Anti-Semitism in
the Socialist Tradition

By Kjetil Simonsen

In June 2004 something unusual happened in Norwegian politics. After a long public debate the left-wing party Rød Valgallianse threw out Hans Olav Brendberg, a religion teacher and party veteran, for disseminating anti-Jewish sentiments. This was the first time anyone had ever been excluded from a Norwegian political party because of anti-Semitism. Brendberg had railed against the Jews in innumerable writings on the Internet and in the leftist daily Klassekampen. He alleged that the Jews were responsible for the murder of Jesus and that they nourish a bitter hatred of non-Jewish people. He portrayed “Jewish power” as a cornerstone of international, especially U.S., politics. Jews, according to Brendberg, exercise immense influence on the Bush administration and, through their financially powerful lobbies, they pushed for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Brendberg drew several of these assertions directly from sources related to extreme right-wing groups, some of which deny that Holocaust really happened.(1)

What is striking about this story is that for quite some time a leftist, formerly Maoist party like Rød Valgallianse allowed a party member to disseminate anti-Semitic views and was even featured in Klassekampen. But links between anti-Semitic concepts and seemingly radical perspectives are not exceptional. Recently anti-Semitism has once again been on the rise in Europe, and the extreme Right is not alone in embracing it. Leftists too have espoused anti-Jewish sentiments, trumpeting them in the name of opposing globalization, defending the rights of Palestinians, and fighting imperialism. In a February 2003 article in the antifascist periodical Searchlight, Steve Silver warns the Left, in a period marked by increasing anti-Semitism, against succumbing to hostile attitudes toward Jews. “Anti-Semitism,” Silver writes, “does not always come from the fascist right. Just as the Left and labour movement accepts that it is perfectly capable of harbouring racist practices against black people, so it should recognise this is the case with anti-Semitism, too.”(2) As an example of anti-Jewish flirtations within the Left, Silver mentions the Trotskyist organization Socialist Voice, in the north of England, which in 2002 promoted a web page claiming to contain information about the history of Zionism. But this web page was actually being administered by a leading member of the Institute for Historical Review, well known for its denial of the Holocaust.(3)

Fortunately, such flirtations with outright Holocaust denial, although they have precedents on the Left, are rare.(4) Anti-Semitic leftists far more commonly view Jewish nationalism as the very source and motive force of world imperialism; contend that Jews are running world affairs secretly, through financially powerful organizations and lobbies; and compare Israeli assaults on the Palestinians to the Nazi German genocide of European Jewry.

In the summer of 2002 the Dutch antiracist organization De fabel van de illegaal scrutinized such an instance. A pro-Palestinian demonstration had occurred in Amsterdam in April the same year. This demonstration, according to De fabel, constituted the largest anti-Semitic demonstration in Holland since World War II:

Even as anti-Jewish slogans and attitudes are increasing tied to an “anti-imperialist” framework, many self-described leftist circles have increasingly accepted conspiracy theories. In March 2002, only six months before the Brendberg incident, the Norwegian Communist weekly Friheten, published a letter contending that on September 11, 2001, four thousand Jews, through messages on their cell phones, were warned in advance of the impending terrorist attacks and that they therefore stayed home from work that day.(6)

The extent of anti-Jewish, or potentially anti-Jewish, notions within the Left may come as a surprise or seem incomprehensible. After all, the Left has always said it stood for human emancipation. Alas, anti-Semitic ideas have been found among socialist theorists and in leftist circles for two centuries. This anti-Semitism has taken a host of different expressions, but certain elements have been characteristic: a fundamental contempt for the Jews as Jews; allegations of negative character traits; and an attribution of responsibility for economic problems, exploitation, and social injustice to “the Jews,” viewed as a monolithic entity.

In this article I will try to present a historical overview of leftist hostility to Jews, and try to illuminate some of the most important forms of expression that this ‘socialist anti-Semitism” has taken. At the outset I must make certain clarifications. By focusing on socialist anti-Semitism I by no means intend to argue that anticapitalist ideas “inevitably” lead to anti-Semitism, or that historical socialism per se can be associated with hostility toward Jews. On the contrary, my intention is to warn against the spread of conspiracy theories and against xenophobia, precisely for the purpose of rescuing the libertarian and humanistic dimensions of anticapitalism and the Left. Only by pointing out and criticizing mistakes of the past can we hope to build future movements and a future society along democratic and humanistic lines.

Anti-Semitism in Early French Socialism

Modern anti-Semitism, as it emerged in the nineteenth century, primarily took root within reactionary, ultranationalistic, and antidemocratic political circles. It was mainly in these milieus that anti-Semitism was elevated into a worldview and that hatred of Jews found its most uncompromising expression. Claims to “racial” and national purity and renewal were often associated with a basic aversion to the spirit of the Enlightenment. Hence the extreme Right in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw social development since the Great French Revolution as the outcome of a Jewish conspiracy. The extreme Right held that the Jews, supposedly by controlling the media and international finance, were disseminating liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and socialism in order to subvert the national community and the moral order of traditional society. In the twentieth century these authentically reactionary ideas culminated with German Nazism – a movement that coupled its resistance to social liberation, equality, and democracy with fanatical racism and anti-Semitism. During World War II hatred of Jews was brought to its most cruel conclusion, the Holocaust, the industrial and bureaucratically organized attempt to exterminate European Jewry that succeeded in killing approximately six million.

Anti-Semitic notions fit hand in glove with the regressive, xenophobic, and antiegalitarian worldview espoused by European right-wing tendencies from the nineteenth century on, but many socialists embraced anti-Semitic notions as well. Within early French socialism, as developed by Charles Fourier, Auguste Blanqui, Saint-Simon, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, we can trace a variety of explicitly anti-Jewish views. According to the historian Einhart Lorenz, the French thinkers “identified [Jews] with the financial system and considered them as the very incarnation of capitalism and the Rothschild family’s bank system.”(7) Fourier viewed the Jews as the very embodiment of capitalism and characterized them as parasitic, deceitful, treacherous, and unproductive. Blanqui denounced Jewish usury and in his anticlerical tirades accused Judaism of being the cause of an even worse corruption: Catholicism.(8)

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the earliest and most prominent theorists of anarchism, held even more uncompromising anti-Jewish views. Not only did he portray “the Jew” as an incarnation of finance capitalism; his denunciations were occasionally marked by fanaticism: “The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it.”(9) According to left-libertarian theorist Murray Bookchin, this aggressive anti-Semitism – together with Proudhon’s patriarchal views and parochial provincialism – made his ideas highly attractive among reactionary movements:

These thinkers’ antipathy toward the Jews was continued by their successors and followers. Particularly renowned in this respect is the French author Alphonse Toussenel, an early admirer of Fourier. In his book Les Juifs, Rois de l’époque: Historie de la Féodalité Financière (1845) he painted an apocalyptic picture of France under the July Monarchy of 1830-48. In Toussenel’s view France was becoming a victim of “financial feudalism,” in the form of Jewish usury. Through their financial power the Jews had achieved control over French society: “Today [the feudal clique] is not yet completely organized. But it will be tomorrow. It already has the producer and the consumer at its mercy. The Jew reigns over and governs France.”(11) Toussenel’s work has been called “one of the most vehement attacks on the Jews published in France,”(12) antedating the publication of Eduard Drumont’s infamous 1886 anti-Semitic best seller, La France Juive, a book that inspired anti-Semites on the Left as well as in conservative circles, not to speak of eugenics theorists and ultranationalist groups.

The anti-Semitic tradition within French socialism continued into the second half of the nineteenth century. Not even the well-known Dreyfus case in 1894 – when a French officer of Jewish descent was arrested and convicted of treason without a shred of evidence – halted the torrent of anti-Semitic statements. Nancy L. Green, discussing the attitudes of French socialists preceding and during the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, documents that the general socialist periodical, La Revue Socialiste regularly published articles imbued with racial, economic, and religious anti-Semitism. As Green points out, even during the most intense stages of the Dreyfus affair – when France was on the brink of civil war, and pro- and anti-Dreyfus groups held demonstrations and clashed in street fights – many people on the Left hesitated to take a stand and defend Dreyfus. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did French socialists accomplish a thoroughgoing change in their outlook. The main reason was a wave of Jewish working-class immigrants from Eastern Europe. As these destitute Eastern Jews became more conspicuous in French society, leaving a substantive mark on the working-class movement, the French socialists discovered that there existednot only a Jewish bourgeoisie but a Jewish proletariat. Socialists began to defend Jews against the enemies of the Republic, while they gradually reconsidered their attitudes vis-à-vis anti-Semitism.(13)

The Populists and the Pogroms in Russia

France was not the only country where socialism was stained by anti-Semitic ideas. Early working-class movements in other European countries flirted with them as well. One example is the reactions of the Russian Populist movement to the pogroms that scarred the tsarist empire in the 1880s.(14)

From 1881 until the summer of 1884 a wave of violent persecutions of Jews raged all over Russia. These pogroms, orchestrated by the tsar’s agents, aimed at channelling social unrest onto the “foreigners” and caused immense suffering and devastation. In total the Jewish settlements in more than 160 cities were exposed to violent acts in a massive “storm of incinerations unprecedented in modern times.”(15) The perpetrators’ explicit political aim was to worsen the position of the Jews in Russian society. The economic activities of the Jews, their national isolation, and their religious zealotry were officially said to be the actual causes of the tension between Jewish and Christian populations. The government stated that “persistent efforts” to assimilate the Jews had failed because of an unbridgeable gap between “the Jewish race” and the majority population. The tsarist regime provoked the pogroms in order to divert the anger of the masses away from oppressive social structures and shift it instead onto the Jewish population.

Curiously the Russian revolutionary movement in that period adopted a corresponding strategy. Populist rhetoric aimed at gaining the confidence of the peasants and inspiring their militancy by pandering to popular prejudices. According to Avram Yarmolinsky, most revolutionary circles, at least initially, expressed ‘sympathy with the perpetrators [of the pogroms], not with the victims of the looting and the butchery.” Populist indignation was directed chiefly “at the police for manhandling and arresting the rioters.” Apparently the Populists viewed the pogroms as a “prelude to a broader movement, indeed a harbinger of revolution. For here was an authentic mass protest, violent, unbridled, sweeping aside the barriers of law.”(16)

As Yarmolinsky points out, Russian radical theory at the end of the nineteenth century was also tainted by anti-Jewish attitudes. One of the best examples is the view expressed by the Russian anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin. During his conflicts with Karl Marx in the First International, Bakunin authored several circulars to the organization’s members in Spain and Italy, wherein he presented himself as a victim of a dire conspiracy by German and Russian Jews, led precisely by Karl Marx:

“Zur Judenfrage”

If Bakunin used anti-Semitic rhetoric to attack Marx, what was Marx’s own view of the so-called “Jewish question”? He left an ambiguous legacy. In 1843, at the age of twenty-five, he wrote a piece called “Zur Judenfrage” (On the Jewish Question).This article was not given specific attention until the turn of the last century and has since been subject to several interpretations. As Lorenz points out, “some have considered his attack on Judaism and the Jews as a sign of Jewish self-denial, others have understood it as expressing a critique of religion, and still others as a critique of the socio-economical structure, that is, of capitalism and its ideological consequences.”(18) Generally Marx portrayed Jews as the instigators and the backbone of capitalism. Jewish collective identity was based on financial greed; hence abolishing the money-based economy required, according to Marx, liberating humanity from Judaism.

It must be emphasized that Marx, after the publication of this pamphlet, never again treated the “Jewish question” in a similar manner. Later, however, many of his followers adopted his early analysis. His adherents in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), for instance, held diverging and to some extent contradictory views on the “Jewish question.” But even though the Jews often were stereotypically associated with finance capitalism, anti-Semitism did not become a cornerstone either of Marxism or of the organized workers’ movement, Generally, the theorists of the working-class movement considered neither the Jewish religion nor the Jewish ethnic and cultural community to be the primary characteristic of Judaism. Rather, what the Jews were – or were not –depended on their position in the economic system. The “Jewish question” could thus find a solution only through fighting capitalism. Once capitalism was eliminated, Jews as a separate entity would disappear.(20)

After the rise of political anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1880s, the German Social Democrats distanced themselves from anti-Semitic programs and views. Anti-Semitism, the Social Democrats contended, caused a split within the working class and distracted its attention from the class struggle and from prevailing social conditions. Still, some within the SPD wanted to “understand” anti-Semitism and argued that anti-Semitism could be used to generate anticapitalist sentiments. For instance, at the congress of SPD in 1893, Wilhelm Liebknecht declared that the Social Democrats would reap the anticapitalism that the anti-Semites sowed. The idea was that active anti-Semites would evoke anticapitalist sentiments within the peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie, thereby – inadvertently – laying a foundation for Social Democracy. Sooner or later these middle classes would recognize that not only Jewish capitalists but the capitalist class in general constituted their opponents, and they would then align themselves with the Socialist movement.(21) History has taken a different direction, however, showing us that anti-Semitism can serve only profoundly reactionary ends. Those who reaped the fruits of German anti-Semitism turned out to be those who, in the next century, defeated the Social Democrats and attempted – and nearly managed – to exterminate the Jews.

Left Anti-Semitism in the Interwar Period

By the turn of twentieth century many people on the Left had discovered that in addition to the Jewish bourgeoisie and middle-class there was also a Jewish proletariat, and in the interwar period they paid more attention to this proletariat. This was the result of several factors. For one, from the 1880s onward an extensive immigration by poor Jews from the Eastern parts of Europe into the West made Jewish workers more and more conspicuous in social life. For another, Jews gained increasing importance within the European working-class movements, playing a central role in the development of political parties and trade unions alike.

At the same time fascist and reactionary movements achieved an increasing following in the aftermath of World War I, and after the Russian Revolution in 1917 anti-Semitism was closely tied to vulgar anti-Marxism. Before the war the far Right had to a large extent been talking about a “Jewish-Masonic conspiracy”; from now on its propaganda was dominated by the stereotype of the conspiring “Jew-Bolshevik.” Right-wing authors contended that socialism was a Jewish invention, created to fulfil the diabolical Jewish plan to achieve global domination.(22) Far Right propaganda thus considered socialists to be Jewish agents and apologists and used a hateful anti-Jewish vocabulary to attack them. For many socialists, this fact helped reveal the reactionary nature of anti-Semitism and strengthened the rejection of anti-Jewish ideas within the Left.

Although the political Left in general rejected anti-Semitism, and although many Jews supported left-wing parties, clichés about “Jewish capital” and “the Jewish press” occasionally filtered into the propaganda of socialist parties. After Hitler’s conquest of power, the Social Democrats in Austria, for instance, attempted to prove that the Nazis cooperated with the “Jewish intelligentsia” and “Jewish capital.” Even members of the German Communist Party (KPD) were influenced by the general anti-Semitic climate of the Weimar Republic. Not only were KPD’s Jewish representatives in the Reichstag gradually removed, but Communists occasionally availed themselves of the stereotypical picture of the Jewish capitalist for opportunistic reasons. Toward the end of the Weimar-era, in the KPD-newspaper Rote Fahne, Jews were even accused of supporting Nazism.(23)

The European anti-Semitism reached its peak during the Second World War, when the German National Socialists murdered six million Jews. After the war was over, the cruelties that had taken place during the Holocaust shocked European public opinion and contributed to the complete disregard and rejection of expressly anti-Semitic ideas. Still, anti-Semitic stereotypes and angst-ridden clichés survived in some political circles, often through coded words like “Zionists,” “bankers,” “rentiers” and “cosmopolitans.” And the totalitarian Soviet Union and its puppet regimes in Eastern Europe became one of the key areas of this camouflaged anti-Semitism.

The Black Years in the Soviet Union

The Russian Revolutions of 1917 abolished the tsarist decrees persecuting Jews, and during the interwar period many Jews in Eastern Europe sympathized with Communism. This sympathy was strengthened by the fact that during the Civil War that followed in the wake of the revolution, the counterrevolutionary “white guards” – considering the Bolshevik revolution as Jewish-Communist conspiracy – perpetrated massive pogroms in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine. But throughout the 1920s and 1930s, especially after Stalin’s rise to power, the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union drastically worsened, accompanied by increasingly negative ideas about Jews. As noted by Einhart Lorenz, Stalin’s proclamation of “socialism in one country” and the subsequent purges of the Communist Party had anti-Semitic undertones: “The Jewish background of many of the arrested and convicted was especially pointed out. In this way there was created an image of Jews as not only enemies of the Soviet Union, but also as spies for foreign powers.”(24)

After the Second World War, within the Soviet regime and in Eastern Europe, this image of the Jews as a “fifth column” conspiring to subvert the Soviet state and the “national community” was promulgated with increasing intensity. As a result of massive anti-Semitic campaigns – waged in a coded language of anti-Zionist and “anti-imperialist” slogans – the years 1948-53 passed into history as “the black years” for Soviet Jewry. Domestically the Soviet state promoted two ideological campaigns– one “antinationalist” campaign and one campaign against “cosmopolitanism.” Both had strong repercussions on Eastern Europe and had fatal consequences for their Jewish inhabitants. The campaign against nationalism was directed toward “non-Russian” nationalism, including Jewish nationalism; the struggle against cosmopolitanism was directed against what was described as a lack of Russian national feelings. Cosmopolitanism was linked to the United States’ alleged attempt to achieve world hegemony, and “rootless cosmopolitans” were – in correspondence with anti-Semitic traditions – associated with Jews. Zionism, in turn, was conceived of as the core of a global conspiracy, led by “Jewish capital” and international imperialism.

From 1948 onward the situation of the Russian Jews deteriorated dramatically, due to a more open and increasingly brutal state persecution. The winter of 1948-49 saw mass arrests of leading representatives of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union, and in 1952 Jews accused of planning to transform the Crimean Peninsula into an “imperialistic bridgehead” for the Israeli state were executed. Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns culminated between October 1952 and February 1953, when several hundred doctors where arrested; legal processes were carried out against prominent representatives of this profession in Moscow. Many of the accused were of Jewish descent. Allegedly the doctors had killed two important politicians and now were planning to murder Stalin. At the same time, rumors circulated that ordinary people also had fallen victim to their misdeeds. The large proportion of Jews among the accused fomented a mood for pogroms in Soviet society. On March 5 the “Red Tsar” of the Soviet Union died, and in April the “Doctor’s Plot” was revealed to be sheer fiction. But by that time several of the accused had already died as a result of brutal interrogations.

The Soviet Union’s anti-Semitic campaigns of the 1950s spread to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and East Germany. The most notorious trial was probably that of the Czech Communist leader Rudolf Slansky. In November 1951 Slansky was accused of planning a “Titoist-Zionist-cosmopolitan conspiracy” and a year later was condemned to death. His trial was followed by a series of other trials up until 1954, resulting in a total of 178 executed death sentences and more than 35,000 prison sentences, as well as 22,000 internments in labor camps without legal convictions. To be sure, not all those arrested and sentenced were Jews, but the trials were overtly anti-Jewish. Communist leaders with a Jewish background were accused of “crypto-Zionism” and treason against the socialist cause, and the impeachments emphatically noted whenever the indicted was of Jewish descent.(25)

Anti-Semitism After Stalin

After Stalin’s death the extensive anti-Semitism of his era was somewhat reduced, but anti-Zionism was still presented as official doctrine. The pressure toward Jewish assimilation persisted, and arrangements based on national quotas contributed to discrimination against Jews within the educational system.

In the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the Soviet Union’s Arab allies, a new outburst of anti-Semitism erupted within the Soviet perimeter. As noted by the Swedish historian Henrik Baeckner, the outcome of that war caused the Soviet regime to initiate “one of the most hateful and persistent anti-Jewish campaigns of the twentieth century” that for two decades served to demonize “the Jewish people, Judaism, Zionism and the state of Israel.”(26) Such propaganda, directed toward a domestic audience as well as an international one, had repercussions in the Arab countries as well as in the third world and in the West.

The post-1967 propaganda repeated several of the contentions made during the anti-Semitic campaigns in the Stalin era. Zionism (again a code word for Jews) was once again portrayed as the core of a global imperialist and capitalist conspiracy. To this conspiratorial notion was added a new element: the depiction of Zionism as a racist and fascist movement and the State of Israel as a new “Third Reich”:

This anti-Semitic offensive was quickly elevated to official policy in the rest of the East Bloc countries as well. Its worst effects occurred in Poland, where anti-Semitism was involved in a political showdown within the Communist Party. In the summer of 1967 the party and state leader Wladyslaw Gomulka unleashed a terrible campaign under the slogan “liquidation of the Zionist fifth column.” At the beginning of 1968, when student demonstrations against the government erupted, the regime held international Zionism responsible. In the name of fighting Zionism, the government purged the Communist Party, the ministry of defence, the university, the press and cultural life of Jews.(28) Furthermore, Polish authorities registered every single Pole of Jewish descent, and in March 1968 the security police circulated anti-Semitic leaflets drawn directly from Hitler’s National Socialist Party.(29)

In the 1970s and 1980s anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism, remained influential within Soviet and Eastern European propaganda and reached its peaks in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 war in Lebanon. Not until the time of Gorbachev was anti-Jewish rhetoric eventually relaxed, accompanying the regime’s new reorientation toward the Israeli state.

The anti-Jewish policies of the Soviet regime had repercussions among radicals in the West. The traditional worker’s movement as well as “the New Left” – particularly after the Six-Day War– often uncritically adopted Soviet postulates concerning the Jews and the situation in the Middle East. A host of Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, and Stalinist organizations proceeded to picture Zionism as the driving force of world imperialism, and Israel as a Nazi state conducting genocide corresponding to the Nazis’ Holocaust.

In recent years these ideological themes have been revitalized on the Left. Statements portraying globalization as the result of a Zionist conspiracy, presenting Israel as a “Nazi state” equalling the “Third Reich,” and contending that Jewish power is the actual driving force behind the Bush administration are neither isolated nor incidental; rather they rest on an age-old historical legacy. More specifically, they continue and renew an arsenal of anti-Jewish prejudices and stereotypes delivered from the past, ones that have historically caused atrocious results.

Socialist Anti-Semitism in Context

The elements of anti-Semitism on the Left have not gone undisputed. The history of socialism also contains a proud antiracist tradition, whose advocates have fought unconditionally against prejudices and stereotypes – within the Left’s own ranks as well as in society at large. Still, anti-Jewish ideas have won a following within many radical circles. From the early French socialists to the present day an anti-Jewish thrust runs throughout the history of the Left, where anti-Jewish clichés have merged with seemingly progressive social ideas.

What actually constitutes this convergence of leftist and supposedly liberatory perspectives with anti-Semitic clichés? Necessarily, the answer will largely depend on the historical epoch and geographical area in question. Still, certain common causes may be emphasized. Among them is the fact that images of Jews as scapegoats and subversive social agents have a long historical pedigree and deep cultural roots. Although anti-Semitic notions have been used in new settings and with diverse ideological motivations, they have always maintained their emotional force. In anti-Semitic tracts “the Jew” may be both capitalist and communist, democrat and tyrant, pacifist and warrior; he or she can be “visible and invisible, assimilated and unassimilated, aboveground and underground. The Jew can be everywhere and anyone.”(30) In this context no political milieu, not even on the Left, is immune to anti-Semitic ideas.

Another central explanation for the socialist attraction to anti-Semitism is that hatred of Jews has historically contained an anticapitalist element. In the Middle Ages attacks on “Jewish usury” were rooted in the image of the Jew as a greedy and parasitic moneylender. This stereotype, identifying Jews with financial power, was carried into nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, albeit in a new form. Industrial capitalism was not only identified with “the Jews” but was often conceived of as a “Jewish invention.” Particularly when capitalism underwent crises, the stereotypical Jew became an attractive scapegoat.

Much of this “anticapitalism” was profoundly reactionary, in the sense that its critique of capitalism was entangled with an aversion to the spirit of the Enlightenment. Capitalism was to be resisted not because it gave rise to social injustice, as manifested in uneven power relations and economic exploitation, but because it represented the incarnation of modernity and industrialism, This view offered no objections to private property or class society as such. On the contrary, its proponents drew a distinction between “productive” national capital (which was welcomed) and ‘speculative” Jewish capital (which became an object of condemnation).(31)

Finally, the main reason that stereotypes of the wealthy and greedy Jew were coupled with socialist ideas was that many socialists abandoned social analyses in favor of simplistic modes of explanation and conspiracy thinking. Instead of challenging the underlying dynamics and structures of capitalist and hierarchical society, the prevailing social system was considered to be the result of a conspiracy, propelled by a certain group of people or secret elite. Such conspiracy theories, which traditionally have focused on Jews in particular, have found a variety of expressions at different times and under diverse social and political circumstances. On the Left they have been voiced in the form of anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and antiglobalization. The core ideas are nevertheless the same. When banal scapegoat theories replace structural critique, then xenophobic attitudes may exorcise libertarian and progressive impulses. The spread of prejudices usually paves the way for political reaction.

Unfortunately, irrational ideas about Jews have not been brought to an end. To the contrary, the last few years we have witnessed a revitalization of anti-Semitism, in Europe as well as in other parts of the world, representing crucial challenges for the Left. History reveals that the Left is in no way immune to anti-Semitic and racist notions; here, too, they must be actively fought. Only a radical Left movement that is crystal clear in its antiracism and antinationalism, grounding its critique of society in rational social analyses, may hope to create a free and humane society. This involves an unconditional struggle against anti-Jewish prejudices and stereotypes – irrespective of their forms of expression and ideological motivations.

This essay was put into English with the help of Atle Hesmyr and Janet Biehl.

Notes: