Ford's ninth chapter presents what he considered the most dramatic contemporary example of Jewish organizational power: the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Ford cited British intelligence documents — particularly a report prepared by the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1919 and circulated among Allied governments — that listed the ethnic backgrounds of the leadership of the Soviet government. Ford cited 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 examples of Jewish Bolshevik leaders. Ford acknowledged that Vladimir Lenin was not Jewish (though Ford noted that Lenin's maternal grandfather, Israel Blank, was Jewish — a fact that was suppressed in Soviet records during Lenin's lifetime).
Ford argued that the disproportionate Jewish representation in the Bolshevik leadership was not a coincidence but the product of the same organizational capacity and communal solidarity he had been describing throughout the series. He noted that Jews had been among the most persecuted groups under the Tsarist regime — confined to the Pale of Settlement, subject to periodic pogroms, excluded from most government positions and many professions. Ford acknowledged that this history gave Jewish intellectuals powerful personal motivation to participate in revolutionary movements. But he argued that the motivation did not explain the disproportionality: Jews were approximately 4 percent of the Russian population but constituted a far larger proportion of the Bolshevik party leadership and the early Soviet government.
Ford devoted considerable attention to the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote to Lord Walter Rothschild, a prominent British Jewish leader: '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 — a commitment by the British government to support Jewish settlement in Palestine — had been obtained by the organized Jewish community in exchange for Jewish support for bringing the United States into the First World War on the Allied side. Ford's specific claim was that American Jewish financiers and political leaders, including Louis Brandeis (by then a Supreme Court Justice), had been crucial in persuading Woodrow Wilson to abandon neutrality and enter the war in April 1917, and that the Balfour Declaration, issued seven months later, was part of the quid pro quo. This specific claim has been contested by historians, though the broader point — that Zionist leaders actively cultivated Allied governments in exchange for support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine — is documented in Zionist primary sources.
Ford's larger argument about Bolshevism and Zionism was that they represented two tracks of the same underlying Jewish national project: Bolshevism as the revolutionary method for destroying existing social orders that oppressed Jews, and Zionism as the constructive method for building a specifically Jewish national homeland. Ford cited statements from Jewish leaders in both movements who had articulated the connection between the two — including statements by Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow to the effect that the Jewish people needed both a homeland and a more just world order, and that both the Zionist and socialist movements were working toward these goals by different methods.