MODERN ANTISEMITISM as it emerged in the early nineteenth century was nationalist, racialist, and right wing-populist in inspiration. This was the age of nationalism and of the Volk. The Jews, as the antisemites saw it, didn’t just belong to another religion; their character and mentality were essentially different, alien to the values and traditions of the French, Germans, Poles, Russians, and other European peoples. They were destructive elements, parasites who made no positive contribution to society; their main occupation was accumulating wealth and, through their money, political and cultural influence. The antisemites claimed that the Jews wanted to conspire and dominate, and constituted a major, perhaps mortal, danger to the normal development of other nations. There were many more suspicions and accusations and they all amounted to the demand to expose and combat Jewish influence, if it was not possible physically to remove them. This then was the predominant strain of antisemitism throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The left, on the other hand, was the heir of the Enlightenment and its ideals were those of the French Revolution, not only of liberty and equality but also of fraternity. The left wing stood for the liberation of the oppressed. In view of its basic ideological orientation, the left wing as a group could not possibly be antisemitic.
Furthermore, the “Jewish question” was not a central one for the left, which was preoccupied with the worldwide struggle between oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited. In this global confrontation, the Jews were a small and not very important factor. No wonder that in this global confrontation Jews were prominently involved in the left-wing camp that promised the Jews at long last full emancipation and liberation. “Left wing” was a synonym for progress and freedom, just as “right wing” was tantamount to the old order in which the Jews had been among the main victims.
Thus, the left, the protagonist of freedom, was the great hope of many Jews, except perhaps the very orthodox among them who preferred conservativism to liberal, let alone revolutionary, ideas. The very orthodox feared that the new freedom would bring about the disintegration of traditional Judaism. But it is also true that among the leftists there was an anti-Jewish element from the very beginning. This appeared in the writings of the early utopian socialists for whom the Jews were the prominent representatives of the new capitalism (as personified by the Rothschilds) that was the main enemy. The young Marx wrote a long essay replete with anti-Jewish stereotypes, and the not-so-young Ferdinand Lassalle, the great popular leader of the early German working-class movement, wrote in a love letter that he hated the Jews.
It could be argued with some justification that these and other anti-Jewish utterances were rooted in psychological resentment rather than deep ideological conviction. The state of European Jewry after the fall of the ghetto, following centuries of oppression and a miserable existence, was deplorable. The young Jewish revolutionaries imbued with the modern ideas were anything but proud of their Jewish ancestry. They had nothing but scorn for the antiquated religious practices of traditional Judaism, the lack of culture among a community to which they felt no ties and from which they wanted to dissociate themselves as quickly and as a radically as possible. There was considerable embarrassment and even physical repulsion—Marx, whose outward appearance was not “Nordic,” called Lassalle a “Jewish Nigger.”
Jewish leftists saw themselves as citizens of their countries, patriots of the world, not members of an anachronistic sect. Among leading European Jewish socialists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is difficult to find many who had any sympathies for their poor and downtrodden brethren in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, however often they stressed that they should not be approached with complaints of specific Jewish sufferings (as had Rosa Luxemburg), however often they stressed that they were not Jews in any meaningful sense (as had Leon Trotsky), however great their expressed disinterest in things Jewish, for their enemies Jews remained despicable and dangerous.
This was their personal predicament; the Social Democrat and early Communist parties did not want to have any truck with antisemitism, which was the “socialism of fools” (Engelbert Pernersdorter). It would not be difficult to find incidents of antisemitism in the history of left-wing parties beginning with the socialist revolutionaries (the People’s Will) in Russia in the 1870s. But these were isolated incidents, in no way typical for the socialist and Communist movements in general. It is true that Marxist ideologists from Lenin to Karl Kautsky bitterly opposed Jewish national movements—in the case of Lenin, not just Zionism but also the anti-Zionist Bund; still, this too cannot possibly be interpreted as manifestations of antisemitism, attacks against Jews as such.
Socialist and Communist parties prior to World War Two were careful not to go out of their way in their defense of Jewish communities against antisemitic attacks; this was done out of political opportunism and tactical considerations rather than from deep conviction. Populist antisemitism was quite popular and it was politically unwise even for a left-wing party to engage in a direct confrontation with such widespread public sentiments.
In the 1950s, however, a new left-wing doctrinal attitude, sometimes sponsored by Jewish radicals, developed; its roots can be traced back to an earlier period. Abram Leon, a young Belgian Trotskyite and former Zionist, published during the Second World War a little book on the Jewish question “from the point of view of historical materialism” that contained antisemitic motifs. He argued, for instance, that historically the Jews had chosen usury as their main occupation not because other professions were barred to them but out of an inner, essential inclination. No one had prevented them from becoming peasants or workers or choosing some other productive job; they had opted for usury; those who did not admit this were fools or liars. Neither Trotsky nor Lenin had ever argued on these lines and professional historians of the Marxist persuasion (such as Maxime Rodinson) rejected this kind of argument as ignorant. Leon perished in the Holocaust, and although his writings could be rejected as the aberrations of a semieducated young man, his little book became in the following decades something like a cult book in certain circles of the extreme left. It was translated and often reprinted, and it can be seen as a forerunner of the new antisemitism of the last third of the twentieth century.
Trotskyism, however, was a fringe movement at the time, while Stalinism after the Second World War was the dominating force in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and it too turned openly antisemitic during the early 1950s. This was manifest in a variety of declarations and actions. Jews with very rare exceptions were removed from leading positions in the state, party, armed forces, economy, and public life in general. Jewish Communists who had adopted Russian names to hide their ethnic origins were identified in the media as aliens by mentioning their original names. (Stalin, Molotov, and others had also changed their names, but this was different.) The remnants of Jewish culture, theater, and publications were destroyed; Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Fascist Committee, founded during the war, were dissolved; its members were arrested and some were executed. A major anti-Jewish propaganda campaign was undertaken that claimed that the Jews were enemies of Russia and Communism; it culminated in the arrest of leading Jewish doctors who were accused of having poisoned Communist leaders. Stalin planned to deport Soviet Jewry to distant parts of the country, and only his sudden death in March 1953 seems to have intervened.
While antisemitic stereotypes were constantly used, it would have been politically inopportune to attack Jews as Jews following the mass murder committed by the Nazis during the war—the parallels with Nazi Germany would have been too striking. Thus, Jews were usually termed “Zionists” or “rootless cosmopolitans.” However, there was not a single Zionist among the victims of the anti-Jewish purges; they were fervent anti-Zionists, faithful sons and daughters of the Communist party and the Soviet fatherland. Their crime was being Jews, not engaging in any ideological deviation, let alone treason.
This antisemitic campaign was not limited to the Soviet Union and had strong repercussions in other East European countries. An intense anti-Jewish propaganda campaign was launched in these countries from 1949 to 1952, sometimes in connection with the anti-Tito campaign (the Yugoslav leader had distanced himself from the Communist camp in 1947–1948). The anti-Jewish character of the purges and trials was perhaps most obvious in Prague in the 1952 Slansky trial; the accused were all former leading members of the Communist party, and if two or three non-Jews were included among them, this was no doubt done for propagandistic reasons. The interrogators called the Jewish accused “Jewish swine” and enemies of the people, who had wormed their way into the party and state to cause maximum harm to the cause of Communism and progressive mankind.
Similar trials were carried out or prepared in other so-called People’s Democracies, with slight differences in timing. In East Germany, Paul Merker, a non-Jew (who had spent the war years in Mexico, not in the Soviet Union), was designated the main culprit. He was accused of having overemphasized the role and the suffering of the Jews among the Nazi victims, and he had even suggested that Jews should be compensated to a certain extent for the property that had been robbed by the Nazis. According to the party line in the Soviet bloc, the fact that Jews had been systematically killed by the Nazis in contrast to all other groups or nationalities was played down: the Jews had been mere “passive victims,” not active antifascists; they had been persecuted but they were second- or third-level victims. Merker was saved because the investigations against him lingered on, and after Stalin’s death they had to be discontinued. However, he was never fully rehabilitated, and a number of other leading Jewish cadres had been meanwhile sentenced to long prison terms; others had died under interrogation or were driven to suicide. Most Jewish Communists in East Germany were demoted or excluded from the party, but many were reinstated after 1955.
In Hungary, where the percentage of Jews in the supreme leadership was higher than in all other Communist countries, Matias Rakosi, the party leader and a Jew, had foreseen the coming of the antisemitic campaign and early on warned the Soviet security organs about the infiltration of hostile (Jewish) elements in the party. In Romania leading Jewish Communists were squeezed out and some (such as Ana Pauker) sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In Poland too, Jews were heavily represented in the upper echelons of leadership (Jakub Berman, Hilari Minc, Roman Zambrowski), but opposition to Communism was so great and the absence of reliable Polish cadres—reliable from Moscow’s point of view—so obvious that the removal of the Jews occurred only after Stalin’s death, in 1956 and 1968. Ultimately, as in the other People’s Democracies, Jews were totally eliminated from leading positions in the Polish state and party.
The elimination of Jews from government office and the antisemitic public climate affected not just Jewish Communist party members but also the remainder of erstwhile substantial Jewish communities, and it resulted in the emigration of many of them, principally from Romania, Hungary, and Poland. In the Soviet Union there was initially great reluctance to let the Jews go; the desire to get rid of them collided with the ideological claim of having solved the national problem once and forever.
What were the motives of Communist antisemitism and how did it differ from that preached and practiced by the Nazis? The persecutions of the early 1950s can be explained in part with reference to the personal attitudes of Josef Stalin and his paranoia, which became more obsessive with old age. Among the many other factors was the anti-Jewish feeling shared by other Soviet leaders and rooted in the population at large. Although by 1950 few Jews were left in leading positions in the Soviet Union, this was certainly not the case in the People’s Democracies, and their replacement sooner or later by native cadres was inevitable—that it should proceed in this particular gruesome and mendacious form was another issue.
Communist antisemitism under Stalin had in common with Nazi and fascist antisemitism the belief in a Jewish world conspiracy. This was an essential part of Communist doctrine; the role allegedly played by Kuhn, Loeb, and other Wall Street banks in the struggle against the Soviet Union in the early 1920s still echoed in the Communist memory. Soviet Jews were not the only ethnic group with coreligionists living abroad. But in the case of the Armenians, for example, the concentration of their people and the center of their religion were inside the Soviet Union, while in the case of the Jews, most were located abroad and, of course, the state of Israel acted as a magnet.
The deep belief in plots and conspiracies preceded the Cold War—it was at the bottom of the great purges of the 1930s, the allegations that leading Communists had sold out to the Gestapo, to the Japanese secret service, to British and French imperialism. With the outbreak of the Cold War, the United States became the main enemy, and since the American Jewish community was sizable and influential, Jews everywhere became a priori suspect. This remained the case, albeit not in such an extreme form, after Stalin’s death, even though there were no leading Jewish cadres left to be purged. Nevertheless, the anti-Jewish propaganda machine continued its work. Soviet foreign policy, which had initially been neutral in the Arab-Israeli conflict, sharply turned against Israel after 1967, and Russia broke off diplomatic relations. But as far as Jews in the Soviet bloc were concerned, the propaganda campaign was preoccupied only to a limited extent with the misdeeds of the state of Israel; it followed classical antisemitic lines. According to the books and pamphlets by various official writers, issued by the propaganda department of the Communist party or Soviet army intelligence (there was no certainty about the identity of the sponsors), the teachings of Judaism inspired inhuman deeds, provided the chauvinistic idea of the Jews as the chosen people, and led to their notion of ruling over other people of the world. These teachings were an unsurpassed textbook of bloodthirstiness and hypocrisy, treason, perfidy, and vile licentiousness. Jews had been Hitler’s fifth column, the propagandists claimed; they had financed the Nazis and they were instrumental in trying to overthrow the Soviet order. These antisemitic texts were accompanied by cartoons that resembled and in some cases reproduced Nazi propaganda.
The crudeness of these publications caused negative reactions and embarrassment among Communist party members outside the Soviet Union. From time to time this propaganda was tuned down, but it basically continued up to the last years of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was taken up and intensified by both former Communists and the extreme right, and also by sections of the Russian Orthodox church, which could now claim that their dire prophecies about the Jewish cabal had come true.
There were certain differences in the attitudes toward Jews in the People’s Democracies. In East Germany for the obvious historical reasons—recollections of Nazi ideology and propaganda—there were fewer instances of openly antisemitic attacks, and few if any attacks against the Old Testament and the teachings of Judaism. Jews were denounced as the “class enemy” and the term Zionist was usually preferred when denouncing Jews. Unlike in the Soviet Union, positions in the state and party leadership, except for the brief period noted above, were not barred to Communists of Jewish origin. Furthermore, as East Germany tried to normalize relations with the United States in the 1980s, the anti-Jewish attacks became far more infrequent. The same is true, to a lesser extent, with regard to the other Eastern European countries. The decline in openly antisemitic incidents had more to do with the lessening of the intensity of the Cold War rather than with any profound ideological change.
Seen in retrospect, there were, of course, other significant differences between Nazi-style antisemitism and Communist antisemitism. Above all, Communism would emphatically deny that its repression of Jews as communities or individuals or its anti-Jewish political indoctrination had anything to do with antisemitism. It would argue that the Communist system treated all ethnic groups equally and that ethnic belonging was of no significance—if individuals were attacked or repressed, this was because they were enemies of peace, or agents of capitalism or of imperialism, not because they were Jews.
In view of its ideological tenets, Marxism-Leninism, even in its Stalinist phase, could not be openly racialist; the Soviet Union, furthermore, was a multinational empire and a few Jews were always left unmolested even at the worst of times. Marxism, after all, was the heir of the Enlightenment and the ideals of the French Revolution, and the concept of a superior master race was unthinkable—even though Soviet ideology had gone a long way from the early internationalist days to something akin to National Socialism. Marx had been born a Jew and many other Jews of an earlier period had been Communists—this history could not be rewritten.
Even in the days of Marx and Engels, however, not all people had been considered equal—Poles and Hungarians, for instance, were considered progressive whereas Russians were a reactionary force in world history, and the South Slavs, unimportant. Later, there was an official Marxist-Leninist doctrine of absolute equality, but there was an unwritten party line according to which some groups were more progressive than others and Jews were considered reactionary. The very least that was demanded of Jews in order to be accepted as equals was to dissociate themselves totally from Judaism, not only from the Jewish religion or sympathies with Zionism but from any identification with other Jews, and to actively struggle against all national Jewish feelings. Only on these conditions could these non-Jewish Jews—to use the expression coined by one of them, Isaac Deutscher—hope to be treated as comrades in the fight for justice and progress. Even in these circumstances, a residue of suspicion and hostility remained.
Communist anti-Judaism is also of interest because of the interchangeable use of the terms “Zionism” and “Judaism.” The Bolsheviks had opposed Zionism even before the revolution of 1917 (as had leading Social Democrats such as Kautsky), but the use of the term “Zionism” as a synonym for Judaism and Jew had been unthinkable. Among the Jews left in the Soviet empire after the Second World War were no more than perhaps a handful of Zionists, because the true Zionists had used the opportunities at the end of the war to emigrate to Palestine. Those attacked as Zionists under Stalin and his successors were anything but Zionists; most of them knew little and cared less about the Jewish state that had come into being in 1948. Hence, it is legitimate to define the Communist attitude toward Jews during much of the postwar period as anti-Jewish even though this antisemitism differed in character from previous religious or racialist manifestations.
The influence of the Communist parties and of Communism greatly declined with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but the New Left remained an influential player on the political scene in many countries. It was among these groups and especially among the most radical of them that antisemitic views emerged. Again, as in the case of the Communists, there were emphatic denials on the part of those charged with antisemitism: this was a base calumny spread by right-wing nationalist Jews; many of the leading figures of the New Left, of the Trotskyites, and other leftist groups were Jews, and the charges of antisemitism were merely an attempt to silence critics of right-wing, aggressive, and reactionary policies followed by the state of Israel.
The occupation of the West Bank following the Six-Day War of 1967, the struggle against terrorism, and the policies of the right-wing Likud in general generated anti-Israeli feelings among leftist groups (and others) in both Europe and America, as it did among Arabs and Muslims. However, as indicated earlier, there had been hostility toward Israel even before 1967; Israeli policies after that date are not sufficient to explain the anti-Jewish attitudes that developed on the political left. At least some of the other motivating forces involved ought to be mentioned.
While Jews continued to be prominently involved with the radical left in the West, especially with the Trotskyites and similar groups, these were “non-Jewish Jews.” On the other hand, Jews were at least equally prominently involved in the anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist camps during the Cold War, and this, the far left was not willing to forget and to forgive, especially when their assessment of the Soviet Union and Communism was borne out by the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s.
Furthermore, as the result of social and economic developments, increasing numbers of Jews had moved from the left to the center; for sentimental reasons most American Jews would still vote for the Democrats although they could equally support the Republicans. Although in years past, there had been no room for Jews in conservative parties, this was no longer the case; there were no longer significant antisemitic sentiments in these circles. Among radical populists of the left in Europe as well as in America, attacks—sometimes veiled, sometimes outspoken—were launched against the Jews. If the right was no longer what it had once been, the character of the left had also changed. Once there had been a democratic left and a Marxist or anarchist left, but as time went by, populist elements became much stronger among them. This populism with equal ease could turn to the right or to the left, and could cooperate with reactionary, antisemitic groups.
AS FAR AS ISRAEL IS CONCERNED, it is useful to recall once again that a majority of the radical left (except, for a short time, the Communist parties following the Soviet lead) had been against the creation of the state of Israel, which, as they saw it, was at best an anachronism, a relapse into bourgeois nationalism at a time when the whole world was moving toward internationalism. Thus, the radical left wing considered Zionism and the establishment of Israel a retrograde, reactionary development, while the Arabs were seen as progressive fighters for national liberation.
From this perspective, the fact that there was a strong labor and left-wing movement among the Israelis was of little consequence, as was the fact that there was no significant Arab left, even though anti-imperialist, quasi-Leninist phraseology was adopted in certain Arab circles during the 1960s and 1970s. Later on, extreme nationalism and religious fundamentalism took over in the Arab left. As far as the radical left was concerned, “objectively” the Arab opponents of Israel were a progressive force and had to be supported. Even the classics of Marxism and Leninism had taught that the struggle for national and social liberation in backward countries could assume strange and antiquated forms. On the other hand, Israeli left wingers, whatever their political doctrines, were “objectively” reactionary and pro-imperialist.
Thus, even in the 1950s and early 1960s, there was an identification in Western radical left-wing circles with Palestinian insurgents, which manifested itself in ideological writings as well as the wearing of the kaffiyeh and the dispatch of Western terrorists (“Carlos the Jackal” and members of the Baader-Meinhof gang) to training camps in Arab countries. Eventually, members of these terrorist groups made common cause with Arab terrorist organizations in aircraft hijackings and other operations. The Baader-Meinhof group welcomed the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics as yet another step in the struggle of national liberation. They took part in attacks against Israelis and European Jews. As they saw it, the Jews living in what had earlier been Palestine had no right to a state of their own; they should and would have to emigrate or find their place in an Arab country and society.
Such declarations and demands in an extreme form were by no means shared by all segments of the left, and it is debatable whether the very radical, terrorist, or proterrorist leftist groups could still be considered “left wing” in any meaningful sense. They defined themselves as being of the left, but early fascism, after all, had also proclaimed itself anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and against plutocracy. This new left-wing doctrine probably had more to do with third-world romanticism than with ideas of the traditional left. Whether ideologically legitimate or not, the anti-Jewish character of this propaganda emerged clearly well before 1967 when, as the result of the Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. It showed itself also in aspects that had nothing to do with Israel—such as Holocaust denial or denigration.
This school of thought found more than a few adherents, mainly among neo-Nazis and their sympathizers. It was also adopted by groups of the extreme left such as La vieille taupe (the Old Mole) in France as well as former leading Communists such as Roger Garaudy, who had moved from the Politburo of the French Communist party to the extreme right. Others had adopted what they called a “third position.” La vieille taupe was attacked for its advocacy of Holocaust denial, as was Robert Faurisson, the French author of the standard text and manifesto detailing the allegations. But Faurisson’s book had a preface by Noam Chomsky, the most famous spokesman of the American left, and this caused a minor scandal.
The Baader-Meinhof gang and allied groups, which claimed its anti-Nazism was second to none, argued nevertheless that Germany had somehow to overcome the incubus of Auschwitz. As Horst Mahler, the lawyer of the group at the time, later put it, the “Auschwitz lie” had been “fabricated by our enemies to destroy us and eventually the whole German people.” As far as the Jews were concerned, to these groups yesterday’s victims had become the killers of today (“ZioNazis”) who wanted to exterminate the Palestinians, and Moshe Dayan was the Himmler of Israel. The case of “Carlos the Jackal” was not untypical. The most prominent terrorist of the 1960s and 1970s, this Venezuelan gunman had moved from ultraleftist positions that rejected Soviet policies as not sufficiently revolutionary to identification with the struggle waged by Osama bin Laden. Whether to define such a position as Communist or fascist might be a moot point; the anti-Jewish element was obvious and the denial of the Holocaust was part of his new ideology.
Holocaust denial also became part of the ideological arsenal of Arab propaganda against Israel and the Jews. Seen from an Arab point of view, this was not a rational and logical argument, for had it not been for the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis, the state of Israel would, in all probability, never have come into being. But it was an illustration of how emotional factors got the better of clear thinking.
In their extreme form, the Holocaust deniers of the left were not many, but there was a considerably larger group of people who expressed similar theses in a watered-down version or fought for the right of the Holocaust deniers to express their views. Yet others claimed that while the Holocaust had indeed taken place, it had been exploited and instrumentalized by chauvinist Jews to gain international sympathy, to extort money from the international community in compensation for the funds robbed by the Nazis, and also to justify Israeli politics.
Individual Jews of the far left played a leading part in the “deconstruction” of the history of the Holocaust: this campaign was quite successful because it coincided with the emergence of a widespread reaction against being reminded of the Holocaust. Was it not true that too much had been made of the murder of the Jews for too long, and was it not correct that other cases of mass murder were taking place in the contemporary world? Why should the Jews insist on preferential treatment and stress the exclusive character of the Holocaust? Above all, would this emphasis on the Holocaust not be of help to Israel?
Two other considerations—one of practical politics, the other ideological-psychological—played an important role in the emergence of anti-Jewish feelings among the European left. (Practical politics and ideological considerations were also in play in America, where left wing radicals would find excuses, if not justifications, for the likes of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, A1 Sharpton, and others who claimed that Jews had been the leading slave traders among their other crimes.)
There had been a time when the industrial working class had been considered the natural ally of Social Democrat and Communist parties, but over recent decades this segment of society had shrunk and its ethnic composition had changed. Following the great immigration wave into Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, a strong Muslim element emerged in what remained of the European industrial working class. The rapid population increase among these newcomers from Turkey, North Africa, and the Arab world made them a factor of political importance. Socialist and Social Democrat politicians as well as the Greens in Germany and other political parties had to take into account the mood and the demands of these new voters whose numbers could be decisive in dozens of constituencies, and it was no secret that anti-Jewish feeling ran high in these circles.
If this applied to moderate socialists and their electoral calculations, the more radical left wing, such as various Trotskyite and New Left groups, went still further, were more outspoken, and felt fewer restraints. Small and isolated, they had been searching for decades for allies, as they tried to work through established political parties and unions in a policy termed “entryism”; this however had proved unsuccessful. For them, this new “proletariat” seemed yet another opportunity to strengthen their influence and to create a mass base.
Although traditional Trotskyite ideology is in no way close to radical Islamic teachings and the shariah, since the radical Islamists also subscribed to anticapitalism, antiglobalism, and anti-Americanism, there seemed to be sufficient common ground for an alliance. Thus, the militants of the far left began to march side by side with the radical Islamists in demonstrations, denouncing American aggression and Israeli crimes. In Britain a new political party named Respect was established, uniting Trotskyites, Stalinists, Muslim Brotherhood militants, and similar groups. And it was only natural that in protest demonstrations militants from the far right would join in, antisemitic banners would be displayed, anti-Jewish literature such as the Protocols would be sold. One could not reasonably expect the politically unsophisticated to make the fine distinctions between Zionism and Judaism. On occasion shouts such as “death to the Jews,” “death to gays,” or “down with women’s rights,” or the advocacy of suicide terrorism would embarrass left-wing militants, but it was a small price to pay for gaining powerful allies.
Similar alliances of various, more inchoate groups—anarchists, ATTAC (Association for a Taxation of Financial Transaction and for Assistance to Citizens, an international antiglobalization organization), and other “autonomous” organizations who appeared under the general umbrella of antiglobalism—were forged for public demonstrations. Individually, most of them were not antisemites, or at least not more antisemitic than members of other parties, and they would angrily reject any such imputation. But opinion polls established that as far as they were concerned, the enemy was not just Ariel Sharon; they were convinced that Jews were far too influential in world politics in general, that Israel (not the proliferation of nuclear weapons, not al-Qaeda, not even America) was the greatest danger to world peace. And since the majority of the inhabitants of Israel were Jews, since many Jews outside Israel had family there, and many Jews sympathized with the state of Israel albeit disagreeing with its government, it would follow that Jews in general were responsible for Israel (unless they would actually fight it), that the world would certainly be a safer place if Israel did not exist. It was clear to what conclusions such reasoning would ultimately lead.
Seen in this mirror, Jews were the new Nazis. They were systematically exterminating the innocent Palestinians, enclosing them in ghettos. But Israeli misdeeds quite apart, Jews had been responsible for international crime in the past, from the black slave trade to the white slave trade (prostitution), corruption, and many other crimes. Although these denunciations were often rejected by the more responsible leaders of antiglobalism and the left, they persisted nevertheless. It is also true that the charges of Nazism and Nazification did not always mean what they seemed to mean, especially when emanating from Arab sources. Nazism in the Arab world had never been the worst of crimes; on the contrary, Hitler and his regime have retained considerable popularity to this day on the basis that the enemy of one’s enemy must be a friend.
There was a belief on the left that Jews were the main force behind globalism and this together with the rise of anti-Americanism (and the conviction that Jews were running American policy one way or another) was the doctrinal source of anti-Jewish feeling on the left. Great powers have never been popular in history, and anti-Americanism was nothing new except that in the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries it had been far more widespread on the right in Europe than on the left. Attacks against “plutocratic America” under the warmonger President Franklin Rosenfeld (Roosevelt) had been frequent in the age of the Nazis.
As the Cold War ended, America had emerged as the sole superpower, and this created an entirely new situation. Many on the radical left could not accept that the wrong side had prevailed in the Cold War, and they came to regard aggressive American imperialism as the enemy of all peoples. This was true under Bill Clinton’s administration and especially under President George W. Bush, who followed an aggressive foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. America, and in particular the Republican administration, became the great menace to be combated and in the struggle against it, all allies were welcome.
Where did the inspiration for American policy originate? From the neoconservatives and Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss (1899–1973), a political philosopher of German Jewish origin, came to America in the 1930s and taught for many years at the University of Chicago. He had written about Xenophon and Plato, about Spinoza and Hobbes and Maimonides, but in reality (according to the New Left version) he was a cryptofascist; the insidious message of his work had been to establish American global hegemony and American world empire by means of deception. Strauss, it was maintained, had established a cabal of mainly Jewish students, the so-called neoconservative school, and his disciples attained positions of immense influence under the Bush administration in the late 1990s. It would be difficult to show that the president or the vice president of the United States, the secretaries of defense and state, or the head of the Central Intelligence Agency had ever heard of Strauss, but so powerful and insidious was Strauss’s ideological legacy that almost imperceptibly it had shaped American foreign policy, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war against terror, through the machinations of his Jewish acolytes, ardent supporters of right-wing Zionism acting in unison and with great determination.
The foregoing, in briefest outline, was the quasi-academic New Left explanation of much or all that had gone wrong with American policy; in a simplified form through the mass media, it reached a far wider public. In the case of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, those pulling the strings had been rabbis and bankers; the leading figures in this new conspiracy were professors of philosophy. As in the case of Communism in its Stalinist and post-Stalinist phases, the New Left and the antiglobalists faced some barriers to openly proclaiming racial antisemitism, the idea of superior and inferior races. Code words were used but, nonetheless, the radical left and antiglobalism certainly had what some observers called a “Jewish problem.” Jews were regarded with distrust unless they made it abundantly clear that they actively participated in the struggle against capitalism, imperialism, globalism, and, in some cases, the existence of a Jewish state.
Whether to call these suspicions of Jewish intrigues, the imputation of double loyalties, and the denunciation of excessive Jewish influence antisemitic or to use other terms is a question of semantic interest that could be endlessly discussed. The New Left attitude toward the Jews certainly resembled more that of the medieval church than that of the age of racialism; there was salvation through conversion. Some of the similarities with earlier forms of hostility toward Jews as a group or individuals were certainly more than superficial, and they were part of what has been called, for want of a more accurate—and less offensive—term, the new antisemitism.