Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-jbkpb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-15T04:11:48.712Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Demonizing Judaism in the Soviet Union during the 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert Weinberg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, Robert Weinberg explores the visual representation of Judaism and observant Jews in the Soviet journal Bezbozhnik u stanka (The atheist at the workbench), which appeared in the 1920s. In their efforts to promote atheism and undermine organized religion, the artists responsible for the images in this journal singled out the Jewish god to be depicted with inhuman, bestial, and bizarre features such as a single eye and a nose made out of a fist. This portrayal of Judaism and religious Jews drew upon the pervasive antisemitic tropes and motifs in Russian culture and society and served to demonize Judaism and its adherents.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 120 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

The author thanks the following friends and colleagues for their valuable comments and insights: Laurie Bernstein, Nathaniel Deutsch, Bruce Grant, Adele Lindenmeyr, Gary Marker, Louise McReynolds, Ben Nathans, Joan Neuberger, Mark Steinberg, the anonymous readers for Slavic Review, and the members of the Swarthmore College Department of History. I also appreciate the research funds provided by Swarthmore College and thank Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library for permission to use the illustrations contained in this article.

1. Some of the better known works covering this period are Zvi Gitelman,/eiuu/i Nationality and Soviet Politics: Thejewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 (Princeton, 1972), and Gitelman, , A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2d ed. (Bloomington, 2001)Google Scholar; Kochan, Lionel, ed., The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, 3d ed. (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; Levin, Nora, Thejews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Pinkus, Benjamin, The jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge, Eng., 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwarz, Solomon, Thejews in the Soviet Union (Syracuse, 1951).Google Scholar

2. See Shneer, David, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930 (Cambridge, Eng., 2004)Google Scholar; Shternshis, Anna, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Bloomington, 2006)Google Scholar; Slezkine, Yuri, Thejewish Century (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Veidlinger, Jeffrey, The Moscow State Jewish Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar; and articles in Yaacov Ro'i, ed.,Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union (London, 1995). See also Zvi Gitelman's pioneering work on thejewish Sections: Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics.

3. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 215.

4. Both the content and style of the drawings discussed in this article are extremely rich and evocative. I make no effort to analyze all aspects of their imagery and symbolism. All images presented in this article can be found in color on the Slavic Review web site: http://www.slavicreview.uiuc.edu.

5. For example, Perry, Marvin and Schweitzer, Frederick, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindemann, Albert, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Wistrich, Robert, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Katz, Jacob, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.,1980)Google Scholar; Chazan, Robert, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar; and Langmuir, Gavin, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990).Google Scholar

6. Klier, John, “Traditional Russian Religious Antisemitism,” Jewish Quarterly 46, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 30–31.Google Scholar

7. Klier, John, Imperial Russia's Jeiuish Question, 1855-1891 (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 417.Google Scholar

8. Avrutin, Eugene, “Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 18–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a different view, see Weinerman, Eli, “Racism, Racial Prejudice and Jews in Late Imperial Russia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 3 (July 1994): 442-95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Trachtenberg, Joshua, The Devil and the fetus: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven, 1943), xii.Google Scholar

10. Strickland, Debra Higgs, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003).Google Scholar

11. Robert Wistrich, “The Devil, the Jews, and Hatred of the ‘Other,’ “ in Robert Wistrich, ed., Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia (Amsterdam, 1999), 4.

12. It bears noting that Jews have not been the only group of people viewed as “subhuman … with evil overtones.” See Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “The Demonization of the 'Other’ in the Visual Arts,” in Wistrich, ed., Demonizing the Other, 44.

13. The journal Bezbozhnik (The godless, 1925-1941) and die newspaper Bezbozhnik (1922-1934 and 1938-1941) were sponsored by the League of the Godless, which spearheaded the antireligious campaign and took its cues from the Kremlin. Another journal sponsored by the League of die Godless, Antireligioznik (The man against religion), appeared between 1926 and 1941 and was intended to provide propagandists with historical background and methodological preparation.

14. Peris, Daniel, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998), chap. 2Google Scholar; and Husband, William, “Godless Communists“: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (DeKalb, 2000)Google Scholar.

15. The print run of Bezbozhnik u stanka fluctuated between 35,000 and 70,000, similar to the journal Bezbozhnik, but significantly less than the newspaper Bezbozhnik, a weekly under Iaroslavskii's control. Peris, Storming the Heavens, 74nn20 and 21; and Husband, “Godless Communists,” 60.

16. For example, of the approximately 140 issues of Bezbozhnik u stanka that appeared between 1923 and 1931, the covers of 12 included depictions of thejewish god or touched upon Jewish religious themes. Of these 12, 5 were devoted solely to Jewish matters.

17. Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (East Brunswick, N.J., 1981), 76.

18. Material concerned with Russian Orthodoxy and Islam were similar in tone and content in Bezbozhnik u stanka.

19. Young, Glennys, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (University Park, 1997), 259-65Google Scholar.

20. Drawings focusing primarily on women's concerns do appear from time to time. In a full-page color illustration of three Jewish women in a mikva (ritual bath), one of the women assisting with the bath has a misshapen, simian face and body, and the mikva's water is teeming with several kinds of insects. A brief discussion of the religious function of the ritual bath accompanies the drawing, but the writer emphasizes the bath's unsanitary nature. Interestingly, the story on the mikva precedes one written by a physician who claims to expose the link between religious prejudice and the prevalence of venereal disease among Russian men and women. Bezbozhnik u stanka, 1924, no. 6: 16 and 17.

21. A phylactery (tefila [singular], tefilin [plural] in Hebrew) is a small, leather case containing pieces of paper with passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. During morning prayers a pious Jew uses leather strips to fasten one phylactery to the forehead and another to the left arm.

22. Devotees of Star Trek will no doubt recognize the priestly benediction as the Vulcan hand greeting (“Live Long and Prosper“) used by Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy has said diat he remembered the gesture from services in the Montreal synagogue he attended as a youth.

23. On the notion of political transparency during revolutionary eras, see Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), esp. 44–46 and 72-74Google Scholar. See also Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999)Google Scholar, where she discusses the unmasking of enemies during the purges of the 1930s. The Bolshevik fixation on unmasking enemies can be seen in other visual representations of the time. For example, Viktor Deni's 1920 poster “The Entente under the Mask of Peace” shows a capitalist holding a face mask with a peaceful repose that conceals his real face, which is threatening and odious. For a reproduction of the Deni poster, see White, Stephen, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven, 1988), 17.Google Scholar

24. The editors added “u stanka” soon after they issued the second number in order to distinguish the journal from the newspaper Bezbozhnik.

25. This practice stemmed from God commanding Moses to remove his shoes as he approached the burning bush.

26. For example, Bezbozhnik u stanka, 1927, no. 4: 20; 1928, no. 9: 6; and 1930, no. 22: cover.

27. Deuteronomy 6:3 and 7:6-7, 24 and Leviticus 26:12.

28. The kneeling may allude to the injunction against Jews’ prostrating themselves before false gods.

29. Bonnell, Victoria, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 14.Google Scholar

30. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 19.

31. Press, Political Cartoon, 20-21. “A good cartoon does not contain unnecessary complications in its imagery…. A related point is that the imagery should not get too complicated, because the artist may run the danger of saying more than he or she wants to say” (22-23, emphasis in the original). The artist also runs the risk of saying less than was intended, however, leaving a viewer who cannot or does not understand the cartoon.

32. Verdery, Katherine, “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism'?” Daedulus 122, no. 3 (1993): 36–46.Google Scholar

33. I thank my colleagues Nathaniel Deutsch and Martin Ostwald for these observations. Similarly, an all-seeing eye located within a triangle was used to represent the Supreme Being during the rule of Robespierre during the French Revolution. Like the Jewish deity, Robespierre's Supreme Being lacked physical representation. See Hunt, Lynn, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992), 154-56.Google Scholar

34. Ryan, W. F., The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park, 1999), 32–34.Google Scholar

35. Gravel, Pierre Bettez, The Malevolent Eye: An Essay on the Evil Eye, Fertility and the Concept ofMana (New York, 1995), 6.Google Scholar

36. Park, Roswell, The Evil Eye Thanatology (Boston, 1912), 17.Google Scholar

37. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford, 1993), 2:2870.

38. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 42 and 159; and Boris Uspensky, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, ed. Stephen Rudy (Lisse, Belgium, 1976), 39.

39. Aptekman, Marina, “Kabbalah, Judeo-Masonic Myth, and Post-Soviet Literary Discourse: From Political Tool to Virtual Parody,” Russian Review 65, no. 4 (October 2006): 659.Google Scholar

40. On the history of Freemasonry in Russia, see Smith, Douglas, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb, 1999)Google Scholar; and Serkov, Andrei, Istoriia russkogo masonstva, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1997-2000)Google Scholar. See also the review essay by Faggionato, Raffaella, “New and Old Works on Russian Freemasonry,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 111-28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Bezbozhnik u stanka, 1927, no. 7: 10, no. 8: 7, and no. 9: cover.

42. The connection among NEP, Jews, and Judaism continued to resonate even after the decisive turn against NEP a year or two later. An issue of the newspaper Bezbozhnik from 1930 shows a drawing of a rabbi with the inscription “NEPman.” The illustration accompanied an article on how to make antireligious costumes for celebrating 7 Novem ber, the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Bezbozhnik, no. 59 (25 October 1930): 7.

43. Ball, Alan M., Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley, 1987), 165.Google Scholar

44. In addition to the illustrations in this essay, see also Bezbozhnik u stanka, 1924, no. 5: cover; 1927, no. 4: 20; and 1930, no. 22: cover; Bezbozhnik, 1928, no. 13: cover.

45. Andrea de Jorio, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity (Bloomington, 2000), 214-15. Dejorio's original work appeared in 1832.

46. Periodicals on both sides of the political spectrum used the image after the 1905 revolution. The right-wing, antisemidc journals Pliuvium (1906-1908), Veche stol'nago gorodaKieva (1907), Veche (1905-1909), and Knut (1906-1908) displayed their dissatisfaction with the liberal reforms granted by Nicholas II, while the left-leaning satirical journals Gorchishnik (1906) and Gudok (1906) used the image to emphasize their opposition to efforts to turn back the achievements of the revolution. The cover of Gudok's initial issue from 1906 shows two sinister-looking, devilish hands giving the mano in fica to a rising sun diat symbolizes the dawning of freedom in Russia. The caption reads, “The doubleheaded … fica,” a play on the tsarist emblem of the double-headed eagle.

47. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 47.

48. Ryan, Bathhouse at Midnight, 55. See also Matthew 25:33, 41.

49. Nevertheless, the Jews represented in Bezbozhnik u stanka do not have horns, another hallmark of antisemitic iconography associating Jews with the devil.

50. Of the illustrations diat appear in this essay, Moor drew 1, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 15. Cheremnykh drew 6, 8, 9, and 10.

51. White, Bolshevik Poster, 41-43; and Iurii Khalaminskii, Moor: Sovetskii khudozhnik (Moscow, 1961), 74. According to Khalaminskii, Moor drew partial inspiration for his de piction of the Christian god from the writer Lev Tolstoi and the anarchist Petr Kropotkin, both of whom had long, flowing white beards (75).

52. Khalaminskii, Moor, 73.

53. White, Bolshevik Poster, 65-71.

54. Cheremnykh, Nikolai, Khochetsia, chtoby znali i drugie … Vospominaniia o M. M. Cheremnykh (Moscow, 1965), 95–114.Google Scholar

55. Gitelman's book Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics remains the best book on efforts to spread the revolution to Soviet Jewry. Other accounts of the efforts of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia to reshape Jewish identity in the 1920s are Slezkine, Jewish Century, chaps. 3 and 4; Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher; Veidlinger, Moscow State Jewish Yiddish Theater; and Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture. See also Shneer, , “Having It Both Ways: Jewish Nation Building and Jewish Assimilation in the Soviet Empire,” Ah Imperio, no. 4(2003) and no. 2 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 190 and 197.

57. The following data offer one indication of the changing rates of acculturation. In 1897, at the time of the first empirewide census, slightly more than 97 percent of Jews residing in the Russian empire (excluding that part of Poland under tsarist control) reported using Yiddish or another Jewish language (Judeo-Tadjik, Judeo-Tat, and Judeo-Crimean) as their mother tongue. Among this same group, 31 percent of men and 16 percent of women claimed to have reading knowledge of Russian. Some thirty years later, in 1926, the percentage of Jews who stated they used Yiddish or another Jewish language as their mother tongue had declined to just over 70 percent. The rate of linguistic acculturation continued apace, and by 1939 a majority of Jews (54.6 percent) responded that Russian was their first language, slightly more than double the percentage recorded in 1926. Altshuler, Mordechai, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem, 1998), 90–91 Google Scholar; and Pinkus, Benjamin, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948-1967: A Documentary Study (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. See figures 5 and 7 and drawings in Bezbozhnik u stanka, 1926, no. 7: cover and 1930, no. 22: cover.

59. In the 1920s it was not an uncommon practice for the regime to accuse Orthodox priests of sodomy and pedophilia as a way to condemn organized religion as the corrupter of youth.

60. Islam could have served as a substitute for Judaism, but anti-Islamic prejudices lacked antisemitism's deep historical roots in Russia.

61. I thank Mark Steinberg for helping me with these ideas and coming up with the word “hazardous” to describe die impact of using antisemitic sentiments in Bezbozhnik u stanka.

62. Der Sturmer, no. 6 (February 1926): 1 and no. 28 (July 1927): 1.

63. Pagels, Elaine, The Origin of Satan (New York, 1995), 182-84.Google Scholar

64. Pagels, Elaine “The Devil Problem,” in Remnick, David, ed., The Devil Problem and Other True Stories (New York, 1996), 219.Google Scholar

65. See Gregor, Richard, ed., Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, vol. 2, The Early Soviet Period: 1917-1929 (Toronto, 1974), 65 Google Scholar; Luukkanen, Arto, TheParty of Unbelief: The Religious Policy of the Bolshevik Party, 1917-1929 (Helsinki, 1994), 100 Google Scholar; Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 313; and Zel'tser, Arkadii, Evrei sovetskoi provinlsii: Vitebsk i mestechki 1917-1941 (Moscow, 2006)Google Scholar.

66. As a publication of the Moscow party organization, Bezbozhnik u stanka likely fell victim to the efforts of the party's highest authorities to integrate all organizations devoted to the war on religion under the direction of one institution, namely Iaroslavskii's League of the Godless, renamed the League of the Militant Godless in 1929.

67. Yens, Storming the Heavens, 7b.

68. Der ernes first appered in 1918. Interestingly, the September 1934 issue of Der apikoyres has a drawing of a one-eyed Jehovah giving a bag of money to a capitalist.

69. See Peris, Storming the Heavens; Husband, “Godless Communists“; and Young, Power and the Sacred.