Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

HOMO JUDAICUS ECONOMICUS
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ety, strongly influenced socialist parties in his time and long after. For them,
no special effort was necessary to combat antisemitism, since capitalism and
antisemitism, having risen together, would disappear together with the triumph
of socialism. For example, in 1893 German socialists passed a party resolution
that they would not “waste the energy they needed for the struggle
against the existing political and social order on a useless fight against a phenomenon
[antisemitism] which stands and falls with bourgeois society.” 87
While the German and Austrian Social Democratic parties and the
French Socialist party often denounced antisemitism as the way the ruling
classes distracted attention from the real sources of the workers’ exploitation
onto the Jews and some socialist leaders decried antisemitism as “the stupid
man’s socialism,” “the socialism of fools/simpletons/imbeciles,” often they
were inhibited by fear of antagonizing their worker members, many of whom
were antisemitic. Others proposed utilizing antisemitism as a tactical weapon
to rally the workers against their employers and “the bourgeoisie” at the ballot
box. 88 Commenting on its capacity to generate extreme anti-Jewish hatred,
historian Paul Lawrence Rose concludes that Marx’s essay has “remained the
chief source of socialist antisemitism,” its influence “pernicious.” 89 Ironically,
Marx provided fuel for right-wing antisemites. Since he was himself derided as
Jewish by friend and foe alike, parties of the Right defined Marxism as “Jewish,”
as he had defined capitalism and with some of the same kinds of calamitous
effects in later times. Whatever his intentions were and whatever his
unarticulated second thoughts may have been, Marx’s essay was put to antisemitic
use by Hitler and Nazi antisemites, Soviet antisemites* and their eastern
European imitators, and Arab Islamic antisemites. To Julius Carlebach, the
keenest student of Marx’s relationship to Judentum, “Marx is a logical and indispensable
link between Luther and Hitler.” 90 Ruminating on Marx’s essay,
the German Israeli Marxist Franz Fink wondered “how one can consider objectively,
as Marx’s ideas should be considered, thoughts on Judaism which
(however they were meant originally) sound like a justification for the murder
of Jews? What Jew could forget the mass exterminations of 1943 when he
reads the death sentence of 1843?” 91 In any event, neither Marx nor Marxism
* One instance is the notorious Trofim Kichko, who at the height of the campaign
against “cosmopolitanism” in his 1963 diatribe Judaism Without Embellishment unleashed
Marx’s canards: “What is the [Jews’] secular god? Money. Money. Money, that
is the jealous god of Israel.” Quoted in William Korey, Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat,
and the Demonology of Zionism (Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon Center, Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1995), 11. Kichko is reported to have collaborated with German occupiers
of Ukraine in World War II.