MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD
MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD From time to time, I have asked myself whether a Jewish Communist would be able to send people to their deaths in the gulag. With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union,...
...In any case, no Jew could become a NationaUSocialist, much less rise to a leadership role in the party...
...But the misdeeds of a member of the family do generate shame...
...It always seemed to me that to these people (the actual evils of the Soviet system were not real...
...From time to time, I have asked myself whether a given Jewish Communist I have known would be able to send people to their deaths in the gulag...
...The best Germans I know are ashamed of what their fellow Germans did...
...In my mind, Jews are merciful...
...Nevertheless, in spite of anti-semitism in pre-revolutionary Christian Russia, Russia was a great center of Jewish creativity, while Communist Russia was until very recendy a Jewish wasteland...
...Some Jews could and did rise to high positions in which they committed major crimes...
...But the bloodiest form of Marxism was the Leninist version, and here the Jewish names are most painful...
...The willingness to hurt people, to impose suffering, are the essence of un-Judaism, the exact opposite of Judaism...
...Of course, we could argue that these were persons "of Jewish origin" but because they were Marxist atheists and because they did not identify with the Jewish community, they were not Jews and Jews therefore bear no responsibility for them...
...Shame is an indication of the oneness of a people...
...I am ashamed that there was a Lazar Kaganovich and I am also ashamed that so few Jews are ashamed of Lazar Kaganovich...
...We must face the unpleasant facts...
...But there were more Jewish Communists than there should have been and this hurts...
...he actively participated in murdering them...
...Their memory is not a blessing...
...This has not been easy...
...Bolshevism was, of course, not Jewish...
...For these reasons, and probably some others, Marxism appealed to large numbers of Jews...
...It may just be that an atheistic society is worse for Jews than a Christian one, though at the height of Christian power in Europe, that would have been hard to believe...
...There are Jewish criminals, but they tend to be non-violent...
...He not only knew that millions of innocent persons were being murdered...
...The temptation to ignore this truth is great...
...Today, the Marxist worldview based on a dogmatic secularism that aimed to liberate humanity from the oppression of capitalism and religion lies in ruins...
...Their lives and crimes are parts of Communist history but, unfortunately, they are also part of Jewish history...
...We must face the painful truth that some Jews were among the leading Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist murderers in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European satellite states...
...But this was not true of Lazar Kaganovich and his ilk...
...Generally, I have answered the question in the negative...
...The argument that antisemitism was one of the evil flowers of capitalism also sounded persuasive to Jews who could not otherwise explain the virulent antisemitism that permeated their everyday lives...
...I am not so naive as to believe that all Jews are angels...
...He is the author of The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Harper, 1989...
...But this does not always seem to be the case...
...While antisemites will continue to blame all Jews for the misdeeds of a few, our reaction must not be to deny the immense guilt of the Jewish Stalinists...
...Even when, on a verbal and intellectual level, they defended what was happening in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years, it seemed to me that they did not believe that innocent people in the millions were being murdered...
...Nevertheless, a few Jews also played leading roles in creating the Leninist-Stalinist system and imposing it on Eastern Europe after World War II...
...It would be a grave error to pretend otherwise...
...It even permeated the Zionist movement, a large segment of which fused Zionism and Marxism...
...But it was different in the Communist world...
...This bothers me tremendously...
...Here or there Jewish kapos [Nazi-coerced Jewish collaborators] behaved unacceptable but this was always under extreme duress...
...Stalin often trusted those who had survived the war in the Soviet Union more than local Communists who had stayed in their countries and fought in the underground because the latter were less prone to be totally subservient to Moscow...
...Justice for the poor has always been dear to Jews, particularly to those who had lost interest in the more religious aspects of the tradition but could identify with its social teachings...
...According to traditional Judaism, once a person is born to a Jewish mother or validly converts to Judaism, that person is a Jew and remains one for life...
...I have known Jewish Communists but none of those had ever exercised any real power...
...Fortunately, I did not know any of them...
...Of course, the overwhelming majority of Eastern European Jews were not Marxists but the victims of Marxism...
...8* ¦ Michael Wyschogrod is professor of philosophy at Baruch College of the City University of New York...
...The Nazis and other anti-semitic fascists were fond of speaking of Jewish Bolshevism...
...He writes on fewish theology, history and philosophy...
...Jews were attracted to Marxism, I think, because Marxism claimed to fight for justice for the poor and to have located the root cause of antisemitism in capitalism...
...The case of Tito in "^Jugoslavia proved the point...
...Trotsky and Kaganovich in the Soviet Union, Rakosi in Hungary and Berman in Poland were Jews and killers...
...I cannot come to terms with that...
...Stalin turned out to be a vicious antisemite, and Jewish Communists frequently paid with their lives for their loyalty to the Georgian mass murderer...
...In his 1987 book-length study, The Wolf of the Kremlin (William Morrow), Stuart Kahan documents Kaganovich's key role in the deaths of endless millions...
...So I have had to extrapolate from the Jewish Communists I have known to those I did not know...
...Fortunately, Jews could not become enmeshed in the same way in Nazi crimes...
...We cannot erase the Kaganoviches and the Trotskys from the Jewish history of the twentieth century...
...When they became convinced of this fact, they broke with communism...
...Jews do not or should not have the stomach for shedding blood...
...I have never met a Jewish Communist or, for that matter, any Communist who ever had real power and committed the kinds of crimes Lenin, Stalin and their henchmen committed...
...Soon after World War II was over, Jewish Communists who had survived the war in the Soviet Union descended on countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania under instructions to impose the Moscow system on the recently liberated territories...
...Because these Communist killers were born Jews, they remained Jews to the end of their lives, and because all Jews are responsible for one another, their deeds have left us with a heavy burden...
...How could a Jew have done the things they did...
...With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, the time has come to reexamine the Jewish role in the dark history of that country...
...One is not embarrassed by the deeds of a stranger...
...The recent death at age 97 of Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew and one of Stalin's most bloodthirsty henchmen, brought this home to me...
...It is also true that the overwhelming majority of Communists were not Jews...
...However tempting, I cannot do this because it does not correspond with my understanding of how one is a Jew...
...Russia is rediscovering its Slavic and Christian identity, a process not without risks for the Jews of that country...
...But we can tell the world how ashamed we are that some Jews chose the path they did...
Vol. 16 • December 1991 • No. 6
