The appearance of the bogey at this moment is not difficult to understand. There has always been at the back of the anti-Semitic mind an uneasy feeling that the Jews are, as the old law books say, _perpetui inimici Regis et Religionis_. Their participation in the bourgeois Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave political point to this superstition, and ever since it has been a favourite theory of the more fanatical reactionaries that the whole Democratic movement in Europe is a Jewish conspiracy for the subversion of Christianity and Christian society. In this respect the _Morning Post_ theory is, as has already been shown, not new. In Russia it became early an expedient of reactionary tactics. To denounce revolution on its merits was difficult, but to denounce it as a Jewish conspiracy against the Throne and the Altar was always calculated to impress large classes of the population who otherwise might not have been indisposed to look indulgently on a great political change. This was the cue of all the incendiary appeals of the Okhrana against the Revolution of 1905.[54]
Thus, when Bolshevism arose, it was quite in the line of traditional Russian policy to denounce it as the work of the Jews. From the reactionary camps of Deniken and Koltchak, and even from the Allied armies in the North, where the Intelligence and Propaganda Services were necessarily in the hands of Russian officers of the old Tsarist _régime_, the country was flooded with pamphlets and broadsheets declaring that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot, and that the aim of those who were making war on it was not to fight their Russian brothers, but to deliver them from their Jewish bondage. It was, however, in Germany that the bogey was adapted for consumption in Western Europe. The old Junker anti-Semitism received a great impulse from the collapse of thrones which followed the Armistice of 1918. All the revolutionary movements were at once attributed by them to the Jews, and, by way of showing the victorious Allies the danger they were courting by tolerating them, bloodcurdling pictures of Russian Bolshevism as the first fruits of an international Jewish conspiracy were issued from the presses of the anti-Semitic society known as _Deutschland's Erneuerung_, in Munich.[55] A circle of Russian Monarchist refugees in Berlin founded a weekly paper called _The Sunbeam_ to help in the holy work. It was in the columns of this journal that translations of extracts from Nilus's forged Protocols first appeared.[56] Early in 1919 the themes of these imbecile ephemerides were gathered up and co-ordinated in bulky volumes by Baron Hans von Liebig,[57] by Dr. Friedrich Wichtl, and by a person calling himself "Wilhelm Meister."[58] These writers were the final artificers of the bogey as we now know it, Trotsky being represented in their pages as the conscious instrument not only of the Jewish Rabbinate and of Jewish finance, but also of the secretly Judaised Masonic Lodges. A curious restatement of this apocalypse will be found in an anonymous pamphlet, entitled "Le Bolshevisme," which was printed in Paris last year by the Jesuits of the Rue Garancière.[59] The French, however, have been very loth to touch this unclean product of German _Kultur_.