Leftist Jew-Hatred

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As far as the ADL and other leftist groups that are supposedly dedicated to exposing and opposing antisemitism are concerned, hatred of Jews is an exclusively right-wing, Christian phenomenon. Leftist and Islamic Jew-hatred are almost completely ignored. Yet they are the driving impulses behind the explosion of antisemitism we have seen since the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, 2023. Despite the fact that the left’s hatred of Jews and Judaism gets barely any notice from antisemitism watchdogs, it has extremely deep roots.

Karl Marx made his hostility to Judaism clear five years before he cowrote The Communist Manifesto. In 1843, the Hegelian philosopher Bruno Bauer published a book entitled The Jewish Question, in which he considered whether it was possible for a Jew to be a citizen of a modern state of the kind that the Left envisioned: “The question is whether the Jew as such,” Bauer wrote, “that is, the Jew who realizes that he is forced by his true nature to live in eternal separation from others — is able to receive general human rights and grant them to others.” This was the same question that had so vexed the French revolutionaries half a century before.

Of those general human rights, Bauer asks if Jews have “really earned” them. He contended that a Jew’s very Jewishness prevented this: “As long as he remains a Jew, the limited nature of his Jewishness triumphs over the human nature that would link him, with other men, and separates him from non-Jews. By this separation he proclaims the special nature that makes him a Jew to be his true and highest nature, to which all human nature must yield.”

Thus in order to join the state that respected the universal rights of man, the Jew had to cease being a Jew.

Marx disagreed with Bauer, but only because he had an even larger vision of the destruction of Judaism and the erasure of a particularly Jewish identity. Marx was interested not just in the destruction of Judaism, but of the disappearance also of the Jewish influence in the larger society. “For us,” said Marx, “the question of Jewish capacity for emancipation becomes the question of which element in society must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism. For the Jews’ capacity for emancipation depends on the Jews’ relation to the emancipation of our whole enslaved world.”

At this point Marx began to resort to age-old stereotypes and caricatures of the Jews. He asked: “What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world?” Then he answered his own question: “Usury. What is his worldly god? Money.” Accordingly, “emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.” For “the organization of society so as to abolish the preconditions of usury, and hence its possibility, would render the Jews impossible.”

This was the utopian vision Marx offered in The Communist Manifesto: “Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.” Thus in Marx’s perfect society, Jews and non-Jews will have been “emancipated” from “practical, real Judaism,” which he identified with “usury and money,” the hallmarks of the old order Communists were determined to destroy.

Ultimately, then, Marx’s vision was far more radical than Bauer’s. Bauer called for the Jews’ rejection of Judaism in order to join the secular state that respected the universal rights of man; Marx wanted to abolish Judaism and eradicate its influence in society, and since he identified Judaism with the core elements of the exploitative system he was determined to destroy, the destruction of Judaism was a core element of the Marxist program. As Marx himself put it: “The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry.”

Marxism, as its founding theorist formulated it, thus went even farther than the French revolutionaries, as well as the Christians, Muslims and others who had decried and persecuted Jews in the past. Not only did Marx insist that the Jews could only participate in his new society if they ceased being Jews, but he also identified their ceasing being Jews, and the eradication of Judaism itself, with the core goals of his entire program. If a classless, moneyless society in which the proletariat was no longer exploited was to be established, and the Jews were the chief exploiters, then the Jews would have to go. In his foundational work of Communist theory, Das Kapital (Capital), Marx uses Shakespeare’s Jewish moneylender, Shylock, as his model capitalist.

It is remarkable, in light of all this, that so many Jews became Marxists, particularly in Russia, where there were a great many Jews among the Bolsheviks who established the Soviet Union. It is even more remarkable that in the twentieth century, the idea that Marxism was fundamentally and essentially Jewish, and was, in fact, a central element of a Jewish plot to gain global hegemony, became a staple of attacks upon Jews.