Proudhon’s Forbidden Notebook: The Truth About Jewish Power

Mikhail Bakunin was by no means an isolated voice in the 19th-century anarchist movement when it came to calling out Jewish influence. His contemporary and fellow pioneer of anarchist thought, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, possessed a critique of equal intensity and arguably greater scope

Proudhon is widely celebrated as the “father of anarchism,” a pioneering socialist philosopher whose critiques of property and the state shaped generations of radical thought. Yet buried within his voluminous writings and private notebooks lies a virulent strain of antisemitism so extreme that some scholars have labeled him a harbinger of fascism.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born on January 15, 1809, in Besançon, France, to a working-class family. His father was a cooper and tavern keeper, and the family lived in dire poverty. Despite his family’s poverty, Proudhon won a scholarship to the college in Besançon and educated himself further through his work as a printer, teaching himself Latin — and later Greek and Hebrew — to better typeset the books he worked on. His hardscrabble peasant origins deeply shaped his worldview. He idealized a society of self-sufficient small craftsmen and farmers free from exploitation.

Proudhon became the first person to publicly identify as an “anarchist” in 1840. His most famous slogan, “Property is theft!,” appeared in his first major work, What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government. He was not advocating for total abolition of personal possessions but rather distinguished between illegitimate propriété — private ownership allowing exploitation of others — and legitimate possession, meaning direct use-ownership by workers.

Proudhon’s major contributions to political philosophy included mutualism, an economic system based on workers’ cooperatives, mutual credit, and free exchange that rejected both capitalism and state socialism. He also developed a theory of federalism, envisioning decentralized, self-governing communes in a voluntary federation that would replace both the state and private monopoly.

Proudhon served in the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848 and engaged in famous polemical exchanges with Karl Marx. Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty appeared in 1846, and Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847 was a direct rebuttal. This dispute contributed to the historic split between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the labor movement. Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Benjamin Tucker all drew heavily from Proudhon’s ideas.

However, to fully understand the totality of Proudhon’s worldview, one must look beyond his public polemics and into his personal manuscripts. The most notorious statement of Proudhon’s antisemitism comes from his private notebook, dated December 26, 1847, published posthumously as part of his Carnets in 1960 and 1961. The passage reads in full:

Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weill, and others are nothing but secret spies; Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, wicked, bilious, envious, bitter, etc. etc., beings who hate us. The Jew must disappear by steel or by fire or by expulsion. Tolerate the elderly who no longer have children. Work to be done — What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated instinctively, I hate upon reflection and irrevocably. The hatred of the Jew, like the hatred of the English, should be our first article of political faith.

Proudhon’s hatred was as personal as it was political, shifting focus in the same December 26, 1847 entry to target specific Jewish individuals. Heinrich Heine, the celebrated German-Jewish poet and writer, and A. Weill, a writer and journalist, were both called “nothing but secret spies.” Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, and Fould were grouped together and collectively condemned as “wicked, bilious, envious, bitter… beings who hate us.” Adolphe Crémieux was a prominent Jewish lawyer who later served as French Minister of Justice. Benoît Fould was a French banker and politician of Jewish origin. Karl Marx, of Jewish descent though baptized Christian, was included in this company.

Calling Heine and Weill “secret spies” had a specific personal context — Proudhon suspected they had informed on his German associate Karl Grün, who had been disseminating Proudhon’s ideas among German intellectuals in Paris, leading to Grün’s expulsion from France. That broader pattern is borne out by the public record. Antisemitic themes recur across his major published works.

In Césarisme et Christianisme from 1860, Proudhon wrote: “The Jew is by temperament an anti-producer, neither farmer nor industrialist, not even a real trader. He is always a fraudulent and parasitic middleman, who operates, in business as in philosophy, by fabrication, counterfeiting, and shady dealing. He knows only the rise and fall, the risks of transport, the uncertainties of the harvest, the hazards of supply and demand. His policy in economics is all negative, it’s the wrong principle. Satan, Ahriman, incarnated in the race of Shem.”

In De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église from 1858, Proudhon accused Jews of “having rendered the bourgeoisie, high or low, similar to them, all over Europe.” In France et Rhin, published posthumously in 1867, he complained that France was “invaded by the English, Germans, Belgians, Jews,” and other foreigners.

Interestingly, Proudhon’s public posture of hostility towards Jews existed alongside a series of personal encounters that suggest a complex social life. Proudhon and Karl Marx met in Paris between late September 1844 and February 1845, during Marx’s exile there. The two engaged in extended intellectual discussions, which Marx himself described as “lengthy debates often lasting all night.”

Marx wrote Proudhon a letter on May 5, 1846 — by then from Brussels, after his expulsion from France — inviting him to join a correspondence network of socialists, addressing him warmly as a peer. Their relationship later collapsed when Marx savaged Proudhon’s work. Though Marx had Jewish heritage from a rabbinical family on both sides, Proudhon listed him among those he condemned in the 1847 notebook entry.

Proudhon was closely associated with Alphonse Toussenel, a French socialist and disciple of Charles Fourier who authored Les Juifs, Rois de l’Époque — The Jews, Kings of the Era — in 1845, one of the most prominent antisemitic works of 19th-century France. A more explosive second edition appeared in 1847, the same year as Proudhon’s December 26 notebook entry, and scholars have noted the two men’s antisemitism was mutually reinforcing. Adolphe Crémieux, the prominent Jewish lawyer and politician who would later serve as French Minister of Justice, was named and condemned by Proudhon alongside Rothschild in that same entry.

The pattern of these denunciations did not escape later scholarly attention. J. Salwyn Schapiro, a Jewish-American historian writing in the American Historical Review in July 1945, was the most influential early academic to highlight Proudhon’s antisemitic content. In his article “Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Harbinger of Fascism,” he called Proudhon’s antisemitism “the acid test of racialism” and grouped it alongside his other prejudices — misogyny, racism toward Black people, and support for the Confederacy — to argue Proudhon was a proto-fascist.

Frédéric Krier, a historian whose 2009 work Sozialismus für Kleinbürger: Pierre Joseph Proudhon — Wegbereiter des Dritten Reiches remains the most exhaustive scholarly study connecting Proudhon to Nazi ideology, identified Proudhon’s antisemitism as pervasive throughout his thought. Krier drew intellectual-historical continuities between Proudhon’s moralistic critique of “interest” — meaning usury — and the Nazi antisemitic demand for the “breaking of interest slavery.” He also argued Proudhon was a 19th-century variant of the Christian Gnostic heretic Marcion, whose anti-Jewish theological streak ran throughout his anti-theism.

The devolution of modern anarchism into a mere collection of foot soldiers for the Jewish-dominated status quo is a tragic betrayal of its revolutionary heritage. Reverting from the intellectual rigor of Bakunin and Proudhon to the establishment-friendly gatekeeping of contemporary “anarchists” (antifa typically label themselves anarchists) serves only the Jewish masters of the current order. Proudhon’s willingness to place the question of Jewish power at the very center of his political critique serves as a vital blueprint for the contemporary dissident. It is only by discarding the taboos that muzzle inquiry that we can hope to understand and challenge the Jewish forces shaping our world.