Ford's ninth chapter presents what he saw as the boldest recent example of Jewish organizing power: the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Ford cited British intelligence documents — mainly a 1919 report by the British Secret Intelligence Service, shared among Allied governments — that listed the ethnic backgrounds of the Soviet government's leaders. Ford named figures such as Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Grigory Zinoviev (born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky), Lev Kamenev (born Lev Borisovich Rosenfeld), Karl Radek (born Karol Sobelsohn), and Yakov Sverdlov as Jewish Bolshevik leaders. Ford admitted Vladimir Lenin was not Jewish, though he noted that Lenin's maternal grandfather, Israel Blank, was Jewish — a fact kept out of Soviet records during Lenin's lifetime.
Ford argued that the large Jewish share of Bolshevik leaders was no accident but the result of the same organizing skill and community solidarity he described across the series. He noted that Jews had been among the most persecuted groups under the Tsar — held in the Pale of Settlement, hit by regular pogroms, shut out of most government jobs and many professions. Ford agreed this history gave Jewish intellectuals strong personal reasons to join revolutionary movements. But he argued that reason did not explain the imbalance: Jews were about 4 percent of Russia's population but a far larger share of the Bolshevik party leadership and the early Soviet government.
Ford gave a lot of attention to the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leading British Jewish figure: 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.'
Ford argued that the Balfour Declaration — Britain's pledge to support Jewish settlement in Palestine — was won by the organized Jewish community in exchange for Jewish help bringing the United States into World War I on the Allied side. His specific claim was that American Jewish financiers and political leaders, including Louis Brandeis (by then a Supreme Court Justice), were key in getting Woodrow Wilson to drop neutrality and enter the war in April 1917, and that the Balfour Declaration, issued seven months later, was part of the trade. Historians dispute that specific claim. But the broader point — that Zionist leaders actively courted Allied governments in exchange for support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine — is recorded in Zionist primary sources.
Ford's bigger argument was that Bolshevism and Zionism were two tracks of the same Jewish national project: Bolshevism as the way to tear down the social orders that oppressed Jews, and Zionism as the way to build a Jewish homeland. Ford cited leaders in both movements who linked the two — including Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, who said the Jewish people needed both a homeland and a fairer world order, and that the Zionist and socialist movements were working toward those goals by different means.