Right-wing anti-Semitism still haunts the West

In a post-7 October world, many have finally woken up to the reality that the locus of anti-Semitic sentiment now resides on the left. This is the case virtually everywhere in the West, particularly among the educated classes and the left-dominated media. We see it both in Europe, where Jew hatred has a long history, but also in historically more welcoming places like Canada, Australia and the United States.

This doesn’t mean that right-wing anti-Semitism, once the dominant form, has disappeared. As Alan Dershowitz points out, Jew hatred is once again being ‘mainstreamed’. This can be seen in elements of the ‘new right’, or as the media like to call it, the ‘far right’. Within these movements spreading throughout the West, anti-Semitic tropes represent a cancerous cell that is quickly metastasising.

There are two major elements here. Among some US conservatives, there is the rise of ideologies that place Christianity at the centre of national life. This is, of course, something not exactly embraced by most Jews, Muslims, Hindus or agnostics. Equally threatening has been the rise of white nationalism, which lends credence to views that Jews constitute a foreign body in the nation. They are demonised as outsiders who need to be restrained from exercising undue power and influence.

None of this is new. Anti-Semitism has a long history on the right. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church allowed some self-government for the small Jewish community. But once the Crusades began, many Christians increasingly viewed Jews as something of an ‘internal enemy’. Many were killed, forcibly converted or expelled, as in England in 1290, when King Edward I expelled the country’s entire Jewish population. Throughout continental Europe, crusaders and local mobs – egged on by some clerics – urged parishioners to ‘avenge the crucified’. This eliminationist approach, notes historian John Weiss, presaged the logic of the Holocaust.

The tone of anti-Semitism only became more intense with the rise of Martin Luther. Though at first he was friendly to Jews, Luther recoiled when they refused to support his new Protestant faith and took on a hostile, even genocidal, view towards them.

Not all Protestants were negative towards the Jewish community, however, with many identifying closely with the Old Testament religion. After all, it was the Roundheads under Oliver Cromwell who invited the Jews back to England after the Civil War. Similarly, it was the mostly Protestant founders of the US – notably George Washington – who initiated America’s historically tolerant approach towards Jews and other ‘non-conformists’.

By the early 20th century, anti-Semitism was less tied to religion and more fixated on race. This new anti-Semitism castigated Jews not as heretics, but as a kind of malicious presence threatening the values and culture of native or long-standing inhabitants. Ideas developed by racist philosophers like Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Edouard Drumont and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, notes historian Ernst Nolte, helped lay the basis for fascism and its more openly racist Nazi offshoot.

As late arrivals and outsiders, Jews offended some of those who had settled before them. They migrated to the US largely in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where they played a key role in expansion into western America – albeit generally as merchants and not yeoman farmers. Their numbers were initially small. In the 1870s there were just 200,000 Jews in the US. But by 1927, the Jewish population had swelled to four million.

In the 1920s and 1930s, nativists on the right were alarmed by this growth. Both the Jews’ rapid success and their embrace of leftist politics – in part a natural reaction to venomous attacks from the right – aroused the ire of a new generation of nativist politicians. This included most prominently Adolf Hitler in Germany, but also Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Vichy France premier Pierre Laval and America’s Father Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. In Quebec, the rise of Adrien Arcand and his ‘Blueshirts’ threatened Montreal’s Jews, then one of the world’s largest Jewish communities.

These kinds of religious and nativist sentiments have not gone away. In 2022, the Donald Trump-backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, embraced a fundamentally exclusionary Christian-nationalist platform. Meanwhile, Trump loyalists hurled anti-Jewish invective at the judge who approved the raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate that same year.

On the further fringes of the far and not-so-far right, you will hear conspiracy theories about non-whites ‘replacing’ people of European descent. This plot, the so-called Great Replacement theory, is often portrayed as having Jewish support, if not being outright orchestrated by Jews. This idea was on display during the 2017 Charlottesville demonstrations, where white-nationalist protesters chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’.

Trump, easily the most important figure on the new right, has been famously reluctant to openly denounce such nativist demonstrations. Although Trump himself is hardly an anti-Semite (his daughter is a convert to Judaism), he is also favoured by some who flirt with or openly embrace Jew hatred. Back in 2022, for example, he entertained two figures who have made openly anti-Semitic comments at Mar-a-Lago, rapper Kanye West and alt-right internet personality Nick Fuentes.

Following intense criticism, Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting and claimed not to know Fuentes. But it was troubling to see how few conservatives spoke out about this in the first place. Some did indeed step up, like former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, as well as conservative news outlets like Breitbart and National Review. Many others remained worryingly silent.

Right-wing white nationalists have long been a presence within the conservative community, supporting figures like libertarian Ron Paul. But anti-Semitism is not simply the ideology of moronic ‘bubbas’. Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s African-American GOP lieutenant-governor, has an extensive history of social-media comments that downplay Nazi atrocities and flirt with Holocaust denialism. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has also trafficked in anti-Semitic memes, most notoriously with her ludicrous claim that California’s 2018 wildfires were caused by Rothschild-funded ‘space lasers… beaming the Sun’s power down to Earth’.

Less ludicrous but more impactful has been Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with pro-Hamas figures, as well as denunciations of the US’s support for Israel. Former Trump confidante Steve Bannon, himself no anti-Semite, felt compelled to warn Jewish donors of trying to impose the pro-Israel Nikki Haley on the GOP. This rhetoric is painfully reminiscent of Democratic representative Ilhan Omar’s warning that the Democratic Party was ‘all about the Benjamins’.

Some statements by Trump’s acolytes have been even more horrifying. Conservative media icon Candace Owens revealed her astonishing ignorance when she stated that Hitler would have been ‘fine if confined to Germany’. She even recently dismissed accounts of Dr Josef Mengele’s heinous experimentation on Jews in concentration camps as ‘bizarre propaganda’. Both Owens and Fuentes were also among those right-wingers denouncing vice-presidential candidate JD Vance for his enthusiasm for Jews and Israel.

If things are getting dicey for Jews in North America, then the rise of anti-Semitism seems even more dangerous in Europe. To be sure, the clearest threat to Jews in France now comes from the left-wing New Popular Front. This odd coalition of the centre-left, Trotskyists, greens and Islamo-leftists is united in large part by a common detestation of Israel.

Nonetheless, French Jews are not comforted by the fact that the rising force on the right, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is a party whose founder – her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen – has repeatedly denied the Holocaust. To her and the party’s credit, Le Pen has worked for decades to eradicate anti-Semitism from its ranks. Even venerable Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld (who first warned me of the leftist anti-Semitic threat more than two decades ago) has endorsed her. Yet despite these efforts, the National Rally still fielded some openly anti-Semitic candidates as recently as this month’s legislative elections.

It’s no wonder, then, that Jews feel increasingly unwelcome in France. They are hemmed between these remnants of the old anti-Jewish right and the growing, increasingly powerful far left. Earlier this month, the chief rabbi of the Grande Synagogue in Paris said, ‘It is clear today that there is no future for Jews in France’. He encourages his younger coreligionists to emigrate.

Similar processes can be seen in other European countries where leftists and greens tend to dominate the rapidly expanding anti-Semitic space. But right-wingers with a similar worldview have also emerged. Some of the leading new-right parties, like Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), Poland’s Law and Justice Party, the Sweden Democrats and Austria’s Freedom Party have plenty of anti-Semitic activists in their ranks.

The greatest concern lies in Germany, where the AfD is angling to become the country’s second-largest party. In 2018, the AfD’s co-founder and former leader, Alexander Gauland, famously described the murderous genocidal policies of the Third Reich as nothing more than a ‘speck of bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history’. Although he is no longer leader, the party has held on to other Nazi apologists, particularly in its youth wing.

Similarly in Italy, Giorgia Meloni, the European right’s leading political figure, has been plagued by anti-Semitism scandals. Members of her Brothers of Italy youth wing were reportedly seen making fascist salutes and saying ‘Sieg heil!’. This, not surprisingly, horrified Italy’s small Jewish community. Meloni quickly purged the malefactors, claiming there was ‘no time to waste with those who want to, unwittingly or not, become a tool in the hands of our adversaries’. But the fact that her party also has roots in the heirs of Mussolini, who late in his career adopted Nazi racial views, may explain the persistence of such incidents.

Today, as the Jewish affiliation for the left weakens almost everywhere, the right has a unique opportunity to not only expiate past wrongs, but also to bring Jews into the conservative mainstream. Jewish voters are most certainly headed towards the centre. Meanwhile, the right now celebrates the contributions of Jewish intellectuals like Leo Strauss, Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer, as well as the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and talk-show host Dennis Prager. Overall, despite the outcroppings of anti-Semites, the Republicans are clearly more philosemitic than the Democrats. In fact, the anti-Israel caucus is almost entirely made up of Democratic progressives.

Yet for many in the Jewish elite, the perceived right-wing threat is just another reason to support the likes of Kamala Harris and her progressive, DEI regime. This is despite its hostility to Israel and its embrace of racial diversity quotas, which Jews have resisted for decades. Powerful Jewish organisations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have long downplayed anti-Semitism from the left, including from groups like Black Lives Matter. Instead, they foolishly saw right-wingers as the main threat. To insist that the right is the main threat to Jewish survival, as some on the left still do, is clearly out of touch with contemporary reality.

Many Jews no longer believe this. But if conservatives wish to appeal to them and other minorities, Trump and the leaders of the populist right need to become ever more vigilant in weeding out hatred on their radical fringes. There are some promising signs in the reactions of Meloni to expel neo-fascists and embrace Israel. It is also encouraging to see the Trump campaign’s recent decision to eject Candace Owens from a fundraiser.

Today, even the Democratic loyalists of the ADL no longer deny that the left poses the greater threat to our beleaguered people. But a full shift of Jews to the right will not be possible until conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic purge their fringes. The ghost of right-wing anti-Semitism will not go away until it becomes more apparition than reality.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the RC Hobbs presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, published by Encounter.