The Woke Right: How Antisemitism is Infiltrating Conservative Politics

Peloni:  Karys Rhea, a producer and researcher at the Epoch Times, discusses with Tirza Shorr, a researcher at JCSF, common traits between the antisemites on the Right and the Left.

April 4, 2025 | 31 Comments »

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31 Comments / 31 Comments

  2. Sebastien Zorn

    Marx’s last words were “I am not a Marxist”

    They weren’t his last words.

    His son-in-law told him how a group of students was discussing Marxism (there were discussion circles where young people discussed various ideas).

    Marx listened and replied that if this is what they think Marxism is, then he is not a Marxist.

    Yes those are the facts which are covered up by Zorn in the envelope of another lie

    I don’t have the details but what seems possible is that disagreed with the mechanical way they were dealing with his writing. The richness of the thought was left out…they just were not getting it

  3. @Sebastien Zorn

    Marx’s last words were “I am not a Marxist”

    They weren’t his last words.

    His son-in-law told him how a group of students was discussing Marxism (there were discussion circles where young people discussed various ideas).

    Marx listened and replied that if this is what they think Marxism is, then he is not a Marxist.

  4. @Reader fquigley I’ve made my case. If you wish to ignore the facts, that’s your affair, but I’d be surprised if you’ve persuaded anyone.

  6. Peloni my inadequate reply to Zorn didn’t go through

    Reader…your sarcasm is the best answer

    Yes of course Marx was a Marxist but some were using his articles like a dogma. He only meant do not be a dogmatist.

    Total lie from Zorn.

    Marxism was dialectical materialism and that WAS atheism…a specific philosophical outlook.

    The sadly deceased Robert Fine has answered some questions on this.

    The problem Zorn has is after being into Anarchism and Buddhism he is a born again , he imagined, Zionist and he now gets feverishly excited…in other words off his rocker. Your sarcasm is the only antidote.

  7. @Sebastien Zorn
    April 9, 2025 at 7:31 pm
    @fquigley I reposted the last part of the essay with the link to the whole thing. and you are ignoring it. Everything Adam quoted or paraphrased is in there. He’s not lying. You are. Re-read it. Yes, Marx advocated political equality for Jews at that stage of history, as did his follower, Richard Wagner, but they believed “bourgeois” society was evil because it was essentially Jewish. He believed a healthy society is one in which the individual is completely absorbed into the community, the common root of both fascism and Communism, and which produced and produce genocide, which in the French Revolution and German Peasant Wars, Marx celebrated. Fascism, Communism, Islamism, are totaltarian death cults. Judaism celebrates life and balances individual and community. This, they regard as contemptible and transactional, alienated. And they all wanted and want the Jews to disappear.

    And that was why Marx fought against the Antisemitism of Bruno Bauer which is what this essay is about.

    He is defending the Jews of Prussia and is fighting for full political rights for Jews everywhere.

    Your hatred knows no bounds. You will be doing aot of damage to Jews today who are meeting much Antisemitism from fake left and from the likes of Tucker and Jeffrey Sacks.

    The most telling part of your horrific screed of which I have only quoted just a little is where you are forced to admit yes Marx did defend the Jews

    Zorn which is not your real name that is the first time you have admitted that in print.

    You only did it because I pointed it out

    As if that defence of the Jews was a mere trifle.

    Then you say Marx wanted to wipe them out.

    You are being driven into a Fascist hatred of true socialism by the crisis and capitalism is building up to wipe out the Jews finally which is the aim of the Mullah nuclear bomb against the Jews riven by division. As Trump gives the Mullahs more time.

  8. @Reader You’re welcome. Marx’s last words were

    I am not a Marxist

    😀

    At least he had enough sense to be properly ashamed of himself at the end

    “In 1843, Marr was expelled from Zürich under the accusation that he had furthered communist activities.” – Wikipedia

    In my Anarcho-Communist days in the late ’70s, I had a book of like-minded essays that had one by the young Wagner.

    Who named the Communist Manifesto, then?

    “Manifesto of the Communist Party

    A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

    Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

    Two things result from this fact:

    I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

    II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

    To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.”

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

    Say, do you listen to yourself?

  9. @Sebastien Zorn

    Marx, Wagner, and Wilhelm Marr were all Communists

    Thanks for telling me, and I thought that Wagner and Marr were proto-Nazis, and I am not sure whether Marx considered himself a Communist.

    Sorry for insulting the poor Nazis, after all they fought against Judeo-Bolshevism and laid down their lives to save Europe from the Red Eastern horde which showed up in Europe in 1944/45 God knows why!!!

    I know, I know – so that they could rape all the German women!

    The above is sarcasm.

  13. @Sebastien Zorn

    I read Nelson’s article.

    He is another Wagner apologist.

    Wagner considered himself a philosopher first and only then a composer, and his “philosophy” was centered on getting rid of Jews, Judaism, Jewishness, Judaizing, etc.

    In fact, Wagner’s family considered this the Master’s legacy and the ongoing project that must be worked on and implemented after his death.

    Read Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple by Joachim Koehler, especially Chapter 10 Pioneers to learn who was instrumental in creating Hitler, so to speak.

    I don’t want this to turn into another endless argument.

    I explained that in the 19th century Germany these views of Jews and Judaism were standard among those who were considered philosophers and intellectuals.

    Marx was baptized at the age of 6 and this and his further upbringing explains his perception of Judaism.

    P.S.

    Shacher-macher – a Yiddish expression:

    https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=shachermacher

  14. On a humorous note: This line: “the real vital air of society” from This paragraph from Marx’s essay:

    An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.

    appears in on one of my favorite humor articles by Russel Baker, “The Historian Glut”. I wonder if it was deliberate parody.

    Opinion
    Observer; The Historian Glut
    By Russell Baker
    April 9, 1994

    History is constantly being revised these days. It’s because there is a glut of historians. Revising history is the only way to keep them busy.

    The historian glut results from the Government’s Vietnam War policy of granting draft deferments for staying in college. Young men who would happily have left the campus and gone into honest work were naturally tempted to stay on, and on, and on.

    This required them to study something. They studied history. What do you study, after all, when you face a long sentence to college, but lack a head for science or mathematics, go to sleep the instant somebody says “economics,” aren’t built for professional sports, were never any good at Latin or French, and find out they aren’t giving Ph.D.’s for daydreaming?

    You study history.

    Sure, first you think you’ll study literature. It would be swell, you think, to sit around sewing leather elbow patches on your tweeds and reading Spenserian sonnets, metaphysical poets, Alexandrine couplets. It sounds perfect. Imagine wowing the engineering students by casually tossing off phrases from Milton.

    “. . . in Heaven yclept Euphrosyne . . .”

    “. . . filled her with thee, a goddess fair, so buxom, blithe and debonair . . .”

    Sounds perfect, but why do you fall into deep coma three minutes after plunging into the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson?

    Because literature is not vital, that’s why. Not vital for a turbulent age like the age that is forcing you to stay in college forever when, given your druthers, you’d like to be out in the great national hurly-burly, working as an honest shoemaker, or driving a cab and meeting such fascinating people, or . . .

    Well, not vital in a violent age. History is to blame for your fate. You are a victim of history. It’s only natural that having got literature out of your system you will, first, want to study history and, then, take your revenge on history.

    Somebody has to pay for the mess history has made of life. Why not take it out on the historians who wrote it, show they were all wrong about practically everything and, if they hadn’t been, the world wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.

    Ordinarily a country manages to get by with 10 or 12 historians per generation. With the historian explosion created by Vietnam, however, thousands were suddenly coming down the pipeline.

    How could they be kept busy? Newspaper editors could print only a limited number of letters correcting foolish reporters’ errors about Benedict Arnold and Mary, Queen of Scots. With the Vietnam War over, students no longer needed to study history; college therefore no longer needed history professors in boxcar lots. The obvious solution for excess historians: revising the history they had been taught.

    Now they are going at it with gusto. No reputation is safe anymore. Not even Adolf Hitler’s. Scarcely a day passes now without some re-examiner of the past announcing that Hitler wasn’t such a bad chap after all. That he probably didn’t even know people were being exterminated, poor misunderstood guy.

    Mussolini’s reputation is bound to be revised upward now that the revival of Fascist politics in Italy invites the attention of historians desperate for something to revise.

    Thomas Jefferson has been revised so far down that I recently read a newspaper columnist — a newspaper columnist! — asserting her own moral superiority to him. Even the once-sainted Abraham Lincoln can no longer be spoken of admiringly without issuance of the prefatory apology:

    “I realize of course that he was a racist.”

    The trend in history, they say, is to dwell on the social developments of the past, a sort of how-they-lived story of humanity’s miserable passage up the geologic clock. This of course revises the old idea of what history is. Historians like Macaulay, Trevelyan and Prescott made history an entertaining romp down the years, starring characters of the sort who fascinated people in the movies.

    History is always bound to be wrong, of course, including the revised versions. This being so, who would give up Prescott’s Hernando Cortez, that Spanish Errol Flynn swashbuckler, for the modern historian’s study of the diet of roof thatchers in 1750?

    https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/09/opinion/observer-the-historian-glut.html

    Never fails to crack me up, no matter how many times I read it. And, speaking as a former History major, it’s spot on. 😀

  15. @Reader

    Wagner certainly didn’t need to read Marx in order to come up with his article on Judaism in music.

    If you think that, you didn’t read the article.

    https://www.commentary.org/articles/eric-nelson/wagner-anti-semitism-the-ring/

    Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

    …Wagner did intend to put on stage a world that requires emancipation from its “Jewishness.” There is a great deal of evidence that Rose might have offered for this claim, much of which comes from the libretto itself. Let me begin with a clue—a small detail from the second scene of Das Rheingold (the first of the Ring operas to be scored, although the last to be written). Wotan awakes from slumber to find that Valhalla, the new home of the gods, has been completed. We learn that he has made a bargain with the giants, Fasolt and Fafner: If they build the fortress for him, he will give them the beautiful goddess Freia in payment. The bill is now due, and Wotan’s wife, Fricka, assails him for having entered into this perverse contract in the first place:

    O laughingly wanton folly!

    Most loveless joviality!

    Had I known about your contract,

    I’d have hindered such deceit;

    but you mettlesome menfolk

    kept us women out of the way,

    so that, deaf to all entreaty, you could

    calmly deal with the giants alone.

    So without shame you brazenly traded away

    Freia, my gracious sister,

    well pleased with your Schächergewerb!

    What is still sacred and precious

    to your hard hearts such as yours,

    when you menfolk lust after power?

    The puzzle here has to do with the word I’ve left untranslated: Schächergewerb. The German word “der Schächer” is an archaic term for thief or robber, used canonically by Luther in his Bible translation to denote the thieves crucified alongside Christ. The word “Gewerbe” means trade or business, so the compound term should be rendered as something like: “thieves’ bargain.” But this makes no sense at all. Wotan is many things in this scenario, but he is no thief. And just what is a “thieves’ bargain,” anyway? English translations of the libretto most often skirt the problem by simply rendering the term as “pact,” thereby ignoring the fact that Wagner evidently has in mind a specific kind of pact. What is going on here?

    The answer is that Wagner uses the term in an idiosyncratic manner, licensed by one of his habitual false etymologies (the most famous of these comes in the title of his final music drama, Parsifal, spelled with an “s” rather than the proper “z,” because he spuriously derived the character’s name from the Arabic Fal Parsi, “pure fool”). Wagner clearly has in mind the German term “der Schacher,” which denotes “hucksterism,” “sharp dealing,” or “street barter.” Grimm’s Wörterbuch of 1854 helpfully adds that the term is used “particularly of the Jewish peddling trade” (besonders von jüdischen Hausierhandel); indeed, Grimm proposes what continues to be regarded as a plausible Hebrew etymology for the term, deriving it from “sachar,” meaning trade, and suggesting that it must have entered German via Yiddish. “Der Schacher” is distinguished from “der Schächer” only by its lack of an umlaut (used to denote a now-absent “e”). Wagner is incorrectly deriving the latter from the former: “Ein Schächer” for him is one who engages in “der Schacher.” So the term Schächergewerb in fact has a perfectly straightforward meaning in Wagner’s fanciful lexicon: it refers to a huckster’s bargain, or street barterer’s bargain.

    This fact, in turn, gives us a red thread to follow. For the term “der Schacher” (itself quite rare in 19th-century German prose) was absolutely central to one of the most significant left-Hegelian pamphlets of the 1840s, and one with which Wagner was undoubtedly familiar: Karl Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question (1843). We should recall that Marx’s reply to Bruno Bauer memorably turned the familiar question of Jewish emancipation on its head. Whereas most interventions in the debate about the Judenfrage had posited an incompatibility between Judaism and liberalism (on the familiar grounds that Judaism amounted to a chauvinistic rejection of Enlightenment universalism), Marx argued instead that Judaism and liberalism were in fact a perfect match. Liberalism, on his account, is simply an expression of Judaism. Man in liberal civil society is “active as a private individual, treats other men as a means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.” Religion in civil society is therefore “the sphere of egoism, of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of division. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men.” The notion of “the rights of man,” as understood within the liberal order, presupposes a picture of man as “an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself,” into “his private interest and private choice, and separated from the community.” The pathological focus of liberal citizens on their private, isolated needs estranges them from their fellows, whom they encounter as mere “means” to the advancement of their own interests. The result is the distinctive commodification of human life that Marx associates with the bourgeois, liberal order.

    But this fact about the liberal state, for Marx, is to be explained as a manifestation of its essential “Jewishness.” The “secular basis of Judaism,” Marx argues, is “practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining [Der Schacher]. What is his worldly god? Money.” The degeneration of “civil society” into a “sphere of egoism” is to be explained as a “Judaizing” of society, from which it follows that “emancipation from bargaining [der Schacher] and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our era,” or, as he also puts it, “the emancipation of society from Judaism” (die Emazipation der Gesellschaft von Judentum). The key term in this argument, as we can see, is “der Schacher.” Judaism, for Marx, takes the “bargain” as its paradigmatic form of encounter between agents, both divine and human. The Jew approaches God as an “egoist” aiming to satisfy “practical needs”; he promises obedience to “an unfounded, superficial law” in return for the satisfaction of those needs and tries to get the best deal possible from the party opposite—often using the “cunning” of “Jewish Jesuitism” to find loopholes in the law he purports to honor. “The bill of exchange,” as Marx puts it, “is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.” The liberal contractarian tradition is, in turn, merely the application of this Jewish “bargain” mentality to the relationship between citizens; each approaches the other as an “egoist” trying to extract the best possible terms from his fellows. Marx’s conclusion is that “an organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for bargaining, and therefore the possibility of bargaining, would make the Jew impossible.”

    When Marx associates the “bargain” mentality with Judaism, he thus primarily has in mind an egoistic fetishism of needs that reduces both the self and other people to “means,” rather than ends. Jews particularly adore money, on this account, because it is the efficient medium through which human beings (particularly their labor) can be commodified and exchanged. At the limit, Marx explains, “the species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.”

    This is precisely what is happening in scene II of Das Rheingold. Wotan, who “rules only by contracts” and presides over a legalistic order of self-interest, has so objectified his own sister-in-law that he has bartered her to the giants in return for a house. He has engaged in what we are now entitled to translate as “Jewish barter.” And as he is reminded of this heinous fact, the telltale descending notes of the “contract” or “spear” motif appear darkly in the strings (recall that the contracts, or treaties, that undergird the order of the gods are said to be inscribed on Wotan’s spear). Since the audience has already watched Scene I, it knows perfectly well that Alberich’s original sin was merely to take Wotan’s own logic a step further: The dwarf had renounced love in favor of power by stealing the Rheingold. He would eventually use his new wealth to purchase a mate, with whom he would father a child (Hagen) by rape.

    This kind of commodification of women is itself a central thematic preoccupation of the Ring, and virtually every time the subject is broached, Wagner returns tellingly to his language of “der Schacher.” Thus, in Act I, Scene 3 of Die Walküre, Sieglinde explains to Siegmund that a mysterious stranger appeared on her unhappy wedding day:

    The men from his clan

    sat here in the hall,

    as guests at Hunding’s wedding:

    he chose a woman [i.e., Sieglinde herself], unasked,

    whom low barterers [Schächer] gave him as his wife.

    Sadly I sat there

    while they were drinking;

    a stranger then came in.

    My translation of “Schächer” as “low barterers” here is, once again, a departure from the standard English versions of the libretto, which simply don’t know what to do with the word. Obviously, the men who have given Sieglinde in marriage to Hunding are only with the greatest awkwardness to be described as “robbers” or “thieves.” The well-known Jameson version fudges by calling them “miscreants.” But this again serves to efface the move that Wagner is making: On his account, those who traded Sieglinde to Hunding were engaged in “der Schacher,” the paradigmatically Jewish form of human commodification.

    We should also recall that, at this point in the scene, Sigemund has only just finished explaining to Hunding and Sieglinde that he is on the run because he came to the aid of a “sorrowful child” whose “kinsmen sought to bind her, without love, to a man in wedlock.” These same “kinsmen”—who, of course, turn out to be Hunding’s own—are now hot on Siegmund’s trail. He is thus introduced to the audience from the first as the great enemy of “Der Schacher,” the hero who wishes to end the reign of contracts and bargains.

    Once we’ve taken all of this on board and acknowledged that much of the Ring is, in essence, On the Jewish Question set to music, we will be in a position to recognize other straightforward thematic borrowings from Marx’s essay. We have already seen, for instance, that Marx associated Judaism with casuistic bad faith. The Jew, on this account, promises to uphold a law that is arbitrary and alienating, at odds with his proper human purposes, or “species being” (a concept the young Marx took from Feuerbach). As a result, he constantly finds himself thwarted by the very law to which he is bound, and he responds by cultivating a “Jewish Jesuitism…the chief art of which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws.” The canonical embodiment of this charge in the anti-Semitic imagination was always the Shabbos goy, the Gentile who performs what are, for Jews, forbidden activities on the Sabbath. A Jew is, for instance, barred by the law from kindling a lamp on the Sabbath, but he doesn’t wish to exist in darkness—so he might rely on a Gentile who is not bound by the law in question to light the lamp for him. But he may not explicitly instruct or ask the Gentile to do so. This practice raises a whole set of stereotypically “rabbinic” questions about complicity: What hints, assistance, or encouragement is the Jew permitted to offer to the non-Jew in question, without converting the latter’s act into his own? When, if at all, is he permitted to pay the non-Jew for his labor? And so on.

    This aspect of the Young Hegelian attack on Jewishness is crucial to the narrative structure of the Ring. In Das Rheingold, it is personified by Loge, the fire god who is also the great authority on loopholes. When Wotan tries to welch on his bargain with the giants, Fasolt reminds him that he is stuck. “Honor your contracts,” he warns Wotan, “for what you are, you are only though contracts!” The legal order that undergirds Wotan’s reign requires the keeping of contracts, but the perverse consequence is that Wotan must treat Freia as chattel (and, incidentally, die himself, when deprived of her life-giving apples). He therefore seeks a way out, a maneuver whereby he can subvert the contract without actually violating it—and for this he calls on Loge, essentially his shady attorney:

    Where simple truth serves,

    I ask for help from no man.

    But, to turn to advantage an enemy’s grudge

    is a lesson that only guile and cunning can teach,

    of the kind that Loge slyly employs.

    He who counselled me on this contract

    [Vertrage]

    promised to ransom Freia:

    on him I now rely.

    The order of the law requires the cultivation of “guile and cunning” (Schlauheit und List) and the practice of gamesmanship. But this casuistry is, for Wagner, always unavailing. Loge’s proposed solution to the dilemma—that Wotan should acquire the Rheingold and Alberich’s ring and then get the giants to accept them as a substitute for Freia—is what sets in motion the destruction of the order of the gods that comes finally in Götterdämmerung.

    This first bit of casuistry gives rise to a momentous second one in Die Walküre. Wotan has now traded the ring to the giants, one of whom (Fafner) has killed his brother and turned himself into a giant dragon, keeping watch over his quarry. Wotan knows that the ring must be returned to the Rhine if the gods are to be saved, but his contract with Fafner stands between him and salvation: “The bargain I have made forbids me to strike him…. I who am Lord through contracts am now a slave to them.” He therefore concocts a new plan: He will father a son (Siegmund) with a mortal woman, who will not be bound by the laws of the gods (sich löse vom Göttergesetz), and this free man, uninstructed, will slay Fafner and reclaim the ring for him. He raises the boy under the guise of the wolf-man, Wälse, and leaves behind a sword for him (Nothung), which Siegmund will find “in his hour of greatest need.” But Fricka devastatingly exposes the bad faith of this maneuver during her long debate with Wotan in Act II. Wotan is made to acknowledge that by raising and nurturing Siegmund and supplying him with his weapon, he has become complicit in everything that has occurred and whatever is to follow. His pretense that Siegmund is “a hero I never helped with my counsel, a stranger to the god, free from his grace, unaware, free from command” collapses, and he is forced to decree Siegmund’s death in battle (punishment for the latter’s having had intercourse with the legal spouse of another man, who also happens to be his own sister). Once again, “Jewish Jesuitism” is shown to end in utter failure.

    Wagner’s embrace of Marx’s anti-Jewish paradigm in the Ring is therefore quite comprehensive, and in this respect the music dramas simply echo the thrust of his political prose. In his notorious essay Jewishness in Music (1850), written while he was composing the Ring libretto, Wagner quotes Marx almost word-for-word when he dismisses the question of Jewish emancipation as a red herring: “According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipated: he rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force.” What European bourgeois civilization requires is, rather, “emancipation from the yoke of Judaism” (die Emanzipation von dem Drucke des Judentums). Thirty years later, Wagner’s perspective on the subject remained unchanged. In his often-misunderstood essay Know Thyself (1881), this Young Hegelian assault on Jewishness becomes, paradoxically enough, part of an argument against the overenthusiastic scapegoating of Jews for the ills of liberal capitalism. Yes, Wagner writes, “the Nibelung’s fateful ring has become a stock portfolio,” and Europe’s “vanished [Christian] faith is now replaced by ‘Credit,’ that fiction of our mutual honesty kept upright by the most elaborate safeguards against loss and trickery.” But it is a mistake “to lay all the blame for this on the Jews.” To be sure, “they are virtuosi in an art [money-making] at which we but bungle.” But the nefarious “creation of money out of nothing was invented by our Civilization itself. If the Jews are blamable for that, it is because our entire civilization is a barbaric-Jewish concoction [ein barbarisch-judaistiches Gemisch].” It is, in other words, chiefly Europeans who are to blame for the ills of bourgeois Europe, precisely because they have allowed themselves to become Judaized—thus ensuring, as Wagner put it in a March 1878 article for the Bayreuther Blätter, “the victory of the modern Jew-world” (der Siege der modernen Judenwelt). The real trouble, as in the Ring, is “Jewishness” rather than the Jews themselves. But the latter always remain the great embodiments and agents of the former…

    https://www.commentary.org/articles/eric-nelson/wagner-anti-semitism-the-ring/

  16. Ironicallly, the same guy who converted Marx and Engels to Communism, and was the author of the phrase, “Religion is the opiate of the people,” later changed his mind and became the first Zionist theoretician, attempting to fuse the two, the father of Labor Zionism that has now run its course, after playing a central role in the founding of Israel. Moses Hess.

    “This man who, in the mid-1840’s, together with Marx, was condemning the Jews as a race of shopkeepers doomed to speedy disappearance, could proclaim in 1862 that “every Jew, even the converted, should cling to the cause and labor for the regeneration of Israel.”’

    https://www.commentary.org/articles/jonathan-frankel/the-communist-rabbi-moses-hess/

  17. @fquigley I reposted the last part of the essay with the link to the whole thing. and you are ignoring it. Everything Adam quoted or paraphrased is in there. He’s not lying. You are. Re-read it. Yes, Marx advocated political equality for Jews at that stage of history, as did his follower, Richard Wagner, but they believed “bourgeois” society was evil because it was essentially Jewish. He believed a healthy society is one in which the individual is completely absorbed into the community, the common root of both fascism and Communism, and which produced and produce genocide, which in the French Revolution and German Peasant Wars, Marx celebrated. Fascism, Communism, Islamism, are totaltarian death cults. Judaism celebrates life and balances individual and community. This, they regard as contemptible and transactional, alienated. And they all wanted and want the Jews to disappear.

    “We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

    In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

    “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

    Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

    An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

    We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

    In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

    To which I reply, “Nein, Herr Apostate Marx.

    Genesis 12:1:3
    ‘I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
    and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.”

    Hasbara idea
    How about tee-shirts, hats, bumper stickers and billboards that just read, “Genesis 12:1-3.” They can google it.

    Found this on Google:

    ”
    Reddit · r/JewsOfConscience
    40+ comments · 9 months ago
    How to respond when people quote Genesis 12:1-3 and tell you you’re cursed for not supporting Israel?
    I’m Christian, but my family members who are Zionist quote this verse a lot. And say that the Palestinians are under God’s curse for not blessing Israel …”

    Which they are.

    1

  18. Here is a very good explanation of the Marx’s essay:

    https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/35919/was-marx-an-antisemite

    some people comment that this article (On the Jewish Question) may be incorrectly attributed to Marx, and this idea might be at least partially true.

    I read the whole essay before posting my response here and before reading the above explanation, and I understood Marx’s argument until I got to the antisemitic rant in the end of it which to me had nothing to do with his previous line of reasoning – the rant was, basically, about how the modern state/society Judaized itself by becoming mercantile, and how it has to get rid of this (Jewish) feature – Judaism = mercantilism – in order to become a true state/society.

    Maybe it was something that was added later by the editors, or, if it did belong to Marx, he was trying to distance himself from the Jews and Judaism?

    The German philosophers and intellectuals spent the whole of the 19th century trying to figure out how to get rid of the Jews or NOT to emancipate them, as an example you can check out the quotes from Bruno Bauer in the same essay, so this sort of thing was the rule rather than an exception in their writings.

    Wagner certainly didn’t need to read Marx in order to come up with his article on Judaism in music.

  19. @fquigley< Sorry for the delay in answering your inquirey about Marx's "On the Jewish Question." The last line of Marx's article is" The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

  20. Anyway, this article is about right wing antisemitism. Marx belongs in Chit Chat. I see Redacted has become full-blown antisemitic, referring to Bibi as a war criminal visiting Hungary.

  21. Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation.

    Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves – although in a limited way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere – as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men – as it was originally. It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness. The endless fragmentation of religion in North America, for example, gives it even externally the form of a purely individual affair. It has been thrust among the multitude of private interests and ejected from the community as such. But one should be under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the human being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so.

    ibid

    My comment: All of these Left Hegelian theorists, including Marx, thought societies in which the individual was not completely absorbed into the collective, are perverse, alienated. They are totalitarians.

    Not just left-Hegelian. All these communal utopians going way back in history all over the world.

    I, for one, have no interest in being reduced to a “species being” living among other “species-beings.” Sounds like science fiction, but we’ve seen what Orwellian nightmares this produces.

    You can have them.

    “In Fourier’s utopia, one would presumably never hear anyone utter the words, “None of your business!” because everything was everybody’s business. ”

    https://fee.org/articles/the-dark-side-of-paradise-a-brief-history-of-americas-utopian-experiments-in-communal-living/

    And see Daniel Greenfield’s book

  22. Adam

    Your comment is copied from where and from who?

    It isn’t from Marx but from someone else.

    And not you.

    Most I’d from another writer.

  24. …Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

    Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

    What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

    Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

    An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

    We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

    In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

    The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way.

    “The Jew, who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who may have no rights in the smallest German state, decides the fate of Europe. While corporations and guilds refuse to admit Jews, or have not yet adopted a favorable attitude towards them, the audacity of industry mocks at the obstinacy of the material institutions.” (Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question, p. 114)

    This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.

    Captain Hamilton, for example, reports:

    “The devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoön who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels he carries, so to speak, his goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit. If he loses sight of his own business for an instant it is only in order to pry into the business of his competitors.”

    Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel just as the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business deals.

    “The man who you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a trader; his business having failed, he became a minister. The other began as a priest but as soon as he had some money at his disposal he left the pulpit to become a trader. In the eyes of very many people, the religious ministry is a veritable business career.” (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 185,186)

    According to Bauer, it is

    “a fictitious state of affairs when in theory the Jew is deprived of political rights, whereas in practice he has immense power and exerts his political influence en gros, although it is curtailed en détail.” (Die Judenfrage, p. 114)

    The contradiction that exists between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and the power of money in general. Although theoretically the former is superior to the latter, in actual fact politics has become the serf of financial power.

    Judaism has held its own alongside Christianity, not only as religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the religious derivation of Christianity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit, Judaism, has maintained itself and even attained its highest development in Christian society. The Jew, who exists as a distinct member of civil society, is only a particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society.

    Judaism continues to exist not in spite of history, but owing to history.

    The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.

    What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.

    The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.

    Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

    The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

    The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination.

    It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable

    “that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.”

    Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.

    The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

    The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.

    Here, too, man’s supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to laws that are valid for him not because they are laws of his own will and nature, but because they are the dominant laws and because departure from them is avenged.

    Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self-interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws.

    Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law.

    Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the world outlook of practical need is essentially limited and is completed in a few strokes.

    By its very nature, the religion of practical need could find its consummation not in theory, but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice.

    Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self-interest, is passive and does not expand at will, but finds itself enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social conditions.

    Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.

    Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism.

    From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.

    Christianity had only in semblance overcome real Judaism. It was too noble-minded, too spiritualistic to eliminate the crudity of practical need in any other way than by elevation to the skies.

    Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity, but this application could only become general after Christianity as a developed religion had completed theoretically the estrangement of man from himself and from nature.

    Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, vendible objects subjected to the slavery of egoistic need and to trading.

    Selling [verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation [Entausserung]. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity – money – on them.

    In its perfected practice, Christian egoism of heavenly bliss is necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is turned into world need, subjectivism into self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion, but, on the contrary, by the human basis of his religion – practical need, egoism.

    Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

    Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.

    The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

    – Works of Karl Marx 1844

    On The Jewish Question

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

  25. The first paragraph has Karl Marx asking and answering a question thus

    “The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they desire? Civic, political emancipation.”

    He both asks the question and answers it

    Bruno Bauer of the New Hegelians refused to give the Jews that freedom

    To sum up marx…Outside of the state there is total freedom to practice whatever religion

    Inside the state there is seculism

    By reference and direct quotation Marx shows that is the Modus Operandum of the Founding Fathers of the American state.

    Marx was defending Jews to have full political rights inside the German or Prussian secular state. And full freedom of religion outside it

    Bruno Bauer who was an Antisemite would not agree to that.

    Moreover those words by Marx of 1844 have proved wise and have stood the test of time

  26. @Adam

    Why did you put the following in emphasis, are they the words of Marx

    Give the context or the surrounding paragraph

    Use one of many texts on net so we can follow with you together

    (the emancipation of the human race from Judaism)

  27. fquigley, you are wrong. I have read Marx;s essay on the Jewish question several times over the past years, I have two copies of it, included in two editions of Marx’s selected works. O know it almost by heart. It definitely doesnot advocate for the rights of Jews in Germany. Instead it is a critical, negative response to an essay by another Young Hegelian writer who advocated for the emancipation of the Jews of Germany. Marx replied that what was needed was not the emancipation of the Jews but the emancipation of the human race from Judaism It is not the “Sabbath Jew” but the “weekday Jew “whom we should focus on,, Marx wrote. And the “secular religion of the Jew is huckstering..

    In the same article, Marx denounces the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution–the Bill of Rights–which he claims are an expression of Jewish consciousness. Individuals do not or at least should not have rights, bur only the human species, collectively, has rights. People should be “species-beings,” their personal identities totally subsumed in the collective consciousness of the human species.

    Not only is “On the Jewish question” antisemitic, but it predicts the essence of Stalinism.

  28. Adam

    The essay by Marx was an essay fighting for the rights of Jews in Germany of his time and it was a very big issue of the time. Think the dominant themes of today. As I remember it Marx states clearly what he’s doing at the very beginning. A highlight of the essay was where Marx held up the American Constitution in the separation of Church and State as the ultimate best example.

    So when I see this being ignored and lied about then I know I am listening to complete and conscious LIARS.

  29. It was in her large library

    But did she read it…I’m referring to On the Jewish question.

    Have you read it? You.make massive claims. But what was it about?

    Please tell?

  31. There have always been antisemites on the right as well as the left. At least in Europe and the United States, rightist antisemites were more prominent and conspicuous than leftist antisemites through most of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. (roughly 1800-1950). However, the left was also antisemitic, although in a somewhat lower keyed way most of the time, during this era, Market’s 1842 essay “on the Jewish Question” is flagrantly antisemitic. And it was republished in every edition of Marx’s “Selected Works” published in the second half of fthe twentieth century that I ever came across in bookstores, libraries and my mother’s large private library. (She was a professor of political science and European history).

    Antisemitism on the right, at least in the United States, diminished greatly in the United States when William F. Buckley tookover the editorship of National REview, which became the flagship journal of conservative intellectuals in the U.S, Buckley not only eased out of the journal all writers that expressed antisemitic views, but also invited Jewish conservative writers to contribute to National Review,

    More recently, antisemitism on the leftt was become more conspicuous as the Left allied itself with the “Palestinians” and adopted an”anti-Zionist” and inherently antisemitic stance. However, the emergence of amilitant far right among Catholics in reaction to Pope Francis’ widely perceived Marxist papacy, has also led to the revival of the worst antisemitic tropes among right wing Catholics, such as the notorious blood libel. It has also led to the revival of the false identification of Jews with Freemasons, a group that conservative Catholics have always considered a sinister force, although they flourished for centuries in Catholic Italy.

    So we are getting attacked from all sides.