Jews and Communism

Sketching the history

In the collective memory of American Jewry, the entanglement of Jews and Communists merits hardly a footnote.

—Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, p. 161

For paid subscribers, Jerry and I will be talking about this topic on Zoom on Monday evening, February 26, at 8 PM New York time. I’ll send out a reminder with a link closer to the date.

In my own memory as an American Jew, the entanglement of Jews and Communists has more significance.

The Harvard Library houses a document “Investigation of Communist Activities in the St. Louis, Mo. area. Hearing” This was a hearing conducted in St. Louis by the United States House Un-American Activities Committee in June of 1956.

One of the witnesses called was my pediatrician, who was Jewish. Another was my mother, who also was Jewish. She testified that in 1945, at age 22, her primary job was working as a stenographer in the office of the Communist Party in St. Louis.

The woman who became my mother was introduced to my father through his sister. My Aunt Sarah was a Communist, as was her husband, a machinist and labor organizer. My mother testified that she herself quit the Communist Party in 1947. My father convinced her to do that. My aunt and uncle were not wedded to the party, but they never gave up the cause. My uncle put his hopes in the brand of Communism practiced by Tito in Yugoslavia.

Attitudes toward Communism fluctuated during World War II. The war in Europe began soon after Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a non-aggression pact. That meant that if a Jew identified as secular and Communist, he might adopt a favorable attitude toward Germany (Moscow would have instructed him to do so). But non-Communist American Jews, reacting against the pact with Hitler, would have been anti-Soviet.

Then in June of 1941, Adolf Hitler turned on his former ally, invading the Soviet Union. Communists around the world immediately switched their view on Germany, now seeing that nation as the enemy. After Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, America and the Soviet Union found one another on the same side, opposing Germany. Americans, and especially Jews, now adopted a favorable view of the Soviet Union, because it was fighting Hitler.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union soon came to be regarded as America’s adversary. Most Americans who had been Communists, including my mother, dropped their allegiance to the Party. Some made this choice for practical reasons, to join the mainstream. Others were repelled by the horrors of the Soviet Union, especially news that came out after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Of those who remained Communists in the post-war period, some became traitors to America. This gave rise to investigations of the Communist presence. Those investigations harassed many Americans who were not traitors, including those who had long since ceased having any affiliation with the Communist Party. This gave the investigations a bad name, “McCarthyism.”

The investigations were losing steam at the time of my mother’s appearance before the House Committee, and they stopped soon afterward. Because she refused to name any other Party members, she was charged with contempt. But my mother and her lawyer gambled that a case that was pending before the Supreme Court (referred to as the Watson case during the hearing) would result in a ruling that would rein in the Congressional committees and void the contempt charge. Their gamble worked.

An Ethnic Group or a Religion?

Nazi racial ideology saw Jews as an ethnic group. In my lifetime, Jews have leaned against this. They prefer to think of Jews as distinctive religiously or perhaps culturally, but not genetically.

But Jews remained ethnically homogeneous for many generations. In Jewish tradition, a Jew may marry a non-Jew only if the non-Jew agrees to convert to Judaism. Conversion takes place under the supervision of a rabbi, and if the rabbi is Orthodox, the process will be an arduous one. Until very recently, Jews mostly married within the faith. As a result, population geneticists can identify a fairly distinct ethnic group.

The Jewish religion does not lean Communist. Although the Passover story dwells on the oppression of the Hebrews by Pharoah, traditional Judaism does not sacralize victimhood. The more attached a Jew is to Jewish texts and Jewish practice, the less likely it is that he will be sympathetic to Communism.

My father eagerly tried to assimilate into American culture, to leave Yiddish culture, and to discard Jewish observance of any kind. He was the sort of secular ethnic Jew who would have been susceptible to Communism, but other elements in his background went against it.

After serving in the army in World War II, my father finished his studies at Washington University and started teaching there. His field was political science, and his specialty was comparative politics. He knew a great deal about Soviet reality, and one of his cousins was the author of a book How Russia is Ruled, which did not paint a rosy portrait.

He also resented his domineering older sister. I do not know whether he developed a distaste for Communism because of his professional knowledge or because of his negative feelings about his Communist sister. In either case, he was unsympathetic to Communism, and he talked my mother out of it.

Although Judaism as a religion may be to the right of Christianity in that Judaism does not sacralize victims, Jews as an ethnic group tend toward the left. And as an ethnic group, they are highly articulate and engaged in whatever political movement they find themselves. Ethnic Jews will tend to rise to prominence in any political movement that accepts them. In the United States, there have been Jewish Democrats, Jewish Republicans, and Jewish libertarians. And Jews here and elsewhere were prominent as Communists except in times and places where they faced discrimination from Communists in charge.

Why do Jews as an ethnic group lean left? They tend to be urban rather than rural, and cities tend to be to the left of rural areas. Moreover, during the crucial centuries in which the modern world of the Enlightenment arrived, the progressive forces favored Jewish emancipation while the conservative forces resisted it.

Jews have been relatively urban for centuries. One hypothesis, offered by Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini, is that rabbis in the Christian era mandated that young males be taught Torah. This imposed a hardship on a farmer, who needed to tend to crops and/or livestock.

A farmer could not spare his own time or the time of his sons to pursue Torah study. Instead, farmers would have found Christianity easier to live with. Thus, Jewish religion selected for people with urban occupations and an interest in learning. Not many people could adopt such a lifestyle. This hypothesis has been dubbed The Chosen Few.

Historically, Jews have been drawn to and steered toward acting as merchants or financiers. These occupations rise in status and affluence in a capitalist society. We should expect Jews to be the friends of capitalism, not its enemies. Indeed, some of the most outspoken supporters of capitalism have been secular ethnic Jews, including Ludwig Von Mises, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman. Within the economics profession, even the twentieth century Jewish giants of the left—Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, James Tobin, Franco Modigliani—were clear in their preference for capitalism over socialism.

With the exception of the second World War, the entire life of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1989 saw the division over Communism capture the attention of politically engaged elites as the defining conflict of that period. Today, Communism seems much less interesting. But capitalism is still a dirty word to many on the left.

The intellectual crowd is no longer overtly Communist. But it is still mostly anti-capitalist. And, sadly, many Jews are part of that crowd.

My theory of political beliefs is that people tend to align with what they think of as a friendly tribe and in opposition to what they think of as an enemy tribe. These days, the left is working hard to alienate Jews, with its characterization of Israel as an evil colonial power and its characterization of American Jews as evil white oppressors . I predict that the more the left takes on this standpoint, the more you will see Jews turn away from left-wing anti-capitalism.