Leon Trotsky was both an intellectual and a man of action.

One of the charismati c leaders of the Russian RevolutionLenin said there was no better Bolshevikhe crea ted the Red Army through virtually an act of will and led it to victory in the 1 918-20 civil war. But he was also a mesmerizing dissenter, sent by Stalin into e xile in 1927 and then murdered in Mexico by one of Stalin's agents in 1940. Trotsky was Jewishborn Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879and it is as such that he i s treated in Joshua Rubenstein's brief biography, part of Yale University Press' s Jewish Lives series. Trotsky said that his ethnic background had not the sligh test influence on his life. But no one inquiring into his origins can ignore wha t it meant to be a Jew in a Russia permeated with anti-Semitism or can suppose t hat because Trotsky opposed Zionismor, indeed, any movement or policy that favore d Jewshe was unaffected when many of his actions were attributed to his Jewishnes s. Isaac Deutscher, the author of the classic biography of Trotsky (three volumes, published between 1954 and 1963), largely took his subject at his word, noting o nly those instances when Trotsky himself raised the issue of his Jewishness. Tro tsky rejected, for example, Lenin's wish to appoint him commissar of home affair s in 1917, pointing out, according to Deutscher, that counter-revolutionaries wo uld "whip up anti-Semitic feeling and turn it against the Bolsheviks." After Len in died in 1924, Trotsky appealed to Nicolai Bukharin, a fellow Politburo member , to speak out against the anti-Semitic Party members working for Stalin who had begun "hinting" (Deutscher's word) that Trotsky had better give way to "native and genuine Russian socialism." Otherwise, Deutscher is as silent as his subject about the nexus between "Trotsky and the Jews." That is the title of a chapter in Robert Service's "Trotsky" (2009), which provi des helpful background. Trotsky was not a so-called self-hating Jew. He often li ved among Jews in Russia and abroad, but he described himself as an "internation alist," which meant that he wanted nothing whatever to do with specifically Jewi sh causes. He neither favored nor discriminated against Jews and spoke up for th em only in terms of his defense of all minorities suffering discrimination. Mr. Service, however, clarifies an aspect of Trotsky's belief and behavior that bears directly on what Mr. Rubenstein calls Trotsky's "curiously passive" stance during the period after Lenin's death, when Stalin was busily lining up allies and consolidating his hold on power. Mr. Service observes: "Trotsky continued to believe that his own prominence in government, party and army did practical dam age to the revolutionary cause." Surprisingly, Mr. Rubenstein, who is highly cri tical of Mr. Service's biography for its "gratuitous criticism of Trotsky's char acter and personality" and its failure "to understand the full complexity of Tro tsky's relationship to his Jewish origin," does less in a whole book than Mr. Se rvice did in that single sentence to explain why it waswith the fate of a revolut ion in his hands, with at least the chance to outwit and even outgun StalinTrotsk y hesitated and so lost. (He also underestimated his opponent, thinking that bec ause Stalin had neither his intellect nor experience, he would fail.) To put it another way, Mr. Rubenstein's Trotsky is not Jewish enough. Like Deuts cher, he seems beguiled by Trotsky's own denials. In one sense, this accession i s understandable. How can the biographer say being a Jew was important to Trotsk y when Trotsky's public pronouncements and actionsand even his private behaviorsee m devoid of any sort of Jewish resonance. To harp on his Jewishness, to endow it with special qualities, would play into the most anti-Semitic notions of Jewish ness. But though Trotsky never tired of saying "I'm no Jew, I'm an international ist," he knew very well that nothing would change ingrained prejudices. And so k nowledge of his Jewishness affected his decisions at the most important moment o f his career. Although Mr. Rubenstein conscientiously describes Trotsky's dealings with Jews a

nd Jewish issues, he is wary of attributing any feelings and motivations about T rotsky's ethnicity to Trotsky himself. He never mentions it in analyzing Trotsky 's downfall, for instance, though this is ascribed to many factors: Trotsky's ea rly opposition to Lenin, which many Bolsheviks could not forgive; Trotsky's inde pendent and outspoken attitudes, which, mixed with contempt for his rivals, made it difficult for him to secure allies; Trotsky's refusal to act as ruthlessly a s his opponent; the strange and seemingly psychosomatic fevers that felled Trots ky at critical moments; and Trotsky's absolute faith in the authority of the par ty that was in the vanguard of history and his countervailing lack of faith in i ndividuals. These are all reason enough for Trotsky's decisive failure, and they have been c arefully canvassed in the many other Trotsky biographies. And yet a biographer c harged with looking at a single issue and how it played out in Trotsky's life mi ght just want to exercise a little boldness, not refuting the multiple reasons f or Trotsky's failure to seize power but suffusing them with the underlying premi se that, in the eyes of so many others, once a Jew, always a Jewas Trotsky himsel f knew full well. Only once does Mr. Rubenstein seem to recognize Trotsky's lifelong plight. The b iographer recounts his subject's response to the case of Mendel Beilis, a brickfactory worker accused of murdering a 12-year-old boy in Kiev in 1912, supposedl y to use the blood to prepare matzoh for the Passover holidaythe old blood libel. The trumped-up charges and trial gave rise to world-wide protests and were trea ted by Trotsky as a czarist effort to stir up anti-Semitism (always a useful out let for discontent). Trotsky wrote extensively about the trial (unmentioned in the Deutscher or Servi ce biographies), not merely denouncing it but expressing his disgust even after the jury acquitted Beilis. The cautious Mr. Rubenstein notes that Trotsky's comm itment to social justice had "several sources," none of which Trotsky attributed to his Jewish upbringing. But then, summing up Trotsky's passionate coverage of both the Beilis case and earlier the oppressed Jewish community in Romania, he adds this, the most important passage in his whole book: Perhaps he did not think of himself as a Jew in the same way that they were Jews ; he was a Marxist, a convinced internationalist, a man who resisted any narrow parochial appeal in the name of a universal, political faith. But he had still b een born and raised as a Jew. Perhaps the starkness of their lives touched somet hing so deep inside his emotional life that he needed to vomit it out, to disgor ge it before it compelled him to see himself in their faces. At moments like the se, Leon Trotsky was a Jew in spite of himself. And I would add: not only at those moments. Just at the moment when Trotsky comm anded the world stage and still had time to stop Stalin, he may very well have w ondered about doing permanent injury to the revolution he had done so much to br ing about by now vouchsafing it to a Jew. As an introduction to Trotsky, Mr. Rub enstein's biography is succinct and reliable. As the last word on Trotsky as Jew , it seems surprisingly reluctant to pick up on the strains in history and in Tr otsky's own character that made it impossible for a Jew to command Lenin's legac y.