Judaism

In October 1979, while he was locked up by the Hassan II government in the Kenitra prison, the Jewish Moroccan Marxist thinker and organiser Abraham Serfaty wrote a text about one of his main political educators, Abdellatif Zeroual, who had died under torture 5 years earlier. Serfaty had been arrested, alongside Abdellatif Lâabi, in 1972, because of his involvement in the Marxist-Leninist organisation Ilal al-Amam [Forward]. The two men were only freed in 1991. One of the lessons Zeroual had taught him, Serfaty writes, was the meaning of concrete proletarian internationalism. This meant that while the task of the Moroccan Left was to organise the Revolution within the Moroccan borders, this task was never to be detached from the broader Arab Revolution.[1] This lesson would remain central to Serfaty’s theory and praxis. Indeed, as an Arab Jew, he attached a great importance throughout his life to the national question as an important component of the wider international struggle.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

Born in 1926 in Casablanca – a city about which he wrote a study in 1988[2] – in a Jewish family, Serfaty entered the Moroccan Communist Party, which was led by another key figure among Arab Jewish Communists – the Algerian born Léon-René Sultan –, as soon as 1944. Later, during a stay in France, he also entered the French Communist Party (PCF), of which he was a member from 1945 to 1949. It was during World War II that Serfaty had his main political education. Indeed, while the antisemitic laws of the Vichy Regime targeted Moroccan Jews, Serfaty’s anticolonialism crystallised. As Alma Rachel Heckman writes: “Figures such as Abraham Serfaty represented a new generation of Moroccan Jews whose political consciousness had been shaped by the war years.”[3] Indeed, it is worth nothing that Serfaty was no exception and that a number of important Arab Communists were Jewish, such as the already mentioned Léon-René Sultan, or the anticolonial communist activist Edmond Amran El Maleh, who worked closely with Palestinians throughout his life.

While being a member of the Moroccan Communist Party, Serfaty did not follow the PCF’s conciliatory line regarding colonialism and national independence and committed himself to the struggle for Moroccan independence. Serfaty got a diploma in engineering from the famous French University École des Mines and reflected a lot on issues of development and on the continuity of neo-colonial economic relations in Morocco. While he could have chosen a convenient career as an engineer, he chose the political path and struggled against the poor conditions of the Moroccan working class (e.g.: he supported the miners’ strikes in Morocco).

Serfaty was also interested in a range of international issues beyond Morocco’s borders, such as the revolutions in Vietnam, China, or Cuba. Even if it would be worthwhile to write a whole article about his anti-imperialist and proletarian commitment, we will focus here on a particular issue at stake in Serfaty’s involvement: his political reflections on the relationship between Palestinian liberation, Zionism and the “Jewish Question”. In the text that follows, Letter to the Damned of Israel (published in 1982), Serfaty reflects on antisemitism, anti-Zionism, as well as on the oppression of both Palestinians and Jews by Zionism. Insofar as this Historical Materialism issue is organised around the question of Marxism and Antisemitism, this article is key for several reasons:

• Beyond his anti-imperialism, the issue of Zionism was crucial for Serfaty as a Jew – and connected to his fight against antisemitism. His reflections on Zionism were significant because they helped him to think about the meaning of Arab-Jewishness, the specificity of the social conditions of Arab Jews, and their specific class position within the Israeli society.
• He considered Zionism as a specifically European phenomenon and perceived Arab Jews as a potential internal threat to Zionism.
• This focus on Serfaty’s political thinking is crucial in order to avoid erasing Arab-Jews from Jewish history and from the analysis of antisemitism – or to confuse them into a “universal” Jewish people (which tends to means, in practice, to collapse them into the history of European Jews).

As such, Serfaty’s relationship to Zionism, as well as the fact that his being Arab and his Jewishness played a role in his harsh critique of Zionism – a critique grounded on Jewish texts as well as on the tradition of Arab Judaism – can help us to bring an different perspective to some of the issues raised by today's political debates on anti-imperialism, as well as on the connection between Antisemitism and Zionism. As such, the main question that will guide this introduction to Serfaty’s text is to understand to what extent Serfaty understood “identity” as a social category instead of as an abstract and individualist category – not only the “Jewish identity” of Arab Jews in Israel but also their identity as Arabs. 

While the question of “identity politics” is often dismissed by the European and US radical Lefts, Serfaty’s political reflections on these issues can offer some important contributions to our understanding of the intimate connection between issues of “identity” (Arab and Jewish in this case), anticolonial struggles, and class struggle. Indeed, Serfaty’s understanding of “identity” had nothing to do with many contemporary understandings of this concept. Because “Jews”, “Arabs”, “Sahraouis”, etc. were racialized both by the colonial power and the colonial social structures, their “identity” was built on such a racialization. This is exactly why, as we will see, Serfaty did not conceptualise “Jewish identity” as a universal one, but speaks instead of “European Jews” and “Arab Jews” – the social situation of the latter being very different because of its origins within colonial social conditions. Hence, according to Serfaty, “in the countries of the third world – and this is especially true in Arab countries – one cannot dissociate the problem of the class struggle from the question of identity”.[4] From this analysis also emerged Serfaty’s answer to the so-called “Jewish Question”, which he argued was to be found in anti-Zionism, as well as in the history, culture, and class positions of Arab Jews.

Ethnicity and Autonomy: From Sahara to Palestine

As a Moroccan, Serfaty was surrounded by debates touching upon the issues of ethnicity, colonialism, and the need for national autonomy. In 1985, three years after the publication of Letter to the Damned of Israel, while he was in jail, Serfaty had access to Cuban journals thanks to a comrade whose mother was Spanish. In one of these journals, Serfaty read a contribution by a guerrillero from Guatemala who argued that the indigenous question was crucial to the wider revolutionary struggle.[5] While we do not have further information about this specific article, it is clear that his interest in it was part of a wider engagement with the national question, ethnicity, and related questions.

During the same period, Serfaty also read the work of Mikhaël Elbaz, a Jewish Moroccan anthropologist who wrote extensively about Jewish Immigration. Several years later, Serfaty published a book based on discussions he had with Elbaz. In it, Elbaz explains that while he was teaching at Laval University (Quebec) in June 1984, he received a letter from political inmate n°19 559: Abraham Serfaty.[6] In this letter, Serfaty discussed some of Elbaz’s work and asked him about materials in order to continue his reflexion on Arab Jews in Israel. While this correspondent would prove infliential, Serfaty’s interest for national and ethnic questions dates back to several years earlier.

Indeed, already in the early 1970s, Serfaty – along the above-mentioned Lâabi – participated in the building of the Marxist-Leninist Moroccan organisation Ila Al Amam[7] which was the only Moroccan political organisation that explicitly supported the right to self-determination for the Sahraoui people. According to Serfaty, Sahraoui national consciousness was the result of a two-way process:

• The struggle for decolonisation which saw the rise of a common interest – against French colonialism – between Sahraoui tribes and the Moroccan people.
• The post-independence dismantling of the Sahraoui Liberation Army by the Spanish and French armies, with the logistical support of the Moroccan state. This process, called operation “Ecouvillon” [Swab], had the consequence of triggering the mass exile and dispersion of the Sahraoui people. Serfaty compares this 1958 dispersion of Sahraoui people to the 1948 PalestinianNakba. However, he writes, exactly as theNakba, the Sahraoui exile also contains the seeds of the rise of the Sahraoui people as an autonomous, self-aware and organised people.[8] In his marvellous study on the Saharan question, Ahmed-Baba Miské argues that the leader of the pro-monarchist Istiqlal [Independence] party Allal El Fassi played an important role in the Moroccan claims on Sahara, stressing the contradictions that can exist within a national liberation movement, which can struggle against colonialism on the one side (France) and deny the right to autonomy to another people (Sahara) on the other.[9] Serfaty was similarly very aware of this contradiction and argued that a struggle for decolonisation has its own political and social contradictions, and that is not a linear process. As we will see below, the question of contradictions in a colonial situation was critical in Serfaty’s analysis of Arab-Jewishness in Israel.

Based on these analyses, Serfaty was also critical about Pan-Arabism because it ignored the questions of minorities (Sahara, Berber, etc.). While the text presented in this special issue aims to illustrate on Serfaty’s analysis of Zionism and of the “Jewish Question”, his engagement with questions related to national and ethnic minorities remains important in order to grasp Serfaty’s ideas about Arab Jews. In her book The Sultan’s Communist, Alma Rachel Heckman writes that “[i]n the 1960s, Abraham Serfaty, a fellow Jewish Communist, proclaimed his “Arab-Jewish” identity as a way of underscoring his Moroccan patriotism.”[10] Hence, one could say that his criticism of the Moroccan Makhzen [Regime] was deeply influenced by his “Arab-Jewishness”, a social identity that helped him to grasp the issues of minorities within an analysis of the wider social context.

As mentioned previously, Mikhaël Elbaz helped Serfaty to reflect on these questions. In the book they wrote together, based on their epistolary discussions, Serfaty tells Elbaz that the link between ethnicity and class struggle in the Third World was a crucial issue for Moroccan leftists because of the Berber question in Morocco. According to Serfaty, the denial of the Berber reality by national movements in Morocco and in Algeria was one of the main sources for their respective post-independence troubles. Indeed, he argued that because of the French strategy regarding Berber people in Morocco – isolating them from the broader Arab population – the vast majority of the national movement considered the affirmation of the Berber identity as imperialist and complicit with the French colonial power. This was also a point of disagreement between Serfaty and a significant part of the Moroccan Left. For example, in 1958-59, an insurrection in the Moroccan Rif region was suppressed and this repression was backed by every single Moroccan political party, including the Communist Party.

It is in the context of his reflexion about the Arab Nation and its minorities, that Serfaty’s engagement with the disaster that Zionism represented – not only to Palestinians but also to Arab Jews – should be understood. Indeed, he argues that prior to the foundation of Israel there were no problems between Jews and Muslims in Morocco. However, he also rejects the idea that conflicts between Moroccan Jews (some of which were Berbers) and Muslims did not mechanically derive from the foundation of the Zionist state. Rather, they emerged as an effect of the political decisions supported by the Muslim and Jewish Moroccan bourgeoisies. The bourgeoisie and the commercial petite-bourgeoisie saw an opportunity of getting rid of their “poor Jews” – especially the Jewish peasantry of the Atlas Mountains and of South Morocco – who became the favourite target of the Zionist recruiters who were “recruiting” Moroccan Jews in order to send them to Israel.

In his discussion with Elbaz, Serfaty takes the example of a meeting between the Moroccan National Movement and the World Jewish Congress at Aix-les-Bains (France) in August 1955, regarding the departure of 45 000 Moroccan Jews between September 1955 and June 1956. He writes:

The poorest and the most vulnerable became the target of recruiters with the tacit, if not explicit, backing of the bourgeoisie, both Jewish and Muslim, who got rid of this authentic Judaism.[11]

While these Jews were ripped from their land in Amizmiz, in the villages of the Atlas, or in the Moroccan South in the 1950s, the biggest turn came with the 1967 so-called Six Day War. Indeed, Moroccan Jews were ripped from their country in June 1967. This was both due to the promotion of Zionism by the Jewish bourgeoisie of Morocco but also because of the racist politics of the majority of the Muslim bourgeoisie of Morocco who, beginning in 1961, literally “sold” Moroccan Jews to Zionism – in Serfaty’s words. The process of immigration by Moroccan Jews to Israel was, thus, not a simple effect of Zionist policies or propaganda, but a consequence of antisemitism in Morocco – largely promoted by the bourgeoisie. It is worth nothing that this does not mean that the lower classes were free of any prejudices against Jews, but that their ability in influencing the latter’s lives was much more limited. Hence the Zionist project worked hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism in Morocco, an issue to which we return below.

The Social Specificity of Arab-Jewishness

From childhood, Abraham Serfaty’s father had explained to him, especially when going to the synagogue, that Zionism was antithetical to Judaism – an idea that we also find in Letter to the Damned of Israel. But a large part of Serfaty’s reflexion on the Jewish question was developed while he was accompanying his father, who had health issues, in a Parisian clinic, in May 1969. It is in this clinic that Serfaty discovered and read Marxist thinkers that were not discussed in Morocco – he read, for example, Karel Kosik’s Dialectics of the Concrete, as well as Althusser, Ernst Bloch and Lucien Goldmann. It is also during this stay that he really thought about the so-called Jewish Question. In a book written with his wife Christine Daure-Serfaty,La Mémoire de l’Autre [The Other’s Memory], he writes that Kosik,[12] Marx’s text on the Jewish Question, as well as a number of readings on Arab Judaism. helped him to better situate the Jewish Question in Europe on the one hand, as well as Moroccan and Arab Judaism on the other. At that time, he hadn’t read Abraham Léon’s book, On the Jewish Question, which he later considered to be a masterpiece of analysis, whilst also recognising the validity of Maxime Rodinson’s critiques.[13]It is also during this period that Serfaty discovered the work of Emmanuel Levyné, with whom he later exchanged letters, as we will see below.

Serfaty stressed the fact that while Israel was presented as a state founded by “their Jewish brothers”, Zionists were, in reality, the oppressors of Arab Jews and denied the specificity of their identity. Zionism was originally a European ideology, Serfaty writes, and its effect on Arab-Jews was to deny the specificity of their history:

Zionism is contrary to the glorious history, spanning more than a millennium, of Arab and Mediterranean Judaism, which was historically forged in symbiosis with Islam within the Arab civilization.[14]

One of Serfaty’s main ideas was that there is no homogeneous Jewish people – he asked Arab Jews: “Do you form one people with your oppressors?”[15] By oppressors he meant European Zionists. Indeed, he refused to inscribe Arab Judaism in an imagined general History of Jews, with a homogeneous “Jewish subject”.

However, Serfaty did not consider Arab-Jewishness as an abstract identity. The issue of identity was very concrete to him and he criticised the progressive forces that despised engaging with it. Regarding Arab, and more specifically Moroccan, Judaism in the 1950s – the period in which, as we have seen earlier, Zionism ripped Moroccan Jews off from their country – Serfaty categorises poor Moroccan Jews into three main groups:

• A group that is still rooted in a “two thousand year old past”;[16] a past made of peasant communities from the Moroccan mountains. This group is an integral part of arabo-berber society, which forms the deep reality of Maghreb.
• The second group is made up of traditional urban communities – working in small businesses and handicraft.
• The third group consists of the proletariat and semi-proletariat from Casablanca – a product of colonial misery.

Serfaty writes that these groups were organised around two main structures: the Moroccan rabbinate, an older ideological and cultural organisation, and the “Israelites Communities”, a social structure made-up by the colonial power, supported by the middle class and the big bourgeoisies. Hence, Moroccan Jews coming from the lower classes were socially torn between the ancient tradition and organisation of Arab Judaism and another structure shaped by the colonial power and the local bourgeoisie. While the Moroccan rabbinate attempted to struggle against Zionism – which it considered in contradiction with the Jewish religion (Serfaty refers especially to the 1952 Rabbis Council organised in Rabat, as well as to a letter written by the President of the Rabbinic Court from Meknès in May 1952) – it was not powerful enough to prevent the denial of Morocco’s ancient Arab-Jewish tradition by the alliance between the Jewish and Muslim Moroccan bourgeoisies, the French colonial power and, later, Zionism. The assault on traditional identities among Moroccan Jews was led by both antisemitism at home and by Zionism (from) abroad.

In his Letter to the Damned of Israel, he stresses the fact that Zionism was a critical tool in the attempts to rip Arab Jews away from their past – and their specificity. Looking at Arab Jews in Israel, Serfaty argues that the difference between them – who come, for a large part, from the working class – and the European Jews, is the attachment to the Jewish religion. Indeed, Serfaty argues in the 1980s, secularism is much stronger among European Jews – and the religious attachment is stronger among Arab Jews. A direct consequence of this is that Arab Jews are more likely to vote for the Likud Party – an Israeli right-wing Party, whose religious references are more numerous – than for the socialist and secular Ma’arakh.

In sum, the consequences of Zionism on Arab Jews could be seen as contradictory but it is this contradiction that explains the specific position of Arab Jews in Israel. Indeed, Arab Jews are ripped from their traditions – including religious ones – but, in the same movement, the manipulation of the Jewish religion is pushing Arab Jews towards the more right wing Zionist political movements. Should Arab Jews then, Serfaty asks, reject the Jewish religion in order to struggle against Zionism? This question is even more relevant since within the Israeli State, the only political forces struggling against Zionism are Marxist ones – political forces in which religion plays a minimal, if any, role. He answered with an emphatic “no”. Revolutionaries’ duty was to analyse the deepest social reality in order to grasp the seeds from which the struggle could develop. In the case of Arab Jews, Serfaty writes, this deep reality was in contradiction with the immediate reality. He asserts that one should first take into account the level of cultural oppression of Arab Jews within the Zionist entity.

The first thing that was, according to Serfaty, deeply anchored into the Arab Jewish popular masses – and that was crushed by Zionism – was the awaiting of the Messiah which had mainly been formalised through the Zohar (the foundational work of the Kabbalah). Serfaty writes that while they were facing oppression, awaiting the Messiah was a kind of light for Arab Jews. It was the already existing light in the present, of a future where God’s Kingdom will be established on Earth for every human being. Serfaty especially stresses the fact that Jews should contribute to preparing for this Kingdom wherever they are – something that was opposed to the Zionist colonial project; a project that needed to “import” Jews from abroad.

Hence, Serfaty insisted that the spirit of the Kabbalah and especially of the Zohar was the claim that the exile would not end with immigration to Israel – since, in doing so, Jews were separated from their culture and traditions. The Jewish settlement in Palestine, and later in Israel, was not understood as a “return” but as the true exile. Serfaty notes, therefore, that Zionism is a negation and a “monstrous perversion” of the Zohar.[17] While he was not a believer himself, he underlines nonetheless in a lot of his texts that in the Arab World there cannot be a difference between people who believe and people who do not believe in God. The only difference should be between the people on one side of the social order, and the reaction on the other side.

Several years before the publication of Letter to the Damned of Israel, between 1969 and 1972, he exchanged some letters with the anti-Zionist specialist of the Kabbalah Emmanuel Lévyne – whose work was very important in Serfaty’s eyes.[18] In one of these letters, written in 1970,[19] Serfaty writes that an important effect of Capitalism in Europe was that the values of Judaism were betrayed and distorted by the “exploiters of Humanity”. In this very same letter, Serfaty writes to Lévyne that the historical period that they are living in (the 1970s) was not so much a time of erasure of national specificities, but a time of fulfilment of those specificities. Therefore, he argued, the struggle against capitalism should take these specificities into account – the anti-capitalist struggle could not be successful if it tried to erase cultural and religious differences. A similar idea is to be found in another great anti-Zionist Marxist Jewish figure of that time – a European one this time: Maxime Rodinson. He defended the idea “that the only barrier to socialism in Muslim countries would be to put in place anti-Muslim policies”.[20]

The issue of the “Promised Land” was also central in Emmanuel Lévyne’s work, which again found echoes in Serfaty. Indeed, according to Lévyne, Zion was the Land of God, and in order to enter it one should renounce the desire to possess it. Hence, Levitism was opposed to political Zionism – because the colonisation of Palestine was never present in Jewish religious texts.[21] For Lévyne, as well as for Serfaty, Judaism had nothing to do with the colonisation of Palestine. However, in linking these two questions, the European and Arab Jewish bourgeoisies presented the colonization of Palestine as the main solution to the “Jewish Question” – and worked, sometimes, hand in hand with local antisemitism (whether in Europe or in Arab countries). It would rid them of Jews at home, allow them to lay claim over their goods and wealth, while simultaneously reinforcing dominant social relations and imperialism across the region.

Emerging from Serfaty’s analysis was the claim that Jews in the revolutionary struggles in the Arab world should not be understood as the “Jewish people”, understood to be outsiders in relation to the wider national community, but rather as simultaneously Jews and an integral part of the national community (the Moroccan one, in the case of Serfaty). It would be a mistake to try to “unify” Jews in a homogenous people by negating their national specificities. The letter to Levyne where Serfaty develops these ideas is especially interesting because, while Serfaty and Levyne had important disagreements (not least on the question of socialism for instance), they agreed on the importance for Jews to participate to the anti-zionist struggle. They did so both because it was an anticolonial struggle but also because Zionism participated in the destruction of the specific identities of both Jewish culture and Jewish communities.

Arab-Jews as a Threat to Zionism

It is because of this contradictory position that Serfaty considered Arab Jews as a potential threat to the existence of the Zionist state. There was, Serfaty argues, a fundamental contradiction between Arab ethnicities, which are oppressed in Israel, and the Zionist structure of the Israeli state. Hence Arab Jews should be aware not only of their “Jewishness” but also of their Arab identity. Arab Jews could participate in the building of a political movement that might break the Zionist structures from the inside. As a consequence, the social group of Arab-Jews – and especially of poor Arabic Jews – appeared to him as a weak link in the Zionist edifice.

The fact that anti-Zionism is of crucial importance for Jews – and especially for Arab Jews – is a recurrent theme in Serfaty’s writing. This was, for example, visible in 1969 when the Moroccan journal Souffles published a whole issue on the Palestinian Revolution. This issue contained an important paper written by Serfaty on Moroccan Judaism and Zionism. This article is historical in natures and returns to the themes of the life and culture of Jews in Morocco, and on the disaster that June 1967 represented, not only for Arab Jews but also for the Moroccan nation as a whole. Serfaty argued that the future of Moroccan Judaism as well as of Morocco itself are deeply connected to the future of Palestine. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine contains, in this view, alwaysper se an international dimension. RegardingSouffles, it is interesting to stress the critical role Serfaty played in the politicisation of the journal, a process in which these questions were paramount. Andy Stafford notes:

It was the arrival of Abraham Serfaty, mining engineer and trade union activist, on the committee of Souffles in 1968 that heralded the hardening of the journal’s politics and the consequent split three years later.

In his two-part piece in 1968 (in Souffles, no. 12 and nos. 13/14) Serfaty brought a Marxist rigour to the debates over culture and scientific progress in the journal. The triumphalism of the West – Israel – over the Arabs in the 1967 war had now pushed the journal towards a Marxist, militant intellectual, position (…).[22]

In the first extensive study on Souffles, Kenza Sefrioui writes that the issue of Palestine constituted a pivotal point in the politicisation of the journal. It was also the starting point of huge disagreements within the editorial board, especially on the role “cultural issues” should have in its pages.[23] However, Sefrioui also writes that Souffles was a political project from the very beginning (the journal was created in 1966), even if it expressed itself in the form of cultural analysis during its three first existence years of existence.

In their introduction to the English Anthology of Souffles-Anfas (Anfas being the Arabic language counterpart toSouffles, founded in 1971), Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio write that the journal played – despite its modest print run – an important role in establishing a transnational intellectual dialogue with other key Third World actors:

The journal was instrumental in establishing transnational dialogues between writers, artists, and activists from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It published seminal works by tricontinental writers and political activists, such as the Haitian writer René Depestre, the Syrian poet Adonis, and Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the struggle for independence from Portugal in Guinea-Bissau, as well as key revolutionary and postcolonial texts, such as the ten-point program of the Black Panthers or the Argentine manifesto for a Third Cinema. Frantz Fanon, the theorist of decolonization and prophet of postcolonial disillusionment, was a particularly important interlocutor for the journal’s founding members. Heeding Fanon’s call to leave Europe behind, Laâbi advocated for what he called “cultural decolonization,” a process by which Moroccan writers and artists would break with stagnant French models and Arabic canons in order to forge new artistic forms and literary languages in dialogue with the rest of the decolonizing world.[24]

Andy Stafford also highlights this transnational dialogue in insisting on Souffles’ Tricontinental entrenchment: “Morocco became in the late 1960s, for a short period, the pivotal space […] for tricontinentalist ideas to take hold and be propagated. As with all pivots, sections of the Moroccan Left did as much to absorb and process the radical ideas emerging from Havana after January 1966 as to re-expedite them throughout the Arab and Muslim world”.[25] It is not putting it too strongly to say that if Souffles lost the important role it had played in this crucial political space, it was because of Serfaty’s involvement with the journal. This is not to undermine the role of the founders of the journal or of other important figures. However, Serfaty’s involvement brought an explicit Marxist framework to the journal and, as Stafford puts it, started the process of the “de-tricontinentalisation”[26] of Souffles – the orientation on Workers and Strikes “was to come at the expense of international coverage”.[27] However, Serfaty also played, as written above, an important part in putting the Palestinian question at the centre of Souffles – as well as a Jewish critique of Zionism.

Thus, as shown by his engagement in Souffles, as well as in the vast majority of his texts, the Palestinian issue was crucial to Serfaty’s political thought, not only as a way to fight settler colonialism but also as a way to stress the intimate bond between antisemitism and Zionism, which worked hand-in-hand and led, as a consequence, to the growing marginality of Arab-Jews in both their historical and Israeli societies. Because of this, Arab-Jews should play a central role in the anti-Zionist struggle.

Serfaty was opposed to the use of the expression “oriental Jews” (which included not only Arab Jews but also Jews from Iran or India) especially because the huge majority of these “oriental Jews” were, in fact, Arabs. Beside the fact that their cultural traditions were not the same as those of European Jews, it was important to him to stress the fact that Arab Jews were also Arabs. To achieve its mythical goals, Zionism had to crush Arabs. Hence, Serfaty writes that in order to make Arabs disappear Zionists do not hesitate to use the methods of genocide, like the massacres of Palestinians carried out in Sabra and Shatila (1982), but also before, in Deir Yassin (1948), Qibya (1953), or Kafr Qassem (1956). For the Israeli settler colonial project to succeed, the Arab has to become a sort of Untermensch and, as such, Arab Jews who are not just Jews but also Arabs, cannot escape this social condition. Hence, being Jew and Arab did not only mean being part of a long tradition and culture but did also mean that one had a specific social position inscribed into the social relations of (post)colonialism. While it is undoubtedly true that Arab Jews were not the victims of massacres like those meted out against Palestinians, their condition was not the same as the condition of European Jews living in Israel either.

Serfaty insisted on the fact that, in Israel, Arab Jews were treated as “schwartz”. Orit Bashkin writes that the “Arab culture of Iraqi Jews, as well as that of Jews from other Middle Eastern countries, was perceived as primitive and degenerate. In addition, it was racialized: these Jews were sometimes called kushim, shhorim, and schwartzes (derogatory terms meaning “black”) to signify their foreign and non-European racial identity”[28] This “schwartz” non-European racial identity meant that Arab Jews in Israel were forced into less qualified jobs, that their dignity was denied in society, and that they were used as cannon fodder for the Israeli army as well as for Israel’s colonial project. This was underlined by the fact that, as Serfaty puts it:

Zionism [is a] racist and chauvinistic ideology born from the crisis of Judaism in Eastern Europe at the End of the 19^th century, in a context of European colonial expansion and is the contrary of every single tradition (…) of European Judaism.[29]

Hence, the fact that Arab-Jews were both necessary to the Zionist project but also had a lower social condition – a sort of internal antisemitism – made them, in Serfaty’s analysis, the weak link of Zionism. As a social group, they could sharpen the social contradictions within the Israeli state. However, in order to become an autonomous political force capable of challenging Zionism, Arab Jews had to become conscious of their identity – which was not a double identity but a unified identity based on their social conditions. In sum: Arab Jews living in Israel were both oppressed by Zionism but were also a tool of oppression of the Palestinian people – as Israelis and potential members of the Israeli army. The most exact terms to describe them was, according to Serfaty, as a “colonial minority”. But it is also this colonial minority, which he argued could become the best ally to the Palestinians.

Serfaty had participated in discussions with the Israeli Left – especially with Matzpen [Compass], the radical socialist Israeli Party, and the Israeli Communist Party. He acknowledged that the Israeli Left had a brave and difficult struggle to engage in. But he also added that this Left had to fulfil its commitments – which also meant committing to Arab-Jews as potential allies in the struggle against Zionism. This meant that Matzpen could not, for example, recognise both the unconditional right to resistance against occupation and, at the same time, decide to only support organisations of the Palestinian resistance which acknowledge the right to self-determination for the Israelian people. In Serfaty’s writings in the 1970s, the possibility for a part of the Jewish masses to liberate themselves from Zionism was intrinsically linked to the development of the Palestinian Revolution but also to the development of the Arab Revolution. Therefore, both had to be supported by Jewish activists.

For Serfaty, Jewish emancipation and the liberation of Palestine were linked – but it relied on the development of a higher level of consciousness among Jews living in Israel, and especially Arab Jews. On the issue of political consciousness, Serfaty developed his ideas over the years and, in the early 1990s, he wrote that one should not oppose “conscious” and “not conscious” ideas – using Paulo Freire’s idea that there is always an intuition inside an oppressed person, even if this person is overruled by oppression. Hence, consciousness was not something brought from the outside but it was the crystallisation of the “sensuous knowledge” – Serfaty used Mao’s concept. This is why a coherent project grounded on objective contradictions was needed in order to transform existing sensuous knowledge into a rational one. This was the role of Arab Jewish activists within Israel.

Simultaneously, Serfaty reflected on the Palestinian struggle. In his view, it was not only important for Arab Jewish activists in Israel to work on developing a revolutionary project, but it should also be articulated within the strategic project of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Hence, he argued that the PLO should incorporate within its strategy the resistance of oppressed Arab Jews in Israel. Regarding the different options within the Palestinian resistance, Serfaty was very clear about his position: the only project which could objectively answer the issues raised by the Zionist occupation of Palestine was the project led by Fatah, who wanted to build a democratic Palestinian state. Serfaty was opposed to the two-state solution. Not only was it impossible to achieve it, but he was also concerned for the future of Arab Jews in the Zionist state.

However, in the specific context of the early 1980s, he was clear that the first political step was a limited one and was for the Palestinian resistance to build its own state in the West Bank and in Gaza. This did not mean, however, that this Palestinian state should recognise the Israeli one. The second step was to politically divide the enemy forces from the inside, in the Israeli state but also in western opinion. In the context of the time, it was impossible for the Jewish population of Palestine – except for small groups of activists – to support the project of a Palestinian democratic state. This is why an intermediary step was needed in Serfaty’s opinion. This step was the building of two coexisting states based on the principles of secularism and democracy for all their citizens. Serfaty did not explain how to move from this intermediary step to the final goal. The only thing he stressed was that one cannot expect from the oppressed Palestinian or from Arab Jews to renounce revolutionary violence. His main political conclusion was that in fighting for this intermediary step without renouncing the armed struggle, it was possible to convince an important part of international opinion as well as of the Jewish Israeli population and to move to the next step: the liberation of Palestine and, with it, the liberation of Arab Jews in Palestine. 

The importance of Serfaty’s work today is critical. As accusations of antisemitism are used systematically to dismiss any critique of Zionism, the confusion between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has never been greater. Serfaty’s powerful commitment to the simultaneous struggle against both antisemitism and Zionism – a struggle which for him was always rooted in both anti-imperialism and the concrete analysis of identity formation amongst the oppressed – serves as an important intellectual guide for all of us today.

References

Bashkin, Orit 2017, Impossible Exodus. Iraqi Jews in Israel, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Elbaz, Michaël and Abraham, Serfaty 2001, L’insoumis. Juifs, Marocains et rebelles, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.

Harrison, Olivia C. and Villa-Ignacio, Teresa (ed.) 2016, Souffles-Anfas. A critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Heckman, Alma Rachel 2021, The Sultan’s Communist. Moroccan Jews and The Politics of Belonging, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Lévyne, Emmanuel 1973, Le Royaume de Dieu et le Royaume de César, Beyrouth: Le réveil.

Miské, Ahmed-Baba 1978, Front Polisario. L’âme d’un peuple, Paris: éditions rupture.

Nadi, Selim 2018, ‘The Thinker and The Militant’, Translated by Joe Hayns, available at: <https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/thinker-and-militant&gt;

Sefrioui, Kenza 2013, La revue Souffles 1966-1973. Espoirs de révolution culturelle au Maroc, Casablanca: éditions du Sirocco.

Serfaty, Abraham 1977, Lutte antisioniste et révolution arabe, Paris : Quatre Vents Editeurs.

Serfaty, Abraham 1992a ‘Marxiste, décidément’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Dans les prisons du roi. Ecrits de Kenitra sur le Maroc, Paris: Messidor/Editions sociales.

Serfaty, Abraham 1992b, ‘La jeunesse militante marocaine’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Dans les prisons du Roi.

Serfaty, Abraham 1992c, ‘Mouvement ouvrier et révolution au Maroc. Le rôle du prolétariat de Casablanca’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Dans les prisons du Roi.

Serfaty 1992d, ‘Adresse aux damnés d’Israël’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Ecrits de prison sur la Palestine, Paris: Arcantère.

Serfaty 1992e, ‘Le sionisme : une négation des valeurs du judaïsme arabe’ in Abraham Serfaty 1992, Ecrits de prison sur la Palestine.

Serfaty 2018, ‘ ‘En tant que juifs antisionistes’ – Lettre d’Abraham Serfaty à Emmanuel Lévyne’ available at: <http://revueperiode.net/en-tant-que-juifs-antisionistes-lettre-dabraham…;

Stafford, Andy 2019, ‘Tricontinentalism in recent Moroccan intellectual history: the case of Souffles’,Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 7, 3: pp. 218-32.

Rodinson, Maxime 2017, ‘Préface’ in Abraham Léon 2017, La conception matérialiste de la question juive, Geneva: éditions entremonde.

[1] Serfaty 1992b, p. 14

[2] Serfaty 1992c, pp. 158-69.

[3] Heckman 2021, pp. 67-8.

[4] Serfaty 1992a, p. 244.

[5] We do not have any information about this movement but it was probably the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres.

[6] Elbaz & Serfaty, 2001, p. 14.

[7] While we do not have the space here to develop on Ila Al Amam, we still have to say a few words about it. The starting point of this organisation was a theoretical debate held at Serfaty’s house. A leader of the Moroccan Communist Party asked Serfaty to host a meeting with Moroccan intellectuals and two PCF cadres. Hence, in April 1968, around fifty academics, writers, and politicians from several sections of the Moroccan Left came to Serfaty’s house, along with two important guests from the PCF. While the debate started on the topic of Althusser, it quickly shifted on the topic of Western culture’s inadaptability to handle the political issues faced by the Third World. As a heated debate ensued between the different persons present at the event, one of the two PCF cadres stated that this argument was to be found nowhere in the world except in China, and that Moroccan communists had to oppose the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Serfaty presents this debate, and especially the misunderstanding of the non-European reality by French comrades, as the starting point for the creation ofIla Al Amam two years later, in 1970.This organisation emerged as a split from the Parti de la Libération et du Socialisme (Socialism and Liberation Party (PLS), the former Moroccan Communist Party). Serfaty wrote several texts about this organisation, but a complete study is missing.

Brahim El Guabli gives a useful short description of Ila Al Amam : “In the case of Morocco, which I know best, the Marxist-Leninist movement, which also emerged as a response to the failure of the Moroccan Communist Party under the leadership of Ali Yata to disengage itself from Soviet domination and from its enthrallment with the monarchy in search of a dearly won recognition, sought to create the cultural conditions for the political revolution of proletariat. Since 1970, these groups formedIla l-Amām (Forward!) under the leadership of Abraham Serfaty, a Moroccan Jew, and Abdellatif Laâbi, a novelist and poet, and Abdellatif Zeroual, a philosophy teacher, and others. This revolutionary group congregated around the avant-garde social, cultural and political magazine Souffles/Anfās. In addition to its political engagement, Souffles/Anfās launched a “linguistic guerilla war” – to borrow Mohamed Khair-Eddine’s phrase in another context – on the Arabic language, which remained petrified in its classical moulds. After the brutal arrest and torture of hundreds of its members inside Morocco between 1972 and 1974, the movement mainly survived among the Moroccan diasporas. Upon the release of the majority of its leaders in the early 1990s, current and former members of the Marxist-Leninist organization have been the driving force behind the human rights movement in Morocco. Its members were also among the foremost producers of prison literature.” Mahdi Amel and Brahim El Guabli, February 1, 2018 [online].

[8] Serfaty 1992, p. 180.

[9] Ahmed-Baba Miské 1978, p. 51.

[10] Heckmann 2021, p. 1.

[11] Elbaz and Serfaty 2001, pp. 93-4.

[12] Serfaty was especially interested in Kosik’s chapters on the Metaphysics of Culture and on the Philosophy of Labor. Both chapters helped him to understand the fact that culture was rooted in the material history of humans. It is after having read Kosik that Serfaty started to reflect on the issue of cultural memory – especially concerning Moroccan Jews exiled in Israel.

[13] Rodinson 2017, pp. 9-60.

[14] Serfaty 1992d, p.3 translation.

[15]Serfaty 1992d, p.5 translation.

[16]Serfaty 1977, 16.

[17] Serfaty 1992e, p. 60.

[18] According to Serfaty, Lévyne was, at that time, a crucial person in the transformation of Judaism from a tribal religion to a universalistic ethic. It is through Lévyne’s work that Serfaty understood the Kabbale and the way it is deeply in contradiction with Zionism.

[19] Serfaty 2018 [online]

[20] Nadi 2018 [online].

[21] Lévyne 1973, p. 64.

[22] Stafford 2009, p. 225.

[23] Sefrioui 2013, pp. 92-3.

[24] Harrison and Villa-Ignacio 2016, p. 1-2.

[25] Stafford 2009, p. 218.

[26] Ibid, p. 224.

[27] Ibid., p. 224

[28] Bashkin 2017, p. 6.

[29] Serfaty 1992d, p. 32.

At the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, a powerful wave of antisemitism ran throughout Europe, from Tzarist Russia to Republican France. Traditional religious anti-judaism combined here with new, more ‘modern’ manifestations, based on racial, ‘social’ or nationalist arguments. It took different forms: pogroms, mob riots, antisemitic discourses and publications, legal exclusion form territories or professions, antisemitic trials. It did not spare the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its Czech province, where antisemitism was to be found both among the Czech majority and the German-speaking minority. How did Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew of German culture, react to antisemitism?

Kafka’s relation to Judaism was highly ambiguous,  an ambiguity summarized in the famous comment of 1918 in his Octavo notebooks: ‘I . . . have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer-mantle—now flying away from us—as the Zionists have.’[1] In a similar spirit, in a letter to Grete Bloch dated June 11, 1914, he describes himself as an asocial person, excluded from the community because of his ‘non-Zionist, non-practicing Judaism (I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it).’[2] Another well-known statement seems even more negative : ‘What do I have in common with the Jews ? I hardly have anything in common with myself, and I should stay quietly in a corner, happy to be able to breath.’[3]

On the other hand, he subscribed to the periodical published by his Zionist friends (Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Felix Weltsch), Selbstwehr (Self-defense) and even published there his pieceVor dem Gesetz. And, above all, he had a keen interest in the Eastern European Jewish culture, in the Yiddish language, on which he gave a talk in 1912, and on the Yiddish theatre: one of its actors, Ytzhak Löwy, became his friend.

In spite of his sympathy for the Ost-Juden, Kafka knew well enough that he was an assimilatedWest-Jude, with little links to the Jewish religious or cultural tradition. In a letter to Max Brod, from June 1921, he describes his generation of German-speaking Jewish writers in Prague as curious beings who ‘with their hind legs are glued to the Judaism of the fathers, while the front legs could not find a new soil’.[4]

This ambivalence, documented in many writings, did not prevent him from reacting very strongly to antisemitism: this was, in fact, a common reaction among many European Jews, whose uneasy Jewish identity was provoked, enhanced or awakened by antisemitic aggressions. As a jurist, Kafka was particularly affected by legal manifestations of state antisemitism:  the antisemitic trials of his time. As we will try to show, they make up the historical context for the famous novel Der Prozess.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

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Franz Kafka’s Trial, written in 1914–15, was published only many years after his death; just one section of it, the short parable ‘Before the Law’, appeared, as we mentioned, in the JournalSelbstwehr. Let us briefly recall the main episodes of the novel.

Joseph K is arrested one morning, apparently victim of a slander. The two policemen that arrest him refuse to give any explanation for this measure - which doesn’t take the form of a real imprisonment, but remains as a sort of menace suspended over his head, while he is permitted to continue his normal activities. He is judged by a Court that prevents any access to its Judges, and that does not recognize legal defence but only ‘tolerates’ it. This Court, whose hierarchy extends into the infinite (unendlich), and whose behaviour is unexplainable and unpredictable, pretends to be infallible; its proceedings remain secret and the bill of indictment is not accessible to the accused, nor to his lawyers, and even less to the public in general. The accused is therefore unable to defend himself, since he doesn’t know of what he is being accused…After this entirely untransparent proceeding, the Court sends a pair of henchmen to execute the unfortunate Joseph K.

The book became one of the most famous novels of the 20^th century – as well as a remarkable film by Orson Welles – and has been the object of a huge amount of diverse and contradictory interpretations.

Some of them have a strong conformist bent. An obvious example are those readings of the novel that suppose Joseph K’s guilt and therefore the legitimacy of his condemnation. For instance, Erich Heller – whose writings on Kafka are far from being uninteresting - after a detailed discussion of the parable ‘Before the Law’ concludes : ‘there is one certainty that is left untouched by the parable as well as by the whole book : the Law exists,  and Joseph K must have most terribly offended it, for he is executed in the end with a double edged - yes, double edged – butcher’s knife that is thrust into his heart and turned there twice.’[5]  Applied to the events of the 20^th century, this argument would lead to the following conclusion : if this or that person, or even a few million persons, are executed by the authorities, it is certainly because they must have most terribly offended the Law…In fact, nothing in the novel does not suggest that the poor Joseph K did ‘ terribly offend the Law ’ (which one ?) and even less that he deserved a death sentence !

Other readers, more attentive, acknowledge that there is nothing in the novel that suggests the main character’s guilt, but argue that in the chapters which Kafka did not have the time to write there would be, without doubt, ‘the explanation of Joseph K’s fault, or at least of the reasons for the trial’[6]. Well, one can speculate ad libidum on what Kafka would have written, or should have written, but in the manuscript as it exists, one of the strong ideas of the text is precisely the absence of any ‘explanation of the reasons for the trial’, as well as the obstinate refusal of all the concerned instances - policemen, magistrates, Courts, executioners - to give one.

All the attempts by various interpreters to make Joseph K. guilty of something inevitably hurt against the first phrase of the novel, which simply states: Jemand musste Joseph K verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde eines Morgens verhaftet - ‘Somebody must have slandered Josef K., since, without having done any evil, he was arrested one morning’.[7] It is important to observe that this phrase is not at all presented as the subjective opinion of the hero - such as he manifests in the several passages of the novel where he proclaims his innocence - but as an ‘objective’ information, as factual as the next phrase : ‘Mrs. Grubach’s cook (…) did not come this day’.[8]

What is common to all these sorts of exegetic efforts, is that they neutralize or erase the extraordinary critical dimension of the novel, whose central motive is, as Hannah Arendt understood so well, ‘the functioning of a cunning bureaucratic machine where the hero is innocently caught’.[9] Many readers were struck by the prophetic character of the novel; which seems to foresee, with its visionary imagination, the justice of the totalitarian states of the 20^th century.  Bertolt Brecht was one of the first to propose such an interpretation, since 1937: ‘bourgeois democracies carry in their deepest interior the fascist dictatorship, and Kafka painted with a grandiose imagination what later became the concentration camps, the absence of any legal guarantee, the absolute autonomy of the state (...)’.[10] Could not the same argument apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Stalinist USSR? Once again it is Brecht – in spite of being a loyal fellow-traveller of the Communist movement - which says so, in a conversation with Walter Benjamin about Kafka, in 1934, i.e. even before the Moscow Trials: ‘Kafka had only one problem, that of organization. What seized him, is theAngst of the Ant-Hill-State, the way human beings alienate from themselves their forms of common life. And he predicted some of the manifestations of this alienation, like for instance the methods of the GPU.’  Brecht added: ‘One sees with the Gestapo what the Tcheka can become.’[11]           

Such a reading is a legitimate homage to the clear-sightedness of the Prague writer, who was able to grasp the tendencies, already hidden in his time as sinister virtualities, in the ‘constitutional’ European states. However, it offers us very little insight into his own motivations, and his sources of inspiration.

Moreover, these a posteriori references to so-called ‘states of exception’ (dictatorships, totalitarianism) might obscure one of the powerful ideas of the novel: the ‘exception’, i.e. the crushing of the individual by the State apparatuses, ignoring his rights, is the rule – I’m paraphrasing a formula from Walter Benjamin in his ThesesOn the concept of history (1940). In other words:The Trial deals with the alienated and oppressive nature of the modern States, including those who self-define themselves as ‘Lawful States’. This is why, in the first pages of the novel, it is clearly said - again, by the neutral voice of the narrator: ‘K. lived however in a Legal State (Rechtsstaat), peace reigned everywhere, all the Laws were in force, who dared to attack him at his home?’[12]  

It is not in an imaginary future but in contemporary historical events that one should look for the source of inspiration for The Trial. [13] Among these facts, the great antisemitic trials of his time were a blatant example of state injustice. The most (in)famous were the Tisza trial (Hungary 1882), the Dreyfus trial (France 1894–99), the Hilsner trial (Czechoslovaquia, 1899–1900) and the Beiliss trial (Russia, 1912-13). In spite of the differences between the various State regimes – absolutism, constitutional monarchy, republic – the judicial system condemned, sometimes to capital punishment, innocent victims whose only crime was to be Jews.

The Tisza affair was a trial for ‘ritual murder’ against fifteen people from a small Jewish community in a village in Northern Hungary (1882–83), accused of killing a young Gentile women, Esther Solymosi, and collecting her blood at the synagogue in order to prepare their unleavened Easter bread (matzos). Of course, the tragic event could not have touched Kafka directly, since he was born in 1883. But he certainly was aware of it, through various journalistic or literary sources. The strong feelings he felt about it appear in a striking form in a letter from October 1916 to hisfiancée Felice Bauer, which contains a moving reference to a theatrical drama,Ritual Murder in Hungary (Berlin 1914), by the Jewish German writer Arnold Zweig, dealing with the Tisza trial: ‘The other day I’ve read ‘Ritual Murder in Hungary’ (Ritualmord in Ungarn) by Zweig; its supernatural scenes are as feeble as I would have expected from what I know of Zweig’s work. The terrestrial scenes on the other hand are intensely alive, taken no doubts from the excellent records of the case. Nevertheless, one cannot quite distinguish between the two worlds; he has identified himself with the case and is now under its spell. I no longer see him the way I used to. At one point I had to stop reading, sit down on the sofa and weep aloud. It’s years since I wept’.[14] Since this is one of the few – perhaps the only ! – mention of weeping in Kafka’s Correspondence or Diaries, it is obvious that he was deeply moved by the story of this ugly antisemitic trial, where a Jewish boy, Mortiz Scharf, aged 13, was pushed to testify against his father and the Jewish community. The reference to the ‘excellent records’ of the trial suggests that Kafka had read this material before he discovered Arnold Zweig’s piece; very likely, he had already some information on the Tisza affair when he started, in 1914, to write Der Prozess.

Paradoxically, the most (in)famous antisemitic affair of his time, the Dreyfus trial, is hardly mentioned in his writings. For instance, the name of Alfred Dreyfus does not appear one single time in his Diaries. In fact, we do not know what he thought of it, even if one can be sure that, as all Jewish or even European citizen from this generation, he knew the main episodes of this traumatic event.  This is a surprising lack of interest, which still needs to be explained. Some authors pretend that Dreyfus was of utmost importance for him, but this does not seem a very persuasive argument. For instance, according to Frederick Karl, the Dreyfus trial is ‘the archetypal court case in the background of The Trial’[15],  but there is little evidence to substantiate this assessment. There is even less for Sander Gilman’s statement that ‘the Dreyfus Affair haunted Kafka all his adult life’ as well as his attempt to identify Kafka’s Penal Colony with the Devil’s Island were Alfred Dreyfus was interned after his condemnation.[16]

One of the few mentions to Dreyfus appears, rather in an indirect way, in a letter from 1922 to Max Brod. Kafka refers to the cultural struggle around a controversial Czech sculptor, Frantisek Bilek, which he then compares to a similar controversy around the Cezch composer Leos Janacek. According to Kafka, Brod‘s defense of Bilek is : ‘a fight comparable with the fight for Janacek; if I understand the matter rightly (I almost wrote : with the fight for Dreyfus)’.[17] Hardly a powerful statement about the Dreyfus affair, assimilated to an aesthetic controversy…  But one can accept the hypothesis that, to a lesser extent than other antisemitic trials, the one against the French Jewish captain was among Kafka’s sources of inspiration for the novel.

Much stronger was his reaction to the Czech Hilsner trial, for the obvious reason that it took place in his own country. In spite of his young age in 1899 (sixteen years), Kafka immediately grasped the threatening significance of this affair.  In this year a young Czech Jew, Leopold Hilsner, living in the town of Polna, was accused of ‘ritual murder’ against a young Christian woman, Agnes Hurza, in order to use her blood for the Jewish Passover rituals.  Found guilty, in spite the absence of any evidence, Hilsner was condemned to capital punishment and only escaped death thanks to the campaign in his defence waged by the democratic politician Thomas Masaryk (future President of the Czech Republic); following a revision of the trial he was ‘only’ sentenced to life.[18]

In a conversation reported by Gustav Janouch, Kafka mentioned his discussions on this episode with his friend and school-mate Hugo Bergmann, as the starting point of his consciousness of the Jewish condition: ‘a despised individual, considered by the surrounding world as a stranger, only tolerated’[19] – in other words, a pariah...

We know that Janouch notes are not always reliable, but we have, in Kafka’s correspondence with Milena, a direct reference to the Hilsner affair, as a paradigmatic example of the irrationality of antisemitic prejudices: ‘I cannot understand how people (…) came to this idea of ritual murder’; in a sort of phantasmagorical scenario, ‘one sees ‘Hilsner’ commit his crime step by step’.  In this correspondence with his friend and lover, there are several other references to antisemitism, an ideology where all Jews ‘take the form of Negros’ and make up a lower race, the ‘scum of the earth’.[20]

Finally, it is very likely that Kafka was also deeply touched by the trial against the Russian Jewish shoe-maker Mendel Beiliss (Kiev, 1911- 1913), equally accused of ‘ritual murder’ – a trial followed by a violent antisemitic campaign in the press and antisemitic riots in Kiev. The Zionist periodical Selbstwehr, to which he subscribed, was obsessed with this affair, which showed, in a striking way, the dramatic condition of the Jews in the Russian Tzarist Empire: their absence of rights, their social exclusion, their persecution by the State. For instance, an editorial under the title ‘Kiew’, from April 12, 1912, asserts: as at the time of the Dreyfus trial, also now, in Kiev, ‘all the Jews of the world feel that they are on the bank of the accused’ together with Beiliss. The condemnation of Mendel Beiliss would be the sign ‘to launch a legalised storm against the Jews’ in Russia. By the summer of 1913 the trial had become so notorious in the pages ofSelbstwehr that the name of the accused was often deleted and the affair was simply called ‘Der Prozess’…[21]

We know that among Kafka’s papers which he asked to be burned by his friend Dora Diamant just before his death, there was a narrative about Mendel Beiliss.[22] This was perhaps the trial that most directly influenced Der Prozess, since he took place only one year before Kafka started to write it.

This role of the antisemitic trials as a source for the novel is only an hypothesis. But it is a plausible one, considering also that, since 1911, after his meeting with the Yiddish Theater and his friendship with the actor Itzhak Löwy, Kafka became increasingly interested in Judaïsm, and started to send some of his writings to Jewish periodicals such as the above-mentioned Selbstwehr orDer Jude, Martin Buber’s Journal.

However, there is nothing, in the novel, that betrays a direct connexion to the antisemitic trials.  It is true that Joseph K’s arrest seems to be the result of a ‘slander’ – a term which seems to have some analogy to the accusations of ‘ritual murder’. However, the issue of the slander is not pursued in the novel. In fact, there are no references to Jews and/or antisemitism in theThe Trial, neither directly nor indirectly. The main character, Joseph K, has little in common with either the captain Dreyfus, or Hilsner, the Scharf family of Tisza and Mendel Beiliss. Whatis common between the antisemitic trials and the novel is a certain pattern of absurd and injust ‘legal’ procedure, and the crushing of the innocent individual under the wheels of the State machine. In other words: if Franz Kafka was deeply concerned about the antisemitic trials, he did not react to them only as Jew but also as a universal spirit, whodiscovers in the Jewish experience the quintessence of the human experience in modern times. This is why inDer Prozess the main character, Joseph K., has no nationality nor religion: the choice of a simple initial instead of a name – K and not Kohn or Kreuzer – is a strong signifier of this universal identity. Joseph K could be any one of the inumerable victims of the State’s legal apparatus.[23]

In this universalist re-interpretation of the antisemitic trials, Kafka’s sympathy for the libertarian socialist ideas has probably played a certain role.  As it is known, thanks to several witnesses - Michal Mares, Michal Kacha, Gustav Janouch, among others – Kafka took part in several meetings of Prague anarchist circles, during the years 1909-1912.[24]  Now, the issue of ‘State injustice’ occupied an important place in the libertarian culture, which celebrates, every year, on May the First, the memory of the ‘Chicago Martyrs’, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders executed in 1887 under false accusations.  In 1909, another ‘affair’ provoked the indignation of anarchist - and of broader progressive - circles around the whole world : the condamnation to capital punishment and the execution by the Spanish Monarchy  of Francisco Ferrer, an eminent libertarian pedagogue, founder of the Spanish Modern School, falsely accused of having inspired an anarcho-syndicalist uprising in Barcelona.  According to the Czech anarchist poet Michal Marès, Kafka took part in 1909 at a Prague demonstration in protest against Ferrer’s execution.

Unlike the victims of the antisemitic trial, which were either acquitted (Dreyfus, the Tisza-Jews, Beiliss) or at least escaped capital punishment (Hilsner), Francisco Ferrer was ‘legally’ executed, and thus has a significant common trait with Joseph K.  But otherwise, there isn’t much similarity between their stories…

How to resist the murderous machinery of State justice?  For Kafka’s Zionist friends, the Jewish pariahs should organize their self-defence – Selbstwehr – against antisemitism, a first step towards a newfound dignity. For his Czech anarchist friends, the only defence would be the direct action of the oppressed against the powers that be. Kafka probably sympathized with both; but what he shows in his novel is less optimistic and more ‘realist’: the defeat and the resignation of the victim.

Joseph K’s first reaction to the threat is resistance, (individual) rebellion: he denounces, protests and voices, with sarcasm and irony, his contempt for the Institution that is supposed to judge him. He tends also to under-estimate the danger.  The characters to whom he asks for help advise him to submit: ‘There is no way to struggle against the Court, one his forced to confess.  You should therefore confess (das Geständnis machen) at the next occasion’, explains to him Leni, the Lawyer’s servant ; the Lawyer himself tells K that he should ‘resign himself (abzufinden) to the situation as it is’ and not move: ‘Above all don’t draw any attention ! Keep quiet even if this seems a non-sense!’[25] Joseph K. refuses this ‘friendly’ advice, he has only contempt for this submissive and servile characters, described as ‘dog-like’.

The dog, in several of Kafka’s novels is the allegorical figure of voluntary servitude, of the behaviour of those who lie at the feet of their hierarchical superiors and blindly obey to their master’s voice. For instance, in The Trial, the Lawyer Huld ‘humiliates himself in a doglike way (hündische weise) in front of the Court’. At a hierarchical lower rung, the merchant Block kneels at the feet of Huld and behaves in a despicable servile manner: ‘He was no more a client, he was the dog of the Lawyer. If Huld would have asked him to crawl under the bed like in a kennel and bark, he would have done it with joy’.[26]  Joseph K, on the contrary, keeps his dignity and refuses to submit to those ‘above’.

However, in the last chapter of the novel, his behaviour changes radically. After a brief attempts at resistence to the henchmen – ‘I will go no further’ – he decides that any opposition is ‘useless’ and behaves towards his executioners in an obliging way (Entgegenkommen),  in ‘perfect acceptance’ (vollem Einverständnis) of their aims. He is not only resigned to his fate, but seems willing to cooperate actively to his own punishment. It is only by lack of strength that he doesn’t accomplish what he considers to be his duty: take the weapon in his own hands and execute himself. However, at the moment when the executioners plunge the knife into his heart, he is still able to articulate, before dying: ‘as a dog!’ (Wie ein Hund !).  The last phrase of the novel is a commentary: ‘It is as if the shame would survive him’.[27]  

Which shame? Obviously the shame of dying ‘like a dog’, i.e. in a submissive way, in a state of voluntary servitude – in the sense given by Etienne de La Boétie to this word.          

The conclusion of the novel is both pessimistic and resolutely non-conformist. It conveys Kafka’s rebel Jewish consciousness, combining compassion for the victim and a critique of its voluntary servitude. One can read this last sentence as an appeal for resistance against antisemitism and all other forms of legal injustice...[28]

[1] Franz Kafka, ‘The Eight Octavo Notebooks,’ in Wedding Preparations, 114

[2]  Franz Kafka, ‘Letter to Grete Bloch, June 11, 1914,’ in Letters to Felice, 423

[3]  F.Kafka, Journal, (January 8, 1914), Paris, Grasset, 1954, p. 321.

[4] Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Verlag, 1975, p. 337

[5] Erich Heller, Franz Kafka, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 79-80

[6] Casten Schlingmann, Franz Kafka, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1995, p. 44

[7] F.Kafka,  Der Prozess, Frankfort, Fischer, 1985, p. 7. All translations from The Trial are mine ML.

[8]Ibid. .  By proclaming, thoughout the novel, his innocence, Joseph K is not lying, but expressing an intimate conviction. This is the reason why, at the moment the policemen appear to arrest him, he thinks of a practical joke organized by his office colleagues.  This is obviously the reaction of some one who is at peace with his consciencousness…

[9] H. Arendt, ‘F.Kafka’, in Sechs Essays p.128

[10] B.Brecht,  ‘Sur la litterature tchécoslovaque moderne’, 1937, in Le siècle de Kafka, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984, p.162. In an essay published in 1974, J.P. Stern proposes an interesting - but somewhat forced - comparison between Kafka’s Trial and the legal procedures of the Third Reich Courts. (J.P. Stern, ‘The Law of the Trial’, in F.Kuna, On Kafka : Semi-centenary Perspectives, New York, Harper & Row, 1976).

[11] Quoted in W.Benjamin, Essais sur Brecht, Paris, Maspero, 1969, p.132, 136. Tcheka and GPU were different names of the Soviet political police. According to Brecht, in the same conversation, ‘Kafka’s perspective is that of the human being who fell under the wheels’ of power.  

[12] F.Kafka, Der Prozess, p. 9.

[13] I entirely agree with Rosemarie Ferenczi’s argument, in her outstanding book,  Kafka. Subjectivité, Histoire et Structures, Paris, Klincksiek, 1975. Cf.  p. 62 : ‘Kafka did not pretend to be the prophet of future catastrophes, he limited himself to decipher the evil of his times.. If his descriptions appear effectively as prophetic, this is because the future epochs are the logical following of Kafak’s own’.

[14] F.Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth, New York, Schocken Books, 1973 ; p. 530. See the chapter  Kafka wept in Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka. The Jewish Patient, Londres, Routledge, 1995.

[15] Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka, Representative Man, Boston, 1993,  p. 501.

[16] Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient pp. 69-70, 81.

[17] F.Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, Frankfurt/Main, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1975, p. 402.

[18] For a detailed account of the affair, see Maximilian Paul Schiff, Der Prozess Hilsner, Aktenauszug, Wien, 1908 and Der Fall Hilsner, ein europäisches Justitzverbrechen, Berlin, A.W. Hayn’s Erben, 1911.  See also Rosemarie Ferenczi, Op.cit.  pp. 46-58.

[19] G.Janouch, Kafka und seine Welt, Vienne, Verlag Hans Deutsch, 1965, p.55.

[20] Kafka, Lettres à Milena, Paris, Gallimard, 1988, trad. A.Vialatte, pp.66, 164, 255.

[21] See Arnold J. Band, ‘Kafka and the Beiliss Affair’, Comparative Literature, vol. 32, n. 2, Spring 1980, pp. 176-177.  Beiliss was finally acquitted by the jury.

[22] Max Brod, Franz Kafka : eine Biographie, Frankfurt am Main, S.Fischer, 1954, p.248.  Brod mentions a testimony by Dora Dymant, Kafka last companion : ‘Among the papers burned there was, according to Dora, a narrative by Kafka on the ritual murder trial against Beiliss in Odessa’.

[23] According to Rosemarie Ferenczi, the Hilsner affair,  manipulated by the State, teached Kafka, beyond the limits of the Jewish reality, how far could go the ‘ arbitrary behaviour of a unscrupulous power ’. (Kafka, subjectivité, histoire et structures, p. 61).  See also p. 205 : ‘The Trial is an indictment against the History of his times which made possible affairs as Hilsner’s’.

[24] On this issue, I refer to my own book, Franz Kafka, rebellious dreamer , Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2016.

[25] Kafka , Der Prozess, Frankfort, Fischer, 1985,  pp. 94, 104.

[26] Kafka, Der Prozess, pp. 152, 166.

[27] Kafka, Der Prozess, pp.191-194.

[28] Peter Handke has an interesting comment on this : ‘There is not in the writings of the peoples since their origins another text that can so much help the oppressed to resist with dignity and indignation against an order of the world that revealed itself as their mortal ennemy, as this end of the novel The Trial, where Joseph K is carried to be slaughtered and accelerates himself his execution (...).’ (P. Handke, ‘ Discours de réception du prix Kafka’, 1979, in Le siècle de Kafka, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984, p.248).

Since June 2013, when a mass movement took to the streets of Brazil, the country has undergone significant political polarisation. This movement has had an impact on the way Brazilian society and the Jewish community have related to the Palestine/Israel issue. On the left, a growing number of social movements and political parties, such as PSOL^[1], have committed to a stance of radical solidarity with Palestinians, adopting BDS as part of their platforms. On the right, Israel has come to play a central role in the political agendas of evangelical and neo-fascist groups that make up the base of the Jair Bolsonaro government, elected in 2018.

In 2017, a group of far-right Zionist Jews invited Bolsonaro to hold a lecture at a Jewish recreational club in Rio de Janeiro. Amid laughter and applause from an audience of over three hundred Jews, Bolsonaro openly attacked Brazil's indigenous and quilombola communities.^[2] ‘Not one centimetre will be demarcated for an indigenous reserve or quilombola. Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth [to be exploited] underneath’.^[3]

Outside the club, a crowd of over a hundred protestors made up mostly of young Jews from left-wing Zionist youth movements, decried Bolsonaro's presence, waved Israeli flags and chanted in Hebrew. The protesters expressed their disapproval not only of Bolsonaro's approach to Brazilian politics but to Israeli politics as well. ‘Zionist Jews don't vote for fascists,’ they shouted. Left-wing Zionist intellectuals considered the event an important milestone that signified an unprecedented crack in the hegemony of the progressive-liberal agenda of the Brazilian Jewish community.^[4]

Indeed, the demonstration would lead to a public repositioning of Zionist Jews who are supportive of progressive agendas to join the rest of the Brazilian left in defence of oppressed peoples and in the struggle against fascism.^[5] From the point of view of left Zionists, anti-Semitism in the pro-BDS radical left is the reason they are excluded from both the struggle for justice in the Middle East and the battle against the Brazilian far-right. According to them, the Brazilian far-right and far-left both uphold an ‘Imaginary Israel’ that rejects the plurality of Zionism and Israel.^[6]

According to this logic, Left Zionism would represent the only viable alternative against ‘extremism’. Left Zionists argue that dialogue alone would be capable of resolving the Palestine/Israel question and the divergences within the Jewish community and the Brazilian left. This neoliberal discourse that claims ‘there is no alternative’ has managed to attract growing support among Brazilian Jews and relevant sectors of the Brazilian left who are in denial about the reality in Palestine/Israel.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

It is possible to observe a global crisis of Left Zionism, from Israel to Brazil, to the US and the UK.^[7] Jewish communities worldwide have undergone transformations in race and class relations after WWII.^[8] This explains in part why Brazilian Jews have not completed the polarisation observed in Brazilian society to integrate the anti-Zionist left, instead joining ranks with the new neo-fascist right.

Based on an analysis of the intellectual reflections and actions of this group, we argue that, with the help of Zionist elites and the coercion of the Brazilian state, left-wing Zionists act as a gatekeepers to prevent left-wing Jews and sectors of the moderate left from composing radical movements for the emancipation of oppressed and exploited peoples in Brazil and Palestine. As such, they manage to uphold both Israeli colonial claims of sovereignty over Palestinian territory and the legitimacy of Zionism within the Brazilian left.

We ground our critique in reflections by anti-Zionist Jews, anti-colonial and settler colonial perspectives to demonstrate how Left Zionism functions as a soft, patronizing version of the old colonial chauvinism. To that end, we test the hypothesis put forward by the Jewish American Marxist Alexander Bittelman, writing in 1947, that Zionists align with the reactionary forces of the nation-state in which they reside.^[9]

We understand the Zionist Left praxis as a counter-revolutionary strategy to maintain the hegemony of Liberal Zionism based on the exclusion of anti-Zionist alternatives, inside and outside the Jewish community. Historical analysis of the politics of the anti-Zionist Jewish movement disrupts the idea of a harmonious coexistence inside the Jewish community claimed by the Brazilian Zionist Left.

The erasing of the Jewish anti-Zionist left from the history of the Brazilian Jewish community is a direct result of its historical defeat against Zionism.^[10] Academia has been an important tool that has helped Liberal Zionism maintain its hegemony in the country. The few Brazilian authors who approach the particularity of the Jewish question from a Marxist point of view^[11] are invariably accused falling prey to essentialism when treating the relationship between Jews and anti-Zionist communist movements.^[12]

We propose an alternative reflection that examines the anti-Zionist Jewish left, racism and colonialism as key elements to understand the contradictions between actually existing Zionism in Palestine and the progressive-liberal hegemony that prevails in the Jewish community in Brazil. We aim to provide a counter-hegemonic critique for an emancipatory praxis that rejects colonialism and understands the particularity of the Jewish question without subsuming it to class analyses.

First, we present the dominant literature’s understanding of the role played by the Zionist Left in the Jewish community and in Brazilian society at large. Next, we provide a critique of the concept of ‘Imaginary Israel’ and locate it within the counter-revolutionary praxis of the Zionist left. Finally, we point to ways in which the Zionist movement has acted to dismantle Jewish anti-Zionist alternatives in Brazil.  

The crisis of the progressive-liberal hegemony of the Brazilian Jewish-Zionist community

An alignment with the WZO^[13] is at the foundation of the Zionist movement in Brazil in the 1910s. It eventually undergoes dynamisation when, in 1927, Russian immigrant Aron Bergman founds the Brazilian headquarters of the Poalei Tzion in Rio de Janeiro.^[14] Socialist Zionists constituted a majority of the Jewish community in the late 1930s, and were responsible for building schools, libraries and youth movements, which formed their main social base.

These entities played a fundamental role in the expansion of Zionism, the establishment of Hebrew as the Jewish national language, the support of the Brazilian State to Israel and the mobilization of financial and human resources for the Zionist colonization of Palestine, such as military training in youth camps for the formation of new settlers.^[15]

According to Monica Grin, the post-WWII period saw a rise of the progressive-liberal agenda in the Jewish community.^[16] The country’s democratisation after 1945, following the end of the Estado Novo,^[17] resulted in a new model for institutions representing the Jewish community in a territorial form. These entities were directed by Zionist elites to represent all Jews in Brazilian society, in particular to the national government. Nevertheless, they were open to anti-Zionist groups, which were still numerous then but remained autonomous.

The Jewish community's positions in favour of human rights, social justice, the fight against anti-Semitism and the defence of Israel as a democratic nation among authoritarian countries in the Middle East would form the basis of a new social cohesion. The defence of universal rights and citizenship, in particular, and the expansion of ethnic and religious minority rights, would lead to Jews having their rights respected as individuals and as a group.^[18]

This agenda brought about links with other social groups in support of national multiculturalism, religious freedom and the fight against racism. It turned various progressive groups in society, such as sectors of the Catholic Church and the Black Movement, into allies in the fight against anti-Semitism.^[19]

Another example includes the alliances of Left Zionist groups with the Brazilian left. According to Michel Gherman, the relation between Zionists and the Brazilian left went from one of empathy in the 1930s to one of hostility at the beginning of the twenty-first century. According to him, even before the recognition of Israel by the USSR, there was proximity between left Zionists and the PCB,^[20] the main representative of the Brazilian revolutionary left at the time.^[21] There was even sympathy among sectors of the PCB for the collectivist aspects of the Jewish state.^[22]

Even at the height of the ‘zionization’ of the Jewish community after the 1967 war, a relative proximity between left Zionism and the Brazilian left endured. This proximity persisted during the re-democratisation of the country in the 1980s when Zionist groups approached the PT^[23], the main party of the Brazilian left, which adopted the liberal international consensus of peace, coexistence and two states. Thus, both Jews and the left welcomed the ‘critically Zionist’ position.^[24]

However, this Liberal Zionist hegemony would experience a crisis after the Second Intifada (2000-2006), when, according to Gherman, binary interpretations would result in extremist positions on the Brazilian left towards Israel and Zionism. This kind of critique from the left conflated Jewish, Zionist and Israeli identities.

Gherman purposely conflates anti-Zionist critiques of left-wing Zionism with isolated anti-Semitic statements by individuals on the Brazilian left. He claims that the same reasoning underpins texts which accuse ‘minority groups of Jewish origin’ of possessing a ‘hidden power’ that would help them dominate the world^[25] and those which point to the structural characteristics of settler colonial Zionism in Palestine, including on the Zionist Left.^[26]

Therefore, any critique of Left Zionism and its colonial features could easily be framed as a denial of its possibility to exist. Left anti-Zionism would be a new kind of anti-Semitism.

In this sense, Jews cannot be right or left; they are exclusively Jews. Zionism, here, takes the place of an ‘original Judaism,’ replacing the typical accusations found in traditional forms of political anti-Semitism … Brazilian Jews are seen as ‘representatives’ of an alleged ‘Zionism’ that is determined to defend the interests of Israel. Not exactly the real State of Israel, but an imaginary one, that possesses superpowers and is able to exploit and dominate other countries and economic systems.^[27]

Furthermore, according to Gherman, the BDS movement encourages ‘dangerous and generalizing’ confusion between Zionists, Jews and Israel, allowing the anti-Semitic left to reaffirm its position in support of boycott campaigns. BDS Brazil would thus benefit from anti-Semitism on the left.

BDS activists seem to exploit the local confusion between national Jewish and Jewish religious identities, between Jews and Israel, between Israel and the attitudes of specific Israeli governments in order to reinforce their influence and political agenda among specific Brazilian political groups.^[28]

On the other hand, Gherman, Grin and Caraciki understand the political growth of conservative evangelical groups in the 2010s, historical champions of Israel, as a factor that pressured Bolsonaro to embrace Israel as an ally in the defence of Western Judeo-Christian values against threats coming from the East, Islam and the left.^[29] In 2014, Bolsonaro was baptised by an evangelical leader in order to gain the support of evangelicals. Since his inauguration, Bolsonaro has become one of Israel's foremost partners and Israeli flags have become ubiquitous at Brazilian far-right demonstrations.

As a result, this has ignited a neo-Zionist and ultra-conservative agenda led by previously marginalised far-right groups within the Jewish community. These have sought to break with the progressive-liberal consensus and exclude ‘critically Zionist’ Jews. Far-right Israel apologist groups have replaced leftist movements as the Zionist elites’ main allies.^[30]

Therefore, we would be witnessing a ‘de-conversion’ of left-wing Zionists coupled with a symbolic conversion of evangelicals and Bolsonarist supporters of Israel. Far-right Zionist groups, which see themselves as the ‘true’ representatives of Jewish interests in Brazil, would be promoting a ‘cleansing’ within Jewish-Zionist entities. This would be causing a rupture of the solidarity within the Jewish community and a crisis of representation supposedly never seen before.^[31]

A novelty underpinning the alignment between evangelical extremism, Bolsonarist fascism and ultra-nationalist Jews is their essentially positive view of Jews, Zionists and Israel as defenders of their moral and political values. In fact, for Liberal Zionist intellectuals, this essentially positive representation would not be a form of anti-Semitism, although many, including Bolsonaro himself, espouse openly anti-Semitic positions.^[32] That is, their ultra-Zionist and anti-Semitic positions do not overlap but exist as complementary phenomena. On the left, however, there would be an overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The depoliticizing “Imaginary Israel” framework

As a way of explaining the crisis of hegemony of Liberal Zionism, Gherman developed the concept of an ‘Imaginary Israel’, which transmutes with that of the ‘imaginary Jew’, elaborated by Alain Finkielkraut for late twentieth century France.^[33] For Gherman, as for Finkielkraut, there would exist, both on the left and on the right, social constructions that are responsible for making Jews, and by extension Israel, exceptional and guided by a supposed essentialist nature.^[34]

The left would see the Jewish-Zionist-Israel nexus as racist, colonising, imperialist, capitalist and right-wing. The right would interpret this nexus as religiosity, messianism, conservatism and the defence of Western Judeo-Christian society. Neither of these imaginary perspectives would have room for the plurality and diversity of the ‘real Jew’ or the various types of Zionisms and opposing strands in Israeli society.

The new Brazilian right ... seems to attract groups from the new left. And, in a bear hug, this ends up killing both, since the most important thing is to suffocate those who contradict the versions of both sides, in this case, progressive Jews, liberals, left Zionists.^[35]

The theoretical elaboration of the ‘Imaginary Israel’ has guided, in particular, the actions of IBI^[36], an organization founded in 2017 that advocates for a liberal Zionism that aggregates left and right liberals in defence of a progressive-liberal hegemony. Its actions are aimed at representative entities of the Jewish-Zionist community and important circles of Brazilian society, such as literary festivals, film fairs, political parties, the media and public universities.

IBI’s slogan ‘Zionism is plural’ functions as a veil of multicultural tolerance behind which lies an ambition to antagonise criticism from Palestinians and radical left-wing movements that point to the settler colonial characteristic of actually existing Zionism in Palestine. For Gherman, director of IBI, and Thomaz, pointing out the ways in which colonialism structures reality in Palestine/Israel constitutes a misrepresentation that erases the complexity of the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ in a similar argumentative vein to those who would wish to erase thecomplexity of Jews.^[37]

According to IBI's president, David Diesendruck, the organisation was funded as a reaction to the ‘pain’ caused by polarisation in Brazilian society.^[38] In an ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017 with Brazilian Jews who identify as left-wing Zionists, Bianca Marcossi noticed a shared pain among those who claim this identity.^[39] This suffering would stem from isolation and marginalisation in Brazilian society as a result of polarisation around the Palestine/Israel issue.

Common ground for Brazilian left-wing Zionists includes a support for the Palestinian State and the end of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and a Zionism based on Jewish humanist and ethical values. Marcossi notes a common effort of left Zionists to self-define their Zionist identity in an idealistic way that bares no correlation with actually existing Zionism.^[40]

Marcossi highlights how this desire to end the occupation is regarded as a priority required to save Israel and the Zionism that they understand to be true: the one that would have existed until 1967, before the ‘deviation’ caused by the Zionist right. This discourse of ‘deviation’ is also observed in the critique of the actions of the Zionist far-right against the liberal consensus in the Brazilian Jewish community.^[41]

The intellectuals of Left Zionism wish to redefine this individual suffering as an identity with a privileged perspective that allows for a better understanding of the reality, by standing on two sides: the left and Zionism. They aim to make their political proposal of ‘two states for two peoples’ the rational one because it is founded on a privileged experience of suffering that seeks moderation. While the extreme right defends an apartheid state, resulting from its ambitions to annex the West Bank, the project of a democratic bi-national state is gaining ground on the left.^[42]

In the words of IBI's executive coordinator, Rafael Kruchin:

... on the left and on the right in Brazil, there is a clear dichotomy that opposes those who fight against ‘barbarism’ and those who fight against ‘colonialism’ … Each side of this binary reality sees and proclaims itself as the locus of excellence and clarity, and does not seem, at the present moment, willing to rethink its categories of classification … It is necessary to start talking about concrete alternatives to the present conjuncture and, who knows, about the possible solution of two states.^[43]

Therefore, ‘Imaginary Israel’ serves as a theory of liberal Zionism to resume the two states project and re-establish a progressive-liberal hegemony in the Brazilian Jewish community through the strategy of dialogue. This framework seems critical, but it is founded on a false polarisation that equates left and right in a ‘horseshoe theory’.

In this paradigm, the political spectrum would be in the shape of a horseshoe that would result in the extreme left being closer to the extreme right than to the centre-left. Therefore, left and right would not have qualitative or teleological differences.

According to Sabrina Fernandes, the “horseshoe theory” can only be observed in an environment of great depoliticisation such as that of Brazil since June 2013.^[44] The idea of a plurality against ‘binarisms’ advocated by the Zionist Left’s ‘Imaginary Israel’ paradigm enforces a depoliticisation that demobilises the structural antagonisms resulting from the settler colonial reality at the root of the inequalities of power and the conditions of oppression and exploitation between Jews and Palestinians. Consequently, it constructs a representation in which the conflict ceases to be a settler colonial one and instead becomes one between liberals and extremists. ‘Imaginary Israel’ is an ideology that justifies the role of left Zionists as gatekeepers of the Jewish community and the moderate Left against increasingly ‘extremist’ positions on the radical left. In this false representation of reality, left Zionists are equal in victimhood to Palestinians.

For example, in an article on Jewish fundamentalism, Gherman and Grin state that extremists form ‘violent gangs that fight Palestinians and progressive Jews with equal violence’.^[45] As if to imply that progressive Jews are put through equal suffering, following massacres such as the one in Hebron in 1994, as the Palestinians who are submitted to the systematic theft of homes and land, among other acts of violence committed by extremist settlers that end up benefiting the settler population as a whole. 

This distortion of reality is based on fallacies that benefit a right-wing liberal project by limiting the possibility of conciliation exclusively to liberals inscribed within a neoliberal order in Brazil.^[46] This can be seen in the claim that Zionist settler colonialism is the fruit of the left's fundamentalist imagination and that the BDS movement benefits from the anti-Semitism of the radical left. Another form of depoliticisation occurs through the discourse strategy, which is presented as the rational and technocratic solution according to neoliberal procedures of conflict resolution and supposedly rises above the ideology of the 'pro-Palestinian' left and the 'pro-Israel’ right.

In this way, the "Imaginary Israel" theory reproduces the old strategy of ‘complexity’ that has historically kept international leftists in fear of being accused of anti-Semitism when criticising Zionism and its colonial praxis^[47] — a recurrent practice, as observed in the case of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.^[48] Consequently, the settler colonial and racist aspects of Zionism are obscured. Radical forms of criticism by anti-Zionists are portrayed as ‘irrational’, forcing the left to adopt more moderate positions.

The plurality trap: gatekeeping the Brazilian Left

The 2010s have seen the rising impact of new organisations linked to left-wing Zionism on the Brazilian left, thus steering it away from joining the BDS campaign or opposing Bolsonarism in the Jewish community. On some occasions, articulation occurred with non-Zionist Jewish groups that consent to the hegemony of Liberal Zionism, such as ASA in Rio de Janeiro and Casa do Povo in São Paulo.^[49]

The main area of activity was the radical left party PSOL, created in 2005 as a socialist alternative to the PT, a party that became more suited to neoliberal hegemony.^[50] Several left-wing Zionists joined the PSOL in Rio de Janeiro in the 2010s, such as Guilherme Cohen, leader of Jews for Democracy, trained in the Zionist youth movement and former advisor to former MP Jean Wyllys, an important leader of the LGBTQ cause and ardent opponent of Bolsonaro.

Marcossi notes that the recruitment of allies on the Brazilian left seeks to reinforce belief in Left Zionism among those liberal Jews in crisis. Faced with the suffering they bear, they tend to move towards the anti-Zionist left or the Bolsonarist right. The Israeli Zionist left, Meretz in particular, often sends emissaries to impart the teachings of the ‘motherland’ to those whose beliefs are in doubt so as to prevent their departure.

In the 2016 Rio de Janeiro mayoral election, which pitted evangelical Marcelo Crivella against Marcelo Freixo, from PSOL, the left-wing politician was accused of anti-Semitism because sectors of his party claimed that Israel promoted the genocide of Palestinians. With the support of the Zionist left, Freixo sought to distinguish himself from the anti-Zionist wing and adopted the traditional Zionist Left stance of differentiating the State of Israel from the Netanyahu government: ‘Being against a government is not being against a country.’^[51]

It’s important to highlight that PSOL is a party of tendencies without centralism, and that Wyllys and Freixo were independent politicians. The tendencies can have a specific ideology, such as Trotskyism or Ecosocialism, or a more general approach to socialism. As a result, there are divergences between positions taken by some internal tendencies and independent MPs and the official statements adopted by the party’s International Relations Sector on matters such as Palestine/Israel, Venezuela, and Syria. Consequently, PSOL is seen as Zionist and Pro-Palestine at the same time.[52] This kind of contradiction is not seen in minor parties of the radical left that adopt a centralist organization, such as PCB, a Marxist-Leninist party, or PSTU[53], a Trotskyist party. PSTU is particularly involved in the solidarity with the Palestinian cause and rejects any rapprochement with the Zionist left.  

There are also collaborations between different groups for initiatives such as trips to Palestine/Israel for important figures from the Brazilian left. Wyllys went to Palestine/Israel in 2015 on a trip organised by Gherman, Cohen and other members of Progressive Jews, PSOL, CONIB^[54] and the Brazilian Embassy in Israel. According to the politician, the goal was ‘to make the connection between the Zionist left and the Palestinian left and advance the debate about the Occupation within the left’.^[55]

Wyllys' itinerary followed the script of Left Zionism: meetings with figures such as David Grossmann and Nitzan Horowitz; visits to the Israeli-Palestinian NGO Combatants for Peace, to Yad Vashem and to the Zikim kibbutz, connected to Hashomer Hatzair and built over the Palestinian village of Hirybia;^[56] and a lecture on ‘peace’ at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In an orientalist vein, Wyllys wrote about the trip: ‘the rights secured by the Israeli LGBT movement are a beacon in a region dominated by fundamentalism, totalitarianism, misogyny and homophobia’.^[57]

According to Wyllys, during his trip, he learned that ‘Zionism is not a synonym for Jew’; that ‘anti-Zionism is used to disguise anti-Semitism’; that ‘there are Zionists who are against the occupation of Palestinian territories, … and in favour of the two-state solution’.^[58] Marcossi claims that the politician ‘has come to 'see' through the eyes of his 'hosts', adopting the same hope as them, the same repudiation of the BDS movement ... and the same method, dialogue’.^[59]

The case of Jean Wyllys is an example of a successful venture by the Zionist left to ‘teach’ Brazilian society, through the recruitment of non-Jewish intellectuals, how to contest the hegemony at its side. In the view of a militant of Brazilian Left Zionism:

(Wyllys) declared positions that are very close to ours, practically similar. If not for the difference in positionality, which is neither Jewish nor Zionist, but only for the understanding of reality, (it is) very close.^[60]

This effort was also aimed at other public figures in an attempt to normalise the left Zionist discourse in the country, such as Gregório Duvivier, an influential comedian with great public influence who is also affiliated with the PSOL;^[61] Paulo Abrão, a human rights activist responsible for organising ‘meetings and dialogues between Palestinians and Israelis’ for peace through the Ministry of Justice;^[62] and Djamila Ribeiro, an important intellectual of the Black Movement, who was brought closer to the Zionist Left after understanding as a form of racism the criticism that Roger Waters and others in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, including black activists, had levelled against the Brazilian black musician Milton Nascimento for performing in Israel.^[63]

Gherman, Wyllys and Ribeiro share a common understanding of anti-Zionist criticism as a form of intolerance against their individual identities, subscribing to a political strategy close to that of the Brazilian moderate left which is based on a pragmatic adaptation to the dominant neoliberal order. From this perspective, the liberating utopia of decolonisation and the BDS movement are portrayed as oppressive because they confront Israeli ‘plurality’ and exclude their supposedly ‘real’ partners: the Zionist Left.

In this way, the Zionist Left rejects the real Palestinian – the one who claims a settler colonial perspective and adheres to a strategy of anti-colonial refusal against the normalization of Israeli colonial racism – in exchange for an imaginary Zionism grounded in misrepresentations of reality that disguise settler colonialism. Much like Finkielkraut does in relation to Europeans, left Zionists assume a stance that poses as universal and sees anti-colonialism not as humanism, but as prejudice and moral relativism.

Zionist settler colonialism and counterrevolutionary praxis

Judith Butler, in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, notes that any project of Jewish coexistence in Palestine must begin with a double movement, at once reclaiming and negating the Jewish ethical tradition. Butler points to cohabitation with the non-Jew as the central ethical substance of diasporic Jewry, representing a commitment of the secular, socialist and religious Jewish traditions to equality and justice. These Jewish resources are what enable the construction of cohabitation in Palestine as well as ‘the criticism of state violence, the colonial subjugation of populations, expulsion and dispossession’.^[64]

At the same time, Butler posits that it is crucial to reject this Jewish tradition as exclusively Jewish and Jewish ethical values as exceptional. This movement aims to prevent the construction of a privileged Jewish position to understand and act upon reality, even an anti-Zionist one. That is, the Jewish critique of Zionism must question the Jewish framework towards more fundamental and universal democratic values so as to overcome the Jewishness originally claimed as the exclusive framework for thinking about ethics and politics.^[65] 

All criticism of Zionism and Israel by the Zionist left contributes to sustain a privileged position of thinking and acting upon the issue of cohabitation between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine and in Brazil and therefore, fails to depart from the framework of Jewishness.^[66] By ignoring settler colonialism as a structural dimension in Palestine/Israel, left Zionist intellectuals have disregarded how it structures their own consciousness, identity and action. As Fanon has noted, it is the colonial structure that produces the colonial agents, not their individual practices.^[67]

Patrick Wolfe claimed the centrality of the binary cleavage between settler and native as the structural dialectical relationship from which it is possible to understand all the other multiple ramifications in a settler colonial situation such as Palestine/Israel.^[68] For indigenous peoples, which is true of Palestinians, positing the colonial relationship in binary terms as settler and native, oppressor and oppressed, still makes sense^[69] and is not in the least imaginary: it is how the ordering of populations in that territory was originally produced by the racist imperatives of the Zionist settlers and which continues to ground their material relations.

Identity is not something constructed from discourses and imaginations, but from material processes.^[70] Israeli settler colonialism created Palestinian indigeneity, which has recently re-emerged within the debates on Palestine and has become an important aspect of political mobilization – both national and global, constituting connections with other indigenous peoples’ struggles against settler colonialism.[71] However, interaction with the indigenous Palestinian population does not seem to have consequences for the nature and identity of liberal Zionists.

As Gabriel Piterberg notes, ‘what 'we’ have done is actually who 'we’ are’.^[72] Liberal Zionists, however, have grounded themselves in idealistic and particularistic interpretations of the material historical process, as in the case of the kibbutzim. By portraying it as a Zionist socialist utopian movement, they ignore the central role it played in securing the forcible colonisation of Palestinian land and building a settler society on the ruins of the indigenous one.^[73]

Historically, the radical left has fought against social forms that relied on nationalism to carry out oppressive practices such as colonialism, even those that claimed to be socialist. The rupture with the Second International at the beginning of the twentieth century resulted from disagreements that opposed communist and anti-colonial revolutionaries against European social democracy, which supported colonialism as a necessary step to achieve socialism in the peripheries.^[74]

This has been the central element in the historical position of anti-Zionists: the rejection of Zionism as the solution to the Jewish question. Colonialism has been a plural phenomenon in its methods and ideologies, but which are structurally based on the same racist logic of plunder, exploitation and dehumanisation, even when it declares its ‘humanitarian intent to promote the realisation of perpetual peace’.^[75] The plurality of Zionists who have had an impact on the material reality in Palestine represents the plurality that colonialism in general, and Zionist settler colonialism in particular, can assume.

Developed as a nationalist project for the "normalization" of Diaspora Jews around the time of their settlement in Palestine and the construction of a sovereign Jewish state in the territory, Zionism was never a movement aimed at the emancipation of anyone other than Jews themselves. Instead of rejecting the national paradigm at the root of their own exclusion in the quest for internationalist emancipation, as communist Jews did, Zionists reclaimed the very weapons of oppression that begat modern anti-Semitism for their national liberation outside of Europe. The subjugation of an indigenous people conferred upon Zionists recognition as equals by their former oppressors, the Europeans.^[76] Thus, Zionists merely reversed the game of exploitation of man by man.

The positivist interpretation of socialism was central to building the soft and paternalist strand of Zionist colonialism, as noted in the work of Borockov, a Marxist Zionist intellectual influential in leading socialist Zionist movements responsible for the establishment of Israel. Although Borockov identified somewhat with his Marxist anti-Zionist peers in the early twentieth century, such as Vladimir Medem and the Bund, socialist Zionists have always sought to distinguish themselves from Herzl's bourgeois and liberal Zionism on the one hand and from the anti-Zionism of the Bund and the Bolsheviks on the other.^[77]

Despite their differences, Zionists agreed on a territorialist solution to the Jewish question and on the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine based on the destruction of the native society. Borokhov saw the evolution of the productive forces toward a socialism led by the Jewish settlers as beneficial to the native society.^[78] Under a Marxist slant, Borockov reproduced the settler colonial ‘civilising’ discourse that was very much present in Herzl's work.

The population of Eretz Israel will adopt the new economic and cultural model of the country. The indigenous people will assimilate economically and culturally to those who will have assumed leadership of the development of the productive forces.^[79]

Borokhov's socialist Zionism supported inter-class Jewish solidarity above the international solidarity of the proletariat. As a result, the workers' movement became the spearhead of Zionist settler colonialism.

The Histadrut, the Zionist workers' union, was instrumental in building an exclusive settler economy separated from the native one by expelling Palestinians from the land and the labour market and laying the foundations for a Jewish state founded on the continuous exclusion and segregation of the indigenous population.^[80] The Histadrut went so far as to prevent class solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian workers under the auspices of the anti-Zionist Communist Party of Palestine.^[81]

Today, despite a weakening of the Zionist Left, the colonial structuring of solidarity was maintained. The focus of actions has remained on the class struggle among the settler community, as revealed in the 2011 demonstrations by liberal Israelis, to the detriment of solidarity with the Palestinians.^[82] Meanwhile, new softer and harsher forms of government have alternated in dispossessing the Palestinians, both heavily based on neoliberal relations since Oslo.^[83]

Various leftist movements around the world have adapted to new forms of (neo)liberal colonialism, such as the construction of the Belo Monte dam in Brazil by the PT government, which expropriated indigenous populations.^[84] Other forms include multicultural projects of socioeconomic inclusion and recognition that did not alter the racial structure of societies.^[85]

The Brazilian Zionist Left reproduces the colonial paternalism of Israeli liberals as the benevolent bearers of what would be the best alternative for the Palestinians. They defend an imaginary Zionism, which, in the end, is a fraud that serves as a ruse to combat the anti-Zionism of real Palestinians and Jews to ensure the perpetuation of the hegemony of liberal Zionism.

As such, they are part of what that Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes called a prolonged counter-revolution: a permanent effort by the Brazilian dependent bourgeoisie to mitigate the contradictions stemming from inequality and exclusion that are capable of becoming a revolutionary political force.^[86] Although an alignment between the Zionist elites and dependent bourgeoisie in Brazil is quite evident under Bolsonaro’s presidency, their association in the elimination of the Anti-Zionist Communist Left have facilitated the country’s subjection to US imperialism and proximity with Israeli interests since the 1930s. As will be demonstrated below, Zionist leaders did not extend ethnic-religious solidarity to those communist anti-Zionist Jews who were persecuted by the Brazilian State at different moments in history.

The Zionist Left acts elusively within the field of hegemony to co-opt and empty out the political content of the opposing project and thus contribute to the defence of Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian land. This type of action, which Gramsci called transformism,^[87] seeks to construct opponents, in other words, Palestinians, according to colonial perspectives.

Instead of anti-colonial revolutionaries who resort to anti-colonial rejection as a form of liberation from the place where colonial racism initially put them, the “Imaginary Israel” paradigm of the Zionist Left reduces Palestinians to (neo)liberal, rational and moderate human rights activists who maintain peaceful dialogue with their Israeli counterparts.^[88] This kind of reasoning, characteristic of neoliberal human rights^[89], reproduces colonial racism by keeping Palestinians confined to a place established by Zionists.

This counter-revolutionary praxis of the Zionist Left harks back to a historical position of European leftists who rejected the anti-colonial violence of the colonised and supported liberation in the colony merely as a by-product of revolution in the metropolis. In a 1957 article, Fanon condemns the French left for failing to understand how class struggle takes the form of national liberation in the colonial situation. For the Martinican intellectual, this lack of understanding of colonialism is what led the French to reduce the opposite of colonialism to ‘the individual scale of less racist, more open, more liberal behaviour’ and to criticise the ‘excesses’ of anti-colonial violence.^[90]

The pseudo-justification for this attitude is that in order to have an influence on French public opinion, certain facts must be condemned, the unexpected excrescences must be rejected, the ‘excesses’ must be disavowed. In these moments of crisis, of face-to-face opposition, the FLN is being asked to direct its violence and to make it selective.^[91]

Thus, Butler posits as grounds for cohabitation between Jews and Palestinians, rather than an 'easy multiculturalism … that the vast and violent hegemonic structure of political Zionism must cede its hold on those lands and populations”.^[92] Because of their settler colonial rationale, Zionist movements act to eliminate rejectionist anti-Zionist forms in order to maintain exclusivity over Jewish identity and Palestinian land. This is not to say that Zionists act with the same violence against Palestinians and other anti-Zionists, including Jews, but it is important to emphasise that these praxis are interconnected. As Butler notes,

though one needs to contest the hegemonic control Zionism exercises over Jewishness, one needs, equally, to contest the colonial subjugation Zionism has implied for the Palestinian people.^[93]

The movement for Palestinian national liberation is the one that currently represents, from the particular, universal emancipation, transcending its existence as part of the anti-imperialist struggle. Therefore, ethical Jewishness demands anti-Zionist practice and radical solidarity with the BDS anti-colonial rejection.

Anti-Zionist Jews and counter-revolution in Brazil

During the formation of the Brazilian Jewish community in the 1920s, politics was an important identity marker among Jews beyond their region of origin, ethnicity and religiosity.^[94] Despite a shared sense of fraternity and connections among them, Zionists and anti-Zionists constituted groups with antagonistic political projects and entities. While Zionists mobilized in favour of the Jewish colonization of Palestine and of lobbying the national elites, anti-Zionists favoured an integrationist and internationalist praxis aimed at the assimilation of Jews in Brazil and at their involvement in the workers’ movements.^[95]

Socialist Zionists position themselves between Zionist elites and the communist anti-Zionist movements. The socialist Zionists took part both in communist Jewish bodies, such as the BIBSA^[96], founded in 1915 by Bund and Marxist-Leninist militants,^[97] and in the Brazilian Zionist movement itself, disputing its direction.^[98] The anti-Zionist Jewish movement was present in Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Niteroi, and São Paulo.^[99]

In Rio de Janeiro, various organisations of communist Jews were established, such as BIBSA, the Abeter Kich popular kitchen, BRAZCOR^[100] and the Morris Wintschevsky Brazilian Workers' Centre. Jewish communitarian life had important interactions with other racially oppressed populations, such as Afro-Brazilians, and communist movements, especially the PCB. The PCB reorganisation conference in 1925 took place at the BIBSA building during the Carnival holiday to escape police surveillance.^[101]

This proximity resulted in the creation of the Jewish Sector in the PCB, linked to BIBSA. Its main function was to provide financial support and protection to communist Jews persecuted by the state. The Jewish Sector stressed the particularity of Jews in the Brazilian left, albeit as part of the internationalist struggle. There were also several communist Jews involved in the "general struggles" of the PCB, who played an important role in the failed communist uprising of 1935.^[102]

Divergences between Zionists and anti-Zionists grew around disputes in the educational field because of the absence of a strong social base for anti-Semitism in Brazil.^[103] Black and indigenous populations already functioned as the Other in Brazilian structural racism. Brazilian religious syncretism tolerated Judaism and Jewish immigrants were included in a state project to promote the whitening of Brazilian society in the early twentieth century. Therefore, Jews were not coerced to identify with the ‘homeland’ or with the Jewish community.^[104]

The linguistic dispute between Yiddish and Hebrew was the vehicle for conflict between Zionist and anti-Zionist political projects. The WZO conference of 1922 determined that Zionists should promote the hegemony of Hebrew in Jewish education to achieve hegemony over Jewish identity and its political action.^[105] In 1925, the JCA^[106], involved in the Jewish settlement in southern Brazil, came to support Hebrew teaching and Zionism.^[107] This resulted in a fracturing of the communal solidarity.

In 1928, faced with disputes over the direction and ideology of BIBSA, the communists expelled the Zionists.^[108] As a result, the Sholem Aleichem School, linked to BIBSA and the PCB, began to teach primarily in Yiddish and based on a materialist perspective.^[109]

According to a police report on the actions of Socialist Zionism and its leader, Aron Bergman, in fighting anti-Zionism:

... as for the Polaé Sion Socialist Party in Brazil, it was a socialist branch of the Zionist doctrine with the objective of helping workers in Palestine, limiting its activities in Brazil to a financial campaign Kapai Palestine Arbeiter Fond … It is worth noting, however, that this society was guided by an ideology antagonistic to communism. Aron Bergman … declaring himself a social democrat, having headed in 1929 a public demonstration against adherents of communism who, at the time, were meeting in Scholom Alechem.^[110] 

Despite this setback in the dispute with the communists and the rise of anti-Semitism in Brazil, the 1930s witnessed a consolidation of Zionism.^[111] The Estado Novo, which began in 1937, had a Nazi at the head of its political police and part of its social base formed by the Brazilian Integralist Movement, the largest fascist group outside Europe. In 1938, the dictatorship ordered the dissolution of all Zionist centres, and made it difficult for Jewish immigrants to enter the country.^[112]

However, there was no climate of fear and persecution against Jewish immigrants. Zionists easily adapted to the restrictions imposed by the government, adopting Brazilian names and promoting activities that eluded surveillance. Between 1933 and 1945, 24,000 Jews entered Brazil, which meant an increase of almost a third in the overall Jewish population.^[113]

The Estado Novo's main concern was the construction of an authentically Brazilian identity and the preservation of the ‘Brazilian family tradition’. Anti-Jewish hatred was an ideology restricted to small parts of the government and integralism.^[114] The dictatorship was mainly conservative, xenophobic and anti-communist. As a result, communist Jews were the most persecuted. That is, anti-Communism was a greater threat to Jews than anti-Semitism.^[115]

Communist Jews were arrested, tortured, murdered and deported. Olga Benário Prestes was deported to Europe and murdered in an extermination camp. The police closed BRAZCOR and raided BIBSA. The government mainly worked to stop the immigration of communist Jews, while tolerating that of Zionists.^[116] Presented as a nationalism with ambitions to colonise another country, Zionism was not perceived as a threat by the Estado Novo.^[117]

There were acts of Jewish solidarity during this period. However, Zionist groups tried to differentiate themselves from anti-Zionists and would lobby Brazilian elites to position themselves as the true representatives of the Jewish community.^[118] While building support from Brazil for the Jewish state in Palestine, Zionists sought to weaken anti-Zionist alternatives in the social base.

For example, Horácio Lafer, a prominent businessman and Zionist leader, refused to express his solidarity with persecuted communist Jews when questioned by the police. The Sholem Aleichem school suffered a police raid following the complaints of Zionist parents and at the I.L. Peretz School, Zionists tried to take over, resulting in confrontation and police intervention.^[119]

Indeed, Zionist elites started building their hegemony in the Jewish community and in Brazilian society during the repression of communist Jews. As a result, the Brazilian State lobbied and supported the partition plan for Palestine, which created the State of Israel in the UN General Assembly of 1947, presided by the Brazilian diplomat Oswaldo Aranha.

Violence and consent under Liberal Zionist Hegemony

Greater solidarity among Brazilian Jews only resumed when anti-Zionist groups, weakened by state violence, consented to the Zionist project in Palestine after the recognition of Israel by the USSR. Although they did not see Israel as the solution to the Jewish question, communists began to raise money to support the settlement and the Haganah.^[120] In the midst of a Zionist surge in the country, many anti-Zionists joined the ranks of Socialist Zionism, and communist organisations became more diffuse.

Amid the formation of the Zionist progressive-liberal hegemony, communists adopted a position better defined as non-Zionist than anti-Zionist. They stopped confronting the Zionist project, understood as unavoidable. For Jacob Gorender, an important PCB member:

Once the State of Israel became a reality and was recognised by the Soviet Union from the start, I never questioned Israel's right to exist as a state. But I have never considered the State of Israel to be the solution to the so-called Jewish question.^[121]

Though politically weakened, non-Zionist Jews still represented an important part of the community. They sought to compete for representation in Jewish entities to avoid unconditional support for Israel. At the same time, they organized new Jewish institutions to preserve Yiddish culture and mobilize new generations in national and internationalist struggles. The greatest example was the Casa do Povo^[122], founded in 1946 in São Paulo as a space for Jewish anti-fascist struggle.

The institution was an important cultural and political centre that also included another Sholem Aleichem School, a newspaper in Yiddish, a youth club and a theatre. The school became a highly regarded educational project, housing children of Jewish and non-Jewish workers, including members of the clandestine struggle against the military dictatorship (1964-1985).^[123]

In the beginning, Casa do Povo was composed of both communists and socialist Zionists. Internally, communists sought to maintain control of the institute to preserve it as non-Zionist; externally, they competed with other left-wing Zionist organizations for the hearts and minds of the Jewish community.

When the USSR took a belligerent stance towards Israel and in support of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, confrontation between communist and Zionist Jews increased in Brazil. Moments of international crisis were opportunities to contest the direction of Jewish organisations. In one such episode, the Zionists took over Casa do Povo under the leadership of Iankel Len.^[124]

Later, the communists succeeded in regaining control of the institution, which became directly linked to the Jewish Sector of the PCB. The head of the Jewish Sector was also director of Casa do Povo.^[125] This link was fundamental for the activities of communist Jews to continue after the military coup of 1964. Confrontation grew after 1967 when the Jewish Sector publicly accused Israel of acting in an imperialist manner leaving it isolated from the rest of the community and representative bodies, which cut off all political and financial support.

Although socialist Zionists also participated in campaigns against the dictatorship, a large part of them chose to emigrate to Israel during this period.^[126] Non-Zionist communists remained in the resistance and once again suffered greater persecution, imprisonment, torture and murder by the regime. Once more, Jewish communists could not count on the support of representative entities in their community as these preferred to maintain good relations with the dictatorship. Left Zionist militants were protected by agreements between Zionist institutions and the military regime.[127] State anti-Communism, supported by the bourgeoise, in the context of the Cold War remained a greater threat to Jews than any form of anti-Semitism.

The Jewish Sector and the PCB took a hard blow in 1975, when the dictatorship targeted ten PCB party leaders for assassination and persecuted dozens of militants, among them ten teachers from the Sholem Aleichem School. Jewish journalist Vladimir Herzog was murdered as a result of being tortured during the persecution of communist Jews. His death was an important turning point that led to popular mobilisation and contributed to the eventual decline of the dictatorship. It was also a moment that attracted solidarity from liberal Zionists, such as Rabbi Henry Sobel. However, it did not put an end to hostilities with organised non-Zionist Jews.

Faced with the persecution of the dictatorship, isolation imposed by Zionist institutions and the socio-economic rise of Jews who, being well integrated into Brazilian whiteness, left their neighbourhoods of origin for upper scale areas, the non-Zionist communist movement lost its social base.^[128] As a result, the Sholem Aleichem school closed in 1979. A group of communist Jews under the leadership of Max Altman, who presided over the Casa do Povo between 1965 and 1979, understood that the non-Zionist Jewish cycle had reached its end.^[129] It is fair to say that these events were in the interest both of the military regime and the Zionist elites.    

In 1982, during a large demonstration against the massacre of Sabra and Shatila at Casa do Povo, oppositionists set fire to Altman's car amid clashes that took over the streets.^[130] Faced with the Zionist siege of Casa do Povo, the communists left the institution, which in turn endorsed a progressive-liberal Zionist hegemony during the Brazilian democratisation process in the 1980s. The institution eventually lost relevance, deteriorated, and ended up closing its doors. Although it reopened in 2011, present day Casa do Povo is made up of docile non-Zionist Jewish institutions that consent to Israeli settler colonial sovereignty over Palestinian territory.

Therefore, it is possible to see how the liberal Zionist hegemony was built and maintained through violent action against the anti-Zionist alternatives that confronted Zionism – from above, by the anti-communist state, and from below by the Zionist movements, including those on the left, through the denunciation, isolation, expulsion and deconversion of communist Jews. That is, a hegemony, as Gramsci understood it, secured in the last instance by coercion when cultural disputes proved insufficient.

It is important to note how the decline of the non-Zionist Jewish movement coincided with the consolidation of the Brazilian Palestinian movement. In 1980 FEPAL^[131] is created as the official representation of Palestinians to the PLO. Soon after, the Palestinian movement becomes the main target of Zionists, including progressive ones. Rabbi Sobel declared in 1985 that a meeting of Palestinian youth that took place that year was for "training terrorists".^[132]

The resurgence of anti-Zionist movements

The class conciliation and pragmatism that characterised foreign policy under the New Republic (1988-2016), particularly the period when the PT was in power between 2003 and 2016, ensured the hegemony of liberal Zionism until the early 2010s. However, the persistence of grassroots mobilisations by Palestinians and radical left movements during the 1990s and 2000s allowed Brazilians to respond to the Palestinians' call for solidarity and BDS in 2005.

In 2007, leftist activists and members of the Palestinian movement who were part of the radical left opposition to the Lula government formed Mopat.^[133] The first campaign by the BDS Brazil movement was against the Free Trade Agreement between Mercosur^[134] and Israel signed in the same year.^[135] Simultaneously, there was a strengthening of Fepal, an organisation that is closer to the moderate left and the PT administration. In 2010, Brazil recognizes the Palestinian state. 

In 2011, the World Social Forum-Palestine held in Brazil allowed for the transnational meeting of activists in defence of Palestine and served as an opportunity for the creation of new movements in the country, such as the FFIPP-Brazil.^[136] This organisation, whose scope in Brazilian society extends beyond ethnic-national identity, has served as an incubator for a new generation of anti-Zionist Jews.

This group promoted an important demonstration in front of the Israeli Consulate in São Paulo against the 2014 Gaza Strip massacre, which marked the return of anti-Zionist Jews to the political scene of the Brazilian left.^[137] Organised as a result of the international radicalisation of the Palestinian struggle after the Second Intifada, this new generation of anti-Zionist Jews is a true representation of Brazilian radicalisation after June 2013, as opposed to the counter-revolutionary Zionist left that emerges against Bolsonaro in 2017.

However, the active gatekeeping of the Zionist Left, in alignment with the bourgeoise’s interests in maintaining closer ties with Israel for military-security technology and agriculture trade purposes, has prevented more Jews and Leftist organizations from joining the ranks of the new anti-Zionist pro-Palestine movements.

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen how the Zionist left combats the radicalism of the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians and also of Jews and non-Jews on the left. The result is the confinement of the opposition to a docile anti-anti-Zionism that is submitted to the hegemony of liberal Zionist colonialism.

The discursive frauds of the Zionist left find support among liberal Jews and Brazilian left-liberals used to conciliation with the national bourgeoisie and conservatism in foreign policy. In this way, left Zionists ally themselves with the interests of the dependent bourgeoisie and act as gatekeepers, preventing Jews and other militants of the moderate Brazilian left from assuming a more radical anti-Zionist position.

The ‘deconversion’ and exclusion of left Zionists that we are witnessing in the Jewish-Zionist community constitutes the reproduction of the old hegemonic logic of the Zionist movement in Brazil that used to be directed only toward anti-Zionist Jews. Faced with the new configurations of anti-communism under the rise of the new right in 2010, the Zionist left begins to receive the same treatment as the anti-Zionists it helps exclude.

Moreover, Zionists lose sight of the real new anti-Semitism because of the exclusion from their analysis of the dynamics of colonialism and racism. Israelis’ alliance with imperialism and resulting positioning as defenders of Judeo-Christian civilization has rendered Jewish identity racially privileged. The contemporary Brazilian right continues to confine the Jew to a fixed identity, though no longer a negative one. The essentialist positive spin that instrumentalises Jews for the anti-communist and Islamophobic political project of the extreme right serves only to invert the polarity of the racialisation of the Jews but does not break with anti-Semitism.

Therefore, the Zionist Left does not work to dismantle anti-Semitism but mainly to preserve soft colonialism in Palestine and Brazil. Recognizing the centrality of colonialism against Palestinians in the formation of contemporary Jewish identity is an important step in the decolonization of both Palestine and Jewishness.

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Halper, Jeff 2021, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State, 1^a edição., Pluto Press.

Honig-Parnass, Tikva 2011, False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Huberman, Bruno and Arturo Hartmann 2017, ‘A normalização de um crime: quando Duvivier, Bolsonaro, Wyllis e Crivella estão no mesmo campo’, Revista Fórum, available at:https://revistaforum.com.br/blogs/arabizando/a-normalizacao-de-um-crime….

IBI 2019, ‘Colaboradores do IBI promovem encontro com Pai Rodnei de Oxóssi e Djamila Ribeiro’, IBI - Instituto Brasil Israel, available at:http://institutobrasilisrael.org/noticias/noticias/colaboradores-do-ibi….

Iokoi, Zilda Márcia Gricoli 2004, Intolerância e Resistência.A Saga dos Judeus Comunistas Entre a Polônia, a Palestina e o Brasil, São Paulo: Humanitas.

Jaichand, Vinodh and Alexandre Andrade Sampaio 2013, ‘Dam and be damned: the adverse impacts of Belo Monte on indigenous peoples in Brazil’, Hum. Rts. Q., 35, 408.

Justice Ministery 2015, ‘São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro sediarão conferência entre palestinos e israelenses’, available at: https://www.justica.gov.br/news/sao-paulo-e-rio-de-janeiro-sediarao-con….

Kelemen, Paul 2012, The British Left and Zionism: History of a Divorce, Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press.

Kruchin, Rafael 2018, ‘Os 70 anos da fundação do Estado de Israel: podemos conversar?’, Nexo Jornal, available at:https://www.nexojornal.com.br/ensaio/2018/Os-70-anos-da-funda%C3%A7%C3%…

Kuperman, Esther 2003, ‘ASA – Gênese e trajetória da esquerda judaica não sionista carioca’, Revista Espaço Accadêmico, 28, 13.

Lockman, Zachary 1996, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Losurdo, Domenico 2020, ‘O sionismo e a tragédia do povo palestino’, in Colonialismo e luta anticolonial: Desafios da revolução no século XXI, edited by Jones Manoel, São Paulo: Boitempo.

Lowy, Michael 2017, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, translated by Hope Heaney, London: Verso.

Marcossi, Bianca Albuquerque 2018, ‘Entre fantasmas, esperanças e crenças: a angústia do “sionismo de esquerda” no Brasil’, Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ.

Massad, Joseph 2006, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, New York: Routledge.

Moraes, Luís Edmundo de Souza 2014, ‘Pode haver racismo na esquerda? Um estudo de caso’, História (São Paulo), 33(2), 217–49.

Morais, Lecio and Alfredo Saad-Filho 2005, ‘Lula and the Continuity of Neoliberalism in Brazil: Strategic Choice, Economic Imperative or Political Schizophrenia?’, Historical Materialism, 13(1), 3–32.

Neto, Sydenham Lourenço 2008, ‘Imigrantes Judeus no Brasil, marcos políticos de identidade.’, Locus, 14(2), 15.

Nevel, Donna 2020, ‘On Corbyn and accusations of antisemitism’, Mondoweiss, available at:https://mondoweiss.net/2020/12/on-corbyn-and-accusations-of-antisemitis…

Oliveira, Luciana Garcia de 2018, ‘A diáspora palestina no Brasil - a FEPAL: trajetórias, reivindicações e desdobramentos (2000 - 2012)’, São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo.

Piterberg, Gabriel 2008, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, London ; New York: Verso Books.

R7 2016, ‘Candidato apoiado por Freixo queimou bandeira de Israel e dos EUA em ato público’, R7, available at:https://noticias.r7.com/eleicoes-2016/rio-de-janeiro/candidato-apoiado-….

Shafir, Gershon 1996, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sorj, Bernardo 2010, ‘Sociabilidade Brasileira e Identidade Judaica: As Origens de uma cultura não anti-semita’, in Judaísmo para o século XXI: o rabino e o sociólogo, edited by Bernardo Sorj and Nilton Bonder, Centro Edelstein.

Traverso, Enzo 2018, The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate, Boston: Brill.

Veja 2017, ‘Bolsonaro é acusado de racismo por frase em palestra na Hebraica’, Veja, available at:https://veja.abril.com.br/brasil/bolsonaro-e-acusado-de-racismo-por-fra….

Whyte, Jessica 2019, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, London: Verso Books.

Wolfe, Patrick 2013, ‘Recuperating Binarism: a heretical introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–04), 257–79.

Wyllys, Jean 2015, ‘Crônica desde Israel e Palestina’, Revista Digital do NIEJ, 5(9), 58.

[1] Socialism and Liberty Party.

[2]  Quilombolas are black populations descended from former slaves who obtained their freedom and settled in territories throughout the country to form autonomous and self-managed communities called quilombos. The same legal framework that preserves indigenous reserves protects Quilombola territories.

[3] Veja 2017.

[4] Grin, Gherman, and Caraciki 2019.

[5] Gherman 2017.

[6] Ibid

[7] Honig-Parnass 2011; Finkelstein 2012; Kelemen 2012.

[8] Englert 2018.

[9] Balthaser 2020, pp. 462–462.

[10] Neto 2008.

[11] Iokoi 2004; Lowy 2017; Clemesha 1998.

[12] Gherman 2018.

[13] World Zionist Organization.

[14] Bartel 2015.

[15] Ibid

[16] Grin 2017; Grin (ed.) 2008.

[17] Estado Novo, New State, was a dictatorship, which ruled Brazil between 1937 and 1945.

[18] Grin (ed.) 2008.

[19] Grin 2017.

[20] Brazilian Communist Party.

[21] Gherman 2018.

[22] Iokoi 2004.

[23] Workers Party.

[24] Gherman 2018.

[25] Moraes 2014.

[26] Huberman and Hartmann 2017.

[27] Gherman 2018, pp. 9–12.

[28] ibid., p. 12.

[29] Grin, Gherman, and Caraciki 2019.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Carvalho 2021.

[33] Finkielkraut 1997.

[34] Gherman 2017.

[35] ibid.

[36] Brazil-Israel Institute.

[37] Gherman and Thomaz 2018.

[38] Firs 2021.

[39] Marcossi 2018.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Grin, Gherman, and Caraciki 2019.

[42] Halper 2021.

[43] Kruchin 2018.

[44] Fernandes 2019.

[45] Gherman and Grin 2016, p. 48.

[46] Fernandes 2019.

[47] Losurdo 2020.

[48] Nevel 2020.

[49] Amigos Brasileiros do Paz Agora 2011.

[50] Morais and Saad-Filho 2005.

[51] R7 2016.

[52]Fernandes 2019.

[53]United Socialist Workers’ Party.

[54] Israelite Confederation of Brazil.

[55] Wyllys 2015.

[56] Marcossi 2018.

[57] Wyllys 2015, p. 47.

[58] ibid., p. 46.

[59] Marcossi 2018, p. 176.

[60] Quoted in ibid., p. 175.

[61] Huberman and Hartmann 2017.

[62] Justice Ministery 2015.

[63] IBI 2019.

[64] Butler 2012, p. 1.

[65] ibid., p. 2.

[66] It is revealing how Zionist left repeatedly demands the end of the occupation as a way to save Israel and not bring freedom to the Palestinians , very well expressed in the movement Save Israel, Stop the Occupation, of important penetration in the Brazilian Zionist left.  

[67] Fanon 1994.

[68] Wolfe 2013.

[69] Barakat 2018.

[70] Hall 2011.

[71] Amara and Hawari 2019.

[72] Piterberg 2008, p. xvi.

[73] Shafir 1996.

[74] This position, it is important to emphasize, derives from the contradictory reflections of Marx himself concerning colonialism in countries such as India and has been criticized by Edward Said, among others. However, this support for colonialism would later be revised by Marx and Engels, as demonstrated by Kevin Anderson in ‘Marx at the Margins’ 2016.

[75] Losurdo 2020.

[76] Massad 2006.

[77] Traverso 2018.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Borokhov 1920, p. 271 quoted Traverso 2018, p. 125.

[80] Englert 2020; Lockman 1996.

[81] Lockman 1996.

[82] Englert 2020.

[83] Haddad 2016.

[84] Jaichand and Sampaio 2013.

[85] Coulthard 2014.

[86] Fernandes 2020.

[87] Coutinho 2012.

[88] Haddad 2016.

[89] Whyte 2019.

[90] Fanon 1994, p. 83.

[91] ibid., pp. 80–81.

[92] Butler 2012, p. 4.

[93] ibid.

[94] Neto 2008.

[95] Iokoi 2004; Bartel 2015.

[96] Sholem Aleichem Library.

[97] Kuperman 2003.

[98] Bartel 2015.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Jewish Red Help.

[101] Kuperman 2003.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Sorj, Sorj, and Bonder 2010.

[104] Ibid,

[105] Bartel 2015, pp. 207–8.

[106] Jewish Colonization Association

[107] Bartel 2015.

[108] Contributing to this conflict is the growing involvement of the Communists with Stalin's promise to create a Jewish Autonomous Zone in Birobjian (Kuperman 2003).

[109] Kuperman 2003.

[110] Quoted in Iokoi 2004, p. 174.

[111] Cytrynowicz 2002.

[112] Bartel 2015.

[113] Cytrynowicz 2002.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Sorj 2010.

[116] Iokoi 2004.

[117] Bartel 2015.

[118] ibid.; Neto 2008.

[119] Neto 2008.

[120] Bartel 2015.

[121] Quoted in Iokoi 2004, p. 350.

[122]  The “People’s House” official name was ICIB - Brazilian Israelite Cultural Institute and it was filiated to the ICUF - Iídicher Cultur Farband.

[123] Iokoi 2004.

[124] Altman 2021.

[125] Ibid.

[126] Grin (ed.) 2008.

[127]Gherman 2022.

[128] Iokoi 2004; Bahia 2011; Altman 2021.

[129] Altman 2021.

[130] Ibid.

[131] Arab-Palestinian Federation of Brazil.

[132] Oliveira 2018.

[133] Palestine for All Movement. 

[134] Southern Common Market.

[135] Clemesha 2008.

[136] Education Network for Human Rights in Palestine/Israel.

[137] Dichtchekenian 2014.

ISSUE 26(2): IDENTITY POLITICS

This paper explores contemporary Jewish identity-formation, identity politics, and the centrality of state-sanctioned commemoration of the Nazi genocide and Zionism – understood as the ongoing settler-colonial project aimed at the formation and maintenance of a Jewish-exclusivist state in Palestine – to both. It argues that dominant identity politics within the Jewish community are based on an understanding of identity, one which assumes it to be static and individual.

Firstly, this paper discusses the importance of studying processes of identification rather than assuming identity to be static, a-historical, or immutable. It argues that the state is a central actor in structuring processes of identification from above, and that it is in the contested relationship between the state and the population which it attempts to identify that identities are continuously re-created. It further places these processes within the emergence of European modernity and colonialism.

The paper then moves on to a discussion of modern processes of Jewish identification. It locates their origin within the emergence of the European nation-state. It highlights the different, and often opposing ways in which Jewish communities have historically responded to these state-led processes. The paper moves on to discussing how a political framework focussed on a fixed Jewish identity, and the centrality of Israel to that identity, has become dominant in recent years.

The paper then offers a critique of the classical Marxist approach to the Jewish question before analysing the development of new processes of identification of Jewish people in the West. Central to these are the strategic role of the Israeli state in the Middle East, and the crucial nature of official Holocaust history to Western self-representation.

Finally, the paper argues that contemporary Western states perpetuate antisemitism, albeit under a different guise, through the essentialisation of Jewish communities as an extension of the Zionist project in Palestine and as bearers of official state-sanctioned history. In doing so, the state mobilises these communities as representatives of its policies abroad, and discriminatory policies at home.

The paper’s conclusion is that far from operating as a shield against antisemitism, the state remains the central agent in the reproduction of antisemitism. The identification of many within the Jewish community with Israel and the Zionist project in Palestine, and with an official account of the Nazi genocide that whitewashes Western states, is an outcome of state processes of identification. The paper will focus mainly on Anglo-Saxon realities and examples, especially the UK but also the US, which constitute the largest and the fourth-largest Jewish communities outside of Israel. Additionally, the two states’ historic and contemporary role in supporting the Zionist movement in Palestine warrants this focus. 

Identity, Identification, and the Role of the State

The questions of narratives, history, and structures of power run throughout the literature on identity. In ‘Who Needs Identity?’, Stuart Hall discusses the tension between approaches to identity that favour either innate characteristics or long-term processes of identity-formation. Hall writes: 

In common sense language, identification is constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance established on this foundation. In contrast with the ‘naturalism’ of this definition, the discursive approach sees identification as a construction, a process never completed – always ‘in process’. It is not determined in the sense that it can always be ‘won’ or ‘lost’, sustained or abandoned.[1]

Identity, then, appears as a natural, intrinsic reality that is shared by members of the same group. It is experienced as a-historic and innate, a fundamental element at the heart of the individual’s sense of self, which has always been there and through which the experience of society is mediated. However, Hall invites his readers to look further and to reflect on the processes which create and re-create identities. Identities, then, for Hall are neither individual nor pre-existing categories. They are outcomes of contingent processes across society and through time.

If identities are so socially constituted, the question remains of who, or what, generates and shapes them. Lawrence Grossberg argues that ‘the question of identity is one of social power and its articulation to, its anchorage in, the body of the population itself’.[2] He locates the origins of this process within the emergence of modernity – an issue to which this paper returns below.

If Grossberg’s concept of ‘social power’ remains as vague as Hall’s ‘material and symbolic resources’, it points to an important aspect of the identification process: that power is required to generate identities across society, and that it is in the process of articulation of said power in the collective body of the ‘identified’ that identity emerges. Grossberg compares this tension between coercive power and popular consent to Marx’s formulation that people make history but not in conditions of their own choosing.[3] Identity is, then, the outcome of a power struggle between processes of identification from above and collective articulation of those processes from below, which generate and regenerate outcomes, always anew.

The extreme contingency of identity-formation and the fundamentally contradictory ways in which identity is understood, both in society and within the academic literature, has led others to reject the term altogether and focus on the process and its actors instead. Indeed, Roger Brubaker and Frederick Cooper argue in ‘Beyond “Identity”’ that the term itself has lost all explanatory power by being mobilised to denote not only different, but also opposing concepts, and that it should therefore be abandoned altogether. Instead, they propose to separate out the different elements contained within the concept of identity, and to talk about the processes of identification.

Furthermore, Brubaker and Cooper identify the modern state as a critical actor in this process of identification, not because it can create ‘identities’ in the strong sense – in general, it cannot – but because it has the material and symbolic resources to impose the categories, classificatory schemes, and modes of social counting and accounting with which bureaucrats, judges, teachers, and doctors must work and to which non-state actors must refer.[4]

This centrality of the state in the structuring of the categories of identification is also a key aspect of the settler-colonial literature. Indeed, the question of identification – and racialisation more specifically – of the indigenous and enslaved populations by the settler-colonial state is a central aspect of this growing body of work. Furthermore, much like Grossberg above, scholars of settler-colonialism locate the origins of racialisation in the emergence of European modernity and the nation-state.

For example, Paula Chakravarty and Denise Ferreira da Silva have noted that racialisation was central to European colonialism because "[i]n the post-Enlightenment era, once universality and historicity became ethical descriptors of the properly human, then the task of justifying how rights such as life (security) and freedom had not been ensured for all human beings required that human difference … become irresolvable."[5]

In the same vein, Wolfe writes:

Racial identities are constructed in and through the very process of their enactment … [R]ace is colonialism speaking, in idioms whose diversity reflects the variety of unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted conquered populations.[6]

Wolfe argues, in Traces of History, that the structuring of different racial characteristics, based on different populations’ role within the colonial system of exploitation and land expropriation, was a central concern of European settler-colonial (and colonial) states.

Processes of identification, including racialisation, operate within categories structured by the state. By mobilising these categories the state is able to exercise control, distribute rights, and facilitate exploitation, expropriation and exclusion. It is in this tension between the attempted imposition by the state of those categories and the response – of rejection or acquiescence – by the identified, that identities emerge.

The analytical task then is to locate the processes of identification, its agents, and the ways in which the identified integrate, subvert, or reject the categories that they are being subjected to. It is to these tasks, in the case of Jewish communities in the West, that this paper now turns.

The European State, the Settler-colony, and Jewish Identity

The emergence of modern antisemitism – as opposed to pre-capitalist Christian judeophobia – can be traced back, much like the processes of racialisation discussed above, to the emergence of the nation-state. Indeed, as Enzo Traverso has pointed out, the emergence of the nation, unlike the multinational and multi-confessional empires that preceded it, ‘viewed every ethnic, linguistic or religious minority as an obstacle that it sought to overcome, by championing policies of assimilation or exclusion’.[7]

The need to unify the nation around a singular history, culture, religion, and/or language placed Jews decisively outside of the new emerging national body. More than that, it categorised the Jew as the enemy of the nation. The ‘international Jew’, always on the move within diasporic networks, neither constrained by the borders of the state nor loyal to the emerging nation, became the central theme of the emerging antisemitic propaganda of the late nineteenth century. It also captured the anxieties of European populations confronted with the rise of capitalism, rapid urbanisation, and the transformation of their livelihood through processes of primitive accumulation that separated them from the land.[8]

Similarly, Wolfe has argued that the emergence of the nation-state in Europe was accompanied by the creation of a ‘monolithic Jewishness’.[9] Whereas, feudal states had relied on so-called court Jews and their networks for finance and trade (see below), the promise of emancipation at the hands of the state that followed the French Revolution homogenised Jewish communities and in the process laid the basis for them to be, collectively, identified as external to the emerging nation. Wolfe places this contradictory process in the continuity of colonial classifications of Black populations in the United States:

In both cases, uniformity would come to be constructed genetically, as an ineradicable hereditary mystique, common to every member of the persecuted community; a collective though not always visible mark of Cain.  

The emergence of the nation-state, which placed the Jew firmly outside of its limits, was accompanied by the application of colonial processes of racialisation to explain this exclusion. The modern state then promised emancipation through assimilation within the nation, while simultaneously barring access to the national body for Jewish communities through their racialisation.

In the face of the emergence of these structures of identification from above, different political responses developed from within the Jewish communities of Western and Eastern Europe. On the one hand, a cultural conflict emerged between the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), which argued for the full assimilation of Jews within the nation-state, and the orthodoxy that remained faithful to its cultural and religious traditions. On the other hand, political strife developed between the revolutionary traditions associated with Bolshevik, Bundist, Anarchist or reformist currents, which saw in the Jewish exclusion from the nation-state an internationalist potential for its very destruction, and the emerging Zionist movement. The Zionists, on which more below, argued that it was only with the creation of a Jewish nation-state, developed through colonisation, that the so-called Jewish question could be resolved, by ‘normalising’ Jewish life and joining the family of European nation-states.[10]

Much more could be said about these competing movements (see below), but for now it will suffice to point out that modern antisemitism emerged out of the formation of the nation-state, and that in response to the state’s exclusion and racialisation of Jewish populations a plethora of political, cultural and religious responses developed. There were then not one, but a multitude of processes of identification that emerged out of different, often competing, responses to the state’s structural categorisation of Jews.

Contemporary Debates on Jewish Identities and the Modern Monolith

The variety of responses to state-led structures of identification applied to Jewish communities is highly relevant to contemporary debates surrounding Jewishness. Indeed, Jewish identity is increasingly portrayed as monolithic, static and a-temporal within the Jewish community. For example, Mick Davies, chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council in the UK, explained to the Home Affairs Committee that

Zionism is so totally identified with how the Jew thinks of himself, and is so associated with the right of the Jewish people to have their own country and to have self-determination within that country, that if you attack Zionism, you attack the very fundamentals of how the Jews believe in themselves.[11]

Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, propounds the same argument, put this time in religious terms:

Zionism has been an integral part of Judaism from the dawn of our faith. … We have prayed towards Israel. Open any prayer book and you will find Israel jumping out at you. It is the centre of what we are. As a result – further to a political development in the latter part of the 19th century through which Zionism gained an added dimension, spelling out the right of the Jewish people to live within secure borders with self-determination in their own country, which they had been absent from for 2,000 years – that is what Zionism is. If you are an anti-Zionist, you are anti everything I have just mentioned.[12]

This approach to Jewish identity, and therefore to antisemitism and the place of Jews within European society, stands in stark contrast to the discussion above about the origins of antisemitism in the European nation-state, and the multitude of different, and often opposed, responses to it from within the Jewish population. Indeed, if this reading of Jewishness and antisemitism is to be taken at face value, the revolutionary, assimilationist, and orthodox religious traditions within European Judaism, all of which rejected the colonial project of Zionist nation-building (for different reasons), should be considered within the realm of antisemitic thought and action. It appears that the approach to the process of identification carries important political significance.

Indeed, in his Judaïsme et Révolution, Ivan Segré argues that there exists a deep tug of war within the history of Jewish thought, both secular and religious. He identifies a tension between a revolutionary, universalist, and dialectical reading of Judaism and a counter-revolutionary, ethno-centrist, and static one. Segré argues that both in the religious and political field, from Maimonides to Benny Levy, there exists a strand of Jewish thought that struggles to fix its identity once and for all in a literal and a-historic space. To this he contrasts a dialectical reading of the Letter, associated with the sages of the Talmud and St Paul, which leads it to always re-invent and regenerate itself through contact with its surroundings. Segré argues for a return to a dialectical and – in his view – revolutionary reading of Jewish identity against the tide of reaction.

Similarly, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin straddles the religious and the political to challenge the dominant portrayal of Jewish identity. He points out that the view of the Jews as perpetually out of place in their host-societies, and therefore in need of returning to ‘where they came from’, is in fact a judeophobic Christian concept exogenous to Jewish thought. Raz-Krakotzkin argues that before the advent of modern Zionism, exile was an existential claim in Jewish theology that could not be solved physically. Indeed, he points out that ‘[t]he Jewish communities that lived in Palestine before Zionism described themselves as “in exile in the land of Israel”’.[13] In this reading, contrary to Rabbi Mirvis’s view, the history of a people perpetually out of place and the idea of a physical return appear as modern constructs of a Jewish identity shaped by the political necessities of the Zionist project.

However, statistical data collected both in the US and the UK points to the fact that Mirvis and Davies are not alone in positing the centrality of the state of Israel to the formation of Jewish identity. For example, 93% of British Jews feel that ‘Israel plays some role in/is important to/is central to [their] Jewish identity’,[14] and 69% of US Jews feel ‘emotionally attached to Israel’.[15]

This raises a series of questions about Jewish communities in the West: what are the processes of identification, from above and below, that have taken place, which can help explain the emergence of what appears to be the increasingly monolithic understanding of Jewishness? Does the space for conflicting identities still exist or has it truly been narrowed down to an increasingly single one? And what are the political ramifications of these processes for anti-racist political action today?

It is to these questions that the paper now turns, by discussing the development of Jewish identification by Western states and their responses throughout the last century.

Marxism and the Jewish Question

The classical Marxist tradition was the first to develop a materialist framework to analyse what it has called the Jewish question: the reasons behind the survival of Judaism for thousands of years despite its existence as a minority faith in starkly different societies, and the rise of modern antisemitism in the nineteenth century.

Much of the literature on the question had relied on idealist or teleological assumptions about the strength of the Jewish faith, Messianic expectations, or the yearning for an eventual ‘return’ to the Promised Land. At the same time, antisemitism was understood as an a-historical and universal reality, present at all times, and located within competing religious frameworks (see above). In this view, Jews were an essentialised people, always foreign to, and rejected by, the host society, who survived by clinging to their faith or nationhood in the expectation of – secular or miraculous – liberation. An approach, rooted in Christian Judeophobic prejudice, which, as discussed above, remains present to this day.

In stark contrast to this approach, Marx put forward a framework of analysis that understood the Jewish people – like other peoples – as continuously made and re-made by history and the prevailing economic and political structures within which they operate. In his famous essay On the Jewish Question, this approach is summarised in the simple statement that ‘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’.[16] The longevity of Judaism, for Marx, is neither an aberration of history nor a miraculous feat; it is the product of specific historical processes.

Through the economic and political roles they played in these societies, based on mercantile activity and money-lending, Jews were preserved as an entity separate from the rest of society. Although widely criticised for the language he used,[17] Marx’s approach to the Jewish question put forward the beginning of a materialist analysis of Jewish history and modern antisemitism, while simultaneously arguing for the need to struggle against it.

Marx’s thesis was developed further by Abram Leon, a young Jewish Marxist writing in hiding in Nazi-occupied Belgium. Leon’s The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation expanded, detailed and developed Marx’s basic insights into the history of the Jewish people and the realities of modernantisemitism. Echoing Marx, Leon argued that

It is not the loyalty of the Jews to their faith which explains their preservation as a distinct social group; on the contrary it is their preservation as a distinct social group which explains their attachment to their faith.[18]

He developed the idea that for the majority of their history, Jewish people constituted a people-class, which reproduced itself through their specific economic roles within the different societies they inhabited. Jews were therefore not a foreign entity within these societies, but an integral part of their socio-economic organisation.

The advent of capitalism was to be, in Leon’s work, the historic period during which the economic tasks previously reserved to the Jewish people-class became universal. Mercantile and financial activity moved from the periphery to the centre of the economy. The economic base for the historic survival of Judaism was disappearing and Jews were being assimilated in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe however, where the decay of feudalism and the rise of capitalism were held in a lasting balance, Jews were trapped between semi-proletarianisation and emigration. As they emigrated to the West, they brought with them a Jewish reality, which had, Leon argued, by and large disappeared in those countries. The new bourgeois order rejected them.[19]

These approaches, by Marx and Leon, as well as by others in the classical Marxist tradition, from Kautsky to Trotsky, have been criticised more recently for their over-emphasis of the economic unity of Jewish communities and the economic nature of the Jewish question. What remains from their contribution, however, is their emphasis on the material basis that generated a Jewish identity as opposed to a set, pre-existing, and naturalised one.

For example, Maxime Rodinson[20] pointed out that there was little evidence for the validity of Leon’s people-class argument before the period of the Crusades. More significantly, in his The Marxists and the Jewish Question, Enzo Traverso argues that the classical Marxist tradition’s economism in addressing the Jewish question led it to develop major blind spots: an over-emphasis on class over people in the people-class formulation, and an exaggeratedly economistic approach to historicising Jewishness andantisemitism.

Classical Marxism therefore also assumed that the elimination of the economic specificity and ghettoisation of Jewish communities would lead both to full assimilation into the surrounding population and the disappearance of antisemitism. Traverso wrote:

Leon remained the prisoner of a vision of assimilation inherited from the Enlightenment, which did not interpret the entry of the Jews into the modern world as a metamorphosis of Judaism, but quite simply as the annulation of Jewish otherness.[21]

Indeed, the economism of the classical Marxists blinded them to the differing political realities of Jewish populations in Europe.

In the East, the tearing-down of the Ghetto walls, the development of economic centres, and the proletarianisation of the Jewish masses in the towns and cities of the Pale of settlements – roughly the area covering modern Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine, where nearly half of the world’s Jewish population lived at the turn of the twentieth century – did not lead to assimilation.

On the contrary, the Eastern-European Jewish masses developed simultaneously a class and a national consciousness which gave birth to a Yiddish revival as well as to the Bund, a mass Jewish workers’ organisation that would play a central role in the development of Russian Social Democracy.[22]

In the West, where the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had promised emancipation and equal rights as citizens to the Jews, the situation was reversed. Jewish communities tended to try to assimilate. They spoke the national language, and participated in the intellectual, cultural and official institutions of the nation.

Whether atheist or religious, they tended to enact the words of the poet Yehuda Leib Gordon, which became a slogan for the Haskalah: ‘Be a Jew at home and a man in the street.’ However, this process did not lead to the disappearance of antisemitism. In fact, quite the contrary was true and the emerging state played a key role in this process (see above).

Indeed, it was Tsarist antisemitic decrees that concentrated Jews in the Pale. This concentration made the development of a national feeling, based on a shared language, culture and geographical area possible.[23] Similarly, as discussed above, it was the collapse of the old empires and the rise of the nation-state which posed the Jewish question in the West around suspicions of split loyalties, and accusations of a Jewish identity lying beyond the boundaries of newly-constructed national myths of origin. Finally, the barriers to Jewish land-ownership, enforced by the state, concentrated Jews disproportionately in towns and cities, locating them at the heart of the newly-emerging capitalist order.

The classical Marxist tradition then made an important contribution by highlighting the material processes of Jewish identification, and modern antisemitism. It was however unable to reach the full breadth of its own method because of its excessive focus on economic processes and its acceptance of the Enlightenment’s promise of assimilation. These adjustments are crucial to understanding the formation of modern Jewish identification and the resurgence of antisemitism, as discussed below.

The Nazi Genocide, Zionism and Denied Assimilation  

The classical Marxist debates on the Jewish question took place before the two key events that shaped Western Jewish life decisively in the second half of the twentieth century: the Nazi genocide and the creation of the State of Israel. Both these events ushered in monumental changes in the make-up, location, and politics of Jewish communities across the world. In the space of little more than a decade: 6 million Jews were exterminated in the gas chambers; the Israeli state was founded after the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians; the majority of Holocaust survivors moved to Israel; in the 1950s, Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa relocated to Israel, through migration and expulsion.

The centres of Jewish life shifted in this period toward the United States and the newly-formed state. These events, and European, American and Israeli state-responses to them, continue to structure Jewish identification in the West.

Contemporary polls, for example, of Western and Israeli Jews find that both the Holocaust and Israel remain some of the key issues cited as central to the construction of their identity.[24] This, however, as discussed above, has not always been the case.

Jewish Identification and the State of Israel

The creation of Israel, and its future, depended on the so-called ingathering of the world’s Jewish communities. The newly-formed state therefore worked actively to encourage and disseminate its vision of Jewish peoplehood. It did so both legislatively and practically. From its creation, the Israeli state immediately officialised its vision of history. It declared itself the state not of its citizens, but of the Jewish people around the world. The Israeli Declaration of Establishment, approved on 14 May 1948, states:

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the [Jewish] people kept faith … throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. ... This right [to a Jewish state] is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State. … We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.[25]

Two years later, the Knesset approved what it called the ‘Law of Return’, which guaranteed the right of Jews worldwide to settle in the newly-formed state and to enjoy the full rights of citizens. Palestinian refugees who had fled during the Nakba, however, were forbidden to come back to their homes.

The ‘ingathering’ was not only a legal process inside of Israel; it was also a political one across the world. While encouraging Western Jewry to support Israel economically, politically and culturally, the Israeli state worked to encourage the emigration of Jewish communities, from Morocco to Iraq, and from the Soviet Union to Ethiopia.

Often assisted by the antisemitism of the local regimes,[26] the young state did not hesitate to sanction terrorism against Jewish minorities in Iraq to accelerate their departure and convince the reluctant.[27] The European character of the Zionist project and the treatment of Mizrahi (Eastern/Oriental) Jews as second-class citizens by the Israeli state have been widely documented.[28] However, the need to find new Jewish populations to settle the land in the demographic war with the Palestinians went hand-in-hand with the need to validate the state’s claims as the representative of world Jewry.

Interestingly, the settlement of Jewish communities from Asia, Africa and Europe with different languages, traditions and cultures had a contradictory effect on Zionism. If they strengthened the state’s representative claims they also undermined its conception of a singular Jewish ethnicity.

As the Israeli Marxist Akiva Orr has argued, Israel has struggled since its inception to develop a secular Jewish identity, separate from religion.[29] Orr points out that, despite the avowedly atheist (even anti-religious) attitudes of the founding generations of the Zionist movement, the state remains dependent on religion for the construction of a unified Jewish identity.

Orr argues that the central role played by the rabbinate in key state matters, such as the decision concerning who is and isn’t Jewish – and therefore a potential citizen – or in the regulation of marriage, are not pragmatic concessions to religious voting-blocks in Israel but indispensable in the process of constructing a unified Jewish identity.

Others, such as Moshe Machover,[30] echoing certain arguments made by the revisionist Canaanite school in the 1940s, argue for the decoupling of Israel from the rest of world Jewry and the recognition of a Hebrew nationality and identity. Machover sees in this a stepping-stone toward de-Zionification, weakening the settler-colonial project by cutting it off from its source of new arrivals. It would, Machover argues, also lay the foundation for the recognition of Hebrew national rights in a free Palestine.

The identification of Jews as a unified population, in physical exile, in need of ingathering to Israel, plays a crucial ideological role for the Israeli state and the expansion of settler-colonialism in Palestine.

Rodinson argued in the 1960s that the success of Zionism in Palestine had become the defining structural factor in modern Jewish life.[31] Zionism, for Rodinson, was born out of the simultaneous rejection of Jews by the European bourgeois order as well as the integration of its values and norms by the (European) Jewish people themselves. The scale of the Nazi genocide and the destruction of (often revolutionary) European-Jewish alternative movements to Zionism hastened the development of this process among postwar European Jewry.

Rodinson, in an argument which echoes Edward Said’s, identified Zionism as a European colonial movement, which turned the pariahs of the metropolis into a settler-colonial avant-garde. It was in the process of dispossessing the indigenous Palestinian population that the Zionist movement became the representative in the Middle East of the very society that had rejected them and led them to the brink of extermination.

Just as Zionism was the outcome of simultaneous rejection and internalisation, the Jews themselves were both internalised and rejected by the West through Zionist expansion in Palestine.

Rodinson opposed the way in which Zionism generated a political pressure from above in France for the essentialisation of the Jewish community in the West:

A continuous moral and physical blackmail is applied against the Jews who refuse to consider themselves members of a separate community to which they should swear allegiance. They are expected to adhere to options taken on Palestinian lands by organs on which they have no control.[32] 

This, Rodinson argued, started a process of nationalisation of the Jewish people.

However, if, as shown above, the Zionist movement and the Israeli state actively encouraged this attempt at nationalising world Jewry in the service of its settler-colonial project in Palestine, it does not automatically follow that Jewish communities would accept and respond to this new identification.

Here, the role of the state is once again paramount. In his book, Knowing Too Much, Norman Finkelstein details the ways in which the relationship between American Jewish communities and Israel developed. He shows how the leadership of the American Jewish community did not – despite humanitarian or philanthropic monetary donations – support Israel politically before the 1967 war.

Finkelstein quotes, amongst other documents, a study conducted by the American Jewish Committee only a few months before the outbreak of the war, which concluded that American Jewish life and institutions were not connected to Israel, and that only 17% of American Jews were members of avowedly pro-Israel organisations.[33] Finkelstein argues that the main concern of Jewish communities in the US in the direct aftermath of the Second World War was assimilation into American life and that active political support for Israel was considered by the community’s leadership to be a display of ‘dual-loyalty’. This, they feared, would stoke up suspicion and halt the process of integration.

It was in fact in the wake of the 1967 war and the decisive shift of Israel into the US sphere of influence – and of the US’s changing strategy in the Middle East, away from appeasement of Arab Nationalism – that American Jewish organs became outspoken supporters of Zionism. It is, therefore, firstly as loyal American citizens rather than as members of a singular Jewish nationality that the representatives of the American Jewish community became supporters of the Zionist movement and the Israeli state. Finkelstein writes:

Israel came to incarnate for American Jewish intellectuals the high cause of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, to which they could now assert a unique connection by virtue of blood lineage. Joining the Zionist club was a prudent career move for Jewish communal leaders who could then play the role of key interlocutors between the US and its strategic asset. … These gung-ho Zionists didn’t even subscribe to the Zionist tenet that Jews had no future in the gentile world. On the contrary, they converted to Zionism because it facilitated their acceptance in the United States.[34]

Jewish Identification and the Official Memory of the Nazi Genocide 

A similar process took place in terms of the commemoration of the Nazi genocide. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the remembrance of the gas chambers and the Nazi genocide did not play a central role in Western societies. Different explanations have been given for this. Finkelstein has stressed the postwar US-led drive to ‘de-Nazify’ West Germany and to remobilise former Nazi state-officials in the cold war, as a key reason for the muted nature of official recognition of the genocide.[35]^|[36]

Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life has stressed the assimilationist strategies of the Jewish community in the 1950s and the fears of stoking the flames ofantisemitism. While Traverso, on the other hand, emphasises that official ceremonies focussed on the national and anti-fascist character of the resistance in the first decades after the war – as such the ‘symbol of Nazi barbarity was not Auschwitz but Buchenwald, where so many antifascists were murdered’.[37]

In Israel itself, Holocaust survivors were often met with animosity.[38] They represented the weakness of the diaspora that had ‘gone like sheep to slaughter’, which the ‘new Jew’, reborn in Israel and strong, would replace. A popular term of derision for those survivors in Hebrew slang was sabonim – soaps – a reference to the Nazis’ experiments to turn Jewish fat into soap.

The Eichmann trial in 1961 was a turning-point in the dominant discourse about the war. Both in Israel and across the Western world, the recognition of the Nazi genocide, as well as the centrality of the remembrance of it in collective ceremonies, finds its roots in that moment. Traverso describes this shift as a crucial one in the collective memory and understanding of History of (and in) the West: ‘Nazi extermination was no longer regarded as the expression of a retreat of civilisation into barbarism, but rather as a barbarism inscribed in modernity itself’.[39]

Never Again became an international watchword against the demons within Western society. Traverso describes the process through which the Nazi genocide became what he terms, using Rousseau, a Civil Religion – a secular form of sacralising certain aspects of history in order to build a collective identity around the state. With its monuments, national museums, laws forbidding its denial, and official ceremonies, the memory of the Holocaust has become a key pillar of Western societies’ projection of self and collective identity.

Traverso argues that this laid the foundation for the recognition of other genocides and massacres across the world, whilst at the same time risking de-politicising the memory of the Holocaust and mobilising it as a shield behind which to mask more contemporary crimes: ‘Institutionalised and neutralised, the memory of the Holocaust thus risks becoming the moral sanction for a Western order that perpetuates oppression and injustice’.[40]

Similarly, Finkelstein describes in The Holocaust Industry an industry that has developed around the memorialisation of the Holocaust, which has depoliticised it by making it an inexplicable and incomparable event, next to which all others pale into insignificance. Finkelstein argues that this process has emptied collective memory of its political lessons, allowed collaborating governments and corporations off the hook, and strengthened the vision of Jewish history as one marked by eternal, a-historic, and incrementally severe persecution.

This version of history, Finkelstein argues, has also facilitated the use of the Holocaust to justify the colonisation of Palestine by allowing Western powers to wash their hands of the past by simply supporting Israel and – by extension – their own interests in the Middle East.

Yitzhak Laor, the Israeli poet and author, also emphasises the role that this official history of the Holocaust plays for the whitewashing of Western states’ racism and crimes – both in the present and in the past:

The Holocaust alone can provide the definition of evil. … But the other evils are still lurking there. The universal dimension of the genocide is projected to overshadow the victims of colonialism and slavery, who have received no compensation remotely comparable to the sums paid to the Israeli state, nor even the fortune of being recognised, precisely because they are still living in devastated countries, or miserable neighbourhoods, under occupation or oppression.[41]

Jewish history and the Nazi genocide are brought to the centre of modern constructions of Western identity and the legitimisation of Western states. However, it is a depoliticised, a-historical, and sterilised version of history, which locks Jews into a specific historic role.

There is once again a trade-off: in order to access the recognition of past wrongs, Jewish communities must relinquish demands for structural justice, and accept that the mass murder of their ancestors be removed from historical and political analysis. Instead, commemoration is turned into a tool behind which Western states can acknowledge and condemn racism, violence, and collaboration, while continuing to mete these out against other communities and countries.

Jews can then become part of a Western hegemonic culture, which has recently discovered itself to be Judeo-Christian only a few decades after the Nazi genocide, on the condition that their history becomes a pillar of the state’s official history, rather than a boulder to bring it tumbling down. Jewish communities must accept the role of guardians of a distorted history, which leaves current power structures untouched and unchallenged, in order to accede to the promise ofNever Again. Assimilation is promised, while effectively denied.

It emerges from this overview that the process of Jewish identification in the second half of the twentieth century has been constructed around the Nazi genocide and Zionism, within a state-led framework that has both placed Jews at the centre of Western hegemony while simultaneously keeping them at arm’s length of full integration. The Jewish community is then pushed into a schizophrenic dance in which it must simultaneously represent key areas of Western identification, while being denied full integration within its structures.

Far from being an intrinsic and a-historic fact, the current identification of Jewish communities with Israel, and the importance accorded to the Holocaust in their sense of self, is in fact the outcome of half a century of Western state policies. Indeed, political support for Israel in the Middle East by European and North Americans states, and the centrality of the Holocaust in their official historical self-representation, have switched the structures of identification for Jews in the West. Once upon a time the ‘Other’ of the European states par excellence, Jewish communities are now being identified as the standard-bearers of two key pillars of Western policies at home and abroad. It is to a discussion of the political consequences of this process, that this paper now turns.

Mobilisation of the Jew against the European ‘Others’ 

Sartre famously wrote that ‘it is not the Jewish character that provokes antisemitism but, on the contrary, the antisemite that creates the Jew’.[42] It then should not be a surprise that a growing proportion of Jewish people understand Zionism and a particular history of the Holocaust as a central part of their identity (see above). Indeed, they are being identified as Jewish through the prism of this binary framework by Western states.

The essentialisation of Jews, at home and abroad, by the state creates a new form of antisemitic rejection. No longer the rootless cosmopolitan, the revolutionary, the internationalist, the Jew today is identified, in the first instance, as – at least potentially – a Zionist, a citizen of Israel, and defender of the ‘West’s values’ in the face of barbarism. No longer the potential destroyer of Western society and bourgeois values but its most fierce protector, antisemitic essentialisation paints the Jew in a seemingly positive light. The underlying logic, however, remains one of a top-down structuring of Jewish identification by the Western state.

Antisemitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century served to channel class struggle away from the bourgeoisie towards the Jews, while simultaneously making the revolutionary movement suspect and facilitating repression. It was, as the German phrase put it, the socialism of fools.[43] Today, it serves to obscure state policies, while simultaneously reinforcing Islamophobic reaction.

Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan argue:

The aim is to convince people that there is an underlying unity between the support given to the struggle of the Israelis against Arab ‘fundamentalist’ barbarism, and the struggle at home against the young barbarians of the banlieues – whose ‘barbarian’ description is well attested to by the double fact that they are not only Arab or Muslim, but also criticise Israeli government policy.[44]

This process of essentialisation of Jewish people is reinforced from above, through official state policy. For example, the UK HAC report on antisemitism announced:

Those claiming to be ‘anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic’, should do so in the knowledge that 59% of British Jewish people consider themselves to be Zionists. … For the purposes of criminal or disciplinary investigations, use of the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ in an accusatory or abusive context should be considered inflammatory and potentially antisemitic.[45]

The report takes as read that the political movement of Zionism, and the Jewish people, should be considered, in the sphere of law-making, as nearly interchangeable. The 41 per cent of British Jewish people who do not consider themselves to be Zionists, according to the report’s own sources, are not considered relevant to the development of effective policy to combat antisemitism.

Nor is the fact that most data shows that a younger generation of Jews in the West is increasingly critical of Israel.[46] A recent piece of research conducted by the National Union of Students and the Union of Jewish Students in the UK found that 24% of Jewish students supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.[47] Yet, under the guidance of the British state, these positions, held by a considerable proportion of Jews, are dangerously close to antisemitism.

Jews are essentialised by the UK Home Affairs Committee as adherents to the only political movement ascribed to them – Zionism – regardless of the facts. Similarly, when the British government attempted to limit local councils’ right to implement boycott or divestment policies, it justified its actions through concern for ‘international security’ and ‘community cohesion’, and went on to state:

There are wider national and international consequences from imposing such local level boycotts. They can damage integration and community cohesion within the United Kingdom, hinder Britain’s export trade, and harm foreign relations to the detriment of Britain’s economic and international security.[48]

Jewish communities in Britain are being directly mobilised as a shield, behind which the government can hide to defend its own trade and international-policy choices, while also undermining political freedoms in the UK. To complete the picture, the government minister Matthew Hancock announced these measures while on an official visit to Israel.

Furthermore, the British government’s anti-radicalisation strategy, the Prevent agenda, which has made it a legal duty for public-sector workers to report service-users for signs of radicalisation, follows this pattern. The policy sets out a series of indicators of so-called non-violent extremist ideas and behaviours, which the government believes lead to ‘extremism’. The policy has been widely criticised for its ineffectiveness, unsubstantiated assumptions, and disproportionate targeting of the Muslim community.[49] Indeed, Muslims made up 56 per cent of those targeted between 2012 and 2014, despite making up less than 5 per cent of the British population.[50]

Leaked Prevent training materials show that participants are specifically encouraged to target those who criticise UK foreign policy, with a specific emphasis put on Palestine solidarity as an indicator of radicalisation. It states, for example, that ‘as recent stories involving vulnerable pupils have shown, issues around Palestine, Syria and the growth of ISIL/ISIS require careful monitoring’.[51] This approach has led to Palestine activists and students expressing an interest in the question being referred to the authorities.

The case of a 15-year-old Muslim school student in Luton, who was repeatedly interrogated under Prevent for wearing a ‘Free Palestine’ armband and organising a fundraiser for Palestinian children affected by war, is a case in point.[52] Support for Palestine, including from children, is identified as a threat to the state. The state’s support for Zionism abroad becomes a tool for Islamophobic oppression at home, and to undermine civil liberties more generally.

It is, then, interesting in this context that Jewish organisations, publications and leading community figures are putting forward an analysis which holds that contemporary antisemitism, while no longer structural, is the outcome of left-wing and Muslim activism. The Palestine solidarity movement, anti-Zionist politics, and support for the Boycott, Solidarity and Sanctions (BDS) movement are particularly singled out for criticism and accused of actively undermining Jewish self-determination, the right for Jews to self-define their oppression, or Jewish identity itself.

In the UK, for example, when giving evidence to the HAC, discussed above, Rabbi Mirvis declared that:

There was a time when [antisemitism] came from the far right; now increasingly it is coming from the far left. There is an element of radical Islam that is part of this narrative. Events in the Middle East serve as trigger points.[53]  

Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies (BoD), made similar points:

Traditionally antisemitism has come from the far right, and we are not seeing very much far right activity at the moment. Traditionally there has always been prejudice against Jews coming from the far left as well, and I think that with the advent of a more leftward tilt in the leadership of the Labour party, some people feel that a space has opened up for them … A significant part of the incidents come from people who are or who appear to be from areas in Muslim communities. I want to emphasise that the overwhelming majority of British Muslims … are moderate and law abiding, … but there are some quarters who are very prejudiced, and I think they may get information … through mosques, schools, literature or Muslim subscription TV channels of an extreme nature coming from abroad.[54] 

The problem is no longer the far right but Muslims and the left, under foreign influence.

Remarkably, all available information about the UK – including the Annual CST Report on antisemitism[55] and the HAC report itself – demonstrates that the vast majority of antisemitic incidents come from the far-right and fascist groups, or prejudiced white individuals. This points to a high level of identification by leading representatives of the Jewish community with the state’s essentialisation of Jewishness under the banner of Zionism, mobilised against racialised communities and critics of the state’s foreign policy.

The state supports Israeli policies and expansion abroad. It justifies this support not on the basis of its economic and political interests in the Middle East, but through the supposed intrinsic role of Zionism in the religious and cultural identity of Jews. Simultaneously, the state criminalises political action and targets Palestinian solidarity movements. This can then be justified both through equating Judaism and Zionism, and through the baseless position, discussed above, that Muslims are the modern source of antisemitism.

The state then appears not as the oppressor of both Jews and Muslims, identifying both communities through racialised and essentialising structures, but as the defender of the Jews – understood, by official policy, as Zionists – against Muslims and the left. The state erects the Jewish community as a shield behind which it hides the political motives of its foreign and domestic policy.

Conclusion

Starting from the position that identity is not static or primordial, but generated through the relationship between identification processes by state structures from above, and collective responses by the ‘identified’ from below, this paper has discussed the identification of Jewish communities by Western states. It has argued that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Western Jewish communities have been defined by the state as an extension of its own legitimacy, and the fate of Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine. This process of essentialisation of the Jewish people is a form of structural antisemitism, which attempts to impose a specific, politicised, identity upon an entire community.

Moreover, this paper has argued that an approach based on processes of identity-formation, rather than monolithic, pre-existing, and a-historical identities, has important consequences. When, for example, polls show that a large majority of UK and US Jews feel connected to Israel, one answer is to consider these feelings as defining an immutable reality. Another is, as this paper has attempted to show, to take these feelings as the starting-point of an analysis which uncovers historical and societal processes of identification, which develop through the tension generated between those people and the state.

These two different approaches also lead to different political consequences. If the politics of identity lead one to consider identity as originating in the individual, one risks fixing as natural the outcomes of specific and historically-contentious processes. This leads, in the case of Jewishness, one to accept that Zionism is no longer a political question, which plays itself out to the detriment of the Palestinian people, but a question of self-defined identity, central to the very essence of Judaism and Jewish people. It similarly leads one to assume that the state, through its official remembering of the Nazi genocide and its laws against antisemitism, is the protector of Jewish communities, rather than the very structure putting them at risk.

It equally leads to the belief that those activists who oppose colonial processes in Palestine, condemn Israeli human-rights violations, and campaign for an end to their states’ and institutions’ complicity with these processes, are the real antisemites despite – or sometimes even because of – their consistent refusal to equate Jewish people worldwide with the actions, politics and realities of Israel and the Zionist movement. Indeed, as discussed above, if Jewish identity is inextricably linked to Israel and Zionism, then any rejection of it has to be, either consciously or unconsciously, an attack on Jewish identity itself.

However, if one starts from the experience of identity in order to initiate a process of uncovering the specific historical, political and economic factors that construct it, it becomes possible to imagine ways to challenge the structures out of which identities emerge. Liberation is then understood as a process of transformation both of structural and individual circumstances.

Identity, when understood as the outcome of discreet social realities, can be studied as a flexible and ever-changing concept. In this case, the materialist approach to the Jewish question, discussed above, leads to an understanding of how the Civil Religion of the Holocaust and Zionism have played a crucial role, both practically and ideologically, in reinforcing Western colonial expansion abroad, and racism at home.

Jews are essentialised under the banner of Zionism and turned into either active participants of colonisation or shields for state-policy at home and abroad. The duo of Zionism and official remembrance of the Nazi genocide is the contemporary form of the rejection of Jewish people from Western states, which has positioned them – once more – in the firing-line.

It follows from this analysis that a modern struggle for the destruction of antisemitism, far from relying on the state, must pass through the struggle against racism, imperialism, and the state structures that champion them.

It is then not useful to declare, as Rodinson did, that ‘[w]e can at least ask the Jews to not place themselves in the wrong camp or halt the struggle [for a society free of oppression and exploitation]’.[56] This approach accepts – despite his own analysis – that Jewish people have become irremediably homogenised under the influence of Zionism, and benefit from its actions. Furthermore, the evidence, as discussed above, is that this is increasingly challenged from within the Jewish community itself.

It must be demonstrated both in theory and practice that the struggle against antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Western intervention abroad are one and the same. Therefore the struggle for Palestinian liberation and against Zionism is indeed related to antisemitism, but not in the way that it is so often presented. Houria Bouteldja makes this point, when she writes, as an invitation to Jewish communities in France: ‘You are still in the ghetto. What if we got out of it together?’[57]

BACK TO ISSUE 26(2): IDENTITY POLITICS

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* I would like to thank Amelia Horgan, Hannah Dee, Yvon Englert, James Eastwood, Malia Bouattia, Ashok Kumar, Noha Abou El Magd, and Karma Nabulsi as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their comments and advice in the drafting of this paper. All remaining shortcomings are, of course, mine and mine alone. 

[1] Hall 1996, pp. 2–3.

[2] Grossberg 1996, p. 99.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Brubaker and Cooper 2000, p. 16.

[5] Chakravarty and Ferreira da Silva 2012, pp. 369–70. [No such reference in bibliography – MC]

[6] Wolfe 2016, p. 5

[7] Traverso 2016, p. 10.

[8] Traverso 2016, pp. 7–19.

[9] Wolfe 2016, p. 86.

[10] For more detail on these conflicts and different movements, see, for example, Jacobs (ed.) 2001; Frankel 2009; Traverso 2016.

[11] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 2016, Q13.

[12] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 2016, Q418.

[13] Raz-Krakotzkin 2007, p. 109.

[14] Miller, Harris and Shindler 2015, p. 15.

[15] Pew Research Center 2013.

[16] Marx 1844.

[17] For a detailed historical discussion of the contradiction involved in the use of antisemitic language in the process of arguing against antisemitic politics in Marx, see Hal Draper’s Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype (Draper 1977).

[18] Leon 1942.

[19] Others, beyond the Marxist tradition, have adopted a similar outlook on the relationship between the rise of capitalism and Jewish communities. Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century argues, for example, that the advent of capitalism represents the universalisation of historically Jewish socio-economic roles (Slezkine 2006), while, on the other side of the political spectrum, Niall Ferguson argues that the development of modern capitalism cannot be understood without an analysis of the rise of the house of Rothschild and their financial and trade networks across Europe (Ferguson 1999).

[20] Rodinson 1968.

[21] Traverso 1994, p. 224.

[22] For more on the Bund and its approaches to the National Question, see Jacobs (ed.) 2001. For a summary of the Bundist and Austro-Hungarian Marxists’ contribution to the debate on the Jewish question, see Traverso 1994.

[23] Frankel 2009.

[24] Miller, Harris and Shindler 2015; Pew Research Center 2013; Pew Research Center 2016.

[25] Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013.

[26] Behar 1997.

[27] Shiblack 1986; Giladi 2006.

[28] Ben-Dor Benite 1997; Chitrit 1997 [No such reference in bibliography – MC]; Shohat 1988.

[29] Orr 1983.

[30] Machover 2013.

[31] Rodinson 1968.

[32] Rodinson 1968, p. 179

[33] Finkelstein 2012, pp. 35–44.

[34] Finkelstein 2012, p. 42; emphasis in the original.

[35] In this context, official reparations from the German government paid to Israel allowed for justice to appear as having been served, while avoiding fundamental structural changes, and financing the Western ‘watch-dog’ in the Middle East.

[36] Finkelstein 2000.

[37] Traverso 2016, p. 117.

[38] Laor 2009.

[39] Traverso 2016, p. 118.

[40] Traverso 2016, pp. 126–7.

[41] Laor 2009, pp. 32–3.

[42] Sartre 2011, p. 152.

[43] This phrase is often attributed to August Babel. There is, however, no evidence that this is indeed the case. It appears that it was a common saying within German socialist circles in the late nineteenth century.

[44] Badiou, Hazan and Segré 2013, p. 15.

[45] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 2016.

[46] Finkelstein 2012; Miller, Harris and Shindler 2015; Pew Research Center 2016.

[47] National Union of Students 2017, p. 26.

[48] Quoted in Stone 2016.

[49] Open Society Foundation 2016.

[50] National Police Chiefs’ Council 2014.

[51] Quoted in Hooper 2016.

[52] Open Society Foundation 2016, pp. 86–9.

[53] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 2016, Q430.

[54] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 2016, Q2.

[55] Community Security Trust 2017.

[56] Rodinson 1968, p. 181.

[57] Bouteldja 2016, p. 69.