So in the UK there has been a review of anti-Semitism in the Labour party and plenty of suggestions that the far left in British politics has been tainted by anti-Semitism especially in anti-Zionist support for the Palestinian cause. By contrast the far right has, amongst many other things, characterised Bolshevism, and by extension Communism, as a Jewish conspiracy.
Considering how opposed these two political ideologies are, how did they both develop similar anti-Semitic elements?
I have a provisional answer for you, relegated to my expertise. Setting aside that many people throughout history have blamed Jews for their problems - it's sort of built into the Christian/Western identity - I would say the answer is - anti-capitalism. More than just racism or nationalism, which are the forces we would expect to be active on the right, anti-capitalism has long had a home in the discourses of both the left and the right.
In pre-1945 Germany, many German intellectuals of the right - I have particularly in mind Werner Sombart - used anti-semitism to reconcile anti-modern conservatism with modernity. Germans, said Sombart, were productive, entrepreneurial, heroic capitalists. The Jews, on the other hand, were finance capitalists and parasites. They did not create but only sought profit.
You can see where that argument overlaps with the left. The Rothschilds, or for that matter the lesser remembered Bleichroders of Germany, embodied modernity, finance capitalism and cosmopolitanism, and thus became a target for your socialist or communist of the left wing as readily as they were a target for the rightists seeking to promote industry and nationalism.
That sounded good in my head. Does it make sense?
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I'm not kidding around with this people.
Thank you.
Well for the left I think we have to consider the possibility of political influences and opportunism. Take the case of Stalin: on one side he created an oblast for jewish people back in 1934. At that time nazism and fascism were at full blast as political movements and had plenty of adherents both in europe and throughout the world. While externally it was displayed as a big counter to the growing racism in western europe in reality it was seen by the soviet state as a way to keep soviet jews in check by sending them as far east as possible. This wasn't the only time stalin and the soviets sort of used jews for a PR move, there was the case of the jewish anti-fascist committee where in the middle of WWII stalin created a group made of soviet jews to go to western countries and obtain support for the russian war effort, raising over $30 million in donations plus great amounts of machinery and supplies. After the war and no longer useful stalin started prosecuting the members of the committee using made-up charges of treason and espionage, and after a series of mock trials they were executed. Of course stalin wanted to avoid a political backlash so instead of saying he was killing the jews like hitler did he simply said he was getting rid of "rootless cosmopolitans".
I think there are parallels with current europe, I see left parties are quite agile when it comes to using the memory of jews and the holocaust to prop up their analogies but when it comes to israel they suddenly forget jews even exist.