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Jews in the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920-1948: Ethnic Susceptibility, Generational Divergence and Party Strategy
This PhD thesis was accepted at the University of Sheffield in January 2001.
Jews have been disproportionately represented in socialist and communist parties throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Britain, approximately 7-10 per cent of Communist Party activists in the early 1950s were Jews even though they formed less than one per cent of the national population. My thesis, 'Jews in the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920-1948: Ethnic Susceptibility, Generational Divergence and Party Strategy', sought to explain the Jewish-communist relationship and explored in general the relationship between ethnic and political identity within modern European political history.
The basis of my research was the development of a model of interaction, which was used to explain what has been termed by Professor Jaff Schatz 'The Riddle of Jewish Radicalism': why were so many communists Jews. but also why were so few Jews ever communist? The proposed model identified the factors of ethnic susceptibility and generational divergence within the British Jewish community which led to communist sympathies. However, the critical aspect in determining why Jews did or did not join the CP was the interaction between these factors and those of the Communist Party's own strategies of recruitment.
My approach is interdisciplinary; it synthesises the thematic and contextual sensitivities of historical methodology with the structural and model driven dynamics of political science. It offers not only a solution to the question of why Jews joined the Communist Party but also why people join political parties in general. The emphasis is on the processes of recruitment and the degree to which these are shaped by prevailing social, cultural and political conditions. It is not sufficient to discuss only the ethnic dimension but also those elements that relate to the activities of the political party. The party was the physical embodiment and organisational nexus of the communist ideology. It alone was responsible for acquiring a membership with which to pursue political goals. The range and complexity of Jewish communist personal histories can be contrasted with the singularity of the party. The party is not just another factor to rank alongside those of anti-Semitism and socio-economic conditions; it is of a very different nature. All Jews that joined the Communist Party did so because they were recruited in one way or another. The emphasis is on the approach of the party towards recruitment: the methods and techniques used to build a membership. It is the pattern of variance of recruitment methods, in effectiveness and scope, in differing contexts of susceptibility that determines, within the limits set by probability, why some Jews do not join and others do.
It is surprising how infrequently the role of party recruitment is discussed by historians and political scientists, and how little stress is placed upon it when it is mentioned. The belief appears to be that only the individual is the historical agent in decisions over party selection not the political party itself. The assumption is that the party will recruit whoever turns to it. In fact, this is far from the case, as recruitment is a complex process of interaction between individual and institution and one that depends as much on party context as it does on personal choice. The concern of academics is generally with party policies, ideology, personalities, and the impact of historical events. There is little discussion of the organisational and structural features of a political party in relation to context. The fact, for instance, that the actual number of members is always far smaller than the number of potential members or supporters is usually given only a cursory acknowledgement and is not regarded as of considerable significance. However, to the British Communist Party the evidence that it always had a significantly higher number of sales of its daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, and more electoral votes than its membership count, was a crucial issue. The great hope of the Communist Party was that it could turn support into membership and so build the party into a mass party. It was the Communist Party's strategy to turns the hostile into the neutral, the apathetic into the aware, to guide the interested into activity and, crucially, to transform the supporter into a member. Where it failed to do this the potential recruit became the lost recruit.
My research demonstrates that the Jewish communist phenomenon must be understood within the political structures and historical context of the Communist Party. This emphasis is not to diminish the importance of Jewish identity but rather to view it through the prism of a political organisation. It is only through an analysis of how the political party develops its policies and strategies and how it responds to external and internal pressures that the complex subject of ethno-politics can be properly addressed.
