[49] "The Nikky-Willy Correspondence," Times, Sept. 4, 1917; Daily Telegraph, Sept. 4, 27, and 29, 1917; and Morning Post, Sept. 15, 1917.
[50] For Russian text of Count Lamsdorf's proposal see Vol. VI. of "Secret Documents," published by the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. An English translation with an introduction appears in Wolf: "Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question" (London, 1919), pp. 54-62.
[51] These leaflets were very promptly withdrawn as soon as the attention of His Majesty's Government was called to them.
[52] Besides Count Reventlow's article see a very light-giving article entitled "Reventlow und die Weisen von Zion" in the Berliner Tageblatt, May 18, 1920.
III
JEWS AND BOLSHEVISM
The final argument of the anti-Semitic scaremongers is the Judeo-Bolshevik bogey. The Morning Post theory of "World Unrest" may prove difficult of assimilation to matter-of-fact minds, and the authenticity of the Nilus Protocols may be suspect, but the Bolshevism of the Jews is asserted to be an incontrovertible fact, which proves that both the theory and its documents are morally justifiable. Were it not for its very tragical possibilities, the evocation of this bogey would be a fit subject for mirth, or, at best, a problem for the folk-lorist or the student of corporate hallucination. As it is, it is a very serious matter, seeing that the lives of many thousands of innocent persons are jeopardised by it.
The bogey takes the specific form of a charge against the Jews of Russia and Poland that they are for the most part Bolsheviks, and that the Bolshevist revolution was engineered by them and is still controlled and directed by them.[53] The only evidence cited in support of it is that Trotsky and a few of the more prominent Bolshevist commissaries are men of Jewish birth, and that a similar element on an even more restricted scale is found in certain of the Soviets. But those men are no more Jews than Lenin, Lunacharsky, Chicherin, and the great bulk of the Russian Bolsheviks are Christians. It would, indeed, be just as reasonable to say that the mainstay of Russian Bolshevism is to be found in American and British Christendom because it has found sympathisers in Mr. Bullitt and Mr. Steffens, in Mr. Goode, Mr. Price, Mr. Russell, Mr. Ransome, Mr. Hunt, and many other Americans and Englishmen of Christian birth.