Jewish Bolshevism
conspiracy theory that Jews have been the driving force behind Communist movements
Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an antisemitic, anti-communist conspiracy theory, and myth that claims that a Jewish conspiracy was behind the Russian Revolution of 1917, controlled the Soviet Union and international communist movements, and had a secret plan to control or destroy Western civilization; or, more generally, it is the antisemitic myth that Bolshevism was fundamentally Jewish. It was one of the main Nazi beliefs that served as an ideological justification for the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.
After the Russian Revolution, the catchword was the title of the pamphlet The Jewish Bolshevism, which featured in the racist propaganda of the anti-communist White movement forces during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922). During the 1930s, the Nazi Party in Germany and the German American Bund in the United States propagated the antisemitic theory to their followers, sympathisers, and fellow travellers. Nazi Germany used the trope to implement anti-Slavic policies and initiate racial war against the Soviet Union, portraying Slavs as inferior humans controlled by Jews to destroy Aryan people.
In Poland, Żydokomuna was a term for the antisemitic opinion that the Jews had a disproportionately high influence in the administration of Communist Poland. Although a sizeable minority of Polish Communists were Jewish, Polish Jews were equally supportive of Communism as Catholics at around 7% by vote, and much of the party's support came from Belarusians and Ukrainians. In far-right politics, "Jewish Bolshevism", "Jewish Communism", and the ZOG conspiracy theory are catchwords asserting that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy.
Origins
The conflation of Jews and revolution emerged in the atmosphere of destruction of Russia during World War I. When the revolutions of 1917 crippled Russia's war effort, conspiracy theories developed far from Berlin and Petrograd. Some commentators in Britain ascribed the revolution to an "apparent conjunction of Bolsheviks, Germans and Jews".
“Jewish Bolshevism” enters the record as conspiracy theory that Jews have been the driving force behind Communist movements. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jewish, Bolshevism and conspiracy can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q701198. The Library of Congress control number is sh85070270. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1918 and 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jewish Bolshevism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.