Middle Israel: Was the Bolshevik Revolution a Jewish plot?

Lenin’s deputies Lev Kamenev (originally Rozenfeld) and Grigory Zinoviev (born Hirsch Apfelbaum) and his treasurer Grigori Sokolnikov (Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant) were all Jews, as were Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), co-writer of the Soviet Constitution, Maxim Litvinov (Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkelstein), foreign minister of the USSR until his removal so Stalin could pact with Hitler.

This is, of course, besides Trotsky himself, builder of the Red Army and the only Soviet who served as both foreign and defense minister.

Most proverbially, a Jew – Yakov Sverdlov – oversaw the nighttime execution of Czar Nikolai, Empress Alexandra, and their five children.

Jewish revolutionaries were prominent beyond Russia as well.

In Germany, philosopher-economist Rosa Luxemburg led an abortive revolution in 1919 before being caught, clubbed, shot dead and dumped in a canal. In Hungary, Bela Kun – originally Kohn – led a short-lived communist coup several months after Luxemburg’s murder.

In Romania, Ana Pauker – originally Hebrew teacher Hannah Rabinsohn, and later the world’s first woman foreign minister – effectively ran the country for Stalin, before falling from grace and spending her last years under house arrest. In Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slansky was the second-most powerful figure before his public trial and execution alongside 11 other senior Jewish communists. In Poland, two of the three Stalinists who led its transition to communism – Hilary Minc, who collectivized its economy, and Jakub Berman, who headed its secret police – were Jews.

The revolution, in short, was so crowded with Jews that one had to wonder whether “the Jews” were inherently revolutionary.

The Jerusalem Post, 2017