Izabella Tabarovsky: The Sinister Legacy of Soviet Anti-Israel Propaganda

by Marilyn Stern Middle East Forum Webinar
May 1, 2023

https://www.meforum.org/64410/izabella-tabarovsky-the-sinister-legacy-of-soviet

Izabella Tabarovsky, a senior advisor at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center and research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), spoke to a May 1st Middle East Forum Webinar (video) about the connection between early antisemitic tropes propagated in the Soviet Union and contemporary anti-Zionist discourse in the U.S. and the West. The following is a summary of her comments:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1905, is one of the most influential books “propagating antisemitic conspiracy theory” and has been referred to as a “warrant for genocide.” Conspiracy theories are very adaptable and easily morph over time, spreading much like a virus adapting to its host, evading defense mechanisms to survive and reproducing across the globe. Resurfacing in 1921, Le Peril Juif, a French edition of antisemitic propaganda based on The Protocols, rapidly spread to other countries. Its cover bore an illustration of a spider whose arms envelop the globe and a face with exaggerated Jewish features. Political movements have exploited antisemitic images since the French edition based on The Protocols used caricatures to demonize Jews as the embodiment of the far-left revolutionary Bolshevik movement in the 1920s. It resurfaced in the dehumanizing cartoon portrayals of Jews in the antisemitic propaganda disseminated by Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

“The Bolsheviks outlawed this kind of antisemitic propaganda. The Soviet Union for many decades presented itself as standing at the forefront of the fight against antisemitism.”

Nevertheless, in Moscow’s 1971 May Day parade, a float displaying a giant menacing spider with a Jewish star on its cap was meant to evoke the 1920s propaganda of the Jew “as a subhuman and super powerful,” similar to that of The Protocols image. The float’s slogan, “Zionism is a weapon of imperialism,” targeted Israel following its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War against Arab armies supplied and trained by the Soviet Union. The Soviet propaganda machine thus repackaged antisemitic conspiracy tropes from a half a century earlier to meet its “domestic and foreign policy objectives” against a perceived powerful threat to its global ambitions.

Unable to openly express antisemitic tropes because the USSR cultivated a false image of being a “left-wing anti-racist international superpower,” it accomplished its strategic ends by “refram[ing] The Protocols as a Marxist-Leninist critique.” By demonizing Zionism, the Soviet government’s “new approach to fighting” was a “turning point” as Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda went global. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, anti-Zionist propaganda again moved to the far right, where Russia’s neo-fascist parties embraced it.

Soviet anti-Zionism culminated in real-world consequences that affected the daily lives of Soviet Jews who faced antisemitic harassment, the suspicions of the Soviet security services, and the inability to practice their religion. Soviet style anti-Zionism was also prevalent in Poland in 1968. A full understanding of contemporary left-wing discourse about Zionism in Israel requires a closer look at Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda in its new forms.

In the U.S. today, conspiracy theories and anti-Zionism infect campuses across America. Willfully blind to the antisemitism that animates these theories, many liberal American Jews raised in the shadow of the Holocaust continue to believe that threats to Jewish survival can only come from the right. They embrace the left’s insidious ideas about Jews and Zionists, ignoring the historical precedent of the adaptability of conspiracy theories underpinning today’s antisemitism. The “full circle” of corrosive ideas has traveled from Soviet Russia to the U.S. in a “chain of succession.” Young progressive Jews descended from Russian Jewish “forefathers four generations back” are repeating left-wing slogans that echo the same antisemitic tropes used against their ancestors in Soviet Russia. “Today these tropes travel all the way to the United States in the Soviet ostensibly left-wing form. And so the descendants of those Jews who fled Russia are using these tropes to claim that they’re being progressive. I think it’s a really toxic, toxic mix and I think that we really (ought to) put a lot of effort into untangling it.”

Tropes maligning Israel “redefine[d] Zionism” in the 1960s and 1970s and have emerged in today’s accusations against the Jewish State. They include charges that Israel is racist, fascist, and an apartheid state, to name a few of the smears voiced by anti-Zionists. Leftist Democrats in the U.S. Congress accuse Zionists of controlling American media and politicians through Jewish lobbying and Jewish money, using anti-Zionist tropes grounded in antisemitic conspiracy theories found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The “rhetoric” used by these members of Congress parallels the language used in Soviet anti-Zionism and is evocative of the far left’s mindset in the American progressive movement during the 1970s and 1980s.

Too often, anti-Zionists ignore the distinction between “criticism and demonization” by insisting that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same. When their critiques rely on antisemitic conspiracy theories, they blur the thin line between the two to such an extent “as to be non-existent.” Indisputably, the anti-Zionism found in much of left-wing discourse in U.S. society endangers Jews in America. The convergence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism melds the idea that Jews, Zionists, and Israel “act out of nefarious motives.” Thus “it is the demonization that unites contemporary left-wing anti-Zionists with classic right-wing antisemitism.”

A recent incident in Britain exemplifies the situation. A British rabbi whose wife and daughters were murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists in Israel called for The Guardian, a British newspaper that ran an antisemitic cartoon, to fire the cartoonist. The cartoon, which contained a caricature of Richard Sharp, the Jewish outgoing chair of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), drew on classic antisemitic tropes. Specifically, it depicted Sharp with a hooked nose, wearing a sinister grin as he holds a box with the name of an investment bank, Goldman Sachs, Sharp’s former employer. The image elicited such an outcry from the Jewish community that the newspaper withdrew it and issued an apology. The cartoonist expressed regret, claiming that, although he knew Sharp was Jewish, “it never crossed his mind” as he drew him — a claim that underscores the insidiousness of an antisemitism that runs deep in the unconscious.

The connection between Soviet anti-Zionism and the Islamism found in many Arab societies is “a two-way street.” The “link between the Soviet regime and the Arab world” borrows from the Arab anti-Zionist propaganda produced by a Nazi fugitive in Egypt during the 1950s. Soviet anti-Zionist books published in Arabic and Persian spread their pernicious influence across the Middle East. One need only consider Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, who sourced his dissertation of Holocaust denial on Soviet writers whose works were replete with anti-Zionist propaganda.

The most effective approach to countering the plethora of anti-Zionism found online, on campus, and in social media is education. People who ascribe to antisemitic assumptions about Jews, Israel, and Zionism are hardest to convince because “conspiracy theories are sort of hermetically sealed” as a type of belief system. The hope lies with “fighting for people who are not yet so radicalized as to not be able to come back” from “understanding how the antisemitic theory mutates and how it impacts us in the current moment, in the current environment.”

Marilyn Stern is communications coordinator at the Middle East Forum.

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May 13, 2023 | 5 Comments »

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  1. “…The Protocols is a fabricated document purporting to be factual. Textual evidence shows that it could not have been produced prior to 1901.[4] The title of Sergei Nilus’ widely distributed first edition contains the dates “1902–1903”, and it is likely that the document was actually written at this time in Russia.[5] Cesare G. De Michelis argues that it was manufactured in the months after a Russian Zionist congress in September 1902, and that it was originally a parody of Jewish idealism meant for internal circulation among antisemites until it was decided to clean it up and publish it as if it were real. Self-contradictions in various testimonies show that the individuals involved—including the text’s initial publisher, Pavel Krushevan—deliberately obscured the origins of the text and lied about it in the decades afterwards.[6]

    If the placement of the forgery in 1902–1903 Russia is correct, then it was written at the beginning of a series of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, in which thousands of Jews were killed or fled the country. Many of the people whom De Michelis suspects of involvement in the forgery were directly responsible for inciting the pogroms.[7].

    ..Numerous parts in the Protocols, in one calculation, some 160 passages,[16] were plagiarized from Joly’s political satire Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. This book was a thinly veiled attack on the political ambitions of Napoleon III, who, represented by the non-Jewish character Machiavelli,[17] plots to rule the world. Joly, a republican who later served in the Paris Commune, was sentenced to 15 months as a direct result of his book’s publication.[18] Umberto Eco considered that Dialogue in Hell was itself plagiarised in part from a novel by Eugène Sue, Les Mystères du Peuple (1849–56).[19]

    Identifiable phrases from Joly constitute 4% of the first half of the first edition, and 12% of the second half; later editions, including most translations, have longer quotes from Joly.[20]…

    “…Resentment towards Jews, for the aforementioned reasons, existed in Russian society, but the idea of a Protocols-esque international Jewish conspiracy for world domination was minted in the 1860s. Jacob Brafman, a Lithuanian Jew from Minsk, had a falling out with agents of the local qahal and consequently turned against Judaism. He subsequently converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and authored polemics against the Talmud and the qahal.[8] Brafman claimed in his books The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods (1868) and The Book of the Kahal (1869), published in Vilna, that the qahal continued to exist in secret and that it had as its principal aim undermining Christian entrepreneurs, taking over their property and ultimately seizing power. He also claimed that it was an international conspiratorial network, under the central control of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which was based in Paris and then under the leadership of Adolphe Crémieux, a prominent freemason.[8] The Vilna Talmudist, Jacob Barit, attempted to refute Brafman’s claim.

    The impact of Brafman’s work took on an international aspect when it was translated into English, French, German and other languages. The image of the “qahal” as a secret international Jewish shadow government working as a state within a state was picked up by anti-Jewish publications in Russia and was taken seriously by some Russian officials such as P. A. Cherevin and Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev who in the 1880s urged governors-general of provinces to seek out the supposed qahal. This was around the time of the Narodnaya Volya assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia and the subsequent pogroms. In France, it was translated by Monsignor Ernest Jouin in 1925, who supported the Protocols. In 1928, Siegfried Passarge, a geographer who later gave his support to the Nazis, translated it into German…

    …Sources employed
    Source material for the forgery consisted jointly of Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly;[11] and a chapter from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by the antisemitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche, which had been translated into Russian in 1872.[2]:?97?

    Literary forgery
    The Protocols is one of the best-known and most-discussed examples of literary forgery, with analysis and proof of its fraudulent origin dating as far back as 1921.[12] The forgery is an early example of “conspiracy theory” literature.[13] Written mainly in the first person plural,[b] the text includes generalizations, truisms, and platitudes on how to take over the world: take control of the media and the financial institutions, change the traditional social order, etc. It does not contain specifics…[15]

    …Daniel Keren wrote in his essay “Commentary on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, “Goedsche was a postal clerk and a spy for the Prussian Secret Police. He had been forced to leave the postal work due to his part in forging evidence in the prosecution against the Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck in 1849.”[22] Following his dismissal, Goedsche began a career as a conservative columnist, and wrote literary fiction under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe.[23] His 1868 novel Biarritz (To Sedan) contains a chapter called “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.” In it, Goedsche (who was unaware that only two of the original twelve Biblical “tribes” remained) depicts a clandestine nocturnal meeting of members of a mysterious rabbinical cabal that is planning a diabolical “Jewish conspiracy.” At midnight, the Devil appears to contribute his opinions and insight. The chapter closely resembles a scene in Alexandre Dumas’ Giuseppe Balsamo (1848), in which Joseph Balsamo a.k.a. Alessandro Cagliostro and company plot the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.[24]

    In 1872, a Russian translation of “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague” appeared in Saint Petersburg as a separate pamphlet of purported non-fiction. François Bournand, in his Les Juifs et nos Contemporains (1896), reproduced the soliloquy at the end of the chapter, in which the character Levit expresses as factual the wish that Jews be “kings of the world in 100 years” —crediting a “Chief Rabbi John Readcliff.” Perpetuation of the myth of the authenticity of Goedsche’s story, in particular the “Rabbi’s speech”, facilitated later accounts of the equally mythical authenticity of the Protocols.[23] Like the Protocols, many asserted that the fictional “rabbi’s speech” had a ring of authenticity, regardless of its origin: “This speech was published in our time, eighteen years ago,” read an 1898 report in La Croix, “and all the events occurring before our eyes were anticipated in it with truly frightening accuracy.”[25]

    Fictional events in Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, which appeared four years before Biarritz, may well have been the inspiration for Goedsche’s fictional midnight meeting, and details of the outcome of the supposed plot. Goedsche’s chapter may have been an outright plagiarism of Joly, Dumas père, or both.[26][c]…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion

  3. I think Galina is wrong because the commentary does say:

    The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1905, is one of the most influential books “propagating antisemitic conspiracy theory”

    Need it say more?

  4. GALINA WRITES:

    the author did not indicate that the “protocols” are a false book, specially written to incite anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, and then used in the Soviet period.

    In general, the author correctly illuminates the problem. We, the “Soviet”, and then the “Russian Jews”, knew everything very well and suffered very much from this.

    But I’m talking about something else. The author presents the book
    “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as authentic. In fact, this is a forged document, created for anti-Semitic purposes, which allegedly outlines the plans of the Jews to establish world domination and destroy Christendom.

    Hstorical research

    «First published in Russian in 1903 under the guise of a report on the secret meetings of the Zionists in Basel and under the title “Minutes of the meetings of the Elders of Zion”. The text of the Protocols became a pretext for anti-Semites at the beginning of the 20th century and played an important role in substantiating the theory of the “Jewish Masonic conspiracy”.

    The falsity of the “Protocols” was noted in the press and independent investigations soon after publication. In modern science, this is considered proven. At the same time, even now there are numerous supporters of the opinion about the authenticity of the text of the “Protocols”.

    The American historian and political scientist Walter Lacker notes that the Protocols had historical prototypes. Among them, he names the pamphlet of the German publicist Wilhelm Marr, who in 1879 predicted the victory of the Jews over Germanism and the revolution in Russia.»
    Source

    https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8B_%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%85_%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%86%D0%BE%D0%B2

  5. Nevertheless, plenty of Jews espouse left and FAR left theology and were/are instrumental in the creation/propagation and development of communism.