So, the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theory has been used across the world for over a century now, and has been used to excuse anti-Semitic policies and incidents, including those perpetrated by the Nazis.

The origins of the conspiracy theory lay partially in the historical status of Jews in Eastern Europe. For centuries, the Czars of Russia operated what was essentially an apartheid state regarding their Jewish subjects. Jews in the Russian Empire were restricted geographically, forbidden from living and working outside of a specified geographic zone known as the Pale of Settlement, which now occupies all or most of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic. Jews were forbidden from owning land, from taking up certain professions, and from attending university (until the 1880s, when a restrictive quota was instituted). There was also what were known as pogroms, which were outbursts of violence, both planned and spontaneous, against Jews for any number of reasons. Czarist authorities frequently used Jews as the scapegoats for political and economic misfortunes, and pogroms were a political tool used to deflect blame away from the authorities. This was especially true in the late nineteenth century, after the czar Alexander III blamed the 1881 assassination of his father Alexander II on Russia's Jews. This led to waves of anti-Semitic violence across the empire, as well as the exodus of Jews out of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, under Alexander III, the czarist Russian government operated a secret police force known as the Okhrana. Many have speculated that it was the Okhrana that originally published and disseminated what is, along with Hitler's Mein Kampf, one of the most popular and influential anti-Semitic texts ever written: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The text was allegedly the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders detailing the master plan for Jewish world domination. Originally published in 1903, it was exposed as an anti-Semitic hoax as early as 1921 by British and German newspapers, yet continued in its role as an incredible influence on modern anti-Semitism.

.Clearly, this caused many Russian Jews to develop anti-czarist sentiments, which was expressed by any one of a number of political movements. In the wake of the February and October Revolutions in 1917, the greatest of such political movements was the Marxist faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. This faction later split from the party and were given the name Bolshevik, derived from the Russian word of 'majority'. Many who took part in Russian politics in the wake of the 1917 revolutions were of Jewish origin as a backlash against their experience of czarist repression. Among these figures, the most prominent was Leon Trotsky. However, many prominent early revolutionary leaders were of Jewish origin, including Lazar Kaganovich, Lev Kamenev, and Julius Martov.The fact that many Jews took part in the overthrow of czarist autocracy was an indication to many that Jews as a collective had a hand in the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. It was at this moment that the Jewish-Bolshevik theory was cobbled together in the way it is recognized today. Those who supported the theory began to look back at the ways the history of communism coincided with the history of Jews in Europe. One of the most popular talking points is that Karl Marx himself was Jewish, which adds to the belief that Jews are the controllers and directors of communist movements. This is in spite of the fact that Marx was raised as a Christian, since his father was a Jewish convert. The main evidence used to support the connections between Judaism and communism is the perceived nature of both Jews and communists. Specifically, both were seen as inherently anti-Christian and international.

Czarist Russia was not the only place where such anti-Semitic repression could have been seen. Nearly every European polity for a millennium instituted some sort of anti-Semitic segregation. This was mainly informed by the anti-Semitic dogmas of the Catholic Church and many Protestant sects. Until 1964, it was official Catholic teaching that the Jews were collectively responsible for the crime of deicide, or the murder of God, in reference to the crucifixion of Christ. This crime was not only collective but inherited, meaning that all Jews at the time of the crucifixion and their descendants would bear culpability for that crime. Hateful legends regarding the anti-Christian nature of Jews were circulated throughout Europe, the most infamous of them being the Blood Libel. This particular false claim purported that during Passover, Jews would kidnap a Christian child and kill it in a ritual sacrifice, collecting its blood to use in the making of matzoh bread. This one anti-Semitic story was instrumental in provoking violence against Jews from the medieval period into the twentieth century. Judaism and communism were linked in this way, since communist movements were viewed as anti-religion, stemming from Karl Marx and his outright assertions that religion “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” The imposition of state atheism by the Soviet Union seemed to confirm this.

Furthermore, before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, it was common among anti-Semitic commentators to view Jews as a sort of nation-within-a-nation. This mainly had to do with the idea of the nation as an organic entity. Many twentieth century cultural and political nationalisms, informed by nineteenth century romanticism, taught that every nation had its own national soul or essence. In many cases, adherence to Christianity was a significant component part of such a national essence. Nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic explicitly wrote that if a country’s essence is Christian in nature, then non-Christian groups like Jews were to be considered separate from the body of the nation. The outsider status of Jews was only reinforced by their diasporic condition. Since Jewish communities could be found in many countries, many believed that it was impossible for Jews to profess loyalty to a single country, even the one where they lived. This is what has been referred to as the international nature of Judaism. Those who believe in the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy hold that it is the international nature of the Jews that makes their affinity with communism even stronger, since communism in its classic sense prioritizes class consciousness over national consciousness.

The Nazi leadership made frequent reference to Jewish Bolshevism or Jewish Marxism, including Hitler. In Mein Kampf, he wrote, “[The Jew] already sees present-day European states as will-less tools in his fist, whether indirectly through a so-called Western democracy, or in the form of direct domination by Jewish Bolshevism.” Later on in 1941, in a speech to the Reichstag concerning the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler proclaimed, “For more than two decades the Jewish-Bolshevik regime in Moscow has tried to set fire not merely to Germany, but all of Europe… The Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow have unswervingly undertaken to force their domination upon us and the other European nations, and that not merely spiritually, but also in terms of military power.” The connection of Jews to a perceived foreign interfering force only accelerated their ‘othering’ within the German-occupied areas, making their repression all the easier.

So yes, the connections made between Jews and communism, or the political left in general, were highlighted by the fascist regime in Germany during its time in power, but it’s important to indicate where these ideological currents find their origins, namely in the institutional persecution of Jews in Europe as perpetuated by both spiritual and temporal authorities.