“Fiends in Human Form”

Abstract

In yet another abrupt shift, the Soviet Union in late 1948 and 1949 began virulent attacks on Israel and Jewish culture, unleashing a torrent of antisemitic propaganda that drew on centuries-old conspiracy fantasies. Like the Nazis, for whom the Jews were the primary force behind both capitalism and Communism, the Soviets leveled contradictory charges, denouncing the Jews both as “bourgeois nationalists,” their term for Zionists, and as “cosmopolites” (internationalists). During the next several years, Jewish emigration from the Soviet bloc was for all intents and purposes terminated, Soviet Yiddish writers were murdered by the state, and Yiddish culture was permanently destroyed. Soviet satellites staged show trials that cast Israel and the Zionist movement as their mortal enemy. State prosecutors invoked the vilest stereotypes of Jews to discredit defendants. The American CP again adjusted its position to conform to the Soviet line. Until 1956, it adamantly denied charges of official antisemitism in the Soviet Union and served as apologist for patently antisemitic Soviet bloc show trials and frame-ups. The Soviets initiated the new antisemitic campaign in the fall of 1948 with an article by Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, a Stalin protege, in which he denounced Zionists as “mystics” and Israel as “bourgeois.” Echoing the argument Stalin advanced in 1913, Ehrenburg denied that “there was any affinity between Jews in different countries.” Thus Jews could not be considered a people.