In August 2017, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us!' They espoused a depressing, if familiar world view: that it is Jews who control the banks and the media, imposing their morality on ‘real' Americans.
In a new book, the American academic Paul Hanebrink looks for the roots of this outburst and finds them over a century ago with the emergence of the view that Jews were responsible for communism. This, argues Hanebrink, laid the basis for the great tragedies of the 20th century: ‘Judeo-Bolshevism made Adolf Hitler.'
While Jews were certainly represented disproportionately in the early Communist movement, many, like Trotsky, had transcended their Jewishness and shrank at the mention of such a label. But long-dead Communist figures, such as Jakub Berman (Poland) and Mátyás Rákosi (Hungary) have been resurrected to fuel the notion of a white Europe amid repeated claims that Jewish communists promoted ‘homosexuality and multi-culturalism'. The liberal Jewish philanthropist, George Soros, has become a target for abuse in Hungary. Judeo-Bolshevism lives on; communism has gone to its grave.f
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