Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] MONUMENTAL TREATISE AND MONUMENTAL REVIEW 769that the so-called Trotskyites of today are fixated in the Marxist dogma andare oblivious of their hero’s moderate revisions and adaptations.One can only be baffled by the longevity of the original Marxist constructof 1844, simplistic and devoid of reality from the start, and progressivelycontradicted by experience. One of several striking examples offeredby Wistrich is his chapter on the Social Democrat Bruno Kreisky, Austrianchancellor for thirteen years (to 1983), never defeated in an election and theonly Jew ever to lead a German-speaking country; Kreisky spent 1938-46exiled in Sweden, losing many relatives to Hitler’s executioners but remainingindifferent to the Holocaust and to Jewish suffering and dislocation thatcame after it, as he was to Austrian participation in mass murder. As asocialist he was heir to the party’s Marxist antisemitic stance, by whichJews were expected to assimilate to the disappearance point because therewas no Jewish nationality, while Jewish culture and religion—of which hewas studiously ignorant—were of no value. As a guarantor of the country’samnesia, Kreisky facilitated Austrian self-exculpation for its responsibilityin the Holocaust by his speeches and diplomacy villainizing Israel in theanti-Zionist manner, minimizing the Holocaust, recognizing the PLO (hiswas the first government to do so), admitting former Nazis and warcriminals to his government, and quarreling vehemently and contemptuouslywith the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Kreisky’s attitude to Jewishnesshas to be seen as an atavism, another latter-day re-embodiment ofMarx’s 1844 essay. Such throwbacks continue to the present, more numerousthan one would expect and in places that surprise, as one reads onthrough Wistrich’s careful and precise enumeration.It took a very long time to realize how blind socialist leaders had beenfor well over a century. It seemed perfectly legitimate and logical to acceptthe repeated protestations that the socialist parties were the Jews’ bestfriends and defenders; that they had supported Jewish minority rights andcondemned antisemitism as the bodyguard of reaction and prejudice; andthat antisemitism contradicted socialist ideals of equality, tolerance, democracy,dignity, anti-racism, and ending poverty, tyranny, privilege, and so on.Historiography contributed to preserving what was in fact a myth. ThusPaul Massing, an exiled German Social Democrat, wrote what was in effectan apologia in his very influential book on the German antecedents of theHolocaust, Rehearsal for Destruction (1949). The first historian to shatterthe myth was Edmund Silberner, in a series of essays in the 1950s, concludingthat socialism exhibited a “long-standing antisemitic tradition,” thatthere was a distinct form of “Socialist antisemitism” that dates from the1830s, was enunciated by Marx in the 1844 essay, and consistently adheredto for more than a century. In the later 1960s George Lichtheim confirmedSilberner’s approach and broadened the analysis to include France. Wistrich