The connection between Jews and communism - or between Jews and certain varieties or fractions of capitalism - wasn't original to Hitler. Instead, it became an increasingly important part of the worldview of the right wing in eastern and central Europe from the 1870s onward, really accelerating and internationalizing after the 1917 revolution in Russia.

But first things first: was there an association between Jews and finance capital, or between Jews and socialism, in the realm of actual reality? Yes, or at least enough so that the association wasn't entirely random. Of Europe's big old-money families, traditional barriers to Jewish landownership or Catholic moneylending meant that the ones that tended to be Jewish were typically concentrated in finance. And the intellectual and organizational leadership of socialist parties in eastern and central had a number of prominent Jews - Marx, obviously; Bernstein and Luxembourg; Bauer and Adler; Trotsky and Lenin. There were a number of reasons for this - Jews were concentrated in cities, where both secular culture and capitalist relations were most advanced; and they were for obvious reasons immune to conservative appeals that identified the state with traditional Christian religion, or that (especially in a Catholic context) sought to politically mobilize groups by Christian confession directly. And as victims of private and often public discrimination, Jews who weren't invested in their status within the ghetto community had plenty of material reasons to be skeptical of cultural conservatism. (The idea that these groups were coordinating with each other, by contrast, is simply fabricated - bankers and communists of whatever demographic liked each other more or less exactly as much as they said they did, which was not at all.)

I said that this trope emerges in the later 19th century. Prejudice against Jews was, of course, common before that point. This prejudice emerged from a context in which Jews were a religious group that was legally separate from the Christian population. Antisemitic tropes reflected a number of themes, then - Biblical tropes of the Jews as bearing a blood guilt for deicide, stereotypes of greedy hagglers which are common to most groups that often serve as merchants to other ethnic communities (compare stereotypes of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or Chinese in Southeast Asia), and, among the most educated and "enlightened" non-Jewish elements, the view of Jewish communities as backwards, insular, and steeped in the past. But over the course of the nineteenth century, economic growth and the spread of Enlightenment view secularized both populations, and led many governments to adopt policies of Jewish emancipation, ending their separate legal status. Capitalism - risky credit-backed ventures for profit, wage labor, and all the rest - picked up more and more steam. Conservative ideologists went from rejecting the idea of the nation-state to embracing it. And in the last couple decades of the nineteenth century, structural factors such as the expansion of Russian and American wheat, and a financial crisis meant that it was a pretty tough time for the agricultural sector in many parts of Europe.

As noted above, the idea that Jewish bankers and Jewish communists were involved in some kind of plot together is pure fantasy. But it was a fantasy that was appealing to certain demographic groups. For landowners, independent craftspeople, and other groups who were involved in "small" or traditional production and were threatened by laissez-faire capitalism (with its recurrent and bewildering financial crises, and its destruction of inefficient producers) and by socialist promises of redistribution, the idea of a concrete enemy that stood behind both threats to their property held a lot of explanatory power. And at a more abstract level, these fears were strongly connected with a fear of modernization, which was also strongly connected with policies of Jewish emancipation. In this context, a new conspiratorial belief system was able to draw on certain old tropes about Jews ("Jews are greedy") while forgetting others ("Jews are backward and superstitious") and borrowing a whole universe of conspiratorial tropes from theories about the Freemasons, which had been popular among anti-Enlightenment politicians and thinkers already. These conspiracy theories posited a cunning group aiming at achieving absolute power through the destruction of all the institutions which felt threatened by modernity (the family, social rank, and so on,) the most elaborated version of these being of course the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And the geographic epicenter of this was also in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the state was much less strongly identified with any one ethnicity and the idea of Jews as a separate "national" group was most plausible, insofar as emancipated Jews would not as automatically start identifying as members of the official nationality (who happened to have a different religious confession.)

So to sum up: by the eve of World War I, antisemitic conspiracy theories - often as part of a whole package Antisemitic worldview - were part of a familiar set of tropes, especially popular in east-central Europe and (for various reasons) in France, and also especially popular among small propertyholders of various kinds who felt positively predisposed to conservative ideologies because they felt threats from economic modernization. Enter WWI, which resulted in the destruction of the continent's major dynastic empires, communist revolutions leading to civil wars in Hungary, Russia, and parts of Germany, and an overall feeling of apocalypse. America at least briefly pushed for installing liberal institutions across the continent, and the peace was marked by complicated financial systems of integration and control. If you had been mainlining the Antisemitic worldview, it appeared that Jewish plot for world domination was entering its diabolical next phase. (Evidence that went against this worldview - like how American liberals allied themselves with nationalist movements in central Europe and tried to crush communism, or how largely antisemitic French nationalists were pushing for the most punitive reparations schemes and liberal Anglo financial interests were the most interested in being forgiving, or just the inherent unlikelihood of a secret banker-communist alliance, and so on and so on - could be ignored, just like most people ignore most things that don't fit into their view most of the time.) And if you hadn't been mainlining it, and you also weren't attached to traditional liberal or socialist ideologies - well, you were likely scared and bewildered. And when the multinational convocation of officers that fought for the Whites in the Russian Civil War returned to their various homes, even to contexts where the Jewish question was obviously irrelevant (like Japan,) they brought Protocols-flavored ideas with them.

So when Hitler was selling the idea "Jew = Communist," he was selling an idea of a singular, all-powerful enemy that united almost everything (from abstract market forces, to revolutionary communists, to mainstream socialists, to rival national powers) that threatened the core demographics that he was selling to. And he was employing a set of tropes that had a level of history and ambient cultural familiarity, even if they had often been fringe up to that point. And while free-market liberals were not the main image in this story, the association that could be made with them and Jews was one that was incorporated (however incongruously) into the narrative, rather than simply ignored.

For an appropriately short introduction, you may want to start with Stephen Beller's Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction. On the economic groups that fascists appealed to, see Michael Mann's Fascists. For the role of conspiracy theories in conservative thought prior to the entrance of Jews as the main villain, see Darrin McMahon's Enemies of the Enlightenment. On how Protocols-style ideology spread in the wake of the Russian Civil War, see Michael Kellog's Russian Roots of Nazism. For wide-ranging essays on the very colorful history of the Protocols itself, see Katz and Landes' Paranoid Apocalypse. For the role of antisemtism in proto-fascist ideology, see the appropriate chapter in Ishay Landa's Fascism and the Masses. (And of course please PM me if you are interested in any of these but cannot find them in your local library!)

In order to analyse this perceived connection present in the National Socialist ideology, we need to go back to the origin of Communism. Even in pre-Marxist times, since the French Revolution, Jews have been associated with proto-socialist ideological concepts. For example, in the early days of the French Revolution, Jews were considered one its primary supporters (A), being successfully repaid with Jewish emancipation measures. (B)

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Then, as we move forward to Marx - the grandson of a Trier's Rabbi - the claims about the Jewish origin, and subsequent interest, in Communism start to take shape. According to National Socialist ideologists, Jews used Communism in order to shift racially-based conflict (which targeted Jews in Europe) to a class-based conflict, making the proletariat blame the higher classes instead of foreigners. As exposed in the Great Anti-Bolshevist Exhibition of 1937,

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"The beginning of the nineteenth century had particular significance for Jewry and its plans for world domination. The ideas of this revolutionary age created the foundation for Jewry to establish its claim to absolute equality within the lives of its host peoples. The intellectual currents at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century freed people from the long outdated bonds of the Middle Ages and their unhealthy class restrictions, unleashing their strengths for creative purposes. Thus for a period, the slogan of the French Revolution became: “Men are everywhere equal and have the same right to the same happiness.” This phrase, which quickly became misunderstood in the sense of mere leveling of people, was the signal to Jewry to claim equality with the members of other peoples, whose host friendship they enjoyed, and in which they were and remained different in various ways both in nature and character." (C)

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On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Jews in Russia were oppressed and forced to live in the Pale of Settlement, and suffered several Pogroms. As a result, they started supporting the revolutionary movements brewing in the early XX century. Prior to the February Revolution of 1917, they represented 1,6% of the Bolshevik party (in line with their share of Russian population : 1,7%). In 1922, they amounted to 5%, and as of Lenin's death (who was himself of partial Jewish descent), 6%. (D) Only after Stalin took power were most of the powerful Jewish Old Bolsheviks removed from power or even purged(Kamenev, Kaganovich, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Sverdlov). The association between Communism and Jews was present in White Russian wartime propaganda, and some authors claim that White Russian refugees in Germany were the origin of the Nazi concept of Jewish Bolshevism. (E)

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Shifting the focus to Germany, at the end of WW1 the Spartacist uprising, organized by the Spartacist League (of which the vast majority of leaders, except for Mehring, were Jews - Rosa Luxembourg, Liebknecht (partial), Eisner, Paul Levi, Leo Jogiches, Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam, Eugene Leviné, Karl Radek, Gustav Landlauer. The (failed) Spartacist Uprising of 1919 was one of the reasons of National Socialist hate of Communism and it's conflation with Jews. As such, the National Socialists despised the people who supported Communism as being puppets of their Jewish masters. As Goebbels said in 1935,

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"While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry." (F)

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This association was not exclusive of Germans, however. As Churchill published in a 1920 editorial of the Illustrated Sunday Herald,

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"[Bolshevism] among the Jews is nothing new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing." (G)

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As such, this association between Communism and Jews was not exclusive to National Socialists; in fact, it even predates it by several decades. Be it due to over-representation in Marxist groups, Proeminent leaders or claimed self-interests, Communist and Socialist history is intertwined with Jewish history, from the early XIX century onward.

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(A) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/french-revolution

(B) The Jews of Modern France, by Paula Hyman

(C) https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/anti-bolshevism.htm

(D) The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, by Jeffrey Herf

(E) The Russian Roots of Nazism - White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945, by Michael Kellogg

(F) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/film/goebbels-claims-jews-will-destroy-culture(G) https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/nov/28/features11.g21

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(Sorry for any synthax errors - English is not my first language)