Even atheist and converted Jewish revolutionaries were doubly targeted by anti-Semitism

Evidence

Marxism sprouted in the same soil that fertilized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that would eventually produce Weimar and then Nazi Germany. No one’s life was unaffected; no one was safe from their Shylock doubles, not even the converts and atheists. Marx’s father converted not out of faith, but because he was a lawyer and a new Prussian decree had barred Jews from occupying legal positions or state offices. Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, chose to reclaim their family heritage and taught herself Yiddish so she could better organize Jewish garment workers in London’s East End, unequivocally declaring, amid a spasm of European anti-Semitism, “I am a Jewess.” Rosa Luxemburg’s political party was a target of what she described as “an all-out orgy of anti-Semitism” in the press. Trotsky, in his early career as a journalist, was shaped by covering outbreaks of anti-Semitic mob violence, describing scenes of gangs “drunk on vodka and the smell of blood.” He was himself routinely portrayed as a Jewish devil (horns and all) by his political adversaries. And, in 1940, the year of his death, Trotsky vividly observed that “in the epoch of its rise, capitalism took the Jewish people out of the ghetto and utilized them as an instrument in its commercial expansion. Today decaying capitalist society is striving to squeeze the Jewish people from all its pores.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 948

Categorization

• XREF: Doppelganger logic — the ‘Shylock doubles’ landing on converts and atheists mirrors how Klein’s own double attaches despite political distance. — connects to: So-called converts of Jewish origin were still deported and killed — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 444