The way of dealing with the Jewish Question, today, all of us know, at least in words: you set out from a super-structural definition of Jew, in the same way one would talk of being Christian or Muslim. In fact worse, and we know why, because there is nothing more hateful and false from the point of view of historical and dialectical materialism. After it seemed that everyone has taken on board the idea that a Jewish race doesn’t exist, in the same way that a Christian race doesn’t exist, with the revival of fundamentalist virulency, and not only of the Islamic but also of the Catholic and, why not, Jewish varieties, there came a relapsing, with a disarming facility, back into clichés which we thought had long since been dispersed. Which does not remove the fact that one can and should discuss the question, if only to reiterate our general and particular evaluations of it.

If even a maitre à penser like Sartre takes delight in asking himself in his Reflexions sur Question Juive to what extent the Jew is more intelligent than the Christian, there is little we can expect from the way bourgeois thinking addresses the question. He wrote: “It is at the same time true and not true that the Jew is more intelligent (…) We would say rather that he has the propensity for pure intelligence, to which he has recourse in relation to everything and anything, and that the use he makes of it is not obstructed by the innumerable taboos which still oppress the Christian, or by the aesthetic complications in which the non-Jew willingly indulges himself. And we would add that within the Jew is concealed a sort of impassioned imperialism of reason; he doesn’t just want to convince others that he is right, his aim is to convince others that to rationalism must be attributed an absolute value. He feels himself to be a missionary of the universal, against the universalism of the Catholic Church, from which he is excluded; an instrument capable of attaining truth and establishing a spiritual contact between men”.

Evocative words certainly. But what is Sartre talking about? About the Jew once again according to the petty-bourgeois taboo, of the member of an alleged distinct race. What we want to talk about is not the idealized, tabooed Jew, but about the Jewish Question, of its place in modern and ancient history, and in particular within the history of the class struggle, in the course of which Jews have been considered at times the very personification of capitalism, or on the contrary of Bolshevism, according to the notion of a conspiracy against the gentiles.

Starting with the Jewish Marx, we must say straightaway that the great scandal led by certain critics and haters of communism, apropos of the fact that his conception of history in the final analysis is just an eschatology, typical of Jewish fundamentalism, even if immanentized, constitutes no obstacle at all, quite the contrary! Marx, in his study of the real world which has nothing to do with the world of ideas, takes into consideration actual reality, or as he put it, the empirical and material reality of mankind and of the world in which it finds itself operating. What is more he anticipates and hopes for a time when “natural science will eventually include the science of man, just as the science of man will be included within natural science: there will be one science” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844).

Since today there is an almost unanimous emphasis on how much western culture owes to its Jewish roots, and not just its Greek and Roman ones, we do not see why anyone would want to cast not simply a shadow of discredit, but real hatred over Marx’s Jewishness, to the extent that the “baptized Marx” is emphasized, almost as if to lay on thicker the position that most Jews are in, forced to pretend so they can integrate into gentile society.

Since we are not interested in the superstructure as the base from which to depart, but in the structure, it is not for nothing that it has an effect, in fact it bears us out that among the early elements of Jewish culture one comes across the strict link between Saying and Doing, such that both the verb to say, deber, and the term dabar mean at the same time Saying and Doing, Deed and Word, and that in Hebrew the verb To Be does not exist in the present tense, such that the translation of the unpronounceable Jehovah is “I will be he who I will be”, underlining how history is projected into the future. If the Jewish conception of history views things in these terms, in contrast with the cyclic notion of the Greeks, should we be offended by it? Who can deny that it is within the framework of Greek intellectualism that the justification for the division into classes matures, leading to the Platonic conception of “aristocratic communism”?

If we were to set out from the superstructure to gain an in-depth understanding of the nature of social life, we would have to first clarify which basic elements to start from, having once recognized that culture is a mixture of diverse elements, due to very complicated and fascinating mediations. But once we have decided to set out from the structure, we would trust neither eschatological nor cyclical history, without however ignoring that the use of language, of ‘a tongue’, can condition any kind of research, and even lead us where it wants to go. The method which historical materialism follows is critically conscious of these problems, which doesn’t prevent it from seeking answers within the material conditions, which might bely, or even in certain respects confirm, given co-ordinates of thought.

Marx the Jew then can be neither condemned nor simply exalted if certain underlying tendencies in his thinking seem to align with his culture of origin, or if in others he may be considered a heretic and a subverter of every previous school.

Having clarified these points the consciousness and overall understanding of the Jewish Question also takes on a different significance. In particular once a certain portion of historical Judaism had formed itself into a state, along with all the consequences of this event.

Throughout the whole of the second half of the eighteen hundreds, up to when the state of Israel was formed in 1948, discussions about Judaism focused on the problems of the Jewish diaspora, on the presence of Jewish citizens in the various European countries, and on the plotting, real or presumed, derived from a wish on the part of that ethnic group to conquer and dominate the world. Our interpretation of conspiracies, from wherever they might emerge and whoever hypothesizes them, is well-known: anybody who is serious about the history of society and classes cannot afford to fall for such nonsense. And yet tensions and conflicts between States were resolved in this way: the Jews, frustrated by their exclusion, were only able to engage in conspiracies…

We have said enough and written enough about these themes, which is why it seems necessary to us to see what happened once the new global set up which emerged from the Second imperialist war contributed to bringing about the formation of a “Jewish” State of Israel. It is impossible not to immediately take into consideration that what the bourgeois states wanted to do, after the military and political - but not historical and social - defeat of nazi-fascism, was defuse the question of the residual presence of the Jewish people by creating an independent state, which would attract to the “Promised Land” the Jews who wanted it, in such a way as to free the overpopulated countries of a shattered Europe of their presence.

As one can see things were still proceeding according to the old categories and taboos, as if Jews signified race, with unmistakable ethnic and religious characteristics. Our view is that there have always been rich Jews and poor Jews, like English bourgeois and English proletarians. Then and now we are not prepared to engage in further protracted studies on the question. To get the general idea we need only cite a quip attributed to Ben Gurion, the founder patriarch of the State of Israel: “Our state will not be a normal state until there are thieves and prostitutes like in every other state”. What does that say about the requirement for normality, or rather, normalization!

And so, one must admit that the birth of a “Jewish” state does not dispel ambiguity and equivocation.

The very insistence with which in today’s civil society the Jewish extermination is deemed to be an “absolute Evil” indicates a wish to continue treating the issue as if it were absolutely unique, and therefore, whether demonized or sanctified, we are back where we started! Every time it is claimed that the uniqueness of Judaism has been identified, it is realized that only one important aspect has been touched upon, but not such as to have exhausted the question. Our method emphasizes that by going down the religious or cultural path one can only establish half-truths; but if we are really put on the spot, we won’t refuse to go down it, and will compare the various super-structural interpretations.

What is the form that is best suited to justify modern capitalist society? Which ideology best represents it, or rather, which one would capitalism like to be represented by? Our response today is that the pluralism of ideas excludes no interpretation. And yet, if you only think about the so-called “pensée unique”, you must admit that Capital has never given up the search for a conception which unitarily manages to defend its mode of social life from enemy attacks. So then, if we go back into past history, who would not admit that in the past Judaism was seen as presenting the most striking image of usurer capital, hated by the Feudal world which saw the Jew with no fixed abode as the very incarnation of money given over to usury, which would constitute, in the form of interest, the exception that would eventually become the rule?

Every time that given social forms have sought a supportive ideological expression, visceral tensions have arisen between the presumptive bearers of universalistic visions. Sartre, going off in search of what defines Jewish being, identifies it in his intelligence, that is in an almost missionary quest for the universal,“which puts him in opposition to the Catholic Church, from which he is excluded” (notwithstanding the insistent demands for a “pardon” which the Roman Church has been addressing to the Jewish people in recent times, to get them to forget two thousand years of accusations of “deicide”, of tenaciously cultivated hatred against them).

If the Catholic Church is recognized as the bulwark of the feudal way of life, with the advent of the Protestant Reformation, in the early days of the development of capitalism on a grand scale in Europe, the spirit of capitalism was interpreted ideologically by Protestantism, or reformed Christianity, in tension with the mother church in Rome. What is more Hegel has been recognized as the last Christian philosopher to assume the role of theoretician of the ethical State, “certainly Lutheran, but precisely because of that rooted in the Christian faith and animated by it” (Severino).

So who then best represents imperialistic capitalism in crisis today? What kind of ideological and religious universalism best interprets it? Judaism, defined by Sartre as capable of concealing a passionate imperialism of reason, while its aim is “to convince others that an absolute value must be attributed to rationalism”, where does it stand in relation to Christianity?

What is clear is that any claim to identify the specific aspect of a culture or ethnicity is always partial and one-sided; nor are we of the opinion that we can establish on a theoretical level who should represent the bourgeoisie ideologically, as if this class embodied some kind of category of the spirit. But that doesn’t remove the fact that what Sartre says about the Jews, or Severino maintains about the Hegelian inheritance, does touch on aspects that are worthy of interest, on condition, that is, that we reject the tendency to attribute to the Jewish people a cohesion and organicity which has been belied on more than one historical occasion. We could go on: the attribution at any cost of specific characteristics to a religion or culture is part of the effort to give an unequivocal physiognomy to what is in fact an extremely fragmented and diverse historical experience. Perhaps “European culture” has a complex about not being able ‘to define itself’, thousands of times manifested, and expressed with the accusations against the Jews themselves.

It is no accident that Nietzsche, one of Europe’s most controversial philosophers, oscillated in his assessment of the Jews in a sort of confession of his admiration for them, often accompanied by deadly, murderous polemical tirades. He is happy to steal from Jewish culture to the extent that he believes it to be typical of German culture: “We Germans would still have been Hegelians, even if there had never been a Hegel, inasmuch as we (in contradistinction to all Latin peoples) instinctively attribute to becoming and to development a profound sense and a richer value than to that which is”. But, as chance would have it, this cultural peculiarity is typically Jewish, rather than German!

As one can see, going down this road doesn’t get us very far. And yet no-one can deny that the amalgamation of elements from Jewish-Christian culture with those of the Greek and Roman worlds, together with a far from negligible influence from the Islamic world, has shaped Europe, and exercised a widespread influence on the ancient and modern world. It is a futile exercise however to claim to have found that which is specifically Jewish, or Greek, or even Roman, in isolation from the contributions of other forms of cultural life and social organization. If on the other hand we follow the method of dialectical materialism we can reconstruct the bases of the ancient and modern world: for not even the most demanding theological or philosophical category can elude our investigative criteria, so long as it is not considered on its own, in isolation, and apart from the socio-economic issues that gave rise to it.

If we think how the western world claimed to justify, by theological means, the passage from the Old Testament tradition to Christianity, a complex mass of material elements is excluded: including those we need to provide an explanation. It is precisely with the criterion of either absolute reason, or abstract universalism, useful in some circumstances, that the concreteness of history gets lost.

Still today, and inevitably so, the reasons that led to the crucifixion of Christ are rehearsed. Whereas for almost two thousand years the entire “Jewish People” was held to blame, only recently has the arrogance and limitations of such a position come to be understood: thus it was “decided” that the Jewish people were no longer “Deicides”. An explanation was given then? No. It was just decided, and that’s that.

We claim to have a better way of looking into the question, without depleting one of the most delicate nuclei of western thought. Marx, in his Critique of Political Economy, asserts that the “people” understood in a statistical sense is not capable of explaining and accounting for the composition of a given socio-economic reality. The observation is useful and valid not only in order to understand capitalist society today, it is also applicable to the ancient world. Does the notion of the “people” help explain the social composition of Jewish society in the time of Christ, or make sense of the interests and the composite factors that agitated its internal life during the occupation of the Roman Empire? Absolutely not. Even when religious circles started to study that period, making use of disciplines matured in the modern era such as linguistics, structural and cultural anthropology, political economy, and sociology, they went about it in an instrumental way, as for instance in the case of the encyclical Divino afflante spiritu of Pius XII, the Pope much discussed as regards the role he played during the Shoah.

And yet, the interest expressed in these contributions hasn’t modified how the nature of the Old and New Testaments is viewed at all, including the notion that the crucifixion of Christ is explicable only as a religious Mystery, unique and absolute, and not realizable in any way.

But once you try instead to evaluate the interests that animated the Jewish people, to understand its internal social composition, the relations of its ruling classes with the Roman world, you then notice how things take on another dimension.

Increasingly these aspects are being subjected to criticism, and yet, at the level of churches, and The Church, they have still been unable to come up with the reasons why the Jewish people in toto is supposedly to blame along with its ruling body, the Sanhedrin. What lay behind the recognition of the absurdity of this verdict?

We would not be dialectical materialists if we were advocates of a pure logic, above historical phenomena, that existed independently from the concreteness of natural and historical problems. But that does not mean we are indifferent to the value of logic and of mathematics itself, or even of metaphysics. And yet, one of the questions still not free from antinomies and contradictions is that of the relation of part to whole, species to gender and other significant pairings on which both language and ideas are based. When we discuss the Jewish question and deal with the problem of responsibility and collective guilt, or only of determined leading groups such as the Sanhedrin, we come up against this problem.

We have always supported the thesis which holds that before Logic there is Action, although not a type of action/movement that is an end-in-itself. At the same time, we do not sit in judgement and support an ethic which is not incarnated in historical behaviour. This is true to the extent that the presumed “eternal” problems of pure logic, and of mathematics, are put through a fine toothcomb at given turning points, when there is also a pressing theoretical need for it.

An example of this is the dispute between the Set Theory proposed by Frege and the one Russell opposed to it, known as the Theory of Types, which arose when on a historical level problems were maturing which required a language which was clear, or else capable of taking into account its unresolved antinomies. Frege’s postulate that “to any property there always corresponds a set” can, in fact, appear contradictory. Given a people, a party, an organization in general, it can be asked if the single ‘element’ ‘belongs or not to the set’, and if it is, for example, ethically co-responsible for acts carried out by the set. In organic societies, belonging to a collective entity signifies organic co-responsibility; thus does the ethical state reason. In modern atomistic societies, introduced by liberal theory, it is not so: belonging does not signify co-responsibility, insofar as the rights of the individual are theorized as taking precedence, as ‘natural’, and as not constituted by the set that is the State, or organization. Who is right? How do things truly stand? The antinomy is an open one.

In the case of the Jewish people this antinomy, which appears so open-ended, seemed unthinkable throughout most of its history, at least as far as the perception inculcated and diffused in the ‘other’ culture, especially the Western-Christian one. By definition the Jewish people had to be understood as a whole, as responsible and blameworthy, if for no other reason than having claimed for religious reasons to be ‘the Jewish People’.

It seems we have before us a horrible vendetta. But if we remain on the terrain of feelings and emotional perception, we are unlikely we’ll make much headway. If we stay instead on the concrete terrain of socio-political events, which do not of course completely exclude strong emotions, we are of the conviction, as regards the logical formulations of both Frege and Russell, that we have before us a classic case of thinking you can talk first about the Logic of a discourse and of thought, and then about action, about the events. Whose own logico-semantic questions are nevertheless an important aspect.

Within the Jewish people at the time of Christ there were evident social contradictions, which put into question the very notion of an organic people. We are nevertheless aware of the caution necessary when interpreting the history of the remote past, even if necessarily according to the schema of the struggle between classes, and we certainly do not intend to interpret it with inappropriate, or simplistic, categories and dialectical forms. And yet it is relevant to record that the interplay between the Sanhedrin, headed by the all-too familiar Caiaphas, the representative of Rome Pilate, and the other strata who were active in Palestine at the time, consisted fundamentally of conflicting interests, although connected by explicit or implicit alliances.

That the Sanhedrin represented the religious, political and economic interests of the landowners, certainly hostile to Roman rule but inclined to a reciprocal tolerance, while within the people opposed interests, as well as parties, were at work, which were denouncing and were violently opposed to the Roman empire in cahoots with the Sanhedrin, this can be clearly seen in every interpretation, even questionable ones, of the reality of that period.

The Zealots, to whom it seems Judas, ‘the betrayer’, belonged, represented the violent, or nationalist wing as we would call it today, which didn’t agree with the policies and actions of the numerous Soteroi (saviors) who were proliferating in the region, and indicating various conflicting ways of interpreting the messianism typical of that culture. Certainly Christ, who the later interpretation of the Christian church saw not as one of the Soteroi, but as the Soter par excellence, unique and sent by God to his people, but in a version which in its theology was exclusively and peculiarly messianic, wasn’t on the same positions as Judas.

What is more, there is still no resolution to the ongoing disputation about the possible political relevance of Christ’s teachings, which – if we just think of the concreteness that characterises Jewish thinking – cannot be limited only to asserting “the way to heaven”. This certainly doesn’t make us want to distort the Nazerene’s preaching though, but likewise we do not wish to interpret it according to the religious interests of eras closer to our own, which only seem to be concerned about consigning him to an empyrean extraneous to the culture of his time.

Even from this chronicle reduced to its barest essentials one can evince that the responsibility for the death of Christ attributed to the ‘Jewish people’, in its historical-temporal and ethical extensions, constitutes a unicum, a one-off. It is the landowners and priesthood linked to Rome who, fearing the subversiveness of the soteroi for material and religious reasons, who decide that the Messiah is dangerous, and take responsibility for condemning him to death, with the complicity of Pilate the Roman procurator.

But if we return to the logical precondition that we have brought into play, we realize that even today, when we say that a certain event implicates an entire collectivity, we must clarify the meaning of the rhetorical figures to which we have resorted in order to describe it. Has it ever occurred to anyone to say that the Greeks, as a people, or rather, the Athenians as a whole, were responsible for the death of Socrates? Or, in a more up-to-date example, to say that the Italians as a (non-existent) race, or as an ethnic-national unity are collectively to blame for the death of the Duce?

The ‘theory of types’, with which Russell believed he had resolved Frege’s antinomy is in fact the product of a culture and sensibility derived from the modern empiricism of an Anglo-Saxon stamp, which establishes liberalism as a political doctrine and theory of Law. According to the ‘theory of types’ a set is always a different type of object with respect to the elements that compose it. Based on this principle, which they call the “fundamental principle of the theory of types”, Russell erects his ‘theory of logical types’. In the light of this there can be no confusion between the man and the group, people, party or organization to which he belongs. The connection between part and whole which obsessed classical metaphysics is, in this logical approach, broken.

With this can we say the antinomy has been resolved? Certainly it finds a possible solution on the logical plane. But what are the repercussions in neighbouring fields, distinct or different? There exists no culpability for an individual if it can be attributed to a group, people or party. Bourgeois Law, even when derived from Roman Law, does not recognize group culpability: if a gang of criminals is guilty of a crime, the judge doesn’t punish the group, but has to try and assess the levels of culpability specific to each of its individual components. Even for us communists, organicist and anti-liberal by nature, joining the party militia, for example, remains an individual choice and responsibility.

Regarding the Jewish question one can say that history has a logic, but it is not just Logic. Or worse still “logistical”, as understood by the persecutors of the Jews who tried to resolve the question as though it were just a matter of organizing their destruction. And yet analysis of logical preconditions is bound to teach us something: first of all that an interpretation of history that is reduced to deductive and inductive successes is simply not tenable.

The fact that the Jewish question has been supercharged with emotion, to the point that today anyone who denies that the holocaust is an Absolute Evil might be accused of lacking a moral compass, indicates the extent to which emotions continue to run high on this topic, even if with good reason. On the historical and historiographical plane we have reached the absurd situation of having the courts decide whether the Holocaust was real or only imagined: never before has historical research depended on petitions of this kind, at least not since Galileo’s time. Also this is a sign of how much the question has been speculated about, at some distance from any research or sound judgement, a question which lies within the province not so much, or only, of historiography, or of the courts, as it is a product of history, which in its turn is not reducible to historiography! In our view history as it is really experienced is a complex dialectic composed of actions carried out by human beings and of reflections made upon them.

There is no court of either a legal or historico-historiographic type that can give a definitive response to the Jewish Question or to any other open question. It follows that claiming to be able to resolve such a question, as though it was not still open and only explicable within the dynamics that determined it, as also within the superstructures with which it has been overburdened, is a sign of arrogance and an indicator of political designs which need to be repelled. We must denounce the continued use of concepts, categories and inadequate (though convenient) prejudices which the political and cultural forces of the bourgeoisie as a class have no intention of relinquishing as they serve to conceal the true nature and dynamics of the fueldnts that produced the so-called “Jewish question”.

Why then are categories and prejudices, as well as platitudes, so difficult to get rid of? Because they are continuously being bolstered by those who in some measure benefit from them.

The first of the platitudes we need to confront profits from the fact that the hatred of modernity, which emanates from the most diverse settings, is distributed across the various social classes, not excluding the proletariat itself. According to David Meghnagi:

“The hatred of modernity and everything to do with it, has coincided historically with hatred of that part of the population which from the birth of the modern age took advantage of the opportunities it presented to enter society as a full member of it (…) The Jews remained the principal target of every reactionary discourse, insofar as they were the tangible image of the changes that had occurred with the collapse of the old feudal order; they were negative image of modernity itself, and the symbol and quintessence of capitalism, of democracy, of socialism and of communism”.

Here is the first argument. Since our intention is to see what changed after the ‘Jewish’ state was formed, in terms of mental outlook and concrete reality, it is useful to first analyze the aspect that most disquieted the old social forces before the advent of capitalism. Without this backdrop we won’t understand how the State of the Jews returns once again to feature in anti-Jewish prejudice: finally we know where the Jews are, and towards what kind of reality the energy of the Jews who do not live there is directed.

Our dialectical reading of historical events, and in particular of the modernity inaugurated by capitalism, which overthrew the feudal system, puts us in a position of making an assessment not according to abstract or rigid metrics, but with a capacity to understand, and not execute, to paraphrase Benedetto Croce’s admonition. The enemies of modernity, in the name of the old society divided into ‘orders’ but not yet osmotic classes, could not tolerate anyone not rooted in a given territory: what does ‘servo della gleba’ mean in fact if not peasant tied to the feud, in such a way as not to be transformed into a “wandering Jew”, according to the term of abuse which has been liberally bestowed by Catholic Christian ideology throughout the past millennium; pointing the finger at the rootless, those who are different, the uncontrollable?

The peasants who on the eve of the industrial revolution amassed around great cities like London, were they not branded with red hot irons so they could be recognized and controlled; as though they were automatically delinquents rather than being expropriated people forced to take their chances in an urban environment? But who are the very emblem of the transhumant life, rather than being tied “to the blood and soil” (as the national socialists would say in their relentless propaganda) if not, historically, the Jews of the diaspora? So then it is from this moment that proletarians, who are not rooted in the soil, are assimilated with them, because they by their nature they have no country, being “a permanent army of emigrants”, then and now!

If we are dealing with the Jewish Question, we do so within that optic, not as a defense of an official reality which we admit is distorted, adulterated and manipulated to nurture hatreds and prejudices, but in order to group together a diverse range of problems which have assumed a tragic and increasingly grave significance, up to and including the current planetwide migrations in the imperialist phase of capital. Certainly we place no trust in the correctives that are passed off as so worthy today, when “pardons” are begged and from every quarter the vacuous litany arises: “Never again!”.

If then, for the society of the feudal orders, Judaism is the same as liberalism-democracy-socialism-communism in a unique conjoined sequence, we ask ourselves how come certain liberals today, certain democrats, certain “socialists” and certain “communists”, are unable to see that the theory of a conspiracy is simply an aberration, and how come they have they not realized that the antidote to a theory of this kind is not trusting that after the Holocaust we have all finally understood, and that never again will we witness such wickedness!

Our take on the question has nothing to do with rhetorical hypocrisies and simplifications of this kind. If the nascent proletariat found itself assimilated, not due to ethnicity or religion, but due to its condition of having been deprived of any rootedness in the land or in a country, that does not mean that its history and historical role should be confused with an alleged “Jewish conspiracy”. We know that Judaism, in the Nazis’ ideological simplification, signifies not only capitalism, but communism as well! For truth’s sake we should make clear that it was the Jesuits who, from the perspective of the feudal classes’ and in an ecclesiastical version of it, theorized the inevitable sequence liberalism-socialism-communism!

Capitalism, which had the merit of freeing the serfs, in a certain phase of its development becomes the enemy of the society of the species: progressive no more it becomes in it turn reactionary. We do not therefore play along with the notion that everybody is equal, faced with the harsh reality of the historical dialectic, Nor are we disposed, in the name of a pointless anti-Semitism, or of a generic, remedial pro-Semitism, to renounce the differences that justify the struggle for a society without classes.

Chapter presented in Cortona, October 2004

3. Behind the Generalizations the Class Struggle

Arbitrary generalization as a rhetorical device is as old as humanity, but there is no doubt that in particular circumstances it performs a very specific ideological function, which is to conceal the “creases” in reality, smoothing them out in such a way as to prevent knowledge of its complex articulations, which, as far as it is possible, would allow the study of reality to become a more rigorous science. There is no Ruling Class, ancient or modern, which has not resorted to such generalizations. If we think specifically of theologico-ideological definitions we notice there is always an attempt to conceal reality – as does the myth – under a more or less subtle veil, to make reality appear less “horrible”, as Leopardi put it.

Generalizations in the ideological field often resort, as we know, to an inappropriate use of the principle of induction. If we say that among a certain people thieves are common, we cannot say that everyone belonging to that people is a thief. As regards the Jewish question, if, due to the prohibition on owning land, it often happened that those who observed the Jewish religion often practiced usury, along with the most varied activities of an intellectual and craft type, we cannot generalize by saying that all Jews were usurers.

When one has neither the will or the time to understand something, one tends to pass simple, no-nonsense judgements which consequently lack any foundation in truth, and one willingly resorts to arbitrary generalizations. When however – leaving aside any tendency to do so out of sheer laziness – one practices it knowingly, their use then becomes ideological and in the worst sense of the word. The fact that Jewish culture ended up falling victim to unfounded generalizations is something no-one can deny. We can enumerate them if we want: Jews are untrustworthy, usurers, rootless, double-crossers, prone to atheism, intellectually dishonest, bloodthirsty, affected by delusions of omnipotence, self-pitying. And, above all, they are guilty!

There is no other way of treating the question other than by looking at the historical data, at the conditions which produced specific behaviors and ethical codes.

One should not forget that the methods of dealing with the enemy even in classical antiquity, which coincides with the passage from the Judaism of the Old Testament to the New, were of boundless cruelty. The way the pharaohs succeeded their predecessors was by destroying the “signs” of them and the changeover, eliminating obelisks, references, and any memory of them. And no less so the Christians, in relation both to the Egyptians and all other cultures considered pagan, in particular the Judaic old-testamentary one, interpreted thenceforth entirely in accordance with the entirely new Christian testament. If we do not forget not only the facts, but also the general mentality within which they were interpreted, we can see why, within the framework of Catholic-Christian cultural domination, the Jews would become the designated victims of so much harsh treatment and violence.

The final and most serious of the generalizations levelled against the Jewish people is their culpability. And who knows why it is that which most influences not only individuals, but organizations as well. History understood as culpability entails responsibility, both in a positive and negative sense. That in the history of Judaism this notion is exasperatingly strong there can be no doubt. God chooses his people, and with them he establishes an alliance: but if that people wants his unconditional assistance, it must be faithful to him, because he, in the Bible, “is a jealous God”! Responsibility in life, which then becomes history, has this importance: one must do God’s will, always, and under all circumstances. As soon as the Jewish people degenerates, it suffers the vengeance, the righteous vengeance, of God. This dialectic has marked the history of the West to such an extent that even those who think they have rejected Judaism, more or less consciously move according to its spirit. Whenever history goes off in an unwanted direction the matter of responsibility, of blame, is wheeled out! And then, off in search of who is to blame, to punish them, as atonement, in such a way as to restore the alliance, which saves and leads to the Promised Land.

But one should be able to justify why the blame is essentially attributed to the Jewish people. If we refer to some other cultures, we notice that the Greeks also have a keen sense of responsibility, to the extent that the philosopher Anaximander said that life itself was nothing other than the penalty paid for being born, somewhat akin to the “Morte che si sconta vivendo” [the death that is a penance for living], of the hermetic poet, Ungaretti. But the Greeks, in general, attribute, at least up to the birth of subjectivity with Euripides and Socrates, responsibility to Destiny.

God, the God of the Hebrews is he perhaps analogous to Destiny? If it is true that every cultural superstructure (It is no use continuing to be offended by this term, which is valid in a sense as objective as it is figurative, in so far as culture “stands above”, at times covering and hiding the deeper and underlying structures) of every people or social organization is the product of a basic condition of a type that is economic and social in a lateral sense, then we will need to explain why the Jews cling to their alliance with their One God, and why the Greeks think their Gods themselves are dominated by Destiny. Not that the response is automatic, but by adopting a dialectical approach we should be able to, or at least make an effort to, put the question back on a sound footing.

In the first place the entire Myth of the primacy of Yahweh should be approached with a major critical sense of how possible it is to arrive at a history of religions at all. In the 7^th century before Christ there appeared in the land of Israel the ‘Yahweh-alone’ movement (see Lang’s work): before the one jealous God, a series of Baal, or lords, fought one another, including the famous Baal-ze-bu, (Beelzebub), or Lord of the Flies, passed down to us as the devil. The God of the Bible makes his way through complex and bloody contradictions! On the social level it is a case of recognizing an intertwining of conflicting interests between a multitude of clans, of peoples who inhabit an extremely fertile and highly contested region capable of whetting appetites. The ‘Yahweh-alone’ movement indicates a tendency among the Jews of the time towards unification under a single political and ideological program. Certainly, we do not have here class struggles as we understand them today because there weren’t any! But the one God (and Lang, a Dominican, recognizes it) paves the way towards them in this historical context.

The Greeks know a history of individual poleis, city-states, each of them with their own problems and separate developments, and only at a certain stage in their development do we see some cities, such as Sparta, Thebes and Athens, trying to exert hegemony. But the cultural superstructure is one we know: polytheism, then development of philosophy as a rational discipline.

Almost certainly the culpability of Israel is rooted in its election by God from among all the peoples of the Earth. There is no doubt, as history has shown on countless occasions, that any class that is in conflict with other ones has never restricted itself, as is claimed today, to opposing its armies and interests to the enemy, rather it opposes its entire vision of the world, revendicating thereby the superiority of its own cultural and religious values. If today the tendency is to exclude, indeed, to discourage a clash of civilizations for both ideological and tactical reasons, in the ancient world in time of war one’s entire energy was mobilized. Moreover, when it comes to the crunch, even in today’s world the formula Gott mit uns, God is with us, is still doing the rounds! It is then hardly surprising if the Jews, weak as a whole in comparison with such powers as Babilonia, the Persians and the Romans opposed the power of their God against them.

The singularity of their position is that this God would present with characteristics very different from those of other cultures. In the first place he is a transcendent and hidden God. Creator of all things; but what matters more, with an unpronounceable name, that is dominable, hinting at a power that not even his elect can use with a light heart. Since we are facing a question of a very lofty nature, like all those that have left a mark on human evolution, we cannot get away with saying that the Jews thus had an exceptional ‘brainwave’!

But this type of divinity certainly has that magical appeal which provoked an evident discomposure in its enemies; the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians and Romans. Tradition has it that the Romans in particular, so pragmatic and self-assured when dealing with the religions of subject peoples, did not want to get involved in the polemics between the Sanhedrin and the Soteroi (saviours), and thus get caught up in their game. Their God was the Lex, the State, what remained were secondary questions. But we do know that the condemnation of Christ was an event which shook the basis of Roman power very profoundly.

Our tradition, which has never derided myths and the great systems of the past, capable as it is of seeing in them, and in cultural production too, the ideological justifications of the pulsating modes of social life, the lavic crust from the revolutionary volcanoes of former times, explains the phenomenon which makes Christianity both the culmination and the starting point of the crisis and decline of the Roman Empire, which was based on the slave system. Beyond the specific phases of this complex reality, there is no doubt that in the various parts of the empire the slavery-based religious, legal, political, and social apparatus was profoundly shaken, and our tradition finds in the movements and the forms of struggles arising within them the elements which undermined its foundations.

If we were then to make a detailed analysis of the programs elaborated as an alternative to the established power, we might discover, with the benefit of hindsight, which one best interpreted the requirements of the new mode of production and way of life that was maturing. The message that Christ gave to the exploited of the time, as it appears in the documents assembled around 40 to 60 years after his crucifixion and transfiguration (by which time, in short, he had already become a myth and an icon), was certainly expurgated due to necessities which, with the evolution of the crisis, imposed themselves over time. It turns out in any case that the Soteroi in general were, in various ways, calling for a struggle against those in power, whether from Rome or territorial, the latter being, in this case, the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem.

The way the Gospels tell it is complex and articulated: they oscillate from the wish to struggle “against the merchants in the temple”, to the relationship to be maintained with the empire, and on to a more general elaboration indicating the aims of the struggle, including the nature of the future Kingdom… which is not of this world, according to the reconstruction which reflects vested interests. We will not discuss here the program of the individual Soteroi, whose words we only know from second-hand accounts. But there is no disguising the fact that there was a proliferation of forms of resistance to those in power at the time, who defended themselves by inflicting terror with crucifictions, which was the martyrdom inflicted on rebel slaves. On the hill of Calvary around two thousand skulls of those crucified have been found!

No-one can deny that moving from one mode of production to another (which takes place over a long period, especially when the productive forces lack the impetus of modern industrial capitalism) affects different sectors in different ways. But the constant appeal to the humble, to the slaves, present in the message of the Soteroi, would be interpreted in the centuries which followed the core events related to the crucifixion of Christ, and after undergoing the removal of any genuine reference to the bitterness of the struggles that revolved around his person, in accordance with the tried and tested rhetorical device of the painless, anodyne, generalization. This was particularly so when Christianity, from the time of Constantine onwards, increasingly became the state religion, preoccupied with watering down any revolutionary potential or troublesome significance it might acquire in relation to the new social set up. Constantine took possession of the revolutionary symbols to conquer. A practice that is not unusual in counterrevolutions, and which was applied with tragic effect, in another millennium, by Stalinism.

As compensation a harsh polemic was organized against those who did not accept the new word. Again, nothing new under the sun. But what did take on a particular significance was the spiteful, covert fight against Judaism, or rather against those currents of Judaism that did not recognize Christ as God. Why did the heart of the polemic essentially revolve around the question of the true or false divinity of Christ? Everything we have learned from comparative anthropology confirms that after a nascent state movement is institutionalized, its leaders, or rather the eventual undisputed leader, tends to become an object of veneration, who is mythologized, removed from any contact with concrete reality, so that he can take on the aspect of an inoffensive icon! Then it all becomes Theology, in the same way as in the modern age, during certain phases, everything becomes ‘Ideology’, a subtle diatribe engaged in by the ‘definers’, in which distinguished intellectuals squabble over the placing of commas.

It comes as no surprise to us that a certain ordering of thought and of symbols and words may be passed down in culture even after the overcoming of a particular mode of production. What historical and dialectical materialism discovered lies precisely in this: that a profound change in the means of production may encounter resistance from previous ideological-philosophical superstructures, because the new social force in power will try to derive some benefit from them as well, but without riskingf the new socio-economic set up being called into question.

This should be remembered, since the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudice gets brought up as an example of how a certain sub-culture or superstition may endure for thousands of years, spreading poison, shaping minds and conditioning practical choices in the field of social relations. In particular the prejudice against the Jews supposedly continued down the centuries due to a curse from On High, with no human power able to remove it.

In actual fact the Jews of the diaspora, over the course of two millennia, became rooted in various Europe and Mediterranean realities, and finally in the Americas, by exercising their cultural influence in various ways, even when under pressure and suffering persecutions, by inserting themselves and integrating themselves into the significant apparatuses of social life in general.

The crucial point, as everybody knows, is that under the feudal mode of production, within which the agrarian economy is the determining factor, those belonging to the Jewish faith were prevented from owning land, and would therefore find it necessary to practice certain professions and trades which the Middle Ages, with its values and taboos, did not consider to be worthy of members of the ruling class and which were extraneous to its interests and conception of the world. By exercising for centuries the profession of owner of monetary capital, or by dispensing the knowledge necessary to engage in the liberal arts, led to the arbitrary generalization according to which being a Jew meant being a usurer, who carried out activities related to commerce, which the mentality of the era likened to those of “thieves”.

After the narrow circles of feudal production and consumption have been destroyed, and with the birth of the modern mode of capitalist production the practice of advancing capital becomes one of society’s fundamental roles, it is obvious that the Jew, with no ties to the land, but who for centuries had been refining the practice of advancing loans, or been engaged in a trade which is needed everywhere, would find himself at an advantage. From this would flow the idea that the power of money is entirely in the hands of the Jews. But, in virtue of the arbitrary generalization we all know, in the Eighteen and Nineteen Hundreds the Jews would start to be seen as the occult motors of credit, of speculation; up to our times, when the Jewish question, in the sense of an antisemitic campaign, is not only not over but seems to have had new life breathed into it.

And none of these problems would be resolved once the State of Israel was founded, on the contrary the waters would be further muddied in the polemic which insists on lumping antisemites and anti-Israelis together, as though they were the same thing! Yet again, if our method of analyzing bourgeois society is rejected there is no way of disentangled oneself from a web of seemingly inextricable themes, prone to being manipulated in all kinds of ways.

Since we have never fallen into the trap of explaining history as an uninterrupted series of plots by minorities of any kind, we will reassert our vision of the struggle between the modern social classes, ruling out that cultural or religious diatribes are the key to unlocking it. At the same time we will not forgo seeing how these cultural-doctrinal-religious questions are in general linked to the economic and social base, which today sustains an apparatus of power and social relations which presents an increasingly lethal threat to the future of the entire human species, whether one professes one, none or a myriad of religious faiths.

When a religious or theological superstructure becomes fully established, organized into a doctrinal corpus which is well-defined, but above all which is not easily modified, it indicates that the mode of social and economic life from which it originated has not only become fully established, but has already started to disintegrate. Each ruling class needs to equip itself with a suitable apparatus of consensus, as well as instruments of material repression against the subject social forces. Cultural stratification, over the course of time, is complex; strata of this type of terrain are deeply amalgamated, but not to the point they can avoid being studied by Marxist geology.

That the organization of a church or a religion is particularly functional as regards the requirements of a given type of social and class organization is beyond dispute. It is not particularly difficult to identify the Catholic doctrine as congenial to the justification of the feudal way of life; the proof of this lies in the fact that with the advent of modern capitalism its ecclesiastical unity was shattered.

The question that arises is: why did the Catholic Church stick to its condemnation of the Jewish people as deicides right up until 1966, the date of the Nostra aetate document, allowing this anathema to be considered indispensable until then on the theological and practical levels? What convinced the Catholic hierarchies to dispense with this condemnation, to the point of even asking to be pardoned by their older brothers? Only those in the know can answer this question and about the new stance, and in general there has been little discussion about what motivated the overturning of the sentence that had been passed on Judaism. They prefer to remain on the terrain of definitions, because they do not actually consider it useful to make known the deeper social and practical reasons why for so many centuries they rigidly adhered to their condemnation of the Jews.

But it is precisely that which interests us, in the name of an analysis which can show what it is that drives and modifies systemizations deemed to be inviolable.

In the modern age, or age of capitalism, as the mode of production which brings to the fore the bourgeoisie as a class, we see the establishment of new universalisms, or visions of the world, marked by the overcoming of the narrow, feudal mode of life, shut off in their own separate worlds due to the limited capacity of the productive forces. Antiquity had experienced the rule of great empires, which they believed represented civilized humanity, and excluded any other competing mode of existence. With the rise of Enlightenment culture in the sixteen hundreds, the explosion of the rationalist conception would propose a new form of universalism based on cosmopolitanism and the notion of indefinite progress; a universalism capable of illuminating and freeing the human heart and mind from any kind of narrow-mindedness, dogmatism and obscurantism.

How could the ecclesiastical order of feudal stamp not react to and condemn such a claim?

Judaism, which had been forcibly confronted with other cultures for a long time, itself constituted a form, in fact the oldest form of “universalism”.

We will return then to the consideration by Sartre from which we started: “(The Jew) feels he is a missionary of the universal, against the universalism of the Catholic Church, from which he is excluded; an instrument capable of attaining the truth and establishing a spiritual contact between men (…) In the Jew is concealed a sort of impassioned imperialism of reason; he doesn’t just want to convince others that he is right, his aim is to convince others that to rationalism must be attributed an absolute value”.

And so at least three types of universalism, which inevitably find themselves in conflict due to what motivated them and their provenance. Too many, we would say, taking into account that if one goes back their material concrete base, they are interpreting with their general point of view interests and material forces which are in implacable conflict.

Jewish universalism certainly did have a notable influence on the Enlightenment: in an age of major developments in the productive field, it is only natural those cultural forces which historically had had the greatest experience of dealing with change would be best at interpreting the movement. And yet this does not mean that cultivating, out of choice or necessity, a form of broadmindedness automatically involves favoring the new: the Catholic Church, self-defined as universal, would end up closing in on itself and withdrawing in the face of pressure from the new productive forces which were dismantling feudalism.

Once the bourgeoisie had emerged victorious on all fronts, it was the nature of the new mode of production itself which would determine the stance the cultural forms took: if capitalism had triumphed over the narrow, restricted economy, it would in its turn find itself narrowing its own horizons in order to form markets on the scale of the individual nation, i.e., in economic areas organized on a state basis.

So, if Judaism had contributed to the formation of the enlightenment spirit, which involved a cultural insertion and integration which had previously been prevented, soon, within the ambit of the national spirit of the individual states, it would come to be perceived, even more than before, as an unstable element, which could not be contained within the limits and logic “of blood and soil”, the two terms which would be taken to extremes by the nationalisms of the twentieth century, but which were already gaining a foothold within the romantic notion of identity. It is sufficient, in this connection, to recall how Alessandro Manzoni, a liberal Catholic, and no “extremist” as regards either his character or his background, would state his own requirements for a country as one that honors: “one army, one language, one altar, one memory, one blood, one heart”! Are there not listed in this verse those characteristics of the Nation-State which would prove in the end to be the exact opposite of the universalism proclaimed during the period of illuminist broadmindedness?

In this social and cultural climate in which all convictions end up mixed up together, both the Jewish and Catholic universalisms found themselves gravitating towards intransigent positions. The organized forms of Judaism, in the various communities in Europe, were prey to internal shocks and days of reckoning. This is reflected in the considerations of the heads of the community in Poland, who were exercising the authority of the Kahal, which extended to every act of Jewish daily life. “We have gravely sinned before the Lord. Unrest increases from one day to the next. It becomes ever more difficult to live. Our people have no place among the nations. In fact, it is a miracle that despite all the misfortunes, we are still alive. The only thing that remains for us to do is to unite in a league, held together in the spirit of strict observance to God’s commandments and to the precepts of our teachers and leaders” (from S.M. Dubnow). A document like this is a symptom of a condition destined to get increasingly worse up to the present day, to the point of becoming emblematic of the Jewish condition.

But it is reflected ever more dramatically in non-Jewish cultures as well, indicating that bourgeois modernity constrains every milieu to look within itself, to understand how to cope with a reality which turns established life styles upside-down; tempests which the unfolding new mode of production is bringing among social forces based on long-consolidated cultures, whose principles had appeared eternal.

Related to these problems, which are to do with the attempt to justify the development of society in a bourgeois direction, there would arise over time, especially in the modern era, speculations which to put it mildly were outlandish, and which aimed to base the nation-state on race. As soon as you broach this topic, one’s mind immediately thinks of the Nazi aberration and its rantings about the Jews. But only a minimum of knowledge is needed to clarify that the pressure exerted on the Jewish people dates back to previous centuries, such that today no-one can get away with concealing the responsibility for it that weighs on the culture of the ruling classes, which are disposed to rely on lies and machinations to tighten their nooses around the necks of minorities to use them as scapegoats.

The elaboration of racial theories cannot be deciphered without taking into account the material conditions on which there arises in superstructural form the most varied elements that serve to justify and consolidate the machinery of power. Anyone who has read the polemical tirades of Luther, the leader of the Reformation, against the Jews might well believe they were reading a national socialist pamphlet; as indeed anyone who has attempted to read a few pages by thinkers who are less well-known, but instrumental in pursuing the same aim, soon come to realize that the theoretical elaboration of the theory of Race was clearly entrusted to people who were perfectly aware of the operation that they were involved in.

The nation-state comes to political fruition in the eighteen hundreds when capitalism takes it to its extreme consequences on the practical and theoretical planes. But Christian Europe had in its time taken its own measures, starting with the centralist Catholic kings in Spain, who expelled the Jews in 1492 (the fateful year in which the New World was discovered) as a dangerous minority capable of undermining the Holy Faith. The idea of purity of blood had already been upheld in those times, proof that modern racism only brings to the point of exasperation various motivations that exist within the various social classes in order to divert social energies in ways that are useful for the ruling classes, but fatal for the subordinate ones.

We know states came before nations. But what produces the modern nation-states is nascent capitalism’s requirement to homogenize both market and population over a given territory, such as to allow the integration of the productive forces and relations of production within a complex and inter-active system. The formula cited included in the verse by Manzoni states, de facto, everything the bourgeois nation-state requires: an economic body which can conceal society’s old and new class divisions, brought together where possible by its own collective sentiments, by a common language, by the same religion, and by the same shared sense of its own history.

Within the various historic nations these requirements have never been entirely satisfied. On the ideological and programmatic plane this is due to the bourgeoisie never having had a Party that is truly its own, an organic national vision of its own, due to the incurable contradictions between the productive forces and the social relations of production. It has always attempted to come up with it in an ideal way, drawing on idealistic and spiritualistic philosophies, but without ever realizing it.

This explains why, precisely at a time when in a much-enlarged capitalism national borders have remained in place but are transcended by imperialism, nationalisms, with all their exacerbating factors, have been unleashed within them. In this setting and due to these necessities the struggle against quarrelsome, unfaithful, hypercritical, treacherous and unsound individuals and groups, in short, against all of those members of the nation’ that it is unable to totally metabolize, despite wanting to, within the ethical or organic state, and which is ever pursued but never realized, is inevitable, and will be conducted without quarter.

If the Jews are one of those minorities that traditionally can never be wholly integrated, under the same heading but for different reasons, it is also not possible to genuinely integrate the landless proletarians, the poor farmers, the pariahs, in a word those whom the pedagogic state à la Mazzini has forever been trying to amalgamate, but in vain. In short the nation-state today has still not been realized, and we say it never can be!

The passage from seventeenth century cosmopolitanism to romantic nationalism, with its new kind of particularism, accompanied the necessary drive to form larger and more homogenous markets, which allowed capitalist productive forces to develop and expand. Arguing against the nation-state is therefore as fruitless as it is anti-historical, due to the fact the dialectical advance of social energy does not lend itself to being demonized. And yet it is undeniable that cosmopolitanism seemed the terrain best suited to Judaism. No sooner did it – finally – free itself from the ghetto, than the new climate of nationalism forced it to adapt to the restrictions we have highlighted: already it had paid a high price when expelled from Spain and was dispersed throughout Europe, one minute rejected, and the next minute welcomed by nations in the process of formation (the policy of Frederick II of Prussia springs to mind).

Judaic universalism was clashing with the Catholic and reformed Christian universalisms, which proclaimed a kind of egalitarian humanity, but according to the criteria of a religious vision which postponed the realization of equality and justice to the afterlife. In these conditions, especially in those nations more inclined to rigid centralism, like France for example, the treacherous, uncontrollable element that Judaism, in their eyes, represented would once again be subjected to harsh, underhand pressure: with tensions reaching fever pitch with the Dreyfus Affair in France. Meanwhile, the formation of the workers’ parties, in their various ideological versions, leads to the Jews being accused of being present and active in these formations, which inevitably come into being imbued with a universalist spirit of the internationalist type.

That the Jewish question, set against the backdrop of tension between various, conflicting forms of universalism, should assume a specific, almost symbolic, significance, is now bit of a cliché’. But with clichés one is unlikely to get to the real reason why problems arise.

It has been said, rightly, that on a historical level there have been different kinds of antisemitism, and that the worst (and last..?) of them was “State antisemitism”: but what that means exactly, in the absence of any clear reference to the imperialist phase of capital, is not at all clear.

The myth of “collective societies devoid of elements of internal tension, devoid of disruptive elements” is activated precisely when, with the advent of the fascist and nazi regimes, a part of the bourgeoisie comes to believe that it can counter the growing internal contradictions of capitalism with a statist society aggregated around “corporativist myths”, in which there is no room for minorities of any kind, not just political minorities in a conventional sense but cultural and racial ones as well. State antisemitism, therefore, goes beyond traditional pressure exerted on minorities, and assumes the dimensions of “building a kind of organic state, which has definitively resolved any disconnection between the citizen and the state, in concordance with a spiritual even biologically pure community” (Collotti). What he is saying, in other words, is that class struggle is now behind us, overcome and recomposed within the corporative state. In our version of things, on the contrary, it is precisely in this phase that the more the class struggle is hidden and suppressed, the more it exists, as indeed is inevitable in the imperialist phase.

After the Second World War, the Holocaust having happened, the tone of the investigation into the history and nature of antisemitism entered a phase in which the classic “Never Again!” approach was deemed more worthwhile than developing a more profound understanding of the question; to such a point that if on the one hand there was a retreat into denying that the events had even happened, on the other you were supposed to either affirm that the extermination was an absolute evil, or risk being considered as afflicted to a certain extent by some kind of unresolved antisemitism.

There is no need to underline how the bourgeoisie has always fished in the murky waters of mass emotion and feeling, today referred to by the ever so snappy term collective consciousness. Once antisemitism had become State antisemitism, it wasn’t that difficult to play on emotions that had spread through the so-called people. The ultimate form of anti-semitism is the most shameful and devastating of all.

If we didn’t stand firm on our positions, which is to consider religious superstructures as erected on long established material bases, we would soon be overwhelmed by false problems which would divert proletarian energy away from defending its own interests, and away from the correct way of viewing social contradictions. We know that the dominant ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes, as Marx says, to the extent that the entire ideological apparatus of force and consensus is mobilized in times of heightened social tension. Of this we have had evidence every time the popular imagination has been whipped up so a scapegoat could function as a lightning conductor.

Without needing to bother R. Girard regarding the relationship between Violence and the Sacred, as one of his works is entitled, we can say that the decadent European bourgeoisie had been preparing for quite a while to offload its emotional tensions onto somebody. If, however, it were to be claimed, as in general it still is, that the Jewish question can be explained on the basis of feelings alone, then we must oppose such attempts to make the irrational the keystone of history and of the course it takes.

It will be necessary then to subject to a severe critique all those interpretations which have not only stoked up feelings of hatred, but ended up considering the Jews simultaneously as the expression of the Enlightenment, capitalism and communism, in a hotchpotch of judgements, or rather prejudices, of a hitherto unseen level of virulence; but also we need to criticize those interpretations which in the name of defending the victims have purported to do so by deploying the same weapons, that is by disclaiming the historical reasons which enabled them to be exploited in this way.

The most famous of these positions, from the post-second world war period, admired for its so-called brilliance, is that of the so-called theory of the “banality of evil” asserted by Arendt, which, in parametaphysical mode, goes as far as defending the idea that the Jews have been hounded by accusations and forms of gratuitous violence by people who lacked any sense of values or honor. If at first sight certain definitions might appear captivating, the historical contradictions however take a standing jump, and end up by doing more harm than good to the Jewish reality itself.

Besides, even the Catholic Church, which had historically stoked up the hatred against the deicides, when it realized the extent of the persecution that members of the Jewish people were being subjected to (and it knew about it, as documented) ended up upsetting… the devil, by actually defining the Nazi power, with which it had struck a deal in 1934, as devilish! (Concordat prepared by the future Pope Pius XII).

The latter theme is not intended as a digression but is something that needs to be properly unraveled in order avoid falling victim to false representations and influences.

(Continues)