BOOK REVIEW : Stalin: A Man Obsessed by Jews, Doctors : STALIN’S WAR AGAINST THE JEWS; The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution <i> by Louis Rapoport</i> Free Press $22.95, 293 pages

“Hitler was our enemy, but he was right about the Jews,” a Soviet interrogator ranted at Miron Vovsi in a Moscow torture cell in 1953. “We will bury you and your filthy race 10 meters deep. We never let our corn grow too high. We cut it at the right time.”

Vovsi was one of nine Kremlin physicians--six of them Jewish--whose arrest in 1953 signaled the last and most ominous phase of an official campaign against the Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. As recounted by Israeli journalist Louis Rapoport in “Stalin’s War Against the Jews,” the so-called Doctors’ Plot was nothing less than Stalin’s pretext for a new Holocaust. The whole of the Jewish population, Rapoport insists, was to suffer for the imagined crimes of the “assassins in white coats” who were accused of poisoning the Kremlin elite.

Only a quarter or so of “Stalin’s War” is devoted to the Doctors’ Plot itself. The rest of the book is an urgent, hectic, but mostly fascinating survey of Stalin’s visceral anti-Semitism and how it was manifested in the power struggle among the old Bolsheviks and the agonies of the Soviet Union throughout the Great Terror of the 1930s and World War II.

Thus, for example, Rapoport reaches all the way back to Stalin’s early years in the small Georgian town of Gori, where he might have encountered a Jewish doctor during one of his childhood illnesses. Was this “the village quack,” Rapoport speculates, whom Stalin later described with disdain?

Or did Stalin hate Jews because several of his rivals in the Bolshevik leadership--including his archenemy and bogeyman, Trotsky--were of Jewish parentage?

Rapoport shows us Stalin as a man obsessed by an imagined linkage between Jews and doctors, doctors and death by poisoning. He reminds us that “doctor-poisoners” were accused of murdering Maxim Gorky during the show trials of the 1930s; he insists that Stalin himself disposed of his own adversaries by the discreet use of poisons in the Kremlin clinics.

“A modus operandi emerged,” he writes, “akin to the methods employed by the Borgias, the Caesars, and the Pharaohs.” But Stalin was a murderer on a grand scale, and he was not content with occasional feats of “medical murder.” What Rapoport describes as “Stalin’s War Against the Jews” is really a 50-year chronicle of oppression and terror, including a meticulous account of the liquidation of Jewish observances and Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union.

Much attention is paid, for instance, to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a cynical wartime propaganda effort by the Soviet Union that managed to fool the Jewish community in the United States. Rapoport is particularly harsh on Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Rabbi Stephen Wise, whom he accuses of “acting in the spirit of those who wished to portray Jews as traitors who helped the Nazis.”

Surprisingly, Rapoport is a bit softer on Ilya Ehrenburg, the veteran Soviet apologist whom Rapoport flatteringly likens to the turncoat Jewish historian of antiquity, Flavius Josephus. Ehrenburg, the author tells us, bravely refused to put his name to a phony appeal by prominent Jewish figures who asked that the Jews be locked up in the camps that Stalin had prepared “in the East”--a phrase with particularly malignant overtones in the post-Holocaust era.

“We appeal to the government of the U.S.S.R., and to Comrade Stalin personally, to save the Jewish population from possible violence in the wake of the revelations about the doctor-poisoners,” the appeal stated. “For this reason, we implore you to protect the Jewish people by dispatching them to the developing territories in the East.”

The reconstructed text of the phony appeal is one of Rapoport’s own revelations. Although the author is careful to give us some 50 pages of earnest notes and citations, some of his revelations come off as more rhetoric and speculation than research and scholarship.

Still, the ironic climax of “Stalin’s War” was written by history itself. Stalin’s fatal stroke put an end to his crimes and conspiracies. One of the accused “doctor-poisoners” was abruptly summoned from his cell and asked by a frantic Kremlin official: “Which specialist would you recommend for one of our most important people who has just had a stroke?”

The question came too late to save Stalin’s life--the physicians who might have helped him were locked away in his dungeons. And, as Rapoport convinces us in “Stalin’s War,” it came just in time to save the lives of millions of Jews who were to be his last victims.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Under the Gypsy Moon” by Lawrence Thornton (Doubleday).