Addenda on Soviet Anti-Semitism
LITVINOFF, EMANUEL
COMPANIONS TO KICHKO'S TRACT Addenda on Soviet Anti-Semitism By Emanuel Litvinoff London It would be unfortunate if, as a result of the belated banning by the Soviet authorities of T....
...COMPANIONS TO KICHKO'S TRACT Addenda on Soviet Anti-Semitism By Emanuel Litvinoff London It would be unfortunate if, as a result of the belated banning by the Soviet authorities of T. K. Kichko's Judaism Without Embellishment (see NL, March 16), the impression were to be gained that this anti-Semitic book was an isolated aberration, confined to the Ukraine, and that everything is now "corrected...
...Only a fine distinction separates straight Soviet anti-Semitism from that grey anti-Jewish propaganda which is manifestly approved by the authorities, appears widely in the USSR, and does a great deal to shape the current "Jewish image" in the minds of the Soviet public...
...From Catechism in its True Colors...
...The Holbach essays are widely quoted by Soviet writers in attacks on Jews and their religion...
...The same sentiments appear, word for word, in Light Conquers Darkness, by A. Osipov, published in Murmansk in 1961...
...Then there are the notorious 18th-century essays of the French freethinker...
...Emanuel Litvinoff is editor of the journal, Jews in Eastern Europe...
...It is noteworthy that Izvestia, the newspaper edited by Khrushchev's son-in-law, where this type of propaganda frequently finds a home, greeted the appearance of Judaism Without Embellishment by declaring that Kichko had subjected the Jewish religion to "scientific criticism" and had corroborated "his argument with several new facts...
...How much intolerance, spite, lack of respect for other beliefs, religions and views preach these, if one may call them "moral instructions...
...Their concern is increasingly shared by Socialists, Communists and friends of Russia in the West...
...The Kichko volume is representative of a specific Soviet genre in so-called scientific atheistic propaganda against Jews and the Jewish religion which can be found all over the U.S.S.R., not least in Moscow itself...
...Since they preach that the Jews "always were enemies of the human species" and "were prescribed cruelty, inhumanity, intolerance, thievery, treason, perfidy," it is no wonder that the Soviet Union is the only country in Europe today where Jews have been attacked, and even arrested, on the ground that they use the blood of nonJewish children in their religious rituals...
...And these "words of the Lord" must be observed by the Orthodox citizens of the multi-national socialist state...
...Yes, the Jewish God resembles Kaschei both in character and actions...
...only its historical and factual mistakes were "criticized...
...Baron Holbach, which were reprinted by the Political Department of the Soviet Ministry of Culture in 175,000 copies in 1962...
...The Soviet Union has still a long way to go to rid itself of the anti-Semitism which manifests on many levels of Soviet society without official objection...
...that "God teaches real racial discrimination to the Jews...
...and that "God himself promises the Jews He will cast out and destroy other nations...
...That is hardly the case...
...Where Jews are concerned, the main and only blood-sucker turns out to be God himself...
...The "current propositions" of the book were upheld...
...Published in 1963 by the State Publishing House for Political Literature, it maintains that Jews are taught "the bloody extermination of peoples of other faiths, the land of which Jews are themselves prepared to seize...
...Much will depend on the continued efforts of these people if the position of Soviet Jews is to undergo real improvement...
...As the mighty one, he appropriates the lion's share of the catch, and first and foremost its "strong" part-blood...
...Bloody victims were brought to him, altars sprinkled with blood . . . He nourished himself with it, became strong at the expense of earthly subjects, just like the Immortal Kaschei of the Russian Popular Tales...
...Their voices are seldom heard, but they exist...
...Much more widely circulated, in 105,000 copies, is the Russian-language Catechism in its True Colors...
...At the same time, many people in the USSR are distressed by anti-Jewish discrimination...
...To my mind that is not the worst of it...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 13
