Antisemitism: 'The Socialism of Idiots'

Since the Jews were among humanity’s very first socialists and very first liberals, perhaps we should remind the world about who we are and what we subscribe to.

Many people forget that, in Germany, Hitler’s Nazi party was officially called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free and zero-advertising for all.

---

You can also listen to this essay if you prefer:

Or listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify

---

In the late 1800s, August Bebel, the leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, said: “Antisemitism is the socialism of idiots.”

Bebel used this phrase to demonstrate that antisemites (i.e. Jew haters) were blaming economic inequality on the Jews rather than on the real reasons, such as unregulated capitalism, poor education, and equal opportunity employment. These bigots understood that they were getting shafted by the system, and their Jew-hating attitudes only made it worse.

The incessantly repeated (and still predominant) portrayal of Jews as anti-socialist and illiberal is especially ironic because the Jewish People were actually among humanity’s very first socialists and very first liberals. Not politically speaking, but morally, ethically, and spiritually speaking.

Heck, Jews were even “woke” and “progressive” — thousands of years before these terms became perverted by modern-day impersonators who have, among other precarious positions, developed an “anti-Israel” program to disguise their dangerous antisemitism.

As those among humanity’s very first socialists and very first liberals, perhaps we Jews should remind the world about who we are and what we subscribe to.

One account in the Talmud tells about someone who wanted to convert to Judaism. This happened not infrequently, and the individual stated that he would accept Judaism only if a rabbi would teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one foot. Upon hearing this, the gentle Jewish sage Hillel accepted the challenge, and said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this — go and study it!”

Another story from the Talmud is about Honi the Circle Maker, who saw a man planting a carob tree and asked him how long it takes to bear fruit. “Seventy years,” the man replied, to which Honi wondered aloud, “Are you certain that you will live another 70 years?” The man pondered Honi’s question and then said, “I found carob trees in this world planted for me by my ancestors, so I am planting these for my descendants.”

When the children of Israel had entered the land with Joshua, they divvied it up in equal portions, rendering all Israelites landed and equal citizens. You couldn’t sell a parcel of land; you could only lease it until the Jubilee year, which came once in 50 years.

In Jewish law, if a person is starving, he is permitted to take the food of another person — since that person has an obligation to provide the starving person food. If you see another person’s property being destroyed, you are obligated to do what you can to prevent the destruction.¹

Other Jewish laws, going back thousands of years, include:

1. Not to covet and scheme to acquire another’s possession (Exodus 20:14)

2. To decide by majority in case of disagreement (Exodus 23:2)

3. To give charity (Deuteronomy 15:11)

4. Not to withhold wages or fail to repay a debt (Leviticus 19:13)

5. Help another remove the load from a beast which can no longer carry it (Exodus 23:5)

6. Not to put a stumbling block before a blind man (Leviticus 19:14)

7. To recognize others distraught with burdens (Deuteronomy 22:4)

8. Not to destroy fruit trees even during the siege (Deuteronomy 20:19)

9. Not to have too much silver and gold if you are the king (Deuteronomy 17:17)

10. To leave a corner of the field uncut for the poor (Leviticus 19:10)

Did you know that Judaism is the reason we have a weekend — to encourage rest and relaxation, to not be overworked? In Judaism, we call it Shabbat. Having a fixed day of rest was most likely first practiced in Judaism, dating back to the sixth century BC, according to Eviatar Zerubavel in his book, “The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week.”

In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill, after Jewish workers requested that they not need to work on the Sabbath, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.²

Judaism also contributed to schools and scholarship (i.e. access to education) as we know them. Elementary school learning was regarded as compulsory by Simeon ben Shetah as early as 75 BCE and Joshua ben Gamla in 64 CE. The education of older boys and men in a beit midrash (study hall) goes back to the Second Temple period (which began in 586 BCE).

And the Talmud stresses importance of education, stating that children should begin school at age six. Rabbis added that they should not be beaten with a stick or cane, that older students should help younger ones, and that children should not be kept from their lessons by other duties.

Other liberal values — such as the dignity of human life, peace and harmony, justice and equality, and social responsibility — are typically attributed to the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans.

“It would be pointless to negate that Greece and Rome, besides being the most advanced civilizations of antiquity, have also been the most influential of civilizations on Western Europe and by extension, the Americas,” according to Ken Spiro, author of WorldPerfect – The Jewish Impact on Civilization.

“Without a doubt, much of our ideas about art, beauty, philosophy, government, and modern empirical science do come from classical Greek thought,” Spiro added. “Western law, government, administration, and engineering were also powerfully shaped by Rome. Indeed, we do overwhelmingly get the lion’s share of our culture from these civilizations.”

But can the same be said about our values, ethics, and principles? How did we come to order our socialist values in this particular way?

“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation,” John Adams, the second president of the United States, once said. “Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.”

Paul Johnson, a Christian historian and author of “A History of the Jews,” rendered a more detailed postulation:

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift.”

“To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews it might have been a much emptier place.”

Is it really possible that our liberal values do not originate from one of the great civilizations, but have been bequeathed to us by a small, otherwise insignificant nation inhabiting a tiny piece of real estate in the Middle East?

“I venture to say that the ancient Hebrews (who later came to be known as the Israelites and still later as the Jews) would have disagreed with the statements of Adams and of Johnson above,” Spiro wrote. “They would have insisted that they had nothing personally to do with inventing the values which ran against the grain of the world around them, and indeed were totally unknown to other peoples. They would have insisted that these values came from God, and they were merely the people chosen to disseminate them worldwide.”

“This was the story they told from the time they appeared on the world scene around 1300 BCE, hundreds of years before the ascent of the Greek civilization,” he continued. “Back then, they were still a newly emerging nation that functioned more like a large extended family, all family members tracing their ancestry to a man named Abraham who had lived somewhere around 1800 BCE.”

It was a story bound to raise more than a few eyebrows in the ancient world. Of course, the ancient people believed all sorts of wild things about divine relationships with human beings, so the Jews’ story was not in and of itself all too outlandish.

Nor was a society governed by laws so strange, after all; previous law codes, the Code of Hammurabi being the most famous, set forth rules governing property rights and the like. What the ancient world couldn’t fathom was this particular code. Indeed, it was a code that to the ancient mind seemed irrational.

“The Jews are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life,” Roman philosopher Deo Cassius wrote.

---

In light of the situation in Israel — where we are based — we are making Future of Jewish FREE for the coming days. If you wish to support our critical mission to responsibly defend the Jewish People and Israel during this unprecedented time in our history, you can do so via the following options:

---

Hence why European socialism did not originate in Roman or Greek jurisprudence, nor did it arise out of the “pure reason” of 19th-century political thinkers.

“The roots of socialism are firmly grounded in a Torah institution,” according to Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, who also pointed out that Torah also respects the individual and their “inalienable rights.”³

John Locke, commonly known as the “father of liberalism,” is typically to whom we most owe the idea that each man has a natural right to life, liberty, and property — as well as the notion of giving your “needy brother” the right to your surplus of goods, not out of your mercy, but out of justice.

In a fascinating article titled “Locke and Political Hebraism,” however, Fania Oz-Salzberger dismissed this claim. “Only the Hebrew Bible,” she wrote, “could support this legalist, non-voluntary approach to the relationship between the wealthy and the starving, thanks to its unique model of an altruistic community rooted in law.”⁴

That’s why, in the Torah, there’s no talk of rights. Everyone, by default, has all the rights of the first human being ever created. Torah, then, speaks of responsibilities. The taxes that the Torah speaks of are the responsibility of the individual to provide for the poor, the orphans, and the widows.

As for government, the Torah gives it relatively little significance. Yes, the rabbis instituted takkanot ha-shuk — price ceilings, measures to keep staple foods at reasonable prices — and penalized those who failed to provide their fair share for the poor. The court sat in the marketplace judging case-by-case to keep law in order. But those were supplementary measures.⁵

More aptly, anyone who has studied the Talmud’s monetary laws is struck by the prominent place of the oath in this system. Without the institution of the oath, the entire judicial system of monetary law crumbles to pieces. Every piece of it is built on an assumption that the great majority of citizens — no matter how great a financial loss is at stake — would not be able to hold a Torah scroll and make a statement before a Jewish court that is blatantly false.

“This is an assumption that relies heavily on the moral education of the people,” according to Rabbi Freeman. “And that is just the point: A society can be fair, just, and ethical only when the populace receives an ethical education.”

“That explains why the Torah is obsessed not with government, but with another institution — its primary institution, because it truly is the primary institution of any free society,” he added. “And that is the moral and ethical education of its citizens, by its citizens. Because authentic education — turning out responsible and sensitive citizens who are inspired to social justice — is inherently a bottom-up, grassroots project, and the only path to a just and fair society is from the bottom up.”

Jews do not call the founder of our society “Moses the Law-Maker” or “Moses the Governor,” but “Moses, our teacher.” Few other nations were formed by someone who is called “our teacher.”⁶

And who were the men who forged the law of Torah into a code to function throughout the ages, who legislated its application in everyday life? The rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud were not a ruling class, but by and large people who tilled their own fields, pruned their own vineyards, or occupied a craft or trade. They were of the people themselves.

“When we shift the historical paradigm from slaves throwing off their shackles to free people forming a society, we also shift the engine of this society from governance to education,” Rabbi Freeman said. “But that also requires shifting our understanding of capitalism and socialism — to frame it not in terms of ownership, but rather in terms of our responsibilities to one another and the betterment of society.”

Moving on, Judaism also created the concept of universalism that so many people, especially those on the liberal left, cherish today. From “day one,” Jews have always pushed a universal worldview, an idea of the whole human race united. We are particularists in that the Jewish People is supposed to do this, not at the expense of their identity, but by preserving their Jewish identity as a role model.

Environmental issues are, for good reason, another pressing issue among today’s liberal left. Did you know that the Torah prescribes a responsible stewardship of our environment?

Just as the Jews have a weekly Sabbath on the seventh day of the week, we also have a yearly Sabbath, which takes place every seven years, called shmita, literally meaning “renunciation.” It is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah in the Land of Israel.

During shmita, the land is left to lay fallow and all agricultural activity is forbidden by Jewish law, including plowing, planting, pruning, and harvesting. Other cultivation techniques (i.e. watering, fertilizing, weeding, spraying, trimming, mowing) may be performed as preventive measures only, not to improve the growth of trees or other plants.

In ancient Israel, farmers still harvested crops, but only as much as people needed for their sustenance. And Julius Caesar exempted the Jews from taxation in a shmita year since “they neither take fruit from the trees, nor do they sow.”⁷

Today, in modern-day Israel, shmita only applies within the borders settled by the ancient Israelites upon their return from Egyptian slavery. This excludes the southern Arava Valley and large portions of the Negev, where farming continues as usual.

And most large commercial farmers symbolically relinquish ownership of their land for the sabbatical year, enabling them to sell produce grown in the soil with certain modifications, such as plowing before shmita begins. Farmers who choose to practice shmita more literally can use various methods to continue providing produce to the market, such as growing hydroponically or in raised containers.⁸

Speaking of modern-day Israel, the Jewish state founded in 1948 started out as a beacon of successful socialism in which the paradigmatic building block was the kibbutz, a utopian commune that fused egalitarianism, farming, and Zionism.

“Zionism is the liberation movement of the Jewish People, who lived under millennia of oppression and exile — a resoundingly progressive idea,” according to Joe Roberts, chairman of the Zionist advocacy organization JSpaceCanada.⁹

The Labor Zionists who immigrated to then-Ottoman-era and British Palestine starting in the mid-1800s aspired to develop a more just society centered on community, not the individual. They founded agrarian communes — the kibbutzim that settled the land and later attracted idealist Diaspora Jews to work on them — and socialist organizations like Histadrut (which today represents the majority of Israel’s trade unionists).

Labor Zionism (or socialist Zionism) was, for many years, the most significant tendency among Zionists and Zionist organizations, and was seen as the Zionist sector of the historic Jewish labor movements of Eastern Europe and Central Europe, eventually developing local units in most countries with sizable Jewish populations.

Unlike the “political Zionist” tendencies founded by Theodor Herzl and advocated by Chaim Weizmann (Israel’s first ceremonial president), Labor Zionists did not believe that a Jewish state would be created by simply appealing to the international community or to powerful nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany, or the former Ottoman Empire.

Rather, they believed that a Jewish state could only be created through the efforts of the Jewish working class immigrating to Israel and raising a country through the creation of a Labor Jewish society with rural kibbutzim and moshavim, an urban Jewish Proletariat, with characteristics such as pioneering, humble, idealistic, and modest to the point of poverty.

From 1948 to 1977, the left-wing Labor Party (or its forerunners) was constantly in power and, alongside the Histadrut, built a nation that aligned with Labor Zionist principles.

What distinguishes Labor Zionism from other Zionist streams is not economic policy, analyses of capitalism, or any class analysis or orientation, but its attitude towards Israeli-Palestinian issues.

And this is where the “socialism of idiots” has come to fruition in Israel, as well. From my vantage point, the key difference between Labor Zionism and other Zionist streams is the acceptance of reality: that peace with the Palestinians (and much of the greater Muslim and Arab world) is simply improbable.

“The assumption that real peace is possible here, peace like the one between Switzerland to Italy or between France and Belgium, is an assumption that has nothing to rely on,” famed Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu said.¹⁰

To this end, even Israel’s normalization with Egypt, the first Arab country to recognize the Jewish state in 1979, has proven to be a half-peace at best.

Real peace, according to Benzion Netanyahu, “is a kind of superstition that we cultivate in order to deceive ourselves and to make it easier for the hostile world to mislead us. For the objective enemy will always be present. And the enemy will always wait for us. It will always look for the our weak points, it will wait for revelations of weakness on our part, and then attack.”

Hence why Israel’s “socialism of idiots” is one of the main reasons — but definitely not the only reason — for Israel’s incredibly right-wing government in power today. It’s the more centrist and right-wing Israelis who believe what I’ve said time and time again, and what I’ll keep saying until people finally understand it:

If the Palestinians seriously wanted their own state, they would have had it by now.

Yet, statehood in and of itself is not how the Palestinians define success; their “success” is determined by no longer having a Jewish state exist where it does today, sandwiched between North Africa and the Middle East.

With this as the core of their so-called national identity, the Palestinians as a political entity have unsurprisingly failed time and time and time again. And every argument, including antisemitic “socialism of idiots” ones adopted by many liberal Jews and Israelis, falls flat.

For instance, some claim that Israel isn’t willing to make peace with the Palestinians, even though, since the 1930s, the Jews have engaged in the highly cherished liberal principle of “shared ownership” a whopping 10 times to create a two-state solution with the Palestinians:

1. In 1936 (the Peel Commission)

2. In 1947 (the UN Partition Plan)

3. In 1949 (UN Resolution 194)

4. In 1967 (UN Resolution 242)

5. In 1978 (Begin/Sadat peace proposal)

6. In 2000 (Camp David peace proposal)

7. In 2001 (Taba peace proposal)

8. In 2008 (Olmert peace proposal)

9. In 2014 (Kerry’s “Conditions for Peace”)

10. In 2019 (Trump’s “Deal of the Century”)

Others argue that Israel refuses to return land, without realizing or forgetting that Israel has historically withdrawn from areas it captured following wars in which Israel was predominantly attacked. This includes returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1979 and Gaza to Palestinian governance in 1993.

Others claim it is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, but we’ve supplied them with water, electricity, and currency (which no other country would even do, for reasonable fear of devaluation) for decades. What other country provides their stated enemy (in the Palestinians’ eyes) with such essentials?

When our Arab neighbors need life-saving healthcare, Israelis open their doors. We treated Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader who helped plan the October 7th attacks, for cancer; and we treated his daughter too. We treat war-wounded civilians who arrive at the Syrian-Israeli border. We treat Palestinian children, including right now in this very war. As we speak, we are even treating the terrorists who massacred our people on October 7th.

Others suppose that Israelis are imperialists and Zionism is inherently a colonial movement, even though Zionism is, by definition, the greatest decolonization project on planet Earth. And Israel is the furthest thing from so-called apartheid.

Others presume that Israel was created because of the Holocaust, and since the Holocaust is long gone, there exists the increasingly lesser need for a Jewish state. However, using this logic irresponsibly erases other parts of history which are also important to understanding the still-critical need for a Jewish state.

Others posit that it’s an issue of occupation, without realizing or forgetting that Israel has built walls, checkpoints, and other security infrastructure not to occupy the Palestinians, but as a response to their decades-long grotesque and barbaric terrorism against Israeli citizens, during all the years that there weren’t any walls and checkpoints.

Others believe that Israel wants to get rid of the Palestinians. To this I say: If we truly wanted to get rid of them, the current Israel-Hamas war would’ve been over just a few days after it started. The reality is that we’re using a tiny fraction of our military means, and Israel’s standard of proof to demonstrate compliance with international law is unparalleled. No other state in the international system is subjected to provide such detailed evidence during an ongoing armed conflict.

This is why the Israel’s “socialism of idiots” groups are becoming exponentially less relevant, in favor of the more centrist and right-wing parties which realize (and receive more votes based on the fact that) Israel will likely never be able to live in peace with the Palestinians and Arabs, no matter what us Israelis do.

Going back to the 1970s, Israel’s socioeconomic and political environments shifted from Labor Zionism to relatively righter-wing policies, triggered by the morale-shattering 1973 Yom Kippur War, as well as high inflation that caused several Israeli banks to fail a decade later.

For instance, high inflation and economic troubles in the 1980s caused many kibbutzim (the epitomes of socialism) to go into debt and enter bailout agreements with the government. These agreements allowed the kibbutzim to repay their debt over time on the condition that they be privatized.¹¹

Naturally, this caused Israelis to rethink their economy and ultimately transition away from a socialist welfare state. By liberalizing the Israeli economy, Palestinian day-workers who participate in it had their standard of living upgraded, and Israel’s burgeoning economy sought to globalize.

Meanwhile, Palestinians have blamed Israel’s economic policies for hurting the prospects of an autonomous Palestinian economy, but this is exactly the kind of “socialism of idiots” thinking that continues to plague Israel today: the notion that Israel is to blame for all of the Palestinians’ problems.

The very nature of antisemitism, more recently self-described by antisemites as the more socially acceptable “anti-Zionism,” is to blame the Jews for other people’s problems. Sure, Israel can theoretically always do more in the way of a two-state solution, especially since Benjamin Netanyahu was elected and reelected Israeli prime minister from 2009. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t start in 2009; it goes back to the 1800s.

After living in Israel for the last 10 years, I think I’m hearing many Israelis loud and clear when they say, more or less: “We genuinely tried the Israeli-Palestinian peace process many times, driven by both Israeli left-wing and right-wing leadership, and it has failed time and time again. It’s a lost cause.”

What’s more, I think many Israelis have grown tired of all the people who abdicate the Palestinians of their own responsibilities, and of their own historical missteps; of all the people who ignore or overlook the 10 total opportunities that the Palestinians have had peace deals with the Jews on the table, dating back to the 1930s, yet declined every one; and of all the people who give the Palestinians a “free pass” for being the most funded refugee group in the history of the world, yet having virtually nothing to show for it.

Can you really blame Israelis for feeling this way?

For now, I think Israelis are reasonably asking: What do the self-inflicted Palestinian misfortunes have much of anything to do with Israel and Zionism?

And I agree with them. If anything, the self-inflicted Palestinian misfortunes have far more to do with the centuries-old scourge of antisemitism; in this case, a refusal to share anything with the Jews and accept a Jewish state in the Middle East.

For those who can’t or don’t want to register this reality, well, then, excuse my French, but they might just be an idiot.

---

---

In light of the situation in Israel — where we are based — we are making Future of Jewish FREE for the coming days. If you wish to support our critical mission to responsibly defend the Jewish People and Israel during this unprecedented time in our history, you can do so via the following options:

1. “Is Judaism Socialist or Capitalist?” Chabad.org. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3250289/jewish/Is-Judaism-Socialist-or-Capitalist.htm.

2. Rybczynski, Witold. “Waiting for the Weekend.” The Atlantic. August 1991. pp. 35–52.

3. “Is Judaism Socialist or Capitalist?” Chabad.org. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3250289/jewish/Is-Judaism-Socialist-or-Capitalist.htm.

4. “The Political Thought of John Locke and the Significance of Political Hebraism,” in Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger and Meirav Jones, eds., Political Hebraism (Shalem Press, 2008), p. 248.

5. “Is Judaism Socialist or Capitalist?” Chabad.org. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3250289/jewish/Is-Judaism-Socialist-or-Capitalist.htm.

6. “Is Judaism Socialist or Capitalist?” Chabad.org. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3250289/jewish/Is-Judaism-Socialist-or-Capitalist.htm.

7. Klein Leichman, Abigail. “The farmers giving their land a year off.” Israel21c. August 26, 2021, https://www.israel21c.org/the-farmers-who-are-giving-their-land-a-years-rest.

8. “The Great Clash: Issues of Judaism & Science - Rabbi Moshe Zeldman.” Hidabroot - Torah & Judaism. January 24, 2016, YouTube.

9. Joe Roberts on Twitter (@Joe_Roberts01)

10. “Ben-Zion Netanyahu in an interview in 1998.” Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/2012-04-30/ty-article/0000017f-dba2-df9c-a17f-ffbaff610000.

11. “Israel at 75: How a ‘Young Socialist Nation’ Became Capitalist.” Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-04-25/ty-article/.premium/israel-at-75-how-a-young-socialist-nation-became-capitalist/00000187-b3fb-d803-ad8f-fffb87c30000.