Anti-Semitism deflects class hatred onto merchants who embody the whole system’s exploitation.
Evidence
The Jews constituted the trauma of the knights of industry who had to pretend to be creative, while the claptrap of anti-Semitism announced a fact for which they secretly despised themselves; their anti-Semitism is self-hatred, the bad conscience of the parasite. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Rich yet contemptible, the Jews provided a natural lightning-rod to divert early discharges of the anti-modernist energy. They provided the point where formidable powers of money met with social disdain, moral condemnation and aesthetic disgust. This was exactly what hostility to modernity, and particularly to its capitalist form, needed for an anchor. If only capitalism could be connected to the Jew, it would stand condemned as simultaneously alien, unnatural, inimical, dangerous and ethically repulsive. The connection was easy to establish: money power was confined to the margins and (under the contemptuous name of usury) writhed under the burden of authoritative condemnation as long as the Jews stayed enclosed in the ghetto: it moved to the centre of life and (under the prestigious name of capital) claimed authority and social respect once the Jews appeared on the streets of the city centre. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: A society wholly commercialized condemns Jews as materialists it has itself become.; Capitalist anti-Semitism is the bourgeoisie’s self-hatred displaced onto Jews — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132; Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132 (+9 more)
Broader Connections
- Capitalist anti-Semitism is the bourgeoisie’s self-hatred displaced onto Jews
#corroborates(0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132 - Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable
#expands(0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146 - Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies
#expands(0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132 - Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated
#corroborates(0.82) - Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism
#qualifies(0.80) - Antisemitism functioned as generalizable political hatred of society and the state
#expands(0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 310 - Anti-Semitism’s appeal is destructive pleasure, not material gain
#qualifies(0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 125 - Anti-Semitism projects the subject’s own repressed impulses onto the victim
#corroborates(0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 147 - Nationalist anti-Semitism channels religious fanaticism’s energy into race hatred
#expands(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 133 - Those who profit most from exploitation actively propagate prejudice
#contradicts(0.72) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 118