ABSTRACT
Anti-fascism was both a defining and complicated feature for Jewish communist cadres in Central Europe. In this chapter, such complex identities are analysed and interrogated through the examples of particular defendants in the Rajk and Slánský trials in post-war war Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In effect, by tapping into longstanding social prejudice and scapegoating against Jews, consolidating Stalinist regimes were able to reconstruct the identities of defendants evidenced by nature of the indictments, rhetoric within the trials, and through state-controlled media. In reality, there was no singular form of Jewish communist identity nor Jewish anti-fascist resister, but through the trials Jews were racialized as objectively guilty Zionists and conspirators, in a manner not dissimilar to earlier racialization by Nazis. In so doing, the usable pasts of individual defendants were mobilized and maligned: anti-fascist credentials and secular Jewish identities were moulded into their opposite: the biographical ‘facts’ of allegedly pro-fascist Zionists ‘of Jewish origin’ were rearranged and woven together to ‘prove’ far-reaching conspiracies. Pretrial, defendants would have been lauded for their anti-fascism; as defendants they were even more suspect given both overt and coded antisemitism in trial interrogation and testimony. This was true even for László Rajk who, while not Jewish, was effectively ‘Judafied’ by an unpopular (and Jewish) leader, Mátyás Rákosi. Rudolf Slánský never identified as Jewish and was deeply committed to Muscovite communism, even to the point of engaging in the targeting of others before he too became a victim yet was still framed by antisemitism.
