The Judeo-Bolshevik Myth

Guest: Paul Hanebrink is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University specializing in modern East Central Europe, with a particular focus on Hungary, nationalism and antisemitism as modern political ideologies, and the place of religion in the modern nation-state. He’s the author of In Defense of Christian Hungary. His most recent book is A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism published by Harvard University Press.This week’s podcast is a interview with Paul Hanebrink about his new book A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism published by Harvard University Press. Music: Vladimir Leont’ev, “Polet na del’taplane,” 1983. Here’s a partial transcript to whet your appetite.  If you like these transcripts and want to read more, then support them by becoming a patron of the SRB Podcast. This abridged version of the interview has been edited for clarity. Your new book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, is, as far as I know, one of the first historical investigations into the history of Judeo-Bolshevism. What inspired you to write this study? I think you put your finger on it. There was not such a book that satisfied me. I came to this project already in the late 1990s. I was in Hungary at the time doing work on my dissertation which was about the concept in Hungarian politics of Christian Nationalism, which Viktor Orban has recently brought back. I was looking at the relationship between nationalism, Christianity and anti-Semitism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and I saw a couple of links between them that really intrigued me. On the one hand, I was seeing in all of my sources a real preoccupation with the role that Jews had played in the very short but very cataclysmic Bolshevik revolution that Hungary experienced in 1919. There was a lot of discussion afterwards, both in the immediate aftermath and in the decades following, about how that could have happened, how Jews got this kind of power, what kind of legacy of what was perceived by almost everybody on the national spectrum as an episode of Jewish power, and what that meant for Hungarian history. Then this kept coming back in which people in the 1940s referred to the debates of the 1920s. That was one set of issues. The second was that, as I was doing my work in the archive and trying to come up with a workable dissertation, I was also paying attention to public conversations that were going on in Hungary at the time. This was after 1989 and there was a lot of discussion in the press among historians, but also in the wider public, about the role that Jews had played in the Communist regime after 1945 and the degree to which this fact ought to be relevant or whether it should be relevant to debates about, for example, the history of the Holocaust in Hungary. More generally, what that meant for a reappraisal Hungarian history from a post-Communist perspective. There was a lot of grappling with whether the Jewish role was relevant. People on the nationalist right said that it absolutely was, and they wanted to make comparisons with the Holocaust in various ways. People on left were pushing back. I was very interested in that debate. It struck me that there wasn’t a book that really dealt with the fact that the Judeo-Bolshevik myth was a recurring issue from one historical context to the next across the 20...