Anti-Semitism has a long Left-wing history

Socialists take pride in standing up for the oppressed. So why don’t the Jewish people count?

For two years, Labour batted away charges of anti-Semitism in its ranks with a kind of injured incredulity. But we’re the Lefties! We’re the goodies! Racism is a Tory problem!

As the evidence mounted – links with Middle Eastern Jew-baiters, Holocaust denial by Labour councillors, lurid conspiracy theories about Rothschild-financed plots – the denials became shriller. It’s a plot against Jezza! Stop trying to shut down legitimate criticism of Israel! There is no problem in the Labour Party – Shami Chakrabarti’s inquiry proved it!

Such a reaction was, on one level, understandable. We are all quicker to see faults in our opponents than in ourselves. But there was more to it than that. Several commentators plainly assumed that being on the Left was a sort of magic talisman that made people immune to bigotry. If you start from the assumption that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty, then anti-Semitism, being nasty, must by definition be a Right-wing phenomenon.

Except it isn’t. Last year, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism looked at all recorded cases of anti-Jewish prejudice among people holding office in British political parties. It found that 61 per cent came from Labour, and fully 80 per cent from parties of the Left.

Does that asymmetry surprise you? It shouldn’t. Left-wing anti-Semitism has an old and cruel history. Did you know, for example, that the man who (approvingly) popularised the word “socialist” was an anti-Semite? Or that the man who (approvingly) popularised the word “anti-Semite” was a socialist?

The former was the 19th-century French radical, Pierre Leroux. “When we speak of the Jews,” he wrote, “we mean the Jewish spirit – the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, of speculation; in a word, the banker’s spirit.”

The latter was a German Leftist called Wilhelm Marr. “Anti-Semitism is a Socialist movement,” he pronounced, “only nobler and purer in form than Social Democracy”.

It is a measure of the Left’s cultural ascendancy that those words now seem jarring. Yet they were, if not typical of their time, certainly not exceptional.

This ugly tradition inspired the most malign anti-Semite of all. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Adolf Hitler asked his party members in 1920. (The way in which we have repressed the memory of Nazism’s socialist origins is an even more vivid demonstration of the modern Left’s cultural ascendancy, but that’s another story.)

Yes, many socialists loathed prejudice. Yes, there were plenty of Right-wing anti-Semites. Yes, Karl Marx was the grandson of a rabbi. But listen to the way the odious sponger wrote about the religion that his father had abandoned:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”

That image of greedy, deracinated Jewish financiers inspired the painting whose destruction Jeremy Corbyn opposed, supposedly on grounds of free speech. (I say “supposedly” because Corbo doesn’t normally care about free speech: he demonstrated, for example, against the Danish newspaper that printed an image of Mohammed.)

The painter, Mear One, defended his mural in remarkably telling language: “Some of the older white Jewish folk in the local community had an issue with me portraying their beloved #Rothschild or #Warburg etc as the demons they are.” Ah, yes: the

white Jewish folk.

Now we come to the nub of why anti-Semitism doesn’t have the same status on the far Left as other forms of racism. Jews are not seen as oppressed. Many of those who call themselves anti-racists are not really interested in colour-blindness or equality before the law. They are interested, rather, in identifying victim groups.

When it comes to championing perceived underdogs, they can be in favour of racism. Thus, for example, it was fine for black Americans to vote for Barack Obama on ethnic grounds, but objectionable for white Americans to vote for John McCain on the same basis. It’s fine to want to preserve indigenous culture in Papua New Guinea, but not in Sweden. Whatever the merits of these positions, they are plainly not based on disinterested anti-racism.

Jews, especially since the foundation of Israel, have not always acted like a properly oppressed group. Indeed, Israel exists precisely because its founders had had enough of playing that role. For cheerful and optimistic observers, the Jewish story – including the establishment, against the odds, of a national home – is an inspiring one. For grudging observers, jealous observers, observers determined to see every success as based on a swindle, it is an affront.

There is little new here. The Book

of Esther tells of a Persian official in the fifth century BC whose resentment of a Jew who stood high in the king’s favour drove him to plot the destruction of the entire people: “Yet all this availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate.”

Today, that official would be obsessed by the power of the media, the banks, the “1 per cent”. Now, as then, anti-Semitism appeals to the paranoid, the envious, the spiteful, the scared, the self-pitying. Their rage will never be assuaged, for it is the rage of Caliban.

‘How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?’ Hitler asked his party members in 1920