In 1893, the German labor leader August Bebel breezily dismissed anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools.” From then to the present day, the Western left has been disturbingly complacent about Judeophobia. Communists and socialists of various stripes have persistently underestimated the impact, distinctiveness, and longevity of anti-Semitism. Even today, significant strains of the American and even the Israeli left are far less exercised about global anti-Semitism than the supposed transgressions of the Jewish state. A review of the hard left’s various answers to the “Jewish Question” makes clear that equivocation on anti-Semitism and antipathy toward Israel are enduring, complementary elements in Marxism’s wrongheaded materialist interpretation of world affairs.
Few Marxists have attempted to address Judeophobes’ fundamentally demonic view of the world or the mythical power of anti-Semitic archetypes of “the Jew,” such as Judas, Satan, and the Antichrist. Similarly, few have tried to decipher the phantasmagoric conspiracy theories at the heart of so many anti-Semitic beliefs. This failure contributed to how the Western left viewed the rising anti-Semitism of the Nazis in the 1930s. Very few socialists, anarchists, or Communists (apart from isolated mavericks such as Wilhelm Reich) showed much grasp of the psychology of fascism, let alone addressed seriously the Manichean worldview of anti-Semites before the Holocaust.
Let us begin with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the SPD deliberately played down anti-Semitism and generally avoided any direct attacks on it. The SPD’s paralysis went beyond the fear of challenging the popular prejudices of German workers inside the Third Reich. It was a fundamental failure of the imagination. Both German socialists and Communists grossly underestimated the integrative power of irrational thinking and the centrality of racial anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology. They didn’t see the great qualitative difference between traditional Jew-hatred and Nazi anti-Semitism, which they reduced to a mere political instrument of “reactionary” forces to bring down the Weimar Republic. After 1933, they still regarded Jew-hatred primarily as a tool for consolidating Hitler’s dictatorship.
For the German left, the essence of Nazism was not the destruction of the Jews but the crushing of the working class. They saw Kristallnacht as little more than a trial balloon for more repressive measures against German society as a whole—not as a massive offensive against the Jews. Many left-wing German intellectuals in exile believed that Jews suffered no more than others, and they argued that overemphasizing anti-Semitism would only weaken the anti-Nazi campaign. Writing from postwar Germany in the summer of 1945, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann), who had served as a staff sergeant in the 5th U.S. Army, was still treating the fate of the Jews as a secondary issue; he dismissed the Jews as a “dreary” subject, and the Holocaust as neither special nor significant.