Anti-Semitism
Written by Daniel Hannan Thursday, 31 July 2014 To the Point News
“How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Adolf Hitler asked his party members in 1920. No one thought it an odd question. Anti-Semitism was at that time widely understood to be part of the broader revolutionary movement against markets, property and capital.The man who coined the term “socialism,” the nineteenth-century French revolutionary Pierre Leroux, had told his comrades: “When we speak of the Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit – the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, of speculation; in a word, the banker’s spirit.”
The man who popularized the term “anti-Semitism” had taken a similar line. Wilhelm Marr, a radical nineteenth-century German Leftist, may not have been the first person to use the word, but he certainly – and approvingly – brought it to a wide audience: “Anti-Semitism is a Socialist movement,” he pronounced, “only nobler and purer in form than Social Democracy”.
It’s a measure of the modern Left’s cultural dominance that simply to recite these quotations is jarring. On the centenary of the Dreyfus Affair in 1998, the then French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, casually asserted that “the Left was for Dreyfus and the Right was against him” – an extraordinary distortion.
While some brave radicals did indeed campaign for the wronged Jewish army officer, many socialist papers and politicians were fiercely anti-Dreyfusard, complaining that “rich Jews” were rigging the justice system against ordinary workers.
The leading anti-Drefusard and most popular Jew-hater in France, Edouard Drumont, whose book La France Juive (Jewish France) was a runaway best-seller, was a rabid revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist.
As the French socialist – later communist – deputy, Pierre Myrens, put it in 1911, “The Yid (‘Youtre’) is an Israelite by religion, a Jew by race and, what is more, a capitalist!” This strain of French Leftism was enthusiastically taken up in Ba’athist Syria and, even more, in Algeria, with consequences that we still see around us.
That we have largely edited such facts from our collective memory says a great deal about the assumptions of modern politics. In the puerile formula that seems to dictate our definitions, Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty so, since anti-Semitism is nasty, it must be of the Right.
Such reasoning is not confined to self-righteous seventeen-year-olds; it has, bizarrely, taken over a large chunk of our public discourse.
It’s true, of course, that there have always been Jewish socialists. But – and this can be hard to understand nowadays, perhaps especially for gentiles – several of them were, in effect, anti-Semitic.
Not untypical was Karl Marx himself, whose 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” has, again, been tidied away from popular recollection.
The grandson of two rabbis, he disliked all religions, but reserved a vehemence for Judaism that we never find in his writings on Christianity – about which he could be rather sentimental, though he deplored its corruption by the “Jewish spirit”. In 1844, the odious cadger wrote:
Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew but the everyday Jew.
Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.
The essence of Judaism and the root of the Jewish soul is expediency and self-interest; the God of Israel is Mammon, who expresses himself in the lust for money. Judaism is the embodiment of anti-social attitudes.
A few apologists have tried to argue that their patriarch meant only wealthy Jewish financiers, not Jews in general, but their excuses don’t stack up. Listen to how Marx and Engels wrote of Poland’s Jews, then the poorest and most oppressed in Europe: “The Polish Jew-Usurer cheats, gives short weights, clips coins, engages in common swindling”.
Marx’s dislike of Judaism did not remain confined to his turgid books. It found expression in the anti-Semitic campaigns of the Soviet Comecon regimes:
The purges of Jews by Poland’s Communists, the show trials in Czechoslovakia and Hungary of “Israeli spies” and Stalin’s “Doctors’ Plot”, which accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to assassinate the Communist leadership, and which was intended as a prelude to the mass deportation of Soviet Jews to Siberia (fortunately, the old monster died first, and Khrushchev dropped the policy).
In all these cases, “Zionist” was used as an unsubtle code-word for “Jew”. It’s hardly surprising that, hearing the ideological heirs of the Communist Party who are the apologists for Palestinian terrorists denouncing Zionism, many Jews detect a subtext.
These days, though, it’s not always subtext. Read this chilling article from a Chavist newspaper in Venezuela. Consider the pro-Nazi slogans chanted by the crowds around Europe as they attack Jewish shops. Ponder this shaming statement that the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial organization has felt driven to put out. This isn’t about Israel now, if ever it was. It’s about something altogether older and uglier.
Our political opinions often reflect our character traits. If you’re a generous and optimistic person, if you take pleasure in the success of others, you’re likely to be cheered by the story of the Jewish people, their success against the odds, their disproportionate intellectual contribution to mankind. Far from decrying commercial and financial accomplishments, you recognize them as a source of happiness for everyone.
If, on the other hand, you are determined to see every exchange as a form of exploitation, every success as someone else’s defeat, every trade as a swindle, then the same promptings will make you anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. It’s a tragic condition, a form of existential envy, and it goes back, according to the Book of Esther, at least 2,500 years. Esther 5:11-13:
And Haman told them of the glory of his riches, and the multitude of his children, and all the things wherein the king had promoted him, and how he had advanced him above the princes and servants of the king.
Haman said moreover, Yea, Esther the queen did let no man come in with the king unto the banquet that she had prepared but myself; and tomorrow am I invited unto her also with the king.
Yet all this availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate.
Daniel Hannan is a Member of the European Parliament, representing South East England for the Conservative Party. He is the author of Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.
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