Senator Overman. “You think he brought these people with him?”
Mr. Simons. “I am not able to say that he brought them with him. I think that most of them came after him, but that he was responsible for their coming.”
Mr. Simons further states (Senate Report, p. 114):
“The latest startling information, given me by some one who says that there is good authority for it—and I am to be given the exact figures later on and have them checked up properly by the proper authorities—is this, that in December, 1918, in the northern community of Petrograd, so-called—that is what they call that section of the Soviet régime under the presidency of the man known as Mr. Apfelbaum—out of 388 members, only 16 happened to be real Russians, and all the rest Jews, with the exception possibly of one man, who is a negro from America, who calls himself Prof. Gordon, and 265 of the members of this northern commune government, that is sitting in the old Smolny Institute, came from the lower East Side of New York—265 of them.... In fact, I am very much impressed with this, that moving around here I find that certain Bolsheviki propagandists are nearly all Jews—apostate Jews. I have been in the so-called People’s House, at 7 East Fifteenth Street, New York, which calls itself also the Rand School of Social Science, and I have visited that at least six times during the last eleven weeks or so, buying their literature, and some of the most seditious stuff I have ever found against our own Government, and 19 out of every 20 people I have seen there have been Jews.”
On the same page, referring to a pamphlet written by one Albert Rhys Williams, Dr. Simons states:
“I have analyzed certain questions and answers, especially with regard to this paragraph on religion, and I have no doubt in my mind that the predominant element in this Bolsheviki movement in America is, you may call it, the Yiddish of the East Side.”
On page 116 the witness further states:
“I was impressed with this, Senator, that shortly after the great revolution of the winter of 1917 there were scores of Jews standing on the benches and soap boxes, and what not, talking until their mouths frothed, and I often remarked to my sister, ‘Well, what are we coming to, anyway? This all looks so Yiddish.’ Up to that time we had very few Jews, because there was, as you may know, a restriction against having Jews in Petrograd; but after the revolution they swarmed in there, and most of the agitators happened to be Jews. I do not want to be unfair to them, but I usually know a Jew when I see one.”
In a subsequent part of his testimony, he says:
“I had occasion to speak with people who were working and people who were not bourgeois, I interviewed hundreds, and I asked them, ‘Well, what do you think of this thing?’ ‘Well, we know that it is first of all German, and second, we know that it is Jewish. It is not a Russian proposition at all.’ That became so popular that as you moved through the streets in Petrograd in July and August and September and the beginning of October, openly they would tell you this, ‘This is not a Russian Government; this a German and Hebrew Government.’ And then others would come out and say, ‘And very soon there is going to be a big pogrom.’ As a result of that, hundreds of Bolshevik officials who happened to be Jews were sending their wives and their children out of Petrograd and Moscow, afraid that the pogrom would really come.” (p. 132).