Zionist movement.
Why did Jews, if only in small numbers, join the Party? Dark Times, Dire Decisions shows there were many reasons, depending on time, location and personal needs: faith that the Communist party, unlike most political groups, was not anti-Semitic; internationalism and idealism, which would make all men brothers, regardless of background; nationalism would make the country more just; uncritical admiration for the Soviet Union; dislike of traditional religion; a desire to join a secret band of comrades with particular language, beliefs and social life. For some Jews in the vast Russian-administered area for Jews called the Pale of Settlement, political extremism, revolutionary fervour and hope of a better world drove them, in the 20th century, into communism. Some of their children and grandchildren, even if they had never suffered persecution, knew about it. In historically anti-Semitic countries with communist regimes, some Jews served in the security services that sent people to Siberia; this became a reason for despising all Jews.
With chapters on Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Britain and the United States, Dark Times, Dire Decisions shows that while very few Jews joined the communist parties, when they did they were vastly over-represented in the membership. In Poland, Romania, Czecho- slovakia, Britain and Hungary, moreover, they were often the key cadres — Rakosi Slansky and Pauker, for example — and in America by the Thirties they were in the majority. Stalin, who eventually had most of them killed, was surrounded at the highest level by Jews: Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov and Litvinov spring to mind.
The status of Jews differed from country to country. In Hungary, anti-Semitism was common but it did not prevent Jews from achieving high status. By 1895 a law was passed ‘making Judaism equal in status to the Christian churches’. The minister of defence during the Great War was a Jewish four-star general, one third of the reserve army officers were Jews, and there were dozens of Jews in the parliament. And in 1944, after the defeat of the German army in Hungary, Soviet rulers turned to the 200,000 surviving Jews for service in the political elite. These developments would inflame the anti-Semitism of many Hungarians. By 1952 the Stalinist purge of Hungary’s ‘Zionists’ began, and there would be show trials of communists resembling the Slansky purge in Czechoslovakia.
The British Party was never so successful, reaching a maximum membership of 17,000 between the wars. But ten per cent of its activists were Jews, mostly from the working-class ghettos and slums of London, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. The Party was well off, funded from Moscow and extracting high subscription rates from its membership. Its major appeal, as was the case in the US, was anti-Fascism, but unlike the situation in the US British Jews faced a dangerous indigenous enemy: Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists. Almost all the Party’s members came from East European backgrounds. The poverty of these Jews, compared with the old-established English Jews, was extreme. A survey concluded that 13.7 per cent of East London Jews lived in dire poverty compared with 12.1 per cent of the population as a whole in the same area. One member recalled that he joined the Party because of ‘hatred of [the] capitalist who squeezed the blood out of my father and made Stepney the slum it is’. Jewish trade unions were notably militant and were Party recruiting grounds. The Party activists were well educated — almost a quarter went to college or university, a number far greater than that for the population as a whole. But the Party’s strength within the Jewish community was limited. There were plenty of other radical groups for young militants to join and the Orthodox congregations were hostile to communism.
In the US, the enthusiasms of many Jewish communists — whose numbers fluctuated from 20,000 to 80,000 — and their close allies were notable in the arts: novels, plays, music, theatre, painting. Six of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ movie scriptwriters accused of being communists and imprisoned in 1950 were Jews. Other driving emotions were a hatred of racism, especially directed against blacks who were always welcomed into the Party; praise for trade unionism and internationalism. It was internationalism that propelled young Jews to Spain and into the Abraham Lincoln Brigade where their numbers were disproportionately large.
The chapter on Polish Jews, in a statement broadly applicable across the CP’s international membership, suggests that
I recall that in Red Jewish circles in New York in the Thirties and Forties two common terms of condemnation were ‘he’s a Zionist,’ and ‘she’s too Jewish.’ Such abusive terms were used even during the Holocaust and dropped from the vernacular only when Stalin turned on the Soviet Jews not long before he died. Event by event, Hungary, Czecho- slovakia, the Khrushchev speech — after each one a few more members, including the Jews, walked away from the Party. Their idealism often remained. I bet most of them still feel a thrill when they hear the ‘Internationale’. I bet, too, they opposed the w ar in Iraq. But this time Moscow didn’t have to give the green light.most Jews who were initially drawn to the movement acted in defiance of their own religious and cultural background. The involvement of individuals was in most cases an act of rebellion either against the traditional world of their parents or against the concern with particularist Jewish issues as expressed by movements such as Zionism.
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