Socialist Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism

by Tyler Cowen — January 1997
Reprinted from The Freeman (Foundation for Economic Education)
Expanded with additional material on Karl Marx and Wilhelm Marr by Lewis Loflin

“Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed… Antisemitism is really a hatred of capitalism.”
— Ulrike Meinhof, left-wing German terrorist of the 1970s

Market economies and capitalism have historically fostered greater tolerance toward racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, including Jews. In contrast, heavily regulated and socialist economies have frequently exhibited intolerance and persecution of minorities.

Wilhelm Marr: From Socialist Radical to Inventor of “Anti-Semitism”

Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904), a former radical socialist and 1848 revolutionary, is the man who coined the term “anti-Semitism” (Antisemitismus) in 1879. In his bestselling pamphlet The Victory of Judaism over Germandom (12 editions in one year) he declared that Jews had already conquered Germany through finance and the press, and that a racial—not merely religious—struggle was inevitable.

Marr’s trajectory is revealing: he began as a democratic socialist, idolized Czarist Russia, and gradually fused his earlier hatred of capitalism with a racial hatred of Jews as the supposed embodiment of capitalist exploitation. He founded the Antisemitic League (Antisemitenliga) explicitly to unite anti-capitalist and anti-Jewish sentiment. Marr’s innovation was to secularize and racialize older Christian prejudices, giving them a modern pseudo-scientific veneer that proved enormously influential.

Karl Marx’s Contribution to Anti-Semitic Tropes

Marx’s 1844 essay On the Jewish Question contains some of the most vitriolic anti-Jewish passages in modern political literature:

• “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.”
• “The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.”
• “The emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

Marx equated Judaism not with theology but with the spirit of commerce, egoism, and bourgeois society. By identifying “Judaism” with capitalism itself, he secularized centuries-old Christian prejudices about Jewish money-lending and provided socialist movements with a ready-made ethnic scapegoat.

Soviet and Eastern-European Anti-Semitism

Post-World War II Soviet policy reversed Lenin’s opposition to anti-Semitism. The 1953 “Doctors’ Plot,” economic-crimes executions disproportionately targeting Jews, and the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaigns all drew on the same reservoir of stereotypes that Marr and Marx had helped secularize. Eastern European satellites followed suit, often substituting “Zionist” for “Jew.”

Capitalism and Jewish Flourishing

In contrast, the most capitalist societies—Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands, and the modern United States—have consistently offered the greatest economic opportunity and social integration for Jewish populations. As Ellis Rivkin observed, Jewish communities have flourished wherever capitalism has been vigorous and have faced deterioration wherever anti-capitalist systems prevailed.

Tyler Cowen is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Director of the Mercatus Center.