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A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
"Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time."
--Samuel Moyn
"Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history."
--The Nation
For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism.
"It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little."
--Mark Mazower, Financial Times
"From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element--the Jews--aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers."
--Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs
--Samuel Moyn
"Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history."
--The Nation
For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism.
"It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little."
--Mark Mazower, Financial Times
"From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element--the Jews--aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers."
--Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs
353 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
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About the author
Paul A. Hanebrink
3 books4 followersPaul Hanebrink is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He is the author of In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 15, 2025
Sure, it's provably true...BUT DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO KEEP POINTING IT OUT?!
Paul Hanebrink's A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is an intellectually unserious whitewash of the conspicuous role Jews played in international Communism. To have the audacity to make the claim that Judeo-Bolshevism, as it was known by its many tragic victims, was a "myth", is to deliberately ignore the voluminous scholarly research on the subject proving otherwise over the last 40 years, of which much has been published by Jews themselves. This particular work of apologia takes the peculiarly novel approach of not even attempting to disprove the charge (as a scant few previous works have weakly attempted and in the opinion of this reviewer, failed), and instead chooses to treat it as "one among many forms of anti-Semitism", regardless of its veracity. The result is a truly appalling work of deceit masquerading as scholarship.
Bragging About Bolshevism
The tone is set early on when Hanebrink avers that investigating whether or not Jews were Communists, were overrepresented among party members or leaders, voted for or supported Communist parties in high numbers, or joined Communist secret police forces are all fool's errands because attempting to do so "requires historians to impose rigid ethnic categories on men and women whose sense of themselves was always more complex and multifaceted." Yet Jewish academics curiously don't seem to share his need for such piously sensitive nuance.
Jewish historian Norman F. Cantor observed that:
Jewish political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg writes:
Consulting the Encyclopedia Judaica reveals the following in its article on Communism:
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Paul Hanebrink's A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is an intellectually unserious whitewash of the conspicuous role Jews played in international Communism. To have the audacity to make the claim that Judeo-Bolshevism, as it was known by its many tragic victims, was a "myth", is to deliberately ignore the voluminous scholarly research on the subject proving otherwise over the last 40 years, of which much has been published by Jews themselves. This particular work of apologia takes the peculiarly novel approach of not even attempting to disprove the charge (as a scant few previous works have weakly attempted and in the opinion of this reviewer, failed), and instead chooses to treat it as "one among many forms of anti-Semitism", regardless of its veracity. The result is a truly appalling work of deceit masquerading as scholarship.
Bragging About Bolshevism
The tone is set early on when Hanebrink avers that investigating whether or not Jews were Communists, were overrepresented among party members or leaders, voted for or supported Communist parties in high numbers, or joined Communist secret police forces are all fool's errands because attempting to do so "requires historians to impose rigid ethnic categories on men and women whose sense of themselves was always more complex and multifaceted." Yet Jewish academics curiously don't seem to share his need for such piously sensitive nuance.
Jewish historian Norman F. Cantor observed that:
The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that — as 1930s anti-Semites claimed — Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back. [1]
Jewish political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg writes:
... during the period leading up to the 1917 revolution, Jews were among the leaders of both the Menshevik and the Bolshevik parties. ... Thus, while they had no state of their own, within a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, Jews had a good deal of influence within the new Soviet state. ... in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, the Jews of the new Soviet Union, at least, might appear to have secured the protection of a powerful state that they helped to build and in which they exercised significant influence. [2]
Consulting the Encyclopedia Judaica reveals the following in its article on Communism:
The Communist movement and ideology played an important part in Jewish life, particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, and during and after World War II. ... Individual Jews played an important role in the early stages of Bolshevism and the Soviet regime. ... Communist trends became widespread in virtually all Jewish communities. In some countries Jews became the leading element in the legal and illegal Communist parties and in some cases were even instructed by the Communist International to change their Jewish-sounding names and pose as non-Jews, in order not to confirm right-wing propaganda that presented Communism as an alien, Jewish conspiracy (e.g., the Polish slogan against "Żydo-Komuna" and the Nazi reiteration against "Jewish Bolshevism," etc.) [3]
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November 30, 2021
I know better!
Proof is in the pudding.
Proof is in the pudding.
November 9, 2021
A transnational intellectual history of the complex and portentous interactions between anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, particularly in the Eastern and Central Europe. This is mostly a 20th century thing, but has important aftertaste in today's politics as well. Hungarian case, being the author's area of expertise, is particularly prominent, along with Germany, Romania and Poland (the latter two national histories are discussed through secondary literature). Well-written, even a chapter that's dedicated to discussion of historiography, reads almost as journalism.
April 6, 2020
Didn't really "like" it. However, it is an important book. The latter chapters, in which Hanebrink shows the contemporary power of the Judeo-bolshevist myth, really drives the point home.
Especially the parts where he juxtaposes the way intellectuals wrote and talked about Jews, during the interbellum and WWII, with the way people talk about muslim refugees today. Its a comparison that works shockingly well.
Especially the parts where he juxtaposes the way intellectuals wrote and talked about Jews, during the interbellum and WWII, with the way people talk about muslim refugees today. Its a comparison that works shockingly well.
June 25, 2025
Comincio col dire che il voto relativamente basso che questo libro ha su goodreads è dovuto ai molti punteggi bassissimi dati da chi ancora crede al mito del bolscevismo giudaico e dintorni antisemiti e fascisti.
Detto questo, è proprio di questo che narra il libro, alternando spunti molto interessanti ad analisi in parte già sentite. L'autore affronta anche temi attuali con accento critico, tra i quali ci sono la Memoria dell'Olocausto, il concetto di civiltà giudaico-cristiana (che ha circa un secolo di vita di funzione anticomunista mentre la mia ignoranza mi suggeriva che fosse un concetto recente sviluppato in funzione antislamica) e la presenza dell'idea dell'ebreo bolscevico nella descrizione dell'immigrazione di musulmani.
Nel complesso si tratta di un libro molto interessante.
Detto questo, è proprio di questo che narra il libro, alternando spunti molto interessanti ad analisi in parte già sentite. L'autore affronta anche temi attuali con accento critico, tra i quali ci sono la Memoria dell'Olocausto, il concetto di civiltà giudaico-cristiana (che ha circa un secolo di vita di funzione anticomunista mentre la mia ignoranza mi suggeriva che fosse un concetto recente sviluppato in funzione antislamica) e la presenza dell'idea dell'ebreo bolscevico nella descrizione dell'immigrazione di musulmani.
Nel complesso si tratta di un libro molto interessante.
June 16, 2019
a sobering exploration of anti-Semitism and its perceived (mythical) connection to ‘cultural demise’ in Europe and North American.
Read
October 1, 2019Heavy on the how but light on the why.
April 22, 2023
way too mired in anti-communist bullshit to make anything close to resembling a good point
December 15, 2025
I read this book after listening to an interview with the author, and I think it's a very interesting perspective on both the historical perception of "Judeo-Bolshevism" and the influence it still has on Eastern European nationalism today.
First off, a lot of the negative reviews to this book are from Nazis who didn't read the book and are just mad that it's pointing out that the central premise of Nazism (White Christendom is under attack from Judeo-Bolshevism) is BS.
Judeo-Bolshevism is the idea that Jews developed and are using Communism as their cover to take over and subjugate the world, especially European Christians. But as this book does a great job explaining, this is more than just another antisemitic and hateful concept. This was and is the beating heart of European fascism and ethno-nationalism: the idea that the Jewish peoples of Europe, as a religious and ethnic minority, are trying to overthrow and destroy the Christian conservative way of life to usher in their atheist communist rule. This ideology gained salience in far-right groups after the post-WWI revolutions, obviously the October Revolution in Russia but also the socialist uprisings in Hungary and Germany of 1918-19, which while crushed represented credible threats to once titanic bastions of Christian conservatism. The role of some Jews in these uprisings (Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg) became a lightning rod for the far right, who were convinced that Jewish people were planning on a Red Terror that would turn Christians into slaves.
This perspective became central to the fascist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe: Nazi Germany, Hungary under the Horthy regime, Iron Guard Romania, and fascist Bulgaria. They created huge amounts of propaganda throughout the 30s about the threat of the "Asiatic Judeo-Bolshevik hordes" on their borders, which they leveraged to justify the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. As the Red Army began beating them back, and marching into fascist Eastern Europe, this mythos went into overdrive. When the Red Army controlled all of Eastern Europe, communists were installed into power with the backing of the USSR - but the left of these countries had been decimated by years of fascist rule. In an effort to try to win over the locals, many Soviet-back parties and politicians made choices not to challenge this perspective, refusing to prosecute many lower level fascists for their crimes during the Holocaust, and ultimately preserving a lot of local perceptions of nationalism (critical to the foundations of modern Eastern European nationalism). After the fall of the Soviet Union and their allied communist regimes, the far right in Eastern Europe has largely emphasized the idea that the Soviet Communism was a crime equal to or even greater than the Holocaust, thus arguing their compliance in Nazi crimes as either irrelevant or unnecessary to bring up. Thus, the slow rehabilitation of former antisemitic/Nazi collaborators as national heroes in much of Eastern Europe, as the politics of Holocaust remembrance collide with the politics of anti-Communism in Eastern Europe. In the eyes of far-right Eastern Europeans, the Holocaust was just one front in their war against Judeo-Bolshevism, and to tell them that their heroes are antisemites is just pro-Soviet propaganda, and further evidence of Judeo-Bolshevism.
An interesting book that helps the modern politics of Eastern Europe make much more sense.
First off, a lot of the negative reviews to this book are from Nazis who didn't read the book and are just mad that it's pointing out that the central premise of Nazism (White Christendom is under attack from Judeo-Bolshevism) is BS.
Judeo-Bolshevism is the idea that Jews developed and are using Communism as their cover to take over and subjugate the world, especially European Christians. But as this book does a great job explaining, this is more than just another antisemitic and hateful concept. This was and is the beating heart of European fascism and ethno-nationalism: the idea that the Jewish peoples of Europe, as a religious and ethnic minority, are trying to overthrow and destroy the Christian conservative way of life to usher in their atheist communist rule. This ideology gained salience in far-right groups after the post-WWI revolutions, obviously the October Revolution in Russia but also the socialist uprisings in Hungary and Germany of 1918-19, which while crushed represented credible threats to once titanic bastions of Christian conservatism. The role of some Jews in these uprisings (Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg) became a lightning rod for the far right, who were convinced that Jewish people were planning on a Red Terror that would turn Christians into slaves.
This perspective became central to the fascist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe: Nazi Germany, Hungary under the Horthy regime, Iron Guard Romania, and fascist Bulgaria. They created huge amounts of propaganda throughout the 30s about the threat of the "Asiatic Judeo-Bolshevik hordes" on their borders, which they leveraged to justify the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. As the Red Army began beating them back, and marching into fascist Eastern Europe, this mythos went into overdrive. When the Red Army controlled all of Eastern Europe, communists were installed into power with the backing of the USSR - but the left of these countries had been decimated by years of fascist rule. In an effort to try to win over the locals, many Soviet-back parties and politicians made choices not to challenge this perspective, refusing to prosecute many lower level fascists for their crimes during the Holocaust, and ultimately preserving a lot of local perceptions of nationalism (critical to the foundations of modern Eastern European nationalism). After the fall of the Soviet Union and their allied communist regimes, the far right in Eastern Europe has largely emphasized the idea that the Soviet Communism was a crime equal to or even greater than the Holocaust, thus arguing their compliance in Nazi crimes as either irrelevant or unnecessary to bring up. Thus, the slow rehabilitation of former antisemitic/Nazi collaborators as national heroes in much of Eastern Europe, as the politics of Holocaust remembrance collide with the politics of anti-Communism in Eastern Europe. In the eyes of far-right Eastern Europeans, the Holocaust was just one front in their war against Judeo-Bolshevism, and to tell them that their heroes are antisemites is just pro-Soviet propaganda, and further evidence of Judeo-Bolshevism.
An interesting book that helps the modern politics of Eastern Europe make much more sense.
May 21, 2024
An excellent, important book. Vital points:
- The sheer pervasiveness of “Judeo-Bolshevik” mythology across Europe, from Russia to the UK: Francisco Franco’s circles framed the Spanish Republic as a Jewish plot against Spain, revenge for Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews in 1492. The same myth was in the heads of British Empire officials, Nazi propagandists, and gentile villagers who massacred local Jews.
- Regimes installed by the counterrevolutionary Stalinist USSR in Eastern Europe were widely perceived as “Jewish.” In Hungary the regime combated this by embracing antisemitic ideological tropes.
- Pro-Nazi and Nazi-tolerating churchmen balked at the Nazis exerting more direct control over their Churches and developed the concept of “totalitarianism,” according to which fascism and communism were twin secular evils that exerted total control of human life and crushed the dignity of the human individual. Totalitarianism theory became a cornerstone of Cold War anticommunist ideology.
- Official Jewish institutions in the postwar US sought to displace the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by coining the trope of “Judeo-Christian civilization,” embracing the Red Scare, and making anticommunism a requirement for community belonging. Groups like the ADL volunteered their records to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although Hanebrink does not say this, the continuity from this mandatory anticommunism to the current official Jewish institutions’ mandatory Zionism is pretty obvious.
- Hanebrink ends, much to his credit, by laying out how the same dynamics of nationalist paranoia that held up the Jewish communist as mythical perennial outsider trying to revolutionize Europe have now transferred to paranoia about Muslim refugees trying to Islamize Europe. He also points out that Judeo-Bolshevik mythology persists in the far right, both on the right of German historiography and among the increasingly dominant far right politics of countries like Romania and Hungary.
My major objection in this is that Hanebrink doesn’t differentiate among forces claiming the mantle of communism; ha calls Stalinist atrocities “communist crimes” and mashes the communists and revolutionary proletarians of Europe together with the counterrevolutionary Stalinist states that persecuted them.
- The sheer pervasiveness of “Judeo-Bolshevik” mythology across Europe, from Russia to the UK: Francisco Franco’s circles framed the Spanish Republic as a Jewish plot against Spain, revenge for Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews in 1492. The same myth was in the heads of British Empire officials, Nazi propagandists, and gentile villagers who massacred local Jews.
- Regimes installed by the counterrevolutionary Stalinist USSR in Eastern Europe were widely perceived as “Jewish.” In Hungary the regime combated this by embracing antisemitic ideological tropes.
- Pro-Nazi and Nazi-tolerating churchmen balked at the Nazis exerting more direct control over their Churches and developed the concept of “totalitarianism,” according to which fascism and communism were twin secular evils that exerted total control of human life and crushed the dignity of the human individual. Totalitarianism theory became a cornerstone of Cold War anticommunist ideology.
- Official Jewish institutions in the postwar US sought to displace the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by coining the trope of “Judeo-Christian civilization,” embracing the Red Scare, and making anticommunism a requirement for community belonging. Groups like the ADL volunteered their records to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although Hanebrink does not say this, the continuity from this mandatory anticommunism to the current official Jewish institutions’ mandatory Zionism is pretty obvious.
- Hanebrink ends, much to his credit, by laying out how the same dynamics of nationalist paranoia that held up the Jewish communist as mythical perennial outsider trying to revolutionize Europe have now transferred to paranoia about Muslim refugees trying to Islamize Europe. He also points out that Judeo-Bolshevik mythology persists in the far right, both on the right of German historiography and among the increasingly dominant far right politics of countries like Romania and Hungary.
My major objection in this is that Hanebrink doesn’t differentiate among forces claiming the mantle of communism; ha calls Stalinist atrocities “communist crimes” and mashes the communists and revolutionary proletarians of Europe together with the counterrevolutionary Stalinist states that persecuted them.
July 6, 2024
This book circumvented so many of the questions, that stem from reality, that it was blatantly obvious that glaringly huge realities were ignored to paint a fantasy picture of history. The author, who supposedly did research prior to picking up his pen, could not have been that blind to not see the reality of where most of the fears, that he calls "Europe's own imagining" come from. In any case, I for one was not impressed with the book; it made it clear for me that it is just another example of the propaganda that is being pushed to cover-up the truth of what has been orchestrated under our very noses since the Bolshevik revolution.
Read
November 30, 2023A very depressing but really good book.
December 30, 2023
Too heavy and political -- not what I was looking for. Should be for a political science class
November 13, 2025
Ein Must-have für das Thema "Die Verschwörungstheorie des Judeo-Bolschewismus". Hanebrink analysiert den Wandel der Verschwörungstheorie durch die verschiedenen Jahrzehnte. Das Hauptaugenmerkmal liegt hierbei auf die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, der Hochzeit des Judeo-Bolschewismus.
Read
July 16, 2020Čia labai tiktų pridėti nuotrauką iš mitingo prie Vilniaus m. savivaldybės liepą, kuriam viena liūdno atgarsio mokytoja buvojo su tokiu plakatu: „ – Šalin rankas nuo Lietuvos laisvės kovų didvyrių“. Ta vieta, kur prieš brūkšnį, ten Dovydo ir greta raudona, a la komunistinė, žvaigždės nupaišytos. Kad neliktų dviprasmybių, prie mikrofono pakalbėjo, kad „žydų tautos atstovai ir kai kurie rusai bolševikai puola mūsų laisvės kovas“. Kai istorikai neretai mėgina aktualizuoti savo tyrimus praeities aktualumu dabarčiai, leidėjai ką nors priduria ant knygos viršelio apie tai, kad neišmokta istorija kartojasi, tai geresnės reklamos tokiai knygai ir nesugalvosi.
*
Prieš tai, kai tapęs asmeniniu Stalino priešu Trockis imtas reguliariai šaržuoti „Krokodile“ ir kitoj sovietinėj satyroj, jo atvaizdas jau pasirodydavo karikatūrose už SSRS ribų. Trockis buvo Raudonosios armijos veidu, bet svarbi detalė, taip pat atsispindinti tuose plakatuose, ir kita – jis buvo žydas. Ne vienintelis toks bolševikų politiniam-administraciniam elite, ir kaip rodėsi neretam to meto Europos intelektualui bei spaudai, tai buvo tendencija, dėsningumas – kur bolševikai, ten ir žydai, ir atvirkščiai. 1917 m. perversmas Rusijoje, po to sekę 1918 m. ir 1919 m. socialistiniai eksperimentai Bavarijoje ir Vengrijoje, visur įvykių epicentre galima buvo pamatyti žydų: Trockis, Zinovjevas, Kaganovičius (Rusijoje), Karlas Radekas, Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene‘as Levine‘as (Vokietijoje), Bela Kunas, Otto Korvinas, Tiboras Szamuellly (Vengrijoje). „Žydas bolševikas“ tapo tokio neigiamo krūvio retorine figūra, kad kai kurios žydų bendruomenės Vokietijoje ir Vengrijoje viešai atsiribojo nuo tų veikėjų ir jų ideologijos. Pavyzdžiui, Pešto žydų kongregacija pasisakė, kad šie žmonės „beveik be išimčių išdavė pirmiausia savo religiją, o po to ir tėvynę“. Nepadėjo.
Knyga labai naudinga tuo, kad leidžia geriau suprasti, kaip galėjo įvykti Holokaustas, nes išeina iš už nacių režimo laiko rėmų, kartu primenama, jog karo pabaiga rytų Europoje neužbrėžė brūkšnio ir nepaliko antisemitizmo praeityje, senos įtampos naujose aplinkybėse sugrįžo. Gana nedaug, bet tenka dėmesio ir Lietuvai, ir kiek mano supratimas leidžia sakyti, pasirodė, kad skaičiais ir faktais operuojama korektiškai, tik vienoje vietoje užkliuvo šioks toks generalizavimas be nuorodos į šaltinį, bet ant greitųjų jos neberadau. Tiesa, epiloge daromas palyginimas tarp žydų situacijos ir pabėgėlių krizės 2015 m., mano galva, pritemptas. Suprantama, kad analogijos kaip mąstymo įrankis sunkiai išvengiamos, bet kai jas įdarbina istorikai, ignoruodami aplinkybių skirtumus, atrodo kiek neberimta – nei istorija cikliška, nei reiškinius suprasti tai padeda. Juolab kad, kaip ir pradžioje minėjau, norint aktualizuoti šitą istorijos dalį toli po dabartį klaidžiot nereikia.
*
Prieš tai, kai tapęs asmeniniu Stalino priešu Trockis imtas reguliariai šaržuoti „Krokodile“ ir kitoj sovietinėj satyroj, jo atvaizdas jau pasirodydavo karikatūrose už SSRS ribų. Trockis buvo Raudonosios armijos veidu, bet svarbi detalė, taip pat atsispindinti tuose plakatuose, ir kita – jis buvo žydas. Ne vienintelis toks bolševikų politiniam-administraciniam elite, ir kaip rodėsi neretam to meto Europos intelektualui bei spaudai, tai buvo tendencija, dėsningumas – kur bolševikai, ten ir žydai, ir atvirkščiai. 1917 m. perversmas Rusijoje, po to sekę 1918 m. ir 1919 m. socialistiniai eksperimentai Bavarijoje ir Vengrijoje, visur įvykių epicentre galima buvo pamatyti žydų: Trockis, Zinovjevas, Kaganovičius (Rusijoje), Karlas Radekas, Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene‘as Levine‘as (Vokietijoje), Bela Kunas, Otto Korvinas, Tiboras Szamuellly (Vengrijoje). „Žydas bolševikas“ tapo tokio neigiamo krūvio retorine figūra, kad kai kurios žydų bendruomenės Vokietijoje ir Vengrijoje viešai atsiribojo nuo tų veikėjų ir jų ideologijos. Pavyzdžiui, Pešto žydų kongregacija pasisakė, kad šie žmonės „beveik be išimčių išdavė pirmiausia savo religiją, o po to ir tėvynę“. Nepadėjo.
Knyga labai naudinga tuo, kad leidžia geriau suprasti, kaip galėjo įvykti Holokaustas, nes išeina iš už nacių režimo laiko rėmų, kartu primenama, jog karo pabaiga rytų Europoje neužbrėžė brūkšnio ir nepaliko antisemitizmo praeityje, senos įtampos naujose aplinkybėse sugrįžo. Gana nedaug, bet tenka dėmesio ir Lietuvai, ir kiek mano supratimas leidžia sakyti, pasirodė, kad skaičiais ir faktais operuojama korektiškai, tik vienoje vietoje užkliuvo šioks toks generalizavimas be nuorodos į šaltinį, bet ant greitųjų jos neberadau. Tiesa, epiloge daromas palyginimas tarp žydų situacijos ir pabėgėlių krizės 2015 m., mano galva, pritemptas. Suprantama, kad analogijos kaip mąstymo įrankis sunkiai išvengiamos, bet kai jas įdarbina istorikai, ignoruodami aplinkybių skirtumus, atrodo kiek neberimta – nei istorija cikliška, nei reiškinius suprasti tai padeda. Juolab kad, kaip ir pradžioje minėjau, norint aktualizuoti šitą istorijos dalį toli po dabartį klaidžiot nereikia.
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