Pierre-André Taguieff is a philosopher and historian of ideas, director of research at the CNRS, and the author of an abundant body of work*. When, how and why did the concept of “Jew-capitalism” come into being? This figure of the main enemy of revolutionaries – socialists, anarchists, communists – is at the heart of the first form of modern Judeophobia on the left. From Charles Fourier to Karl Marx, the amalgam between Jews and “speculators”, “international bankers” or “international finance” remains the founding act of anti-Semitic hatred in the political field in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
By Pierre-André TaguieffIt was the early theorists of socialism, oscillating during the 19th century between the libertarian (or anarchist) and communist poles, who gave a revolutionary touch to the stereotypes “Jew = money” and “Jew = financial capitalism”, characterising the common enemy of all those who claim to want to put an end to the exploitation of man by man in order to achieve, in principle, the emancipation of the human race.
Yet many of these contemptuous critics of capitalism violently denounce the emancipation of the Jews. Charles Fourier, the declared enemy of Jewish emancipation, had no hesitation in asserting that “the establishment of a vagrant or a Jew is enough to disorganise the entire body of merchants in a large city and drive the most honest people into crime, since any bankruptcy is more or less criminal”. Generally speaking, the Jews were stigmatised by the author of “Nouveau monde amoureux” and the theorist of “l’attraction passionnée” as embodying a power to disorganise the social body.
Fourier adapted the stereotype of the “usurious Jew” to the era of triumphant capitalism and the “progress of the mercantile spirit”, which was also the era of Jewish emancipation. A shop clerk who, at the unassuming age of thirty-five, declared that he had come to “dispel political and moral darkness” in order to build “the theory of universal harmony”, Fourier, the dreamer of “radiant cities”, saw the entry of the Jews into citizenship as the worst calamity of the nascent industrial society. On this point, the utopian dreamer was particularly virulent: “To these recent vices, all vices of circumstance, let us add the most shameful, the admission of the Jews to the right of citizenship. It was therefore not enough for the civilised to ensure the reign of deceit; the nations of usurers had to be called to the rescue. […] Our philosophic century thoughtlessly admits legions of Jews, all of them parasites, merchants and usurers”.
For him, the Jews were a “nation of usurers”, made up of “unproductive patriarchs”, a nation “believing all deceit to be praiseworthy, when it comes to deceiving those who do not practise their religion”. The “Jewish nation”, “that nation especially given to usury”, that “all unproductive, mercantile and patriarchal race”, also forms a “sect” or “secret league”. In short, born usurers conspire, in accordance with their nature. That’s why Fourier notes with concern: “You wouldn’t believe how many usurers there are in France today. We have begun to notice it on the banks of the Rhine, where the Jews have invaded a large part of the property through usury.” And the socialist sums up his thoughts as follows: “The Greeks […] have truly been the people of God, whereas the Jews, who arrogate to themselves the title of people of God, have truly been the people of hell, […] whose annals unceasingly present their crime naked and in all its ugliness, even in the person of the wisest of their kings; and without there having remained from them any monument in the sciences or the arts, no act which could excuse the fault of having tended continually towards barbarism, when they were free, and continually towards patriarchy when they were enslaved.”
From Proudhon to Marx and Bakunin
While the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was often virulent in the anti-Jewish diatribes scattered throughout his published writings during his lifetime, he went on a rampage in his Notebooks, which form part of his posthumous works. Here we find an echo of Voltaire’s accusation: “The Jews, an unsociable, obstinate, infernal race. The first authors of this evil superstition, called Catholicism, in which the furious, intolerant Jewish element always prevails over the other Greek, Latin, barbarian elements, etc., and for a long time caused the torments of the human race”.
Generally speaking, then, we can say that Judeophobia took on an “economic” form in socialist and anarchist circles during the 19th century, forming a persistent ideological synthesis with anti-capitalism. The sordid medieval usurer was transformed into the triumphant Jewish banker, giving the new era a spirit of its own. Anti-plutocracy was on the rise. It was in this context that the “Rothschild myth” was born, the myth of absolute financial domination by the unfortunately emancipated Jews.
In many respects, the anti-Jewish anti-capitalism of the early socialist, anarchist and communist theorists – in France, Fourier, Proudhon and Alphonse Toussenel; in Germany, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx – acted as a substitute for the old Christian anti-Judaism: Over the course of the nineteenth century, the countertype of the “usurious Jew”, the “financial predator” or the ruthless “exploiter” gradually marginalised that of the “deicidal Jew”.
The “leftism” of Jew-hatred led to its gradual de-Christianisation. As revolutionaries, the new anti-Jews were atheists and anti-religious, materialists and followers of endless progress, not without being tempted by scientism, which consisted in seeing science as a method of salvation.
The denunciation of the “rich Jew”, the “financial predator” or the “plutocratic parasite”, personified by “Rothschild” (taking over from “Shylock” in the nineteenth century), is a topos that remains deeply rooted in Western anti-Jewish discourse, not without having spread worldwide during the twentieth century. Witness the anti-Jewish diatribes of the socialist Alphonse Toussenel, a disciple of Fourier, in his book published in 1845, Les Juifs, rois de l’époque. Histoire de la féodalité financière: “I call, like the people, by the despised name of Jew, any trafficker in cash, any unproductive parasite, living off the substance and labour of others. For me, Jew, usurer and trafficker are synonymous. […] The Jew reigns and governs in France. Where do we find written proof of this royalty? Everywhere. […] The royalty of the Jew can be recognised by the fact that the Jew is in possession of all the privileges that were once the prerogative of royalty.”
And Toussenel makes this revolutionary appeal: “I call on royalty and the people to unite to get rid of the aristocracy of money.” Putting an end to capitalism or “financial feudalism” meant first and foremost “getting rid of” the “kings of the age”, the Jews. In a pamphlet entitled Travail et Fainéantise (“democratic programme”), published in 1849, Toussenel asserted: “The despotism we must break is Jewish despotism.”
In “On the Jewish Question”, written in the autumn of 1843, the young revolutionary Karl Marx sketched out a theory of the “Judaization” of the modern world as capitalist, as if “the jealous god of Israel”, money, had been historically realised in “bourgeois society”: “What is the profane background of Judaism? Practical need, personal utility. What is the profane cult of the Jew? Traffic. What is his profane God? Money. […] An organisation of society which eliminated the preconditions for trafficking, and therefore the possibility of trafficking, would have made the Jew impossible. […]Money is the jealous god of Israel, before whom no other god has the right to subsist.”
As for the Russian anarcho-communist Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s unhappy and vindictive rival in the struggle for the leadership of the First International, in 1872 he brought together, in the same Jewish plot for universal domination, the capitalist pole (the Rothschild bank) and the communist-marxist pole (Marx), in other words the two sides of the “exploiting sect”: “The Jews have one foot in the bank and the other in the socialist movement”. And he denounced “this Jewish world, forming an exploitative sect, a leeching people, a single parasite”.
Redeeming in the name of anti-Zionism
The Dreyfus Affair seemed to have put an end to Judeophobia in socialist circles, and the genocidal anti-Semitism of the Nazis gave the illusion that hatred of the Jews was fixed on the extreme right. Hence the widespread belief, after the fall of the Third Reich, that the left had become Judeophile and that Judeophobia was the preserve of the far right.
Since the 1950s, however, we have witnessed the slow reinvention, long unnoticed, of an anti-Jewish vision of the world, one of the main features of which is that it has taken place on the left and especially on the far left, in the name of “anti-racism”, through the demonisation of Zionism and the State of Israel, and the suspicion that every Jew is an overt or covert “Zionist”.
The creation of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 was immediately denounced as a “catastrophe” or an inexpiable crime by the enemies of the Zionist project, on both the right and the left. But from the 1950s onwards, radical anti-Zionism, whose objective was the eradication of the State of Israel, became one of the fundamental components of the revolutionary vision of the world shared by all the extreme lefts, from the Stalinists to the Trotskyists and the anarchists, and then the Maoists.
The process accelerated after the Six-Day War (5-10 June 1967). The re-diabolisation of the Jews was based on the criminalisation and demonisation of Israel and “Zionism”, denounced as “a form of racism” and fantasised in a conspiratorial way as “world Zionism”.
Correlatively, while the Palestinians have been mythologised as a martyred people, victims of colonialism and racism supposedly consubstantial with Jewish nationalism, Zionists have been criminalised by anti-Zionist propaganda, both in Arab countries and in the Soviet empire, before playing the role of the absolute enemy in the propaganda of various Islamist groups and most leftist movements.
The cultural strategists of anti-Zionism, in all its forms, have never ceased to feed and exploit the imaginary and the rhetoric of victimhood, around the figure of the Palestinian-victim, which has gradually become that of the Muslim-victim, with Islam being defined as “the religion of the poor” or “the oppressed”. This broad amalgam of victimhood has made it possible to link radical anti-Zionism with the “fight against Islamophobia”, in the name of the fight against “racism” and “colonialism”, mythologised themes that mobilise the left and the extreme left. The latter have replaced the working class or proletariat with “minorities” who are supposedly oppressed and discriminated against, and therefore “racialised”.
The Manichean schema opposing the Palestinian-victims to the Zionist-brothers has become part of the so-called anti-Zionist discourse, which, replacing criticism of Israeli policy by denunciation of an alleged “apartheid” or an imaginary “genocide” of the Palestinians, has drifted towards questioning the very existence of the State of Israel.
The demonological treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has driven out any political approach to it. This globalised Gnostic anti-Zionism, which functions as a method of salvation and a promise of redemption – destroying Israel to save humanity – is at the heart of the new Judeophobia. It can be considered to have largely replaced the old anti-Semitism, which nevertheless survives in right-wing extremist circles, whether fundamentalist Christians or neo-Nazis.
It is in left-wing opinion that the legacy of many more or less recycled anti-Jewish prejudices is most visible today: the Jew as exploiter, dominator, racist, manipulator and social parasite. Seen as polymorphous executioners, Jews can be accused of victimising people in various categories: the exploited, the dominated, the “racialised”, the manipulated and the parasites. Added to this is the figure of the ritual murderous Jew, supposedly reborn in that of the Israeli soldier who bombs the Gaza Strip after the mega-pogrom of 7 October 2023. And here the victims are Palestinians perceived above all as Muslims who are supposed to be acting in an act of “resistance”. Hence the accusations of “Islamophobia” and “genocide”.
A section of the Western elites, on the left and calling themselves “progressive”, have converted to a political religion based on the cult of the Palestinian-victim and the criminalisation of the Jewish-dominator and genocidaire. Their ideological reflexes dictate that they defend the supposedly “dominated” against the supposedly “dominant”. The “progressive” elites have long since internalized the evidence surrounding the “dominant/dominated” opposition. The inversion of victimhood that this conversion implies is reflected in the Nazification of “Zionists” and Jews in general. The message spread is as follows: the Zionist Jews are the new Nazis, while the Palestinians are the new Jews. The use and misuse of anti-racism thus consists in giving it the face of anti-Zionism, based on the image of the Palestinian victim of a fantasised “Zionism”.
This is the political mythology inherited by contemporary neo-leftist parties and movements, whose propaganda discourse is strikingly illustrated by the public speeches of the caricatured Islamo-leftist demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his followers.
* Latest publications:
– Le nouvel opium des progressistes. Antisionisme radical et islamo-palestinisme. Gallimard, 2023.
– Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion, des origines à nos jours, entretien avec Roman Bornstein. Hermann, 2024
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