In June’s Irish Political Review Brendan Clifford wrote of ‘The Phenomenon Of Anti-Semitism!’ He observed that the—

“Jewish mode of national existence was viable when there was a world order consisting
of Empires. In 1917/18 most of the Empires fell. They were not overthrown by
nationalist revolutions. It was only in Ireland that there was a nationalist revolution
against Empire. Britain destroyed its rival Empires—Austro-Hungary and Turkey—when
it got the power to do so in 1918, and the Russian Empire collapsed under the stress of the
World War into which it had been lured by Britain.

Nation-states suddenly appeared through no effort of their own. The Jews—having
been people of the Empire—had no position within these new nationalisms. New middle
classes began to form out of the native populations. There was a vigorous upsurge of anti-
Semitism across the region from the Baltic down through Poland to Western Ukraine.

“The only safe place for Jews was Communist Russia—where they were active in the
construction of the new social system. The Russian Revolution was, in a sense,
cosmopolitan, and so, in a sense, were the Jews: and that was how a large population of
Jews survived the quarter-century following the remaking of Europe by the Versailles
Conference.”

Of relevance to this are the comments of Zvi Gitelman, a Jewish American historian, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is a leading scholar on the history, politics, and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Gitelman has authored or edited numerous influential books focusing on Jewish history, identity, and the diaspora, such as A Century Of Ambivalence, Jewish Identities In Postcommunist Russia And Ukraine.

Recently Gitelman discussed what he knew about the cosmopolitan Jews in the Soviet Union and Jewishness in general, as it is in the West. He started by noting how Jews were over-represented among the Bolsheviks, but that the number of Jews involved in Bolshevism was very small. They were largely non-Jewish Jews. But the prominence of Jews in the Bolshevik leadership generated the idea in Europe that Bolshevism was a Jewish conspiracy.

In fact, the Jewish conspiracy was an open one—Zionism and the Bund.

Jews were very prominent in the Soviet secret police, Gitelman notes. Felix Dzerzhinsky, for example. This was because Jews could be trusted by the Bolsheviks more than anyone else in Soviet territory because they could not be counter-revolutionaries—given Tsarist and White hostility toward them. Individual Jews wanted power to take revenge on the White and Ukrainian nationalist pogromists, according to Gitelman.

Jews were also literate and suited to police work in a way that the Russian peasant was not.

Gitelman noted that the Soviet Union never accepted the idea of the WW2 Holocaust. This was because the USSR itself lost 27 million people—with just under 3 million of them being Jews. The killing could not be seen as an anti-Semitic Holocaust—as it was in the West—because of the general killing of civilians by the Nazis in Soviet territories in which the Jews formed only a minor part—around 7%.

Of relevance to this point is how the modern German authorities have sought to confine their war guilt to what they did to Jews! This is why use of the word Holocaust has been confined to Jews. The Germans never admitted their guilt with regard to, or paid reparations to, the victims of the wider Holocaust they made of Soviet citizens, and Jews amongst them. Soviet Jewish victims have featured as a kind of attachment to the European Jews they killed. There has never been an acceptance of the charge of Genocide against the 27 million slain Soviet people.

The West German State, and its unified German expression, has always obstructed claims made by relatives of forced labour victims, and tied these up in German bureaucratic obstacles. At the same time compensation was always willingly given to Jews in Israel.

This has enabled Germany, and Europe in general, to transition from National Socialist mode to European Union mode while retaining its fundamental anti-Russian character. It has also resulted in Russia’s deNazification policy with regard to Ukrainian nationalism having no purchase at all in Western Europe. It seems that European guilt is confined exclusively to its Jew killing and it remains at ease with its fascist past and its Drang nach Osten.

With the honourable exception of the East German Communists, the bulk of Germans always retained the view that their war in the east had been a civilisational imperative—and that their current position of supporting genocidal activity by Israel in Palestine and of support for Ukrainian fascist nationalism are indications of this.

Gitelman observes that Jews were an ethnic category in the Soviet Union and not a religious category—as they had been in the Ottoman Empire. If both parents were Jews someone was Jewish, but they could also choose an alternative ethnic category like Ukrainian if they wished.

He also notes that Soviet law was very different to Jewish Law. Under traditional Jewish law (halakha), a Jew is defined in two specific ways: By Birth—anyone born to a Jewish mother is fundamentally Jewish. By Conversion—anyone who formally converts to Judaism through a recognised rabbinical court (beit din) becomes a Jew—although some Orthodox Jews don’t accept such Jews.

Gitelman notes that Jewish patrilinear inheritance only became accepted in the 1980s, but it is not accepted by Orthodox conservative Jews. Gitelman also observes that secular Jews have a problem with Jewishness because Jewishness is heavily invested with a religious character. The religious component of Jewishness is so fundamental to being a Jew that secular Jewishness is really a transient stage in degeneration that leads, if it is taken in earnest, toward gentilism.

Gitelman notes that Yiddish hardly survived the Second World War and any secular Yiddish development that existed did not survive it. Hebrew has defeated Yiddish he says. The children of secular Jews are lost to Jewishness in the West and the only place where secular Judaism is really possible is Israel—the Jewish state, where secular Jews can be contained within Jewishness by the Zionist mission.

Gitelman notes that the Holocaust Museum in the United States is a presidential appointment.

A disproportionate number of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs were Jews, although they were not practicing Jews. The Oligarchs ran into problems after Putin took over—not because they were Jews, but because they had a dysfunctional effect on the politics of Russia and had to be muzzled. Gitelman makes it clear that this was not Anti-Semitism on Putin’s part.

After the fall of the USSR, there was a growth in “global Russians” – richer, international Russians who lived in a global dimension. And the Jewish oligarchs – Jews being cosmopolitan – were often part of this set. But these Global Russians threatened the national development of Russia from the outside by means of their control of privatised State assets and general economic power. The Ukraine war has diminished them due to Western sanctions on them.

The Jew, Karl Marx, who suggested that “the God of the Jew is Mammon,” or money, was an anti-Semite under the modern definition, according to Gitelman.

Gitelman suggests it was a Jewish Rabbi who negotiated a mobile Jewishness with the Roman emperor 2,000 years ago. In return for tolerance from the Emperor, the Jews would not act as subversives or seek a return to Israel after the destruction of the Temple. This is what enabled the Jews to secure themselves as a distinct people when they went to other countries, according to Gitelman.

Of course, the Jews did return, courtesy of British Imperialism and of their consciousness of being a Special People—who would redeem the fallen world, long after Rome and its emperors had disappeared—by means of a final catastrophe. That belief is what enabled the Jews to maintain themselves as a distinct entity for a couple of thousand years. They kept themselves separate from the Gentile nations in which they lived, assimilating to a small degree within them, while performing certain useful functions for them—but always being ready to move on when a particular host nation tired of them, and remaining mobile enough to find another host which had future need of them.

Gitelman, when asked what he considered Anti-Semitism to be, replied rather controversially that it was “being against Jews for irrational reasons, but more than it is necessary to be just anti-Jewish because of the actions of Jews”.