@MirCat In Defence of the Jews and Communism: Communism is rooted in a number of European philosophical ideas. Some thoughts about sharing equally might even emanate from the New Testament or other religious ideas. Some individuals have always been excessively greedy to the detriment of the many and humans have always tried to reconcile that to create a harmonious society. With the advent of capitalism, everything went haywire - the former happy, if poor, agricultural farmer, share farmer, or just plain peasant suddenly found himself forced into factory labour at ridiculous wages, into bad housing, with a bad, because insufficient diet; equally bad were the conditions for young women from a farming background, they became the meanest-paid servants of capitalism in the various factories (cotton mills in England, were almost entirely staffed with women).
Philosophical ideas about equality, just societies have been tested and tried over the ages, but became a necessity to be tackled in the 19th century. A very influential philosopher was a German by name of 'Hegel' - his ideas were taken up by people like Karl Marx and Engels, who began analysing and writing about what's ailing society and how to help it - they were humanitarians in the true sense of the word and yes, Karl Marx was Jewish. Jews, since the days of the diaspora when one of 'Jehova's' (!) commandments was to educate the first-born in each family - was made true by the Jews in exile, eduating their first-born, no matter what; hence they began a natural way/road towards forming an elite of educated people, different to the masses of ignorant populations in which they found themselves (I am not Jewish btw). How that eventually became their undoing is another story, professional jealousies by the similarly educated but non-jewish populations played a big part - but I don't want to go there.
I just want to show, how Jews, same as non-Jews became interested in social ideas - in fact Karl Marx's right-hand man Friedrich Engels was the son of a wealthy German factory owner, who had sent his son to manage his British cotton mills (who promptly became a communist, when he realised the bad conditions his father's workers laboured under) - he became the co-writer and sponsor of Karl Marx's ideas - and he co-wrote the 'Communist Manifesto' with Karl Marx. Engels had a Lutheran (converted from Judaism) father and a non-Jewish mother, but he -foremost - had a social conscience and he was a good philosopher as well as writer and a good human - getting his ideas from the German non-Jew 'Hegel'.
So: Jews by virtue of their education were naturally among the leaders of new ideas, also prominent in the arts, journalism and medicine (and there were probably just as many conservative ones around, too . . . . ) towards the end of the 19th century into the early 20th century.
The upshot of it: education is the key to success, being Jewish or not is irrelevant; except their focus is on education, the vast majority's focus is not. Stalin btw was not Jewish, he was the child of Georgian peasants and had been brought up in a seminary. Taurisk
