Jews and political radicalism

This article is about the history of ethnic Jews and political radicalism. For the antisemitic canard, see Jewish Bolshevism.
History
According to Paul Johnson, Jewish society in the last 1,500 years has been designed to produce and support intellectuals who largely focused their talents on rabbinical studies. Johnson asserts that "quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbinical studies, ... it unleashed a significant and ever-growing proportion of them into secular life. This was an event of shattering importance in world history."
20th century
Many young Jews rejected the Orthodoxy of their parents and turned to the great Jewish secular movements of Zionism, socialism, and Bundism . They viewed their parents' faith in the eventual coming of the Messiah as a dangerous passivity in the face of imminent danger to the Jewish people. They took their fate into their own hands and created new forms of secular Jewish messianic activity. Their concern for changing the world by rejecting their religious background shows how deeply they were immersed in the Jewish search for redemption.
Jewish Bolshevism
A persistent theme among antisemites—particularly those on the pre-World War II right—has been that the Bolshevik revolution was a Jewish revolution and that the Soviet Union was dominated by Jews. This theme appears in a wide range of writings, from Henry Ford's International Jew, to published statements by a long list of British, French, and American political figures in the 1920s (Sir Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and David Lloyd George), and, in its most extreme form, by Adolf Hitler, who wrote:

"Now begins the last great revolution. By wresting political power for himself, the Jew casts off the few remaining shreds of disguise he still wears. The democratic plebeian Jew turns into the blood Jew and the tyrant of peoples. In a few years he will try to exterminate the national pillars of intelligence and, by robbing the peoples of their natural spiritual leadership, will make them ripe for the slavish lot of a permanent subjugation. The most terrible example of this is Russia."

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