Anti-Semitism in British left highlights a shifting prejudice

Former London mayor and leftwing Labour politician Ken Livingstone has been suspended from his party for claiming that Hitler was a Zionist in the early 1930s. According to Livingstone, “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”, Hitler had merely wanted to expel them from their own countries to Palestine. And that, supposedly, made him a Zionist.

Historically, this is nonsense: Hitler never promoted Palestine as a Jewish state. And the implication that the Fuhrer’s hatred of the Jews put him on the same side as Jews who wished to build their own state to escape from violent anti-Semitism is offensive, to say the least.

But Livingstone was probably being sincere when he said in his defence that “a real anti-Semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel, they hate their Jewish neighbour … It’s a physical loathing.” Hating Jews in Israel is fine, then, because they are “Zionists”, and the sentiment isn’t visceral. Jeremy Corbyn, the leftwing leader of Livingstone’s party, was no doubt equally sincere when he said that anti-Semitism could not possibly be a problem on the left, because Labour has always been “anti-racist”.

It is a common conceit among leftists in Europe that racial prejudice, including anti-Semitism, is a uniquely right-wing phenomenon. This probably goes back to the Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century. When the French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason in a rigged trial in 1894, French society was divided between mostly conservative anti-Dreyfusards and liberal defenders of the Jewish officer. The conservatives were often staunch Roman Catholics, who felt deeply uncomfortable with the secular French Republic, which they associated with liberals and Jews.

Reactionary French anti-Semitism, however, reflected a wider trend in 20th-century Europe. Blood-and-soil nationalists, right-wing Christians, fanatical anti-Bolshevists, and authoritarians obsessed with social order were often anti-Semitic. Jews fared best under leftist governments.

This makes it easy to forget that a streak of anti-Semitism has always tainted the left as well. Stalin was of course notorious for persecuting Jews, or “rootless cosmopolitans” as he called them, whom he regarded as natural agents of capitalism and traitors to the Soviet Union. But well before Stalin, Karl Marx himself, although Jewish by birth, set the tone for a vicious type of anti-Semitism that infected the left, especially in France.

It was Marx who wrote, “Money is the jealous God of Israel”, and that Hebrew was “the muse of stock exchange quotations”. Marx was not oblivious to the dangers of anti-Semitism. He simply thought they would go away once the worker’s paradise had been established. In this, he was clearly mistaken.

Read the full article by Ian Buruma in The Australian