Historical Materialism 32.

1 (2024) 35–57

brill.com/hima

New Trends in Antisemitism

∵
Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism
Sai Englert
Leiden Institute of Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Corresponding author
[email protected]

Alex de Jong
Co-director, International Institute for Research and Education,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[email protected]

Received 1 September 2023 | Accepted 3 April 2024 |

Published online 27 May 2024

Abstract

Antisemitism is an increasingly prevalent aspect of public life in the West, both as a

consequence of the growth of the far right across the board and through its mobili-
sation against Palestinian liberation and Palestine solidarity activism. While syna-
gogues are targeted and far-right politicians revive ideas of Jewish global power, it is
the left, Muslims, and Palestinians that are continuously constructed as the source
of the current rise in hatred and violence against Jews. If historically the Marxist tradi-
tion engaged actively with the so-called Jewish question, in recent decades the subject
has receded from focus. This shift took place as other forms of racism – directed at
Muslims, Black populations, or migrants – became the basis for reactionary politics
in the West. This article argues that while some of the assumptions that underwrote
classical Marxist texts on the issue have been found wanting – perhaps most notably

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/1569206X-bja10040

© SAI ENGLERT AND ALEX DE JONG, 2024 | ISSN: 1465-4466 (print) 1569-206X (online)
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
36 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

the inevitable (or desirable) character of the trend towards assimilation – they remain
important starting points for making sense of our present, both by their method and
their political commitment to liberation.

Keywords

critique of antisemitism – The Jewish Question – Zionism – Palestinian liberation –

structural racism

Antisemitism* has grown exponentially over the last decade or so. While it
has done so in tandem with other forms of racism, oppression, and prejudice,
fuelled by a growing global far-right, its recent trajectory from the periphery
to the centre of Western racist ideas, discourse, and action deserves attention.
In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, antisemi-
tism could easily be considered to have become a fringe phenomenon. The
Holocaust and its memory were central – as they still are – to Western states’
self-image, but not without irony (forgetting in the process that European rul-
ing classes had fuelled antisemitism throughout the continent and supported
fascism and Nazism as a counter force to the threat of Communism at home
and abroad).1
Simultaneously, a newly rising far-right appeared to have abandoned anti-
semitism altogether – or at the very least having pushed it to the outer edges
of its political organisations. This process was most strikingly captured by the
struggle within the French National Front (now renamed the National Rally),
between Le Pen père et fille, over the place of antisemitism in the party and the
centrality of Islamophobia as a mobilising mechanism.2
Yet, perhaps predictably, the stronger the far-right became, the bolder it grew
and ideas that previously were considered to be incompatible with ‘dediaboli-
sation’ resurfaced. Antisemitism reappeared more obviously within its arsenal
and continues to be normalised as far-right parties take power (Hungary, Italy,
Brazil, India) or exert growing influence over elected officials (the US govern-
ment under Trump and most European countries). We are now in a situation

* The introduction to this article was finished before 7 October 2023 and we decided not to
rework it.
1 See, for example, Traverso 2016 for a longer discussion of this phenomenon.
2 Peter Drucker’s excellent essay in this special issue returns to this question and discusses a
comparable phenomenon with regard to the far-right’s relationship with homophobia.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 37

in which antisemitic violence carried out against Jewish people and places
of worship repeatedly occur, most strikingly in France and the United States,
while antisemitic ideas about ‘globalists’ and ‘Jewish space lasers’ have taken
central stage in the far-right’s rhetoric. They played a central role in the elec-
tion of Donald Trump, are reappearing among the Tory right, and are now a
regular feature in the public pronouncements of the Forum for Democracy in
the Netherlands, to name but a few.

The Left

In the face of such a striking and worrying phenomenon, one could be forgiven
for assuming that the response of those who claim to maintain the liberal sta-
tus quo would have been swift and uncompromising. Unfortunately, the oppo-
site is true. While playing into the hands of the far-right on issues of migration,
Islamophobia, trans rights, and law-and-order narratives – thereby severely
constraining their ability to challenge its rise – centrist politicians, journal-
ists, and commentators have turned their ire against the left and its support
for Palestinian liberation instead. Through conflations of antisemitism with
anti-Zionism – itself based on the antisemitic notion that Jews everywhere and
the state of Israel are synonymous – pro-Israeli activists and lawmakers have
constructed a narrative that the real dangers to Jewish people in the West are
not those violently targeting them or resuscitating old and dangerous conspir-
acy theories, but left-wing parties, movements, and organisations. It is worth
restating in passing that, more often than not, the very same organisations are
at the forefront of the fight against the growth of the former.
While pro-Israeli – or indeed Israeli – politicians continue to cosy up
with far-right demagogues (Steve Bannon), far-right governments (Italy and
Hungary) or antisemitic politicians (Poland), they simultaneously aim to crim-
inalise pro-Palestinian voices and movements as a threat to the Jewish people.
They have done so through the widely discredited International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance (ihra) working definition of antisemitism (most
recently rejected by the UN special rapporteur), as well as decrees aiming to
outlaw the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (bds) move-
ment in France, Germany, Austria, numerous US states, Canada, and (so-far
unsuccessfully) Britain.3

3 See, for example, Gould 2020 for an overview and critique. For a full timeline, see Palestine
Legal n.d.

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38 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

The story of the ‘Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right’ con-
ference is a useful illustration in this regard.4 Organisers and participants –
among them the leading specialists in their field – gathered in Berlin to discuss
the importance of Holocaust memory and its (mis)use by the political right,
including the growing threat of outright Holocaust revisionism. One solitary
contribution in the three-day conference came from a Palestinian participant,
Dr Tareq Baconi,5 who pointed out the dangers of weaponising Holocaust mem-
ory in order to deny the Palestinian people’s right to liberation. Nothing, at first
glance, controversial or out of place given the conference’s stated aims. Yet,
first Baconi and then the conference organisers were accused of antisemitism,
condemned in the German press, and even the venue where the conference
was held was threatened with losing its funding by the state. The real danger in
the eyes of the German establishment was not those weaponising or trivialis-
ing the Holocaust. It was the very people targeted by said weaponisation.6
The tendency to flip reality on its head in order to delegitimise the left –
and any anti-systemic critique that it might offer in a time of simultaneous
ecological, economic, and political crisis – was perhaps most visible in the
sustained campaign waged by pro-Israeli organisations and right-wing politi-
cians (in both the Labour and Conservative parties) against Jeremy Corbyn.7
A life-long campaigner against racism and antisemitism was vilified as an exis-
tential threat to the Jewish people, while Tory politicians unveiled statues of
Nazi-sympathisers and maintained friendly relations with Steve Bannon and
Viktor Orbán.8 Unfortunately, many on the left similarly failed to see the wood
for the trees and participated in the construction of a narrative of a specific, if
not primarily, left-wing problem with antisemitism.9
This issue is certainly not limited to Britain, or to those who failed to under-
stand the attacks on Corbyn, the left, and the Palestine solidarity movement
for what they were. As Leandros Fischer reminds us in his paper, the confla-
tion of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, the characterisation of Palestine
solidarity activism and migration as the sources of contemporary European

4 Joshua Leifer’s account, ‘The Challenge of Defending Memory in Germany’, is instructive

(Leifer 2022).
5 Baconi is the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
(Baconi 2018) and the president of the board of the Palestinian policy network Al Shabaka
(<https://al-shabaka.org/profiles/tareq-baconi/>).
6 For an excellent discussion and analysis of the relationship between the Holocaust and the
Nakba, see Bashir and Goldberg (eds.) 2019.
7 For a critical overview of this process see: Stern-Weiner (ed.) 2019; Nunns 2022; McNally 2020.
8 Tidman 2019.
9 See, for example: Renton 2021; Randall 2021.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 39

antisemitism, and the failure to challenge the (often pro-Israel) far-right as

the key driver of antisemitic reaction has a long history on the left, especially
in Germany. In dissecting the political history and theory of the Antideutsch
current, he offers us the tools to understand, critique, and challenge these
wider processes that have become so familiar, well beyond the borders of the
German state. Jean-Pierre Couture, in focussing on France and the specific his-
tory of the systematic (and wilful) misreadings of Marx, recasting the radical
thinker and the movements that take inspiration from his thought as antise-
mitic, similarly helps us make sense of the current impasse and the intellectual
tools necessary to break out of it.
This is where the impulse for this special issue is located. How to make sense
of the contemporary rapid growth of antisemitism, its importance in the rise
of the (far-)right, and the striking inability to name, locate, and fight it effec-
tively that has paralysed much of the left? What can Marxism offer us in this
process, beyond the well-rehearsed reflections on the Marxist classics of the
beginning of the twentieth century? And if these classics remain of impor-
tance to our present moment, how are we to understand, engage with, and
mobilise them today? How can the left rebuild an analysis of contemporary
antisemitism – and social movements against it – which neither counterpose
it to support for Palestinian liberation, nor isolate it from wider structures of
racialised, gendered, or sexual oppression, discrimination, and violence. It is in
the hope of addressing these issues – or at least to offer an impetus to the nec-
essary discussion and debates surrounding them – that we put together this
collection of essays. We hope that they will elicit critical engagement, reflec-
tion, and responses in the months and years to come.

Marxism and the Jewish Question

When discussing a Marxist approach to the issue of antisemitism, a number

of texts are widely-shared reference points. This special issue contains papers
discussing two of such texts; Marx’s essay ‘On The Jewish Question’ (written in
1843, published in 1844) and Moishe Postone’s 1979 essay ‘Anti-Semitism and
National Socialism’.10 Both contain valuable insights but need to be read in
their historical context.

10 Different versions of ‘Anti-Semitism and National-Socialism’ have appeared. The first

English-language publication was ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the
German Reaction to “Holocaust”’ in New German Critique (Postone 1980). A reworked
and shortened version appeared in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust (Postone 1986).

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40 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

Out of all of Marx’s writings, this article might be the most misunderstood.
‘On The Jewish Question’ has often been read as evincing antisemitic tenden-
cies in Marx’s thought, or even as proof of the thesis of ‘an antisemitic Marx’,
as Couture writes in his article on ‘The French Debate on “Zur Judenfrage”:
From an Anachronistic Trial to the Crisis of Secularism’. For a supporter of this
thesis, like the historian Pierre Birnbaum in his Géographie de l’espoir, ‘Marx
advocated nothing less than the necessary and unavoidable end of the Jews’.11
Many readings of ‘On The Jewish Question’ are in fact anachronistic, miss-
ing the emergence of a specific, modern form of antisemitism. As Postone
pointed out, ‘modern anti-Semitism’ (a term popularised in Germany in the
early 1880s by the agitator Wilhelm Marr)12 should not be confused with ‘every-
day anti-Jewish prejudice’ – it rather is an ideology, a form of thought, which
emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century.13 Although building on
older forms of Christian hostility towards Jews, modern antisemitism drew on
a wider field of references, themes, and identities than only the religious, such
as national belonging and ‘scientific’ notions of race.14 A lack of attention to
the historical specificity of modern antisemitism is part of the explanation for
the many misreadings of ‘On The Jewish Question’.
To understand ‘On The Jewish Question’, it is necessary to keep the polemical
character of the text in mind.15 ‘On The Jewish Question’ was Marx’s response
to two articles by Bruno Bauer that had appeared in the two previous years,
‘Die Judenfrage [The Jewish Question]’ (1842) and ‘Die Fähigkeit der heu-
tigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden [The Capacity of Today’s Jews and
Christians to Become Free’] (1843). Before the break between the two authors
in 1842, Bauer had been Marx’s closest friend, and he likely exercised a last-
ing influence on Marx’s conception of critique.16 Bauer argued that political
emancipation entailed human emancipation but would only be possible after
the state and its citizens had become ‘emancipated’ from religion.17 To become
‘truly’ free, the Jews needed to renounce Judaism, and the constitutional state
needed to renounce Christianity. Any attempt by Jews to maintain themselves
as a group defined by religion was thus incompatible with such emancipation.

Postone 2005 contains a version incorporating different English- and German-language

versions of the essay.
11 Quoted by Daniel Bensaïd in Marx 2006, p. 25.
12 Traverso 2000, p. 38.
13 Postone 1980, p. 106.
14 Burrin 2005, p. 23.
15 Claussen 2005, p. 99.
16 Heinrich 2019, pp. 286–8.
17 Yago-Jung, p. 15.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 41

Marx rejected this thesis and argued that the ideas of liberal democracy,
such as freedom and equality, in practice are embedded in the bourgeois right
to private property:

But, the right of man [Menschenrecht] to liberty is based not on the asso-
ciation of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is
the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, with-
drawn into himself. The practical application of man’s right to liberty is
man’s right to private property.
What constitutes man’s right to private property? […] The right of
man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property
and to dispose of it at one’s discretion [à son gré], without regard to other
men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual
liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every
man see in other men not the realisation of his own freedom, but the
barrier to it.18

According to Daniel Bensaïd, ‘On The Jewish Question’ marked a decisive

moment in Marx’s surpassing of radical liberalism and its illusions.19 It is the
starting point of Marx’s critique of the limits of the French Revolution, of the
democratic state, and human rights.20 In this special issue, Igor Shoikhedbrod
shows how Bauer’s opposition to the equal rights of Jews ‘is used by Marx as
a foil for dissecting the potential and limitations of political emancipation
within the framework of the modern constitutional state’ while simultane-
ously recognising the necessity of such emancipation, thereby informing a
‘Marxist internationalism – one that is sensitive to the global history of perse-
cution and oppression’.
‘On The Jewish Question’ is first of all a critique of the limits of political
emancipation, and was, perhaps unfortunately, of limited use for Marxist
movements that were confronted, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, with the rise of modern antisemitism. The leaders and thinkers of
these movements initially interpreted antisemitism as a response to economic
crises and increased competition between different elements of the petite
bourgeoisie. One of the most prominent leaders of the German spd in that
period, August Bebel, claimed that only in 1877 did antisemitism come out
into the open as a political current in Germany. According to Bebel this was

18 Marx 1844.
19 Marx 2006, p. 13.
20 Marx 2006, p. 29.

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42 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

the ‘natural effect and consequence of the economic conditions’ that arose
after the crash of 1873. It was economic misery and precarity that made the
middle-layers of society susceptible to demagogues who scapegoated ‘Jewish’
exploitation. An accident of European history meant that Christian religious
hostility against Jews had as an effect that they were over-represented in eco-
nomic middle layers, in roles associated with finance and trade, and they
thereby appeared as convenient scapegoats.
This economic misery was however inescapable as capitalist development
increasingly rendered intermediate social layers obsolete. According to Bebel,
this meant that antisemitism itself was doomed to become obsolete as its
bankruptcy would be revealed by the development of capitalism itself. Even
expelling all Jews from German areas, Bebel concluded, ‘would not change the
foundations of our society by one inch’; ‘not the Jews, but capitalism is the
enemy of the anti-Semitic middle-layers’. It was inevitable that the ‘declining
middle-layers’ would increasingly realise this; ‘and they will then come to the
realisation that they have not only to fight against the Jewish capitalist, but
against the rule of the capitalist class’. At this point, ‘against its will and by
necessity’, antisemitism would ‘become revolutionary, and thus play into the
hands of us, the Social Democracy.’21
Bebel’s faith that the development of capitalism would force even antisemi-
tism to play into the hands of socialism was an extreme example of a belief in
progress that characterised much of the Marxist approach in this period. In
‘Rasse und Judentum [Race and Jewishness]’ from 1914, Karl Kautsky likewise
expected that capitalist development would inexorably lead to the assimila-
tion of Jews into wider society, thereby dissolving their difference and antise-
mitic hostility towards them. It had been in the interest of the development of
industrial capitalism that the walls around the Jewish ghettos had come down
in Europe, and the further development of capitalism towards socialism would
end the last vestiges of antisemitism.22 Antisemitism was the regressive ideol-
ogy of an outdated petite bourgeoisie, and especially in Tsarist Russia a device
with which the state tried to divide the working class. Kautsky denied any
historical resilience to the social and cultural distinctions of Jewish popula-
tions. Because of their specific social and economic functions and antisemitic
hostility towards them, Jews formed a ‘caste’, according to Kausky. Otto Bauer
shared a similar approach, explaining the existence of Jews as a national group

21 Bebel 1893.
22 Kautsky 1974, p. 90.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 43

in historical terms, as supposedly the outcome of their role as merchants in

pre-capitalist societies.23
‘Only in the ghetto,’ argued Kautsky, ‘in enforced isolation from their envi-
ronment and under political pressure, without rights and amid hostility, does
Jewishness persist.’ Wherever Jews were treated as free and equal, it suppos-
edly dissolved as class contradictions developed among the Jewish population
along parallel lines as in the rest of society.24 The way to their liberation, and
hence their assimilation, for Jews was participation in the proletarian class
struggle.25 As individuals, Jews had played revolutionary roles in the workers’
movement, Kautsky recognised, but Jewishness was only reactionary, a ‘feudal
remnant’ that ought to disappear ‘the earlier, the better’ for the whole of soci-
ety, clearing the way for the creation of a higher form of societal organisation.26
Bebel’s and Kautsky’s approach was shared by later writers. Otto Heller, a
faithful Stalinist, in ‘Der Untergang des Judentums [The Decline of Jewishness]’
(1930) added that the Jewish question was partly a national one. ‘The demise of
Jewishness in its social conception’ according to Heller meant ‘the dissolving
of the Jewish caste, bourgeois emancipation and assimilation of the Jews in the
West; the solution of the Jewish question where it is simultaneously a social
and national question, in the East, through the proletarian revolution: all of
this destroys the social preconditions for the return of antisemitism’.27
As Traverso writes in his survey of the Marxists and the Jewish Question,
the ‘classic’ approach to antisemitism probably found its most sophisticated
example in the work of Abram Leon, a young Belgian-Jewish intellectual who
was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 26.28 In his work The Jewish
Question, completed in 1942 but published posthumously in Paris in 1946, Leon
built on earlier analyses of Jewish history as the outcome of the supposed
‘socio-economic function of the Jews’; ‘Above all the Jews constitute histori-
cally a social group with a specific economic function. They are a class, or more
precisely, a people-class’.29 According to Leon, it was capitalism that posed
the Jewish Question when, by destroying feudal society, it also ‘destroyed the
function of the Jewish people-class’ while being unable to absorb ‘the Jew lib-
erated from [this] social shell’.30 But this also meant that modern forms of anti-

23 Traverso 1994, pp. 76–82.

24 Kautsky 1974, p. 92.
25 Kautsky 1974, p. 115.
26 Kautsky 1974, p. 119.
27 Heller 1931, p. 150.
28 Traverso 1997, p. 225.
29 Traverso 1997, p. 226.
30 Léon 1970, p. 258.

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44 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

semitism were only ‘manifestations of the economic antagonism created by

capitalism’.31 ‘The plight of the Jews has never been so tragic’, wrote Leon, ‘but
never has it been so close to ceasing to be that’.32 Supposedly, ghettos and yellow
badges did not prevent ‘the workers from feeling a greater solidarity with those
who suffer most from the afflictions all humanity is suffering’. Socialism would
open the way for resolving the Jewish plight. Traverso observes that Leon con-
cluded the traditional Marxist approach to the Jewish problem, ‘assimilation
as a historical trend and an outcome of “progress”’, ‘at a time when Auschwitz
was sounding the death knell for a century of Jewish assimilation’.33
It was the horrors of Auschwitz that in the eyes of Adorno ‘makes all talk of
progress towards freedom ludicrous’; ‘if freedom and autonomy still had any
substance, Auschwitz could not have happened’. Confronted with the direct
merger of politics with mass murder in Auschwitz and other camps, such
talk becomes ‘the mere assertion of a mind that is incapable of looking hor-
ror in the face and that thereby perpetuates it.’34 In his contribution to this
issue, Traverso considers the work of one thinker who did look that horror
in the face, Günther Anders. For Anders, Auschwitz and Hiroshima named
the transition to a new historical epoch, one in which humanity itself was
‘exterminable’ (tötbar).35
Whereas the socialist movement has historically tended towards a linear
vision of progress, there is a need for what Michael Löwy has called ‘a dialecti-
cal conception of progress, which takes into account the negative aspect of
capitalist modernity’.36 In his contribution to this special issue, Löwy offers
a reading of Kafka as an observer of one such aspect, of a bureaucratic ‘jus-
tice’ system ‘crushing the innocent individual under the wheels of the State
machine’. In a different view of history, Ishay Landa calls to ‘complete the revo-
lution of 1789 and to follow the process of modernity through’ by recognising
the ‘locomotive of world history’ as a force for emancipation.
In a similar impulse to reassess the Marxist classics, Neil Levi subjects
Postone’s essay to an immanent critique. Such a critique is all the more rel-
evant because the essay has become a widely cited reference, including among
Marxists who otherwise have little in common with Postone’s approach. Part
of the explanation is the paucity of Marxist analyses of Auschwitz. While
National Socialism and fascism have been the subject of intense scrutiny,

31 Léon 1970, p. 266.

32 Léon 1970, p. 262.
33 Traverso 1997, p. 243.
34 Adorno 2008, p. 7.
35 Traverso 2020, p. 48.
36 Löwy 2000.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 45

much less attention has been paid to the analysis of Auschwitz and of the pro-
cesses leading up to it.
Postone’s essay itself dates from 1979. An English translation was published
the following year, in New German Critique. The essay starts by examining the
West German response to the television drama series Holocaust and goes on to
discuss the lack of attention to Auschwitz specifically among the West-German
New Left. Only the second half of the text develops an analysis of antisemi-
tism. According to Postone, this series marked the first time that the majority
of the generation politicised after 1968 had ‘concretely and viscerally been con-
fronted with the fate of the Jews’; ‘they had known, of course, but apparently
only abstractly’.
For Postone, ‘The post-war insistence on not having known should probably
be interpreted as a continued insistence on not wanting to know. “We didn’t
know” should be understood as “we still don’t want to know.”’ Admission of
knowledge – even if acquired post factum – would have necessarily demanded
an internal distancing from past identification and would have led to politi-
cal and social consequences. Such consequences would have required among
other things that former Nazi officials could not have continued exercising
their functions in the Federal Republic. But rather than an anti-fascist reckon-
ing, ‘the demand was for “normalcy” at all costs, one to be achieved without
dealing with the past. The strong identification with that past was not over-
come, but simply buried beneath a surfeit of Volkswagens’.37
At this point, Postone’s essay can be read as an implicit critique of the
Holocaust’s use as a universal key to understanding antisemitism as such.
The failure to reckon with the specific nature of Nazi antisemitism ‘was psy-
chic self-denial and repression’. The German left’s lack of knowledge about
concrete Nazi policies led, on Postone’s assessment, to an incomplete view of
National Socialism. Against this, Postone insisted on the ‘specificity of Nazism
and the extermination of European Jewry’ and argued against interpretations
of the Third Reich in ‘historically non-specific terms’. According to Postone,
German feelings of guilt and shame led to a concern with the Nazi past but one
that avoided ‘the specificity of the past’.38 In other words, Postone’s essay was
not intended to be an analysis of antisemitism in general, nor of murderous,
‘redemptive’ antisemitism, but of specifically National Socialist antisemitism.39

37 Postone 1980, pp. 99–101.

38 Postone 1980, p. 102.
39 It should be noted that at a later point Postone wrote that ‘modern anti-Semitism’ as such
could be understood ‘as a fetishized one-sided form of anticapitalism’ that ‘biologistically
identifies’ Jews with ‘abstract capital’. See Postone 2003a.

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46 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

The main argument that Postone developed is that Nazi antisemitism iden-
tified the figure of the Jews with ‘abstract’, financial capital as juxtaposed to
concrete ‘industrial’ capital. Where purportedly the former was parasitic and
rootless, the latter was productive. In Nazi antisemitism, Jews became iden-
tified not only with money and the circulation of capital, as they had been
already in pre-existing forms of antisemitism, but ‘were identified with capital
itself’.40 National Socialism was, in terms of its self-understanding, a move-
ment of revolt.41 Nazi leaders described their movement as driven by a ‘great
anticapitalist yearning’, even a part of a ‘racial world revolution’.42 Clearly, this
was a very specific form of antisemitism, and an analysis of this form of anti-
semitism cannot simply be generalised.
Regardless of the value of the analysis developed in the second part of
‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’, attention to the often neglected first
part of the text should warn us against attempts to use it as a general explana-
tory model.43
What then to make of the widespread use of the text and its analytical cat-
egories in ways that ignore Postone’s insistence on the specificity of German
National Socialist antisemitism? ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’ itself
offers a critique avant la lettre of this use of the text; by ignoring the specificity
of National Socialist antisemitism, the antisemitism that had led to Auschwitz,
other issues, such as the confrontation with authoritarian policies in the
Federal Republic of Germany could be understood ‘as a direct struggle against
fascism, an attempt to make up today for the lack of German resistance then.’44
A similar mechanism can be seen in the contemporary so-called Antideutsch
(Anti-German) milieu analysed by Fischer. Although Postone’s essay gained
cult status in such circles, Anti-German currents are a stark example of the
mechanism of German deflection described by him: attention to the specific-
ity of German National Socialism is replaced by opposition to a supposedly
universal antisemitism. Instead of a reckoning with the German past and
its consequences, the current focusses on attacks on the other, foremost on
Palestinians and solidarity activists, and, as Fischer shows, a turn towards con-
formity with German raison d’état. As Postone wrote in 1979, ‘What happened
to the Jews has been instrumentalized and transformed into an ideology of
legitimation for the present system’.45

40 Postone 2003b, p. 93.

41 Postone 2003b, p. 84.
42 Rosenberg 2015, p. 629.
43 For one recent critique of Postone’s thesis, see Sommer 2022.
44 Postone 1980, p. 102.
45 Postone 1980, p. 98.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 47

Antisemitism, Zionism, and Palestinian Liberation

One important aspect of the contemporary debate – both because of the

break it represents with most classical-Marxist interpretations of the early
twentieth century, and because of its centrality in contemporary public
discourse – is the relationship between antisemitism, Zionism, and Palestinian
liberation.46 As already pointed out above, the current dominant narrative
propelled by pro-Israeli organisations and politicians, and given material form
through ihra policies and anti-bds legislation, is that the roots of modern
antisemitism are located in the activities of the Palestine Solidarity move-
ments and, by extension, Muslim migrant populations in Europe.47 In this
view, antisemitism is neither a European problem nor one that finds its roots
in the classical arsenal of fascism on the one hand, and European nation-state
formation on the other.
The so called ‘New Antisemitism’ was theorised around the turn of the mil-
lennium by a series of French neo-conservative intellectuals, some of whom
had roots in the 1968 left, who saw the rise of a new left and militant anti-racist
politics in the banlieues as existential threats to the Republic – for its stability
at home, and its interests abroad.48 At the very moment when fascism, in the
form of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, grew to become a key contender
in national politics for the first time in postwar history (the same Le Pen who
described the Holocaust as a mere ‘detail of history’), the French right launched
a sustained attack on the left and Muslim populations as the key danger faced
by Jewish populations in the Republic, to great and long-lasting effect. In
recent years, for example, the Macron government – following in the foot-
steps of its predecessors –, anxious to demonstrate its ability to challenge the
now-renamed National Rally to its right, took aim at so-called ‘Islamo-leftism’
while banning pro-Palestinian demonstrations and bds initiatives.49 The
echoes with the similarly racist and repressive scarecrow of Judeo-Bolshevism
of a century ago are obvious.
In their early and still seminal critique of this phenomenon, Alain Badiou
and Eric Hazan identified the centrality of Palestine to this process.50 The
narrative functions in three steps: i) equate critiques of Israel and of French

46 For a sustained and insightful reflection on the relationships between both over the
longue durée, see Bashir and Farsakh (eds.) 2020.
47 For an excellent study of these processes, see Aked 2023.
48 See, for example: Brenner (ed.) 2002; Taguieff 2002; Taguieff 2004; Taguieff 2021; Fin­
kielkraut 2003; Weill 2004.
49 Nadi 2021.
50 Badiou and Hazan 2013.

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48 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

support for it with antisemitism; ii) claim that Jews are therefore under threat
from growing support for Palestinian liberation, which in turn pre-supposes
a perfect overlap between Jews and Zionism; iii) identify the left and Muslim
populations’ support for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism – even
(especially?) when those accused make a clear distinction between antisemi-
tism and anti-Zionism. Any critique of Israel’s ongoing colonial rule over the
Palestinian people is therefore not only pre-emptively silenced but also fur-
ther proof of guilt: it is but a trick of the ‘New Antisemitism’ in order to hide
its true colours. If, as Bensaïd wrote in 2005, antisemitism can become ‘the
anti-imperialism of fools as it once was the socialism of fools’, the policies of
the Israeli state and its allies will have done much to bring this about.51
Under this narrative, Palestinians and their treatment at the hands of the
Israeli state – supported, armed, and financed by Western states –disappear
from view. Their demands are ignored or, worse, immediately turned into sus-
picious attempts to ‘single out’ the only ‘Jewish state’ in the world. Jewish pop-
ulations, on the other hand, are rendered collectively synonymous with Israel
and thereby positioned, as a sort of ideological shield, between the states in
question and those protesting their imperialist and colonial practices.52 This
attitude points to a much longer-term historical shift in the imposed identi-
fication of Jewish populations in the West, under the dual influence of the
Holocaust and the creation of the Israeli state.
Indeed, a number of the contributors to this special issue point to these
much longer histories, both of attempts to delegitimise anti-Zionism by con-
flating it with antisemitism, as well as different forms of resistance against it.
Salim Nadi, for example, introduces readers to the figure and work of Abraham
Serfaty, a Marxist, Jewish, Moroccan revolutionary who thought through
the connections between colonialism, antisemitism, and Zionism as a basis
for revolutionary politics in the Maghreb. Readers are also presented with a
text, previously unavailable in English, where Serfaty illustrates some of these
connections and their practical consequences by focussing on the fate of
Moroccan Jews, oppressed at home, exploited in Israel, and yet mobilised as
cannon fodder by the reactionary regimes in both countries. Only internation-
alism, solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and the reclaiming
of a pre-Zionist North African Jewishness can, for Serfaty, offer a way out of the

51 Bensaïd 2005.
52 In response to the imposition of the ihra working definition in British universities, more
than 120 Palestinian and Arab scholars, artists and intellectuals published a letter high-
lighting how their oppression – both historic and present-day – was being silenced and
denied, while the struggle against antisemitism was being undermined by this weaponi-
sation. See Abdallah et al. 2020.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 49

impasse. If the text today reads more like a testimony of a road not taken, it
points to a set of strategic commitments which remain nonetheless vital.
Benjamin Balthaser and Sune Haugbølle also return to the 1960s and 1970s,
in the United States and Denmark respectively, to present us with historical
examples of how the left engaged in solidarity with the Palestinian people,
addressed accusations of antisemitism, and fought to link their struggles
together. Similarly to their incarcerated Moroccan comrade, these movements
developed ways to think about their own liberation in connection with that
of the Palestinians – different circumstances linked through the structures of
capitalism, racism, and imperialism.
The period that these texts engage with is crucial if we are to understand the
changes in the nature of Western antisemitism which have led to our current
moment. Indeed, from the 1960s onwards, Western states shifted their atti-
tude towards Jewish populations.53 Under pressure from growing anti-colonial
movements in the Global South and anti-racist movements at home, Western
states re-imagined their history as one centred around the lessons of the
Holocaust. Remembering the Nazi genocide – without acknowledging the
collective responsibility of European and North American ruling classes in
financing the Nazi party and whipping up antisemitism in their own contexts –
became a way to claim a newly imagined anti-racist identity for the very states
that had either organised the extermination of the Jews in Europe, or been
the fertile ground for half a century of antisemitic reaction in the run up to
it. This white-washed Holocaust memory became, as Traverso has argued, a
civil religion. As he warned: ‘Institutionalised and neutralised, the memory of
the Holocaust thus risks becoming the moral sanction for a Western order that
perpetuates oppression and injustice’.54
Indeed, alongside this process taking place from the early 1960s onwards in
Western Europe and North America, Western support for Israel could then be
self-construed not as the continuation of the very imperialist and colonial pol-
icies that were being challenged across the globe, but as a form of anti-racist
solidarity and a commitment to the most narrow and reactionary interpreta-
tion of the slogan: ‘Never Again’.55 From pariahs and prototypical enemies of
the state, Jewish populations were re-invented by their oppressors of yester-
year as the defenders of Western civilisation par excellence. This defence was

53 For a more detailed account of this process, see Englert 2018.

54 Traverso 2016, pp. 126–7.
55 For a detailed account of the reimagination of the German State as an anti-racist actor
and a friend to the Jewish people – via its support for Zionism – see the excellent
Marwecki 2020.

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50 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

mobilised against racialised communities at home, and anti-colonial/imperi-

alist struggles abroad. Far from protecting them or freeing them from oppres-
sion, Western states repositioned Jewish populations at the centre of their
racist regimes, albeit in an inverted way. The consequences of this approach
are all around us. Western states justify their support for Israel as support for
an abstracted Jewish community, rather than as a self-interested imperialist
policy. Jews who dissent are cast out. And the many hundreds of thousands
who support Palestinian liberation and challenge their own states’ complicity
are no longer anti-racist or anti-colonial activists but themselves antisemites.

Antisemitism, Structural Racism, and Oppression

In this context, the analyses which identify, as Aimé Césaire and Hannah
Arendt once did, the continuity between Nazi exterminationist policies and
the genocides carried out by the different European empires across the globe,
help us to undermine these ideological constructions and to rebuild collective
forms of solidarity and action.56 Already in 1942, Karl Korsch noted that: ‘[t]he
novelty of totalitarian politics in this respect is simply that the Nazis have
extended to “civilized” European peoples the methods hitherto reserved for
the “natives” or “savages” living outside so-called civilization’.57 This approach,
far from belittling the Holocaust or antisemitism, points to vital possible alli-
ances in fighting all forms of oppression and exiting the system that produces
them as a necessary component of its reproduction and survival.
The question of the comparability of the Holocaust remains controversial
and fractious today. Accusations abound that placing the Nazi genocide in the
context of the long history of colonial processes of racialisation, disposses-
sion, mass murder, and extermination, is synonymous with undermining its
gravity – or even akin to revisionism. Germany, where furious debate has raged
over the nature of the Herero and Nama genocides and their connection to the
Holocaust for the last decade, once again serves as a helpful example in this
regard.58 As Jürgen Zimmerer has convincingly shown, it is not only appropri-
ate but necessary to put the genocides carried out by German soldiers and

56 Arendt 1973, pp. 123, 138, 143, 218 and passim; Césaire 2000, pp. 35–40.
57 Korsch 1942.
58 Rogers 2023 provides a helpful English-language overview of these recent debates.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 51

settlers in Namibia in the early twentieth century in relation to the Holocaust

in order to understand the latter fully.59
Whether in terms of the development of ideas of racial superiority and
purity, the need for the German Volk to secure its Lebensraum, or the actual
overlap in personnel in developing colonial and occupation policy in Africa
and Eastern Europe, or in settling the two territories, Zimmerer shows that
the connections are as fundamental as they are numerous. This is of course to
say nothing of the ways in which Nazi officials, not least amongst them Adolf
Hitler himself, were wont to make these connections and comparisons explicit
in their thought – from the racialisation and genocide of Indigenous and
African populations in North America to British colonial rule in India.60 Yet
Zimmerer and others’ careful analyses of these parallels have been met with
opprobrium in German public debate. To link the history of the Holocaust to
that of colonial genocides is, in the eyes of the defenders of the official history,
tantamount to undermining its gravity.
Leaving aside for now what this approach might tell us about the value
such commentators attribute to the lives of former colonial subjects across the
Global South, it is clear that positioning the Holocaust as an exclusive event,
located almost outside of time, is key to the process described above: making its
remembrance – ritualised and de-politicised – central to the West’s self-image,
cleansing it of its racist past. If the Holocaust remains disconnected – and
implicit in this disconnection is the idea that it is ‘worse’ in an imagined
hierarchy of barbarism – from the long history of 500 years of genocidal vio-
lence across the world, then Western states can reconcile the recognition and
remembrance of one, with the disavowal of the others. It is, in fact, very much
this question of recognition and reparations for its colonial crimes in South
West Africa which lies at the centre of the contemporary German controversy.
It is worth noting, however, that another form of comparison has, in cer-
tain quarters, become all pervasive. Both Fisher and Miriyam Aouragh discuss
in the pages of this special issue the ways in which Palestinians are repeat-
edly recast as a modern embodiment of the Nazi party. This phenomenon is
long-lasting and well documented in the history of Israeli depiction of the
Palestinian national movement and its organisations.61 Not only are early
Palestinian notables accused of being the ideological source of the extermina-
tionist policies of the Nazis, despite ample historical evidence to the contrary,

59 Zimmerer 2006. See also Wolfe 2016 for an excellent discussion of modern antisemitism
within the general emergence of ‘race science’ and racism.
60 Zimmerer 2008, p. 95; Mamdani 2020, pp. 105–6.
61 Massad 2006; see especially pp. 132–4. See also Segev 1993.

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52 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

but Arab and Palestinian national movements are regularly recast as the con-
temporary expression of this supposed desire, not to free Palestine, but to wipe
the Jewish people off the map.62
As both authors show, the tendency to obscure European histories of colo-
nial and racial violence by projecting responsibility for them onto their con-
temporary victims is not limited to Israel. Palestinians, the global solidarity
movement, as well as other racialised groups – primary amongst which are
the Muslim populations in Europe – have been cast in much the same light by
the propagators of the ‘New Antisemitism’ discourse. With the Western elites
whitewashed and Israel made synonymous with Jewish people everywhere,
any critique of the Israeli state can only be read through the prism of the unad-
dressed demons of the Western collective past. In this narrative it is not out
of Europe that modern antisemitism emerged, nor is it in the re-emergence
of its far-right parties and movements that the danger lies. Instead, it is immi-
grants, Muslims, Palestinians, and their supporters who are ‘importing’ the
scourge of antisemitism into the enlightened West. We return once more to the
image with which we started: while Jean-Marie Le Pen announced brazenly
on national television that the Holocaust had been but ‘a detail’ of history, the
French neo-cons argued it was from the banlieues that the danger came.
Comparison and connections are not only important to understand and
identify the threat, but also in developing ways to fight it. If antisemitism is
one specific expression of a wider framework of reactionary ideas and struc-
tures, then the struggle against it also needs to make these wider connections.
Both Peter Drucker and Cihan Özpinar direct our attention to these issues.
Drucker shows the striking parallels between the place that antisemitism
and homophobia have and continue to play in the organisation of fascist and
far-right parties. Both were key in the so-called period of ‘dediabolisation’ in
the 1990s and early 2000s, when upholding supposedly Western values such
as the equality of genders, religions, and sexualities in the face of imagined
reactionary Muslim invasions became central to these movements’ narratives.
It is also striking that as the far-right has grown in strength, this strategy has
increasingly fallen by the wayside. Özpinar explores the connections between
class and racialisation. While working-class Muslims are targeted and isolated
from wider society through the ‘New Antisemitism’ discourse, Muslim elites are
turned into disciplining agents of ‘their’ community. Both processes, Özpinar
argues, work in tandem to disorganise and weaken movements of contestation
among Muslim populations in Europe.

62 For a careful and detailed debunking of these arguments, see Achcar 2009.

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MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM 53

It is not possible to understand either the nature of antisemitism or its differ-

ent expressions without placing it within a broader framework of oppression,
repression, and racialisation. Failing to do so also undermines the possibilities
to challenge it. Put plainly, in the words of the civil rights leader Fannie Lou
Hamer: ‘Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.’63

Where Next?

The need, then, for an adequate analysis of what antisemitism is, and how to
recognise it and fight it, could not be clearer.
Although many of the conclusions of the classical-Marxist canon have
proven mistaken – not least its emphasis on assimilation as a quasi-automatic
(or desirable) process that would prove to be the solution to the oppression
faced by Jewish populations –, its approach, which insists on historicising
the problem and confronting it within specific and changing circumstances,
remains crucial. Similarly, the emphasis on reading (and fighting) antisemi-
tism as one part of a broader network of oppression and exploitation, so cen-
tral to the reproduction of capitalism, is one which serves as an important
corrective to contemporary tendencies to exceptionalise and de-contextualise
antisemitism.
The Marxist tradition and the socialist movement itself should not be
exempt from investigation. Brendan McGeever’s work on antisemitism in the
Russian Revolution is a powerful example of this. Simon Pirani’s review dis-
cusses the crucial importance not only of acknowledging the ways in which
the Bolshevik revolution was a crucial step forward in the struggle against anti-
semitic terror in Eastern Europe, but also of recognising the ways in which
revolutionary movements are not hermetically sealed off from the hegemonic
reactionary ideas of their time. Here too, reading antisemitism and the strug-
gle against it in a situated, historically informed, and interconnected manner
opens up important avenues for analysis.
Although the Marxist tradition has valuable insights to offer, which we hope
the pages of this special issue demonstrate, we also suggest that there is a need
to overcome a certain Eurocentrism within it, which projects European pat-
terns of antisemitism onto the world stage. Too often have the contributions
of non-European Marxists been neglected, as both Nadi and Aouragh demon-
strate. The same is true in how we approach the European Marxist tradition
and its classical texts. Levi demonstrates in his critique of Postone how crucial

63 Brooks and Houck (eds.) 2010, p. 134.

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54 ENGLERT AND DE JONG

bringing in the wider history of empire, racialisation, and violence is if we are

to understand antisemitism effectively.
However, if a Marxist approach to antisemitism is to be fruitful, i.e. to be
useful both analytically and practically, it needs to turn its attention to the
present. The late nineteenth century gave birth to a form of antisemitism that
emerged out of the racialisations of the colonial world on the one hand and
the emancipation of the Jewish populations in Europe on the other. Jewish
difference was being made increasingly fundamental, biological even, at the
very time when ‘the Jew’ from the mediaeval ghetto was vanishing from view.
No longer kept in place by religious persecution but granted civil rights, ‘he’
could be everywhere. No longer defined religiously but racially, ‘he’ could never
assimilate. These processes are not those faced by Jewish populations in the
present. If Marxism is to be relevant, it must recognise and engage with the
new ways in which ‘the Jew’ is being constructed by the material and ideologi-
cal structures we face in the present.
This Introduction and the special issue as a whole give some possible ave-
nues for reflection: the connection with Islamophobia, the place of Zionism
and Holocaust memory in the projection of Western power, the rise of a new
far-right, and the shifting class position of both Jewish and other racialised
communities, imperialism, and the ongoing crises of capitalism. We hope this
special issue will not only reinforce the need to follow these paths of analysis
and critique further, but also be a modest contribution to the renewed Marxist
engagement with the critique of antisemitism – and the struggle against it.

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