Anti-Semitism and the far left: a brief history

Why does Jeremy Corbyn show such disdain for the mainstream Jewish community? Why does he prefer to associate with terrorist “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah? And why does the Corbyn clique now in charge of Labour insist on diluting the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism?

The fact is that – despite its own boasts about “anti-racism” – the far-left has had a longstanding problem with Jews, and not just with “Zionists.” This problem pre-dates 1844, when Karl Marx published On The Jewish Question; but Marx’s essay is a good place to start.

In On the Jewish Question, Marx tied up Jews with capitalism: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money….Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist…The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.” For Marx, in order for there to be human progress, capitalism, and with it, “the empirical essence of Judaism,” had to be abolished.