Should We Be Worried About Anti-Semitism on the Left?

Virginia, congressman Jim Moran's statement before a church group suggesting that powerful "Jewish" organizations are leading the country to war has produced denunciations from a wide variety of sources--from conservative media which revel in the fact that Moran is regarded as a liberal Democrat to liberal Jewish Democrats who have suggested that Moran, who has issued an apology, not run for re-election. While the incident may seem minor, it brings up a thorny question for historians and students of politics, the role of "left anti-Semitism."

First of all both religious and racist anti-Semitism (the universally accepted term for anti-Jewish prejudice, even though there is no "Semitic race" or nationality, only semitic languages, of which Arabic and Hebrew are the most significant today) have been associated with the political Right in Europe and America in modern history. Court Jews and ghettoized Jewish communities served for centuries as middleman and scapegoats for monarchies and aristocracies in Western and Eastern Europe, serving to deflect popular movements against those elites. Anti-Jewish edicts from the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches go back many centuries and reflect essentially the maintenance of a feudal system where everything had its place-aristocracy and clergy at the top, accepting tribute, and Jews as pariahs at the bottom, filling the cracks in the economy, sometimes as individuals gaining wealth by providing special services or special skills, and as a people never safe in an feudal order than claimed to be unchanging.

For this reason, the "emancipation of the Jews," equal rights for Jews, religious freedom, and cultural pluralism, was taken up by eighteenth and nineteenth century liberals and the main body of socialist movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in their struggle against the old regimes. At the same time, those hostile to the liberal revolutions of the late eighteen and nineteenth centuries and threatened by socialism, figures like the French aristocrat, Gobineau, and the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, became pioneering theorists of racist anti-Semitism, offering a racist restructuring of humanity into hierarchies just as feudal society used religion for that purpose, and now seeing the Jews not only as pariahs but as the source of all revolutionary disturbances and capitalist exploitation.

One of Hitler's early speeches, " Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin," is a perfect expression of this irrationality, which first surface ed in right-wing mass politics in France in the political fallout from the Dreyfus Case in the 1890s and became a fixture of right-wing mass politics in the interwar period, with the German Nazis becoming the murderous expression of these ideas and the model for anti-Semitic fascist and reactionary mass organizations throughout the world, including some like the Christian Front, the Silvershirts, and of course, the German American Bund in the United States.

But, there was another tradition of anti-Semitism, which in Germany took the form of anti-Marxist "Christian socialism," which condemned capitalism as "unchristian" and often advocated populist reforms, but focused on Jews as the source of capitalism's exploitation, condemning all Jews for the actions of powerful Jewish families like the Rothschilds who were separated from their Christian fellow capitalists and seen as representing "Jewish interests." A prominent leader of the German Social Democratic party, August Bebel, called this kind of thinking "the socialism of fools" in that it abandoned a rational critique of a system to join the right-wingers in attacking a minority group because of the wealth of a small group of its members.

In Eastern Europe also, various nationalist movements, which sometimes identified themselves with radical economic and social policies, often separated themselves from Marxists and socialists by making anti-Semitic appeals. Joseph Pilsudski, a founder of the Polish Socialist party in the 1890s and later the nationalist military strongman of the new Polish state in the 1920s and 1930s, is an example of this, although the anti-Semitic regimes in Hungary and Rumania after WWI were clearly regimes of the right.

In the United States, the targets of "the socialism of fools" were mostly blacks not Jews, and here it makes sense to call the phenomenon "the populism of fools," as Southern demagogues appealed to the poor whites with both attacks on the rich and crude racist appeals, sometimes, as in the case of Hoke Smith of Georgia, combining calls for progressive reform with the incitement of race riots. Tom Watson, the former Georgia populist leader combined both anti-black racism and anti-Semitism in his attacks on black rights and his agitation against Leo Frank, the Jewish factory supervisor lynched in Atlanta for the rape of a white factory worker, which he did not commit.

After World War I, Henry Ford, one of the world's great industrialists, published and publicized in the United States the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a bizarre fiction of secret meetings of diabolical Jews to establish a grand design to rule the world. Used earlier by Czarist agents in Russia, this work, which today reads like a gothic horror tale (although it is still widely disseminated in Arabic speaking countries) was spread widely after WWI by those who initially sought to link it to the Russian revolution. Before WWII, right-wing isolationists, including such prominent figures as Charles Lindbergh linked "the Jews" with the British Empire and the Roosevelt administration as conspiring to lead the U.S. into war against Nazi Germany at the behest of British aristocrats, Russian Bolsheviks and Jewish interests-an irrationality which Hitler would have understood..

World War II resulted in the extermination of two-thirds of the Jewish people of Europe, roughly a third of the Jewish people of the world. The defeat of fascism and the collapse of colonialism undermined all forms of racism, including anti-Jewish racism or anti-Semitism. The postwar formation of Israel, I would argue, was a consequence rather than a cause of this. The genocide carried out against Jews greatly expanded Jewish support for the Zionist movement in British colonial Palestine, and the collapse of colonialism made such a state, along with many other new nations, possible.

While the U.S. recognized Israel, it supported an arms embargo that hurt the new state's chances for survival. Actually, a Communist led coalition government in Czechoslovakia was Israel's most important arms suppler in its war of independence, and the "Arab Legion" of what became Jordan, under the command of Sir Malcolm Glubb, its most important enemy. Although the Soviets launched massive and bloody "anti-Zionist" purges, connecting Israel and in practice Soviet Jewry with American imperialism, U.S. governments in the 1950s and 1960s preferred to support the oil producing Gulf States and keep Israel at arms length until the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967; in the Arab Israeli wars of 1956 and 1967, France was Israel's most important arms supplier.

While a sort of "populist anti-Semitism" erupted among radical black nationalists in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, who sought to gain political power for themselves by deflecting the hostility of the African-American poor against institutional racism unto visible individual Jewish American landlords and shopkeepers, this expression of "left anti-Semitism" was by no means organized or powerful among the great majority of African-Americans or other minority groups, who have remained more likely to support Jewish candidates for public office than the general white population, just as Jewish-Americans have been far more likely to support African-American and other minority candidates for political office than their fellow whites in the general population. The Mass media in the Unite States however, have emphasized every expression of anti-Jewish prejudice from blacks for a generation, giving the hardly representative black Muslim leader Louis Farakhan a great deal of exposure as a "voice of black anti-Semitism," demeaning both African Americans and Jewish Americans, historic victims of and fighters against racism, in the process.

The rise to power of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon has brought with it a new situation, creating, along with the September 11 attacks the most potentially dangerous rise of anti-Semitism on the world scene since the 1930s. While some Jewish supporters of Israel are crying wolf about this phenomenon, in order to connect criticism of the government of Israel and anti-Zionism generally with anti-Semitism, which is both wrong and makes the situation worse, the rise of anti-Semitism is a real and dangerous phenomenon.

Just as Israelis forgot that Sharon provoked the crisis that led to the suicide bombings when they elected him and his rightist supporters to power and devastated the peace process, so Americans have in large numbers forgotten that Al Qaeda was an unintended consequence of the Reagan/Bush war in Afghanistan.

Historically, the most powerful argument of the Zionist movement among Jews was that Jews, as middlemen, would be caught in the middle in great political crises, scapegoated by all sides. But the identification of Israel as a country with U.S. foreign policy in the region, becoming a military middleman for that policy, recreates the condition that the Zionist movement came into existence to overcome, namely a ghettoized regional hated garrison state, rather than ghettoized scapegoated communities.

The overwhelming majority of the world's Jewish people, whatever sympathies they have for Israel as a nation, have no desire to settle and make their lives in that nation as against continuing to be integrated parts of the societies in which they live, overcoming the prejudices that exist against them in those societies by advancing broad principles of religious freedom, cultural pluralism, and ethnic tolerance, with which Jewish communities have long identified throughout the developed world.

For Israel, the only realistic solution is to be integrated positively into the Middle East and to use the skills of its population to help to develop the region positively, accepting a Palestinian state and, I would contend, working with and through the United Nations to establish a practical policy to raise the living standards of the long marginalized Palestinian people. Jewish Americans and Jewish people through the world could proudly identify with such an Israel, just as Americans could proudly identify with a United States government that addressed and used its power to redress the economic and social inequalities that produce conflict and war, rather than exacerbating them.

Fighting for such policies--and fighting against an anti-Semitism that identifies Jewish people everywhere with the brutal policies of Sharon and the denial of rights to Palestinians and against an anti-Americanism which identifies the American people with the "Manifest Destiny"-like proclamations of the Bush administration and its attempts to bomb its opponents into submission--is the only way to sustain the gains made by Jewish people globally after the defeat of Hitler. It is also the only way to regain the respect and admiration that the United States as a country had through the world in the Roosevelt years as a bastion of great wealth and a supporter of economic and social justice for the people of the world.