How many Bolsheviks were Jewish?

"Who is a Jew?"

There are some statistics about Jewish Bolsheviks. But who defined who a Jew was?

In the Soviet Union your nationality was shown in your passport (There were about 200 nationalities, some only with fewer than 10.000 members).

You could choose your nationality from your parents nationalities. If one of them was a Jew and the other a Russian you could choose whether you were identified as Jew or Russian.

This seems to be a bit arbitrary, but it's not.

Most Jews married other Jews. So most Jews (according to their passports) were in fact Jews. In the rarer cases where a person could choose to be a Jew or not, most persons chose to be a non-Jew (because of widespread antisemitism).

Therefore Israeli historian Benjamin Pinkus estimates that any statistic about Jews should be about 10% higher.

Was there a Jewish over-representation in the higher echelons?

Yes.

For example: In 1934 39% of the leading NKVD officials were Jews. While Jews only made up 1.9% of the population.

Does this mean that "Jewish Bolshevism" is true? No.

There are many counter-arguments to it. You should read "Neighbors" by Jan Tomasz Gross where he debunks "Jewish Bolshevism".

He is a physicist and as such very good with numbers.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

Leave a comment if you wish to know more.

Of the 21 full members of the Central Committee of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party at the time of the October 1917 Revolution, six were of Jewish origin. That makes 29%.

Just for comparison: of the twelve ANC members who were arrested together with Nelson Mandela in 1963, five were Jews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Committee_elected_by_the_6th_Congress_of_the_Russian_Social_Democratic_Labour_Party_(Bolsheviks)

I understand that by "bolshevik" we're really just referring to the majority party within the USSR (if that is correct?)

This is the original, most concrete definition of "Bolshevik", yes. Outside of Russia however, the term quickly became a more generic appellation for left-wing revolutionaries, Russia sympathizers and so. In contemporary usage the meaning of the term is perhaps even more vague.

In the Russian Empire, Jews may have been less than 5% of the total population. They would have been less in the heart of Russia itself. With that in mind, they were probably somewhat over-represented in the early years of what later became the Bolshevik Party.

But Jews were even more over-represented among the less radical Menshevik party. From the Wikipedia article on Bolsheviks: "In 1907, 78.3% of the Bolsheviks were Russian and 10% were Jewish (34% and 20% for the Mensheviks)." And at the time of the Russian Revolution itself and in the years after, the ratio of Jews among Bolsheviks had fallen significantly. Quoting from the Wikipedia article on Jewish Bolshevism:

On the eve of the February Revolution in 1917, of about 23,000 members of the Bolshevik party 364 (about 1.6%) were known to be ethnic Jews. According to the 1922 Bolshevik party census, there were 19,564 Jewish Bolsheviks, comprising 5.21% of the total, and in the 1920s of the 417 members of the Central Executive Committee, the party Central Committee, the Presidium of the Executive of the Soviets of the USSR and the Russian Republic, the People's Commissars, 6% were ethnic Jews.

So claims that Jews were something like 40% of the party, which did circulate at the time, were pure fabrications.

In Germany, Hitler and the Nazis pushed hard on the idea that Communism and other left wing ideas emerged from the supposed racial degeneracy of the Jews. I cannot find any hard numbers like the above to support the idea that Jews were in fact disproportionately represented in Germany's left wing parties.

It must be said that none of this is objective evidence in support of anti-Jewish racism. Given the oppression faced by Jews in Tsarist Russia and the rest of Europe, it should hardly be surprising that they may have been a significant part of the base for left-wing movements.