Mario Kessler (ed.), Leo Trotzki oder: Sozialismus gegen Antisemitismus [Leon Trotsky or Socialism against Antisemitism], Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2022. 

Mario Kessler, Sozialisten gegen Antisemitismus. Zur Judenfeindschaft und ihrer Bekämpfung (1844-1939) [Socialists against Antisemitism. On Hatred of the Jews and the Fight against It (1844-1939)], Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2022. 

Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers refer to these two volumes.

For over 20 months, the fascistic Zionist government of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, with the full support of the imperialist powers, has inflicted upon the Palestinian people a level of barbaric violence comparable to the Nazi mass slaughter of European Jewry during World War II. The unfolding catastrophe and the role of Israel as an unhinged attack dog of world imperialism in the Middle East raises fundamental questions of historical perspective: How can Zionism be fought?

This requires, first of all, a historical understanding of the emergence of Zionism and its ideology. Two recent books by the German historian Mario Kessler provide important historical and theoretical material on the struggle of the Marxist movement against antisemitism and Zionism. In 2022, he published an edited volume of writings by Leon Trotsky on antisemitism — the most comprehensive of its kind in any language — and a monograph reviewing the fight of the socialist movement against antisemitism. That volume also includes a significant collection of articles by Marxists on the fight against antisemitism. 

Kessler is a senior fellow at the Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam, and an expert in the history of European Jewry and the workers’ movement. He is a principled defender of historical truth. In 2011, he signed an Open Letter by 14 European historians opposing the publication of a hack work by Robert Service on Leon Trotsky, which was filled with mistakes, falsifications, and antisemitic allusions.

Kessler explains at the outset that he was motivated to write both volumes because of the campaign equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, the precursor to the current assault on democratic rights under the false banner of fighting “antisemitism.” Especially in Great Britain and Germany, that campaign early on targeted left-wing opposition to Zionism, seeking to criminalize opposition to war, capitalism and imperialism more broadly. During the student protests against the Gaza genocide since October 2023, this lie has been leveled to justify the use of police state measures against protesters in the US and internationally.

Kessler writes from the standpoint of a left-wing Zionist who opposes the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people but views the establishment of the state of Israel as the inevitable result of the disasters of the 20th century. While he respects the fight by the Marxist movement, and especially Leon Trotsky, against antisemitism and Zionism, he believes that this struggle was rooted in an unrealistic “utopia of socialism” and the abolition of the nation-state system. This position skews his analysis in critical ways and forms the basis of an ahistorical critique of the Marxist approach to what has historically emerged as one of the most complex problems in the development of the socialist revolution.

Karl Marx and the emancipation of the Jews in the era of bourgeois democratic revolutions

In his account of the rise of modern antisemitism, Kessler emphasizes the aborted 1848/49 revolutions. He notes that the most significant pogroms in the 19th century took place on the eve of those revolutions, which, in Germany, saw the majority of the Jewish population on the side of the bourgeois democratic revolution. This solidified the linkage between “Jews” and “revolution” in the minds of reactionaries. Moreover, Kessler notes, “The fact that many Jews remained true to the spirit of the revolution whereas the German bourgeoisie increasingly turned away from it contributed to the development and intensification of anti-Jewish prejudices in bourgeois public opinion.” (Sozialisten gegen Antisemitismus, p. 26)

Kessler provides insights into the rise of antisemitism in Central Europe. However, the fundamental link between the emancipation of the Jewish people and the development of social revolution remains underdeveloped. He barely discusses the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, which led to the political emancipation of large sections of Western European Jews. This association between social revolution, democracy and the emancipation of the Jews had already, in the first half of the 19th century, fueled the emerging political antisemitism of the forces of reaction across Europe, especially in the Russian Empire under the tsar. (See: Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution: Part one)

This weakness also impacts his discussion of Karl Marx’s approach to the Jewish question. In his discussion of Marx’s scant writings on the issue, Mario Kessler places a heavy emphasis on remarks by Marx about the Jewish origins of some of his opponents such as Ferdinand Lassalle. In focusing on them, Kessler ignores the fundamental political differences that Marx articulated with Lassalle, whose orientation toward appealing to the Prussian state and German nationalism Marx and Engels opposed as part of their fight for a consistent revolutionary internationalist orientation of the German workers movement.

Many of these passages in these first chapters read like a political concession to those who claim that the origins of a supposed “left-wing antisemitism” go back to some of the writings of Marx himself. This is, in fact, an old trope. (See also: An exchange of letters on Marx and antisemitism)

But while some of Marx’s remarks in private correspondence might read in an unpleasant way today, they can be explained historically. Similar remarks can be found in the writings of virtually all of Marx’s contemporaries, many of whom were, like him, Jewish, and fervent opponents of antisemitism. To impose our contemporary understanding of the issue and our use of language on this matter, which are informed by the rise of modern antisemitism, fascism and the Holocaust and over a century of scholarship, upon Marx and his contemporaries is entirely ahistorical and obscures an understanding of the issues with which they were, in fact, grappling.

In an important essay from 1977, Hal Draper stressed that the objective social position of Jews formed the basis of the stereotype of the “economic Jew” with which Kessler takes issue. Legislation first in the Middle Ages and then during the early stages of capitalist development had confined much of the Jewish population in Europe to the economic role of usurers, merchants and other forms of middlemen. Addressing the “Jewish question” from this socio-economic standpoint was the hallmark of the political left in its fight for the political and social emancipation of the Jews. As Draper noted, “It was the conservative right that usually expressed antipathy to Jewry in religious and racialist terms; it was the left-of-center that put the spotlight on the economic role of Jewry, the economic Jews.”^[1]

Kessler’s critique of the 1843 essay On the Jewish Question suffers from the same ahistorical approach. Marx wrote the essay at a time when almost nothing was known about the history of the Jewish people and he himself had not fully developed his method of historical materialism. He treats the emergence of Jews as merchants and traders in Europe from precisely the standpoint that Hal Draper identified as characteristic of the pre-1848 left: “The real issue of the time had nothing to do with the use of language about Judaism based on the universally accepted economic-Jew stereotype. The real Jewish question was: For or against the political emancipation of the Jews? For or against equal rights for Jews? This was the Jewish question that Marx discussed, not the one that dominated the minds of a sick society a century later.”^[2]

And on this central question, Marx’s position was correct and consistently revolutionary. Writing in opposition to the idealist Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who opposed Jewish emancipation as an “egotistical” demand by the Jewish population and viewed it as a matter of the freedom of religion, Marx insisted that the emancipation of the Jews was a political and democratic question that was intrinsically tied to the development of the social revolution and the emancipation of society as a whole. Moreover, already at this relatively early stage in his own development, Marx insisted on a class approach to this question. To quote Draper again, the essay 

…was a contribution to a hotly fought campaign in favor of Jewish political emancipation – not however on behalf of the “Christian and Jewish great merchants, factory owners, bankers, and insurance directors who drafted the petitions,” but to show how to link this current battle up with the eventual struggle against these very gentlemen. Its aim was to support political emancipation today in order to make possible social emancipation tomorrow. Hence its last words: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.^[3]

The failed revolutions of 1848 demonstrated that the bourgeoisie in Germany was incapable of realizing the tasks of the democratic revolution, prompting Karl Marx to proclaim the need for a “revolution in permanence” and the politically independent action of the working class. For historical reasons, Marx never worked through the implications of this analysis for the fate of the Jewish and other oppressed peoples. But his fundamental orientation toward the social revolution and the working class as the decisive lever for the emancipation of the Jews and all other unresolved problems of the bourgeois democratic revolution would be proven correct in the struggle of the socialist movement in the first decades of the 20th century.

Dissassociating the treatment of the “Jewish question” from this broader problem of the strategic development of the social revolution, Kessler concludes that the principal weakness of the early Marxist movement was that it did not envisage a “long lifespan” for the Jewish people. Kessler holds greater sympathies for Moses Hess, one of the forefathers of Zionism, whom he seeks to rescue as a pioneer of “Jewish emancipation.” A former collaborator of Karl Marx before the 1848 revolution, Hess in 1862 wrote Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, anticipating some of the key arguments of Theodore Herzl’s later book The Jewish State. Kessler does not quote but has evident sympathies for Hess’s main conclusion from the defeat of the 1848 revolutions: “All history has been that of racial and class war. Racial wars are the primary, class wars the secondary factor.” (On Moses Hess and the origins of Zionism, see also: David North: Genocide in Gaza: Imperialism descends into the abyss)

But this basic proposition is disproven by Kessler’s own account of the powerful response by Social Democracy to the ever more aggressive political antisemitism of the 1880s and 1890s. Rooted in a class analysis of the problems of modern society, the socialist movement in the first decades of the 20th century waged a consistent struggle against antisemitism, culminating in the emancipation of the Jews of the Russian Empire. This struggle immensely elevated the status of Marxism in the eyes of millions of oppressed throughout the world.

Social Democracy and the fight against antisemitism

Under the critical influence of Friedrich Engels, German Social Democracy adopted a clear programmatic position in opposition to antisemitism in its Erfurt Program. Beginning above all in 1890, it placed a heavy emphasis in its educational and propaganda work on the issue. According to Kessler:

Social Democrats often broke up anti-Semitic meetings. There is information about at least 60 such actions for the period during the anti-socialist laws [1878-1890]. For the period from 1890 to 1900, there were even 400 such cases. Moreover, social democrats dealt intensely with anti-Semitism at their own meetings. According to Reinhard Rürup, between 1891 and 1893 over 30 public meetings by the SPD dealt with the issue of anti-Semitism… During elections, it ran Jewish candidates, something most bourgeois parties and electoral associations shunned, considering anti-Semitic prejudices among electors. (Sozialisten gegen Antisemitismus, p. 79)

Kessler quotes another historian who concluded that there was “no other political camp and no major social layer in Germany… which denounced and fought with such consistency and, relatively speaking, i.e., considering the membership of its movement, with such success against antisemitism.” (Ibid.)

In France, antisemitic prejudices were widespread among petty-bourgeois layers and had also influenced many anarchist and petty-bourgeois radical thinkers against whom Karl Marx had polemicized. Perhaps the most notable example of this was Proudhon, who in 1847, a period of violent antisemitic pogroms, wrote, “… the Jew is an enemy of humanity, this race must be sent back to Asia or exterminated.” (Quoted Ibid., p. 101). By contrast, as Kessler shows, Jean Jaurès, the principal leader of French Social Democracy, played an honorable role in the struggle against antisemitism, notably in the context of the Dreyfus Affair, in which Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer, was accused of state treason.

Nowhere was the so-called Jewish question posed as acutely as in the Russian Empire, then the home of the largest Jewish population in the world. Given the absence of a bourgeois democratic revolution, here, in contrast to Central and Western Europe, the Jewish population remained deprived of civil rights and, for the most part, unassimilated.

Most of the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was restricted to living in the Pale of Settlement, roughly comprising what is now Ukraine, large parts of Poland and the Baltic states. The Jewish population of that region spoke Yiddish and was mostly confined to employment in trade and artisanal professions. When the rise of industrial capitalism led to the proletarianization of large portions of the Jewish population, they quickly emerged as one of the most active sections of the workers’ movement.

The prominent role of Jewish workers in the revolutionary movement, fused with medieval anti-Jewish prejudices of the Orthodox Church, encouraged the emergence of a particularly aggressive and virulent form of modern political antisemitism. The explicit association of Jews with the revolutionary movement, articulated in works such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, would form the ideological basis of antisemitic pogroms, encouraged by the Tsar, and influence antisemitic and fascist thinkers across Europe.

This linkage between antisemitism and counter-revolution became central to the Marxist opposition to antisemitism. It is explained and opposed forcefully in many of the articles by revolutionary socialists of that period, including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Julian Marchlewski (Karski) and Trotsky, which Kessler printed as an appendix to his volume. Their articles are an important contribution to an understanding of the Marxist position on antisemitism and an irrefutable counter to the lying claim of a deep-rooted tradition of antisemitism “on the left.” 

The response by the Marxist movement to the emergence of Zionism

The rise of modern political antisemitism in European politics coincided with the emergence of Zionism. Zionism arose as one of several ethno-nationalist movements across Central and Eastern Europe in the last decades of the 19th century. Contrary to the national movements of an earlier period, they had a distinctly anti-democratic and racial component, rejecting the principles of the Enlightenment and the bourgeois democratic revolutions.

In 1896, Theodore Herzl, an Austrian Jew from an assimilated upper class family, developed the founding principles of Zionism in his work Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). However, at the turn of the century, the Zionist movement remained weak, largely confined to privileged layers of the Jewish bourgeoisie and middle class in central Europe. In the Russian Empire, the Zionist movement only gained broader traction after the bloody defeat of the 1905 revolution, to which the Tsarist regime responded by encouraging a wave of major antisemitic pogroms. The result was a major wave of Jewish emigration to Palestine, including David Ben-Gurion, later the first head of the Zionist state. 

Kessler, in part because of his own political Zionism, deals with the response of the Marxist movement to its emergence in a relatively superficial manner. Nevertheless, he draws attention to important writings by Max Zetterbaum in the Neue Zeit, the principal theoretical organ of Social Democracy. In a 1901 essay entitled Problems of the Jewish proletarian movement Zetterbaum offered a perceptive sociological and political analysis of the origins of Zionism, which he identified as the “response by the Jewish bourgeoisie against modern antisemitism,” the growth of the workers movement and the revolutionary epoch more broadly. As Zetterbaum noted, “The Zionists emphasize as their highest principle the solidarity and inseparable unity of all Jews. They have no room for class struggle within Judaism.”

It is unfortunate that Kessler does not spend more time on this insightful article, for it helps explain many dynamics still at work today, within Israeli society and beyond. Zetterbaum wrote:

The Zionist worldview is closed, schematic, and consistent. Just as anti-Semitism and Zionism are merely two sides of the same development of the bourgeois class in terms of their origin and existence, so too does the Zionist worldview represent anti-Semitism translated into Jewish terms.

All the speeches and writings of the Zionists reveal their conviction that they regard anti-Semitism as a fact inherent in the Aryan race, rooted in its very organism. They believe that there is an antagonism, an antipathy, between Jews and non-Jews that cannot be eliminated by historical events. And this “fact” pleases the Zionists, because it guarantees them the separation of the Jewish people from other peoples. Anything that could abolish this separation is mocked and reviled by them. Freedom, equality, and brotherhood are empty words to them, conventional lies, words without value. ... Incidentally, bourgeois Israel is in the least position to complain about the futility of these struggles; its current legal status and activities are the fruit of these struggles. — If Zionist Israel can proclaim ethical pessimism and the worthlessness of freedom and equality to the bourgeoisie, the Jewish proletariat must not follow it on the path of suicide. It is a fighting, rising class and achieves its successes through its belief in freedom and progress, it achieves them thanks to the brotherly action of the “Aryan” proletariat. For the proletariat, freedom and equality remain driving, real living forces.

If Zionism denies all the moral ideals of modern times and rejects all elements of human brotherhood, it naturally seeks its affirmation in everything that distinguishes Jews from others and makes them primarily Jews.^[4]

Hence, Zetterbaum concluded, the obsessive focus by Zionism on religion — itself a rejection of the basic democratic principles of the bourgeois revolution and of the idea of Jewish emancipation and assimilation. Zetterbaum highlighted the profoundly anti-democratic conceptions of Zionism. Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat [the Jewish state] explicitly endorsed oligarchy as the ideal form of governance, denounced the people as ignorant, and fundamental democratic rights such as freedom of assembly as harmful.^[5]

Zetterbaum then observed that the Zionists were, in fact, the best friends of the two governments in Europe that were most closely associated with antisemitic legislation and militarism: the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. The German Zionists fervently endorsed the militarist program of German imperialism, for which, less than half a century later, the Jewish people had to pay an extraordinarily bloody price. Meanwhile, in the Russian Empire, the Zionists praised the tsar, who was a notorious antisemite and whose government helped sponsor the bloodiest pogroms of that era, as a “friend of humanity” — mostly because the pogroms helped spur Jewish emigration to Palestine.^[6]

Zetterbaum’s article demonstrates that the Marxist movement early on identified the class basis and function of Zionism. As a movement, from its inception, Zionism was oriented not toward the emancipation of the Jewish people through social revolution, but toward consolidating the class position of a layer of the Jewish bourgeoisie through deals with the imperialist powers. To the extent that European imperialist governments fostered anti-Jewish violence in their own countries, this, in the cynical calculation of the Zionists, would aid their colonialist project in Palestine. The history of Zionism has proven, time and again, the correctness of Zetterbaum’s analysis: from the 1930s to today, the Zionists have repeatedly allied with antisemitic fascist forces in Europe and the US as a principal lever to consolidate their imperialist project.

Kessler also points to the important fact that the leading proponents of reformism in the Second International early on became advocates of the Zionist project. Their endorsement of Zionism was integral to their orientation toward nationalism, the imperialist powers and the broader capitalist system. This included the leader of the reformist wing Eduard Bernstein, who endorsed Zionism as part of his general support for the colonial policies of imperialism. Kessler also references the remarks of the reformist Ludwig Quessel, who, during World War I, explicitly endorsed the project of an ethno-nationalist Jewish state, demanding that the Arab population of Palestine create “living space [Lebensraum]” for “the Jewish colonization in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.” (Sozialisten gegen Antisemitismus, p. 139)

With some unease, Kessler notes that “arguably the sharpest critique of Zionism” (p. 132), was penned by Leon Trotsky, who attended the 1903 World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. At the time, the Zionist movement was in a deep crisis, prompting Trotsky to forecast its “disintegration” and imminent demise. In an article for Lenin’s newspaper Iskra, published January 1, 1904, Trotsky denounced not only Zionism but also the Jewish Labor Bund, which, though opposing Zionism, adopted a specific form of Jewish cultural nationalism.

By the turn of the century, the Jewish Labor Bund had emerged as a faction within Russian Social Democracy. While it opposed Zionism and instead advocated a joint struggle by Jewish and non-Jewish workers in the Pale, it advanced a particular form of cultural nationalism, centered on the fostering of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews. In terms of their conception of the development of the Russian revolution, the supporters of the Bund shared the national conception of the Mensheviks: They envisioned, first, a bourgeois democratic revolution in the Russian Empire, to be followed in the distant future by a socialist revolution. Like the Mensheviks, they, therefore, favored an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie.

At the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the Bund insisted on its “right” to exclusive representation of the Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement. Their demand, which would have fractured the party along national-religious lines, was opposed by Trotsky, Lenin and Plekhanov. The Bund delegation eventually walked out of the Congress, ensuring that, later in that Congress, Lenin received a majority of the votes in his conflict with what would be called the Mensheviks, meaning “supporters of the minority.” (“Bolsheviks” means “supporters of the majority”.)

Although Trotsky did not, at that point, support Lenin’s struggle against Menshevik opportunism in all of its manifestations, both were hostile to collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie or concessions to all forms of nationalism, Russian or Jewish. Trotsky, in fact, emerged as the most vocal critic of the Bund at the 1903 Congress. It is a remarkable fact — not mentioned by Kessler — that, despite at times fundamental political disagreements on other matters, Trotsky and Lenin were united in their class-based opposition to Jewish nationalism, along with Rosa Luxemburg and Georgi Plekhanov, who once pointedly referred to the Bundists as “Zionists who are afraid of sea-sicknesss.”

In his barely known 1904 article, Trotsky sharply opposed the Bund’s elevation of national considerations over those of class. Over the preceding five years, he noted, the Bund had shifted toward a position where “the class point of view is subordinated to the national point of view, the party is placed under the control of the Bund, the universal is given over to the particular.” He wrote: 

The withdrawal of the Bund from the party is the last moment and result of this five-year evolution. And, in its turn, the fact of the complete “official” isolation of the Bund will inevitably serve as the starting point for the further development of the Bund in the direction of nationalism. We say: inevitably, for the evil will of their national-political position hangs over the good will of the Bund leaders. The fact that the Bund’s departure from the party coincided with the moment of the fatal crisis in Zionism seems to serve as a historical “banner.” Emancipated from the control of the “general” and the “regular,” the Bund opened wide the door to the “particular.” Taken objectively, it now represents an organizational apparatus that is more suitable than ever for leading the Jewish proletariat off the path of revolutionary social-democracy and onto the path of revolutionary-democratic nationalism. Of course, in the subjective consciousness of the leaders of the Bund there are still enough social-democratic “experiences” to fight against such an alignment. But the logic of facts is stronger than the rigidness of thought. ^[7]

While the course of historical developments would not correspond to Trotsky’s forecast, his prediction that the Bund would eventually succumb to Zionism was, eventually, confirmed, after the Second World War.

Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolution and Stalinism

It is to Kessler’s great credit that he introduces readers to this and other little or entirely unknown works by Trotsky on antisemitism and Zionism. His second book, entitled Leon Trotsky on Antisemitism or Socialism against Antisemitism, is the most comprehensive compilation of Trotsky’s writings on the subject in any language. It includes several barely known articles by Trotsky, most notably his essay on the 1913 Beilis Trial. Originally published in 1914 in the theoretical organ of German Social Democracy, Die Neue Zeit, and then re-published in the Soviet edition of Trotsky’s Collected Works in 1926, it has never been fully translated into English.^[8]

In 1911, Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jewish worker at a Kiev factory, was accused of having murdered a young boy in an act of “ritual murder” — a vile rendition of the old blood libel against the Jewish people. The real murderers of the boy were known but protected by the “justice” system of the tsar, set on victimizing Beilis. The trial was a sinister and farcical display of the most backward and absurd antisemitic prejudices, which had gripped the minds of the Tsarist family, leading state officials, and their obscurantist allies in the Orthodox Church.

The essay is an impressive example of Trotsky’s brilliant and impassionate Marxist journalism. In considerable detail, he documented the “monstrous falsification, organized by the state, against a single individual, a helpless, weak Jewish worker, the embodiment of the lack of political and legal rights.” Even more importantly, he uncovered the social and political forces at work in the trial, which served as the catalyst for the immense class and political tensions in the Russian Empire. Soon, these tensions would erupt violently first in the World War, and then the 1917 revolutions. Recognizing that the trial heralded “a new epoch of profound revolutionary convulsions,” Trotsky wrote:

The enormity of this criminal act gnawed at the conscience of everyone day in and day out. The circulation of opposition newspapers doubled and tripled, while the number of readers probably increased tenfold. Many millions rushed to the newspaper every day and read it with clenched fists and gritted teeth. Politically indifferent people jumped up, agitated and frightened, as if they had been caught in a train carriage by a catastrophe. People who considered themselves consistent opponents of the existing political order had to convince themselves anew every day that they had never thought of the rulers as such despicable scoundrels as they had turned out to be in reality... With the Kiev ritual murder trial, the government has publicly revealed not only its boundless baseness, but also its weakness. … [It is an] evident, apparent fact that a dozen carefully selected people were cut off from the world for a month, surrounded by fabrications, beguiled by the poison of anti-Semitic agitation, and terrorized by the authority of the monarchy and the church, and yet despite all this, they could not bring themselves to carry out the villainy they had been assigned and find the defendants guilty. The jury responded to the question of guilt with the verdict: “No, he is innocent!” Thus, despite its outward power, tsarism emerged from the trial as a moral bankrupt in the eyes of the people. (Leo Trotzki, “Die Beilis-Affäre”, in: Leo Trotzki oder: Sozialismus gegen Antisemitismus, pp. 113-114. Translation from the German by this author.)

Trotsky’s prediction was borne out less than five years later. In the February 1917 Revolution, the Tsarist regime was toppled and the Jewish population of the former Russian Empire was granted full civil rights. Shortly thereafter, the Bolsheviks led the working class seizure of power in the October Revolution. In the subsequent civil war, as Kessler observes, “the fight against the pogromists was intrinsically tied to the fight against a society whose ruling ideology provided a fertile basis for hatred of the Jews.” (Sozialisten gegen Antisemitismus, p. 165) 

Kessler terms the civil war, quite correctly, an “antisemitic crusade” and provides a concise overview of the state of research on the subject, paying due credit to the “consistent” fight by the Bolsheviks against antisemitism. He also, if briefly, addresses the fact that this historical experience brought a sea-change in Jewish left-wing politics: The impact of the October revolution and the Bolsheviks’ struggle against antisemitism provoked a split in the Jewish Labor Bund as well as within the left-wing of the Zionist movement. Both split, with a large portion of the membership of the Bund and the Left Poalei Tsiyon joining the Bolshevik party in 1919-1920.

During the civil war, the counter-revolutionary armies of the Whites, backed by the imperialist powers, and Ukrainian nationalist forces under Symon Petliura, carried out mass pogroms, killing an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Jews. Most of the dead were in Ukraine. It was the single largest anti-Jewish slaughter before the Holocaust. The ideological basis for this outburst of anti-Jewish violence was anti-communism and, specifically, opposition to internationalist revolutionary Marxism. This is why Leon Trotsky, associated like no other with the program of world socialist revolution, became the principal target of all counter-revolutionary and antisemitic forces.

“In the hatred of Trotsky,” Kessler observes, “all antisemitic resentments were bundled together, reinforcing each other.” This fact no doubt influenced Trotsky during the revolution and civil war. Thus, he refused Lenin’s proposal to take on the position of People’s Commissar of the Interior for fear that it would further encourage antisemitic agitation. It is also likely that this explains why Trotsky, as head of the Red Army, did not address extensively the antisemitic pogroms during the civil war.

His article “Pogromist agitation,” written on the eve of the seizure of power in October 1917, would be his last article in many years on the subject. Clearly, he left the responsibility for leading this work politically to Lenin, who oversaw a systematic campaign to combat antisemitism within the population at large and the Red Army. This included a widely distributed speech against antisemitism in 1919, in which Lenin forcefully denounced antisemitism as an “attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews.” (See here for a discussion of the Bolsheviks’ fight against antisemitism.)

Underscoring the close inter-relationship between the development of the fight against antisemitism and the revolution, at critical historical junctures Trotsky would time and again be compelled to return to address this issue. Thus, in his 1923 volume Problems of Everyday Life, he pointed to the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudices among layers of the peasantry — still the vast majority of the Soviet population — who had not been fully won to the new order.

These tendencies in Soviet society would re-emerge with a vengeance as the October Revolution, contrary to the expectations of the Bolsheviks, remained internationally isolated. Under these conditions, a bureaucracy consolidated itself in the 1920s and usurped political power from the working class. This process found its political expression in embittered inner-party struggle, in which Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition had to defend the social interests of the working class and the Marxist program of world socialist revolution against the nationalist reaction against the revolution, spearheaded by the Stalin faction. In December 1924, Stalin articulated the programmatic basis of this nationalist reaction against October with the proclamation that the USSR would henceforth build “socialism in one country.”

Beginning in the 1920s, the bureaucracy would systematically stoke and mobilize the tradition of nationalist antisemitism in backward layers of the population in its struggle against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Slowly but surely, the Stalin faction revived the old counter-revolutionary trope of the “Jewish Bolshevik” in the guise of the “Jewish Oppositionist,” Trotsky. This process, which Kessler summarizes only briefly, would eventually culminate in a pernicious revival of antisemitic stereotypes of the “Jewish revolutionary” during the Great Terror and the wave of post-war purges prior to Stalin’s death in 1953 which had an overt antisemitic component.

Given the paucity of literature on the subject, it is to Kessler’s credit that he deals with the impact of Stalinism on the Jewish and Arab workers’ movement beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. However, he does so in a rather superficial manner, without grappling with the fundamental political and historical implications of Stalinism. Thus, he notes that most of the hundreds of members of the Palestinian Communist Party who were expelled from Palestine under British rule in the late 1920s and early 1930s ended up in the Soviet Union. There, most of them became victims of the Stalinist terror. “Of the first CC [Central Committee] of the CP of Palestine,” which included both Arabs and Jews, Kessler concludes, “only Joseph Berger survived the Stalinist terror” (Sozialisten gegen Antisemitismus, p. 226).

Unfortunately, Kessler does not dwell on this history, instead jumping back and forth between countries and issues. We shall hope that other historians will pay more attention to this chapter in the history of the workers movement that would impact the fate of both the Jewish and the Arab peoples for decades to come. The memoirs by Joseph Berger, which Kessler only references without quoting them, powerfully speak to the immense impact of the rise of Stalinism and the terror in the USSR on the fate of the socialist movement in Palestine. Berger was part of a generation of revolutionaries in Europe and the Middle East deeply impacted and inspired by the October Revolution, only to later be disoriented by Stalinism. More so than many of his generation, Berger was acutely conscious of the far-reaching implications of the destruction of his generation of revolutionaries in the Great Terror. In his preface, Berger wrote:

... it was not merely individuals, or groups, or even tens of thousands of individuals who were destroyed. It was a whole generation—the generation which brought about the greatest revolution in history and which, twenty years later, had been either physically annihilated or swept aside in such a way that only a few traces of its work were left. This multitude included not only the men directly responsible for the Revolution but also the millions who took part in it less actively and less consciously, as well as the many more who gave it merely the passive support caused by their hostility to the “former classes.”^[9]

It is only against the background of the immense political, intellectual and cultural damage caused by the Stalinist terror that the subsequent development of the workers movement, including the acceptance of Zionism by many of its former opponents — such as the Bund — can be explained.

Kessler takes note of the role of Stalinism on the fate of the Jewish people, but he only scratches the surface of the subject. Above all, he avoids dealing with the political issues involved in the struggle against Stalinism. In the few passages where he does address them, he expresses his disagreement with Trotsky’s emphasis on internationalism and rejection of all forms of nationalism, a trait which, as Kessler writes in his book on Trotsky and antisemitism, made him “politically vulnerable.”

In a political sense, this is a concession to both Stalinism and Zionism. At the heart of the struggle between the Opposition and Stalinism was the fight over the perspective of revolutionary internationalism in opposition to nationalism. The Stalinist bureaucracy explicitly renounced the strategy of permanent revolution, which had informed the 1917 Revolution.

Elaborated above all by Trotsky, the conception of permanent revolution proceeded from the recognition that, in the modern epoch, the bourgeoisie could no longer resolve the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolutions — including the emancipation of oppressed nationalities and minorities— even in backward countries. Only the working class could resolve these tasks by seizing state power, enacting socialist measures and fighting for the overthrow of the entire capitalist nation-state system. The emancipation of the Jews and the Bolsheviks’ fight against antisemitism were, thus, not an accidental by-product of the October Revolution but an intrinsic component of the socialist overhaul of society by the working class, powerfully confirming the perspective of permanent revolution. Stalinism’s violent Russian chauvinistic reaction against the October Revolution and the program of permanent revolution entailed not only the proclamation of building “socialism in one country” in the USSR. It also involved the subordination of workers everywhere to their “own” national bourgeoisie, including the Arab and Jewish bourgeoisies in the Middle East, eventually strengthening both Zionism and Arab nationalism.

In May 1947, in a markedly abrupt shift, Stalin, who had previously derided Zionism as a reactionary movement and sought to win Arab favor, adopted a pro-Zionist foreign policy. He supported the UN resolution for partition, delivering also the votes of Byelorussia, Ukraine, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, although Yugoslavia abstained, to ensure the UN secured the necessary two thirds majority to pass the resolution. The Soviet Union was the first state to give de jure recognition to Israel. In 1948, the USSR also provided arms to Israel for its war against Arab armies during the Nakba, thus playing a major role in Israel’s very formation and its violent suppression of the Palestinians. In yet another historical manifestation of the twin-nature of antisemitism and Zionism, Stalin, just as he supported Israel, engaged in the most overtly antisemitic purges the Soviet Union would ever witness, culminating in the notorious “Doctors’ Plot” of 1952-1953.

Conclusion

Kessler’s books provide irrefutable evidence that the most powerful and consistent critique of both antisemitism and Zionism emanated from the revolutionary internationalist wing in the workers’ movement, represented, in particular, by Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg.

The Zionist state has emerged as the diseased product of the greatest tragedies and political crimes of the 20th century: The betrayal of the October revolution and the international socialist movement by Stalinism, the coming to power of Hitler’s Nazi movement in Germany which paved the way for the Holocaust, and the destruction of generations of revolutionaries in the Stalinist terror. Prior to that, the Marxist movement commanded the allegiance and respect of the most progressive layers of Jewish workers and intellectuals in Europe, who drew inspiration from its fight against both antisemitism and Zionism. It is only on the basis of these historic defeats of the workers movement and the immense crimes of fascism that the Zionist project was legitimized in the eyes of the masses, feeding itself, more than anything else, off historical despair and pessimism.

Kessler essentially shares this historical pessimism. Although he acknowledges the tremendous foresight of Trotsky’s struggle against Nazism and his warnings of an imminent catastrophe for the Jewish people, his conclusion from the Holocaust is that the Marxist fight against antisemitism, noble though it was, ultimately failed and Trotsky’s fight for socialism was “utopian.” The Holocaust, Kessler writes, meant the “historical failure” of the Jewish aspirations to “assimilate” in European society. The state of Israel, he argues, emerged as a “democratic state in the midst of hostile dictatorship. Yet it [Israel] was and remains an ethnically-defined state that relies on the expropriation and expulsion of Palestinians. This contradiction has become an irresolvable dilemma for socialist Zionists that strive to achieve a just and egalitarian society.” (Sozialisten gegen Antisemitismus, p. 294) No doubt, Kessler counts himself among them.

But this “irresolvable dilemma” only exists for those who accept the capitalist nation-state system. The Trotskyist movement has never done so. It is a telling omission that Kessler, with all the documents he references and translated, does not mention the 1948 statement by the Fourth International opposing the formation of Israel. In a prediction that has, tragically, been fully borne out, the Trotskyist movement warned:

The Jewish worker having been separated from his Arab colleague and prevented from fighting a common class struggle will be at the mercy of his class enemies, imperialism and the Zionist bourgeoisie. It will be easy to arouse him against his proletarian ally, the Arab worker, “who is depriving him of jobs and depressing the level of wages” (a method that has not failed in the past!). Not in vain has Weitzmann said that “the Jewish state will stem Communist influence.” As a compensation, the Jewish worker is bestowed with the privilege of dying a hero’s death on the altar of the Hebrew state. …

The partition was not meant to solve Jewish misery nor is it likely ever to do so. This dwarf of a state which is too small to absorb the Jewish masses cannot even solve the problems of its citizens. The Hebrew state can only infest the Arab East with anti-Semitism and may well turn out – as Trotsky said – a bloody trap for hundreds of thousands of Jews.^[10]

Almost 80 years on, this “bloody trap” has become a bloody disaster of historic proportions for the entire population of the Middle East. The left-wing Zionist perspective that Kessler advocates against Trotsky and the Marxist opponents of Zionism has proven a historical dead-end. In Israel, the Labour Zionists have long joined forces with the extreme Zionist right in the suppression of the Palestinians. Whatever their differences with Benjamin Netanyahu, they have been fully complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. The consequences of subordinating the struggles of the working class in Israel to the perspective of pressuring the Labour Zionists have had immensely tragic consequences for the entire working class, above all the Palestinians.

Lessons must be drawn. The unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people and Israel’s role as the primary proxy of US imperialism in the region underscore all the warnings made by the Marxist movement against Zionism since its inception. In particular, they are a vindication, albeit a tragic one, of the consistent struggle waged by the Trotskyist movement against Stalinism and of the theory of permanent revolution.

Kessler has produced an objective and well documented history of one of the most important aspects of the development of the revolutionary movement. But the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli-Iran war also underscore the urgency of confronting the weaknesses in his positions: the working class of the Middle East - Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Kurdish and Jewish alike - can stop the unfolding catastrophe only by unifying its struggles consciously in opposition to the entire capitalist nation-state system and imperialism. This requires a revival of the revolutionary internationalist traditions of Marxism, embodied today in the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International.