Judeo-Bolshevism combines hatred of Jews with a loathing of Bolshevism or communism. The myth of a global Jewish conspiracy, spread by the far right in Europe, became the central theme of Nazi propaganda.
When the First International Workingmen’s Association was founded in 1864, anti-Semites branded it a cosmopolitan secret society and highlighted the Jewish origins of Karl Marx, one of its founding figures. The conflation of revolutionaries and Jews incorporated the image of the stateless, wandering Jew.
Before spreading to other countries, including France, this fantasy first took root in Russia. In 1881, in the aftermath of the assassination of Emperor Alexander II, Jews—accused of the crime—were the victims of devastating pogroms. In 1901, the text *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, a forgery drafted by the Tsar’s secret police, described a conspiracy combining seemingly contradictory elements—capitalism and social revolution—to establish a “world Jewish government.” A supposed “Jewish plot to enslave the world” was conflated with Marxism, a doctrine of social justice labeled as “Jewish.”
After the October Revolution of 1917, anti-Semitism became a central theme of Russian counterrevolutionary propaganda: Lenin, Trotsky, and most of the Bolshevik leaders (the future communists) were portrayed as agents of the “international Jewish conspiracy.”
To some, the Jew is the man connected to the World Bank; to others, the Jew is the opposite: an egalitarian activist. In both cases, he must be eliminated.
The myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” fueled Nazi propaganda both before and after 1933. On September 11, 1935, Hitler imposed the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Race Laws in Germany.
As early as 1940, during the Nazi Occupation of collaborationist France, Jews were officially persecuted. In 1941, the violently anti-Semitic exhibition *The Jew and France* extensively explored the theme of Judeo-Bolshevism. Beginning in March 1942, a traveling poster exhibition titled *Bolshevism Against Europe* toured the country.
In February 1944, the “Red Poster,” plastered on walls, exposed to everyone the murderous Judeo-Communist obsession of the Nazis and their collaborators.
References:
– Taguieff, Pierre-André, 2008, *The Judeophobia of Modernity: From the Enlightenment to Jihad*, Paris: Odile Jacob.
– Michel Winock, 2004, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, Editions du Seuil, 2004.
