Left-wing anti-Semitism was more subtle and more sophisticated, dating
back to an essay by Karl Marx on the question of Jewish emancipation. Marx
had argued that since “the worldly basis of Judaism was practical necessity
and selfishness,” and that “the worldly culture of the Jew is commerce,”
therefore “the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of humanity
from Judaism.” Thus, for Marx, Judaism personified and perpetuated the
evils of capitalism.
The other element of political anti-Semitism was the myth of Jewish
power and the notion of a world Jewish conspiracy. The myth of Jewish power
was woven into the fabric of anti-Semitic discourse as early as the 1870s.
Marr, for example, claimed that the Jews “fought against the western world
for 1,800 years and finally conquered and subjugated it. German culture
proved itself ineffective and powerless against this foreign power.”
The notion of a Jewish conspiracy was expressed most vividly in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery authored by the Russian secret police
that purported to be the minutes of the Elders of Zion, a secret coterie of
powerful Jews who ruled the world. The Protocols explained major world
events in terms of this secret Jewish conspiracy. Accordingly, the French
Revolution was a conspiracy by Jewish merchants to destroy the European
nobility; and socialism was a conspiracy by Jewish capitalists to
dupe Christian workers into destroying Christian capitalists. At the heart
of this conspiracy theory was the claim that Jews controlled all forms of
media and the conclusion that all perceptions of reality were the result of
Jewish manipulation.
These elements of anti-Semitism crystallized in the Dreyfus Affair. The
Dreyfus Affair refers to the trial and conviction of a French-Jewish officer,
Alfred Dreyfus, for treason, his subsequent exile to Devil’s Island, and the
upheaval this caused in France. The roots of this episode date back to the
defeat of France by Germany in 1871, a defeat that shattered the myth of
French military superiority, and the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany.
Humiliated by this defeat, the French military began a witch hunt for spies.
Individuals from Alsace-Lorraine tended to be suspected of espionage, as is
often the case with people in border territories. In addition, the French mili-
tary and other conservative elements blamed the republican principles of the
French Revolution for weakening France. They claimed, for example, that the
French Commune in 1871 had divided and weakened France in the face of a
German attack.
Against this background, the Dreyfus Affair was the third part in a trilogy
of turn-of-the-century French politics. In 1888, General Georges Boulanger,
a hero in defeat in 1871, attempted to overthrow the French Republic, sup-
ported by a conservative coalition of army officers, church officials, and
former nobility. He was defeated, further humiliating the military’s conserva-
tive old guard. In 1892, several Jewish entrepreneurs, after botching an
attempt to build a canal across Panama, absconded with millions of francs
182 Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914