Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/55

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It is not unnaturally claimed by Western Jews that Russian Jewry, as a whole, is most bitterly opposed to Bolshevism. Now although there is a great measure of truth in this claim, since the prominent Bolsheviks, who are preponderantly Jewish, do not belong to the orthodox Jewish Church, it is yet possible, without laying oneself open to the charge of anti-semitism, to point to the obvious fact that Jewry, as a whole, has, consciously or unconsciously, worked for and promoted an international, economic, material despotism, which, with Puritanism as an ally, has tended in an ever-increasing degree to crush national and spiritual values out of existence and substitute the ugly and deadening machinery of finance and factory. It is also a fact that Jewry, as a whole, strove every nerve to secure and heartily approved of the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, which they regarded as their most formidable obstacle in the path of their ambitions and business pursuits. All this may be admitted, as well as the plea that, individually or collectively, most Jews may heartily detest the Bolshevik régime, yet it is still true that the whole weight of Jewry was in the revolutionary scales against the Tzar's government. It is true their apostate brethren, who are now riding in the seat of power, may have exceeded their orders; that is disconcerting, but it does not alter the fact. It may be that the Jews, often the victims of their own idealism, have always been instrumental in bringing about the events they most heartily disapprove of; that maybe is the curse of the Wandering Jew.

Certainly it is from the Jews themselves that we learn