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“Of Jewish Origin”: Criminalizing Jewish Descent, 1948-1954
On 20 November 1952 Czechoslovak citizens turned on their radios to hear the following elite officials indicted for high treason and other crimes:
Rudolf Slánský… of Jewish origin, from a businessman’s family… the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and, before his arrest, deputy President of the Government of the Czechoslovak Republic.
Bedrich Geminder… of Jewish origin, the son of a businessman and an inn-keeper… the former manager of the International Department of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
Ludvík Frejka… of Jewish origin, the son of a doctor…1
State prosecutor Urválek brought similar charges against eleven more defendants in a high- profile show trial that would come to be known as the Slánský Affair.2 Even before Urválek
1 Proces s vedením protistátního spikleneckého centra v čele s Rudolfem Slanským [The trial of the leadership of the anti-state conspiratorial center with Rudolf Slánský at the head] (Prague, Czechoslovakia: The Ministry of Justice, 1953), 44.
2 This is not the place to retell the story of the Slánský Affair in detail. It has already found explication and revision at the hands of competent historians, survivors, and journalists. Of interest here are only those manifold ways in which the trial, broadly conceived, effected citizens of Jewish origin and religion, along with those party-state officials with whom they interacted. The two most significant works on the Slánský trial are Karel Kaplan, Report on the Murder of the General Secretary (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990); and Jiří Pelikán, ed., The Czechoslovak Political Trials, 1950-1954: The Suppressed Report of the Dubček
Government’s Commission of Inquiry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971). Some of the most recent insights into the Slánský Affair in a transnational context can be found in Jiří Pernes and Jan Foitzik, eds., Politické procesy v Československu po 1945 a “případ Slánský”: Sborník přispěvků za stejnojmenné konference, pořádané ve dnech 14.-16. dubna 2003 v Praze [The political trials in Czechoslovakia after 1945 and the “Slánský Affair”: A collection of contributions from an eponymous conference, held 14-16 April 2003 in Prague] (Brno, Czech Republic: Kateřina Mikšová–Nakladatelství Prius pro Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR v Praze, 2005). On the reaction to the Slánský Affair among the general public and its implications for the Communist Party see Melissa Feinberg, “Fantastic Truths, compelling Lies: Radio Free Europe and the Response to the Slánsky Trial in Czechoslovakia,” Contemporary European History, vol. 22, no. 1 (February 2013): 107-25; and McDermott, “A ‘Polyphony of Voices’? Czech Popular Opinion and the Slánský Affair,” Slavic Review, vol. 67, no. 4 (2008): 840-65; and Idem., “Stalinist Terror in Czechoslovakia: Origins, Processes, Responses,” in Stalinist Terror in
mentioned their class backgrounds, he identified eleven of the men as being “of Jewish origin.” He described the indicted as a conspiracy of “Trotskyite-Titoist, Zionist, bourgeois, nationalistic traitors and enemies of the Czechoslovak people, the people’s democratic order, and socialism” in the service of American imperialism.3 The court sentenced eleven of the men to death and the remaining three to life imprisonment.
The Slánský trial marked the culmination of an anti-Zionist campaign that began in 1948. It also established the framework in which stakeholders would negotiate Jewish-state relations in communist Czechoslovakia until the fall of the regime in 1989.4 Initially imposed from Moscow,
Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression, eds. Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe (Manchester, UK and New York, NY: Manchester University Press; distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 98-118. For accounts with particular attention to Jewish history see Arnold Krammer, The Forgotten Friendship: Israel and the Soviet Bloc, 1947-53 (Urbana and Chicago, IL and London, UK: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 165-96; Moshe Yegar, Eva Adamová, and Petr Sláma, Československo, Sionismus, Izrael: historie vzájemných vztahů [Czechoslovakia, Zionism, Izrael: a history of relations], 144-52; Paul Lendvai, Anti-Semitism without Jews: Communist Eastern Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 244-59; and Peter Meyer, “Czechoslovakia,” in The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, Peter Meyer, Bernard D. Weinryb, Eugene Duschinsky, and Nicolas Sylvain (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1953), 153- 91. Igor Lukes implicates American intelligence operations in Slánský’s arrest in “The Rudolf Slánský Affair: New Evidence,” Slavic Review, vol. 58, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 160-87; and idem., “Rudolf Slánský: His Trials and Trial,” Cold War International History Project, Working Paper #50 (July 2011). Helaine Debra Blumenthal explores the reception of and reaction to the Slánský Affair by Jewish communities in the U.S.A., Israel, and Western Europe in “Fourteen Convicted, Three Million Condemned: The Slansky Affair and the Reconstitution of Jewish Identities after the Holocaust” (Ph.D. Diss: University of California, Berkeley, 2012). On the Israeli citizens arrested in Czechoslovakia and forced to testify at the Slánský trial, see Ivo Pejcoch, “Politické procesy s Šimonem Ornsteinem a Mordechajem Orenem–antisemitské tendence v
komunistickém Československu” [The political trials of Shimon Orenstein and Mordechai Oren– antisemitic tendencies in communist Czechoslovakia], Terezínské listy (2011), 142-54. See the bibliography for a list of related memoires.
3 Proces s vedením [The trial of the leadership], 8.
4 Paul Lendvai astutely noted the challenge that the leaders of Europe’s communist states faced when they sought to implement changes to state policies and ideologies. If the Communist Party was meant to have been infallible, it followed that their doctrines and resolutions could not easily be overturned. Indeed, it took a daring speech by Khrushchev in 1956 to provide the justification for transitioning away from the Stalinist model. (He characterized Stalin’s rule as a deviation from the proper course of socialist development, facilitated by the emergence of a cult of
the Soviet Bloc’s anti-Zionist turn forced party-state officials in Czechoslovakia to repudiate the State of Israel and to seek exculpation for their formerly supportive relationship with that state, deemed criminal in retrospect. Domestically, the campaign took on a distinctly troubling character, as the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia steadily implemented a policy of state antisemitism. Indeed, the trial achieved the extra-legal criminalization of Jewish descent in that country, casting Jewish citizens in their familiar roles of national scapegoats and domestic “others.” It destroyed the fragile status quo established after the Second World War.
The Slánský Affair quickly became a contested symbol of Stalinism around the world and even within Czechoslovakia. It helped establish Zionism and Jewish-state relations as major battlegrounds of the Cold War, strikingly out of balance with the miniscule size and political weakness of Central Europe’s Jewish communities. Across the region, the trial inspired a wave of anti-Jewish accusations, propaganda, and persecution–not ten years after the Holocaust.5 It shook the faith of communists and fellow travelers in the West, in Israel, and even within the Soviet Bloc.6 At home, the Slánský Affair established a conceptual link between antisemitism and Stalinism which would shape the discourses of reform, dissent, and communist reaction for decades.
The Old-New Logic of Jewish Affairs
The trial of Rudolf Slánský and his co-defendants, along with the anti-Zionist campaign initiated
personality around the deceased leader.) Despite the fact that the Czechoslovak party-state overhauled its relationship with domestic and international Jewry after that date, it never transcended the conceptual model for it established during the years 1948-1953. See Lendvai, Anti-Semitism without Jews, 13.
5 Meyer, et. al., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites; and Lendvai, Antisemitism without Jews. 6 Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?: Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 122-35.
in 1948, introduced non-Jewish Czechoslovak citizens and officials to a new language for thinking about their Jewish compatriots, the latter’s relationship with the party-state, and the place of Jews within the Czech and Slovak nations.7 The proceedings of the Slánský trail
established three particular ideas about the danger posed by Jews and “Zionists” to the fledgling communist state, along with a fourth which developed later, in light of the reaction to the trial in the West. Two had roots in pre-communist discourses about Jews, which strongly suggests the need to consider the early communist years in terms of the decades that preceded them, rather than as the dawn a new age.
First, the trial publicly confirmed, with the formal trappings of jurisprudence, the party’s characterization of Zionism as a bourgeois, enemy ideology in the service of American imperialism, nearly powerful enough to subvert the entire party-state system. It associated “Zionism” with the specter of “Titoism,” the contrived, though not baseless, fear that elements within the communist parties of East-Central Europe would attempt to follow Yugoslavia’s example and break with Stalin to chart their own national paths to socialism–or worse, to capitalism.8 By the time of the trial in 1952, however, “Zionism” had replaced “Titoism” as a
7 Peter Steiner likens the communist show trials to an inoculation. He explains that the party- states used them to introduce into the public sphere and render taboo ideologies they considered deviant. See “Justice in Prague, Political and Poetic: Some Reflections on the Slánský Trial (with Constant Reference to Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera),” Poetics Today, vol. 21, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 654-79. Kevin McDermott and Melissa Feinberg, nonetheless argue convincingly that the Communist Party (inevitably) failed at controlling the public reception of the Slánský trial. See Feinberg, “Fantastic Truths, Compelling Lies”; Mcdermott, “A ‘Polyphony of Voices?’”; and Idem., “Stalinist Terror in Czechoslovakia.”
8 Bradley Abrams, “Hope Died Last: The Czechoslovak Road to Socialism,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest, Hungary and New York, NY: Central European University Press, 2009), 362. On Czechoslovakia and the national path, see idem., “The Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak Democracy: Elements of Interdependency,” in The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After, ed. Martin A. Schain with an introduction by Tony Judt, Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001), 93-116; Michal Kopeček, Hledání ztraceného smyslu
main bugaboo of Soviet propaganda.9 Not only did the proceedings and predetermined
convictions of the Slánský trial establish these ideas about Zionism official facts, but they also made clear that the party-state suspected all citizens of Jewish origin of harboring “Zionist” tendencies.10
Second, the trial and the associated propaganda drew heavily upon longstanding ambivalences about the place of Jews in the Czech and Slovak nations. The trial proceedings confirmed the category “of Jewish origin” (židovského původu) as politically salient and further associated it with “cosmopolitanism.” The first term suggested that Jewish citizens did not share the majority population’s hereditary relationship to the Czech and Slovak nations, a key
component of national belonging as understood by most Europeans at the time.
The accusation of “cosmopolitanism” evoked the popular association of Jews with the bourgeoisie, as well as fantasies of international Jewish conspiracies. Communists were
revoluce: zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední Evropě, 1953-1960 [Searching for the lost meaning of the revolution: the genesis and beginnings of Marxist revisionism in Central Europe, 1953-1960] (Prague, Czech Republic: Argo, 2009), 44; and H. Gordon Skilling, Communism: National and International: Eastern Europe after Stalin (Toronto, Canada:
University of Toronto Press, 1964), 3-36 and 84-130. With specific attention to Jewish history, see Jan Rataj, “Poválečný vývoj a východní geopolitické začlenění Československa: od
socializující demokracie k diktatuře” [The postwar development and eastern geopolitical incorporation of Czechoslovakia: from socializing democracy to dictatorship] and Radka Čermakova, “Poválečné Československo: Obnovený stát ve střední Evropě” [Postwar
Czechoslovakia: a renewed state in Central Europe] in Židovská menšina v Československu po druhé světové válce. Od osvobození k nové totalitě [The Jewish minority in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. From liberation to a new totalitarianism], eds. Blanka Soukupová, Peter Salner, and Miroslav Ludvíková (Prague, Czech Republic: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2008), 7- 22 and 23-35.
9 Michal Reiman argues that Stalin inaugurated his anti-Zionist campaign for domestic purposes and that he anticipated, but chose to ignore, problematic repercussions in the satellite states. See “Sovětská politika a sovětské vedení 1948-1953. Sovětský kontext porcesů v zemích “lidové demokracie” [Soviet politics and Soviet leadership. The Soviet Context of the trials in the lands of the “people’s democracy”], in Politické procesy v Československu po 1945 a “případ
Slánský” [The political trials in Czechoslovakia after 1945 and the “Slánský Affair”], eds. Jiří Pernes and Jan Foitzik, 28-29.
supposed to have been “internationalists,” proletariat members of individual nations that marched in step with the working classes of other nations, following the Soviet Union’s lead. Referring to citizens “of Jewish origin” as “cosmopolitans” suggested that they lacked these national ties and socio-political loyalties.11 Demagogues portrayed “Zionists” (i.e., Jews) as, on the one hand, everywhere the same and loyal only to themselves, and, on the other hand, able to adopt outwardly the culture and language of any group among whom they lived. The danger of Jews, according to this logic, exceeded their purported disloyalty. It rested in their ability to feign national belonging, and thereby to manipulate and gain power over non-Jewish Europeans. Of supreme concern in this case was the supposed infiltration of the Communist Party by “Zionists” charlatans.12 To demonstrate that the trial’s defendants did not belong to the Czech or Slovak nations, the prosecution and the state-run media reported that some of them, or at least their forebears, had only recently replaced their original, German-sounding last names with new Czech alternatives.13 This became common practice in subsequent trials and media reports.14
11 On “cosmopolitanism” see Helaine Blumenthal, “Communism on Trial: The Slansky Affair and Anti-Semitism in Post-WWII Europe,” (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East European Studies, 2009), 13-16. <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wr2g4kf> (14 July 2014); and Pelikán, ed., The Czechoslovak Political Trials, 49.
12 Meyer, “Czechoslovakia,” 162-65.
13 After the Second World War, many Bohemian and Moravian Jews–and also non-Jews–traded their German first and last names for Czech alternatives (often equivalents) as a sign of their identification with the Czech nation and rejection of Germany. Between 1945 and 1946, the Jewish Religious Community in Prague alone recorded 349 of such name changes and received requests for an additional 76. Blanka Soukupová “Židé a židovská reprezentace v českých zemích v letech 1945-1948 (mezi režimem, židovstvím a judaismem)” [Jews and the Jewish representation in the Czech lands in the years 1945-1948 (between the regime, Jewishness, and Judaism)], in in Židovská menšina v Československu po druhé světové válce. Od osvobození k nové totalitě [The Jewish minority in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. From liberation to a new totalitarianism], eds. Blanka Soukupová, Peter Salner, and Miroslav
Ludvíková (Prague, Czech Republic: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2008), 66. This practice drew on prewar practices. Austrian Emperor Joseph II made the adoption of German last names a condition of the partial emancipation of Bohemian Jewry in 1781. After the emergence of Czech nationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century and with the foundation of Czechoslovakia in
The brazen antisemitism of the Slánský affair and of early Soviet-Bloc political culture begs a few questions. Why did communist elites use the euphemism “of Jewish origin?” Why did they not simply speak of “Jews?” Karel Kaplan has shown this to have been a matter of
contention, even at the highest levels of government. President Klement Gottwald (1896-1953, President 1948-1953) intervened personally against some of his colleagues and their Soviet advisors to replace the word “Jew” (Žid) in the Slásnký indictment with the term “of Jewish origin”15 From then through 1989, it remained the preferred nomenclature for referring to ethnic Jews.
“Of Jewish origin” is an elusive term, the connotations of which depend greatly upon intention and context. Its roots lay in emancipation-era debates about the integration of Jews into Europe’s emerging and secularizing national communities. It can suggest pessimistically that Jews carry inherited traits which prevent them from assimilating. Alternatively, it can imply that Jews, given the appropriate context, would be able to transcend the Jewishness of their forebears and join their host nations. Ideally, in this case, their parentage would soon become nothing more than a simple fact of personal history–the fact “of Jewish origin.”
1918, many Bohemians and Moravians traded their German-sounding last names for Czech alternatives. Jews were heavily represented among them. On Jewish names in Bohemia and Moravia see Ruth Bondyová, Rodinné dědictví: jména Židů v Čechách a na Moravě, [Family inheritance: the names of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia] (Prague, Czech Republic:
Nakladatelství Franze Kafky, 2006).
14 For example see the party report, “Žaloba na skupinu slovankých buržoasních nacionalistů, sionistů a jiných nepřátel v bezpečnostním aparatě na Slovsku” [Case of the group of Slovak bourgeois nationalists, Zionists and other enemies in the security apparatus in Slovakia] (26 November 1953). NAČR, KSČ-ÚV-02/5, bundle 69, archival unit 187, point 16.
15 Kaplan, Report on the Murder, 223. A draft of the Slánský arraignment wherein the word “Jew” was corrected by pencil to read “of Jewish origin” may be found in NAČR, KSČ-ÚV- 02/5, bundle 2, archival unit 26, point 1, 81. See also McDermott “A ‘Polyphony of voices’?,” 843-49. McDermott argues that the party struggled to balance its use of anti-Zionism to attract nationalists with the danger that it could unleash anti-Jewish populism or confirm Western allegations Soviet-Bloc antisemitism.
Among communists this debate took its own course. Europe’s communist parties denounced antisemitism, along with other forms of racial politics. They claimed that the bourgeoisie deployed such ideologies to distract the laboring classes from their exploitation at the hands of domestic capitalists by redirecting their anger towards their socio-economic counterparts abroad. This anti-antisemitism drew Jews to communism in disproportionate numbers, particularly in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe.16
Ambivalence regarding Jewishness and Jews, nonetheless, characterized early communist thought and shaped Jewish-state relations under party rule for generations. Karl Marx predicted that the proletarian revolution would lead to the disappearance Jewishness, which he identified as the spirit of the bourgeoisie.17 Many Jewish communists held similar sentiments regarding their own heritage. Ethnic Jews served as political officers in the Soviet NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) in disproportionate numbers and often persecuted non-socialist Jews.18 Thus, from the
16 The classic work on this topic is Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism,
Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For an outline of recent revisions see Kenneth B. Moss, “At Home in Late imperial Russian Modernity–Except When They Weren’t: New Histories of Russian and East European Jews, 1881-1914,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 84 (June 2012): 401-42. See also idem., “1905 as a Jewish Cultural Revolution? Revolutionary and Evolutionary
Dynamics in the East European Jewish Cultural Sphere, 1900-1914,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, eds. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 185-98; Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1983); and Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).
17 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Problem (1844),” reprinted from Zur Judenfrage, 1844, ed. Ellis Rivkin and trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College, n.d.), 6-10 and 34-42, in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd edition (New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 324-27. See also Shlomo Avineri, “Marx and Jewish Emancipation,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol., 25, no. 3 (July-September 1964): 445-50.
18 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 220-21;