A Jewish journalist (M. Waldman) who knew Trotsky from the period of his stay in Vienna ("when he used to play chess with Baron Rothschild in Cafe Central and frequent Cafe Daily to read the press there").¹

What could the Rothschilds, the biggest banking house in Europe, possibly have in common with a leader who wanted to destroy capitalism and private property? Conversely, why would a dedicated Communist be a close friend of the most powerful "capitalist oppressor" in the world? Could it be that they saw Communism and Zionism as two very different avenues to a similar goal of power and revenge against the Czars?

A number of questions arose: 1) Could Communism simply have been a tool they adapted to defeat and rule their Russian antagonists? 2) Were there other peoples with whom the Jews believed they were in conflict? 3) Was Communism originally part of a strategic imperative that reached far beyond the confines of Soviet Russia? These were important questions. I thought that I might find their answers in the philosophical origins of Communism.

I resolved to investigate the ideological roots of Communism. I found Das Kapital² and the Communist Manifesto,³ in my public library. Karl Marx's books were obtuse, especially the parts developing the Hegelian dialectic, but they made some sense if one believed mankind had a machine-like nature that Marx described. One of my teachers made the poorly thought out comment that Communism was great in theory but faulty in practice. To my way of thinking, to be a great idea it must work in practice, and Communism obviously doesn't. There has never been a theory that has promised more human happiness yet delivered more poverty, mental and physical oppression, and more human misery and death.

Until I looked into the foundations of Communism, I had always thought Karl Marx was a German. In fact, I had read that Marx's father was a Christian. It turns out that his father, a successful lawyer, was a Jew who had converted to Christianity after an edict prohibited Jews from practicing law. Much later, in 1977, I read an article from the Chicago Jewish Sentinel that revealed Marx as the grandson of a rabbi and "the descendant of Talmudic scholars for many generations."⁴