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.

Hermann Ahlwardt (1846-1914) was a member of the German Reichstag who first belonged, along with Otto Böckel (1859-1923), [1] to the Deutschsoziale Partei of Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911). However, both Ahlwardt and Böckel were later expelled from this party for their extreme anti-Semitism. In 1894, the Deutschsoziale Partei  and the Deutsche Reformpartei — which emerged from Böckel’s Antisemitische Volkspartei of 1890 — merged into the  Deutschsoziale Reformpartei, which championed German nationalist, Christian monarchist programmes that would combat the growing influence of Jewry in Germany. The DSRP adhered to racial anti-Semitism and sought to reverse Jewish emancipation.

Of Ahlwardt’s work ‘Der Verzweiflungskampf der arischen Völker mit dem Judentum’ (1890) I present here the final chapter – as a sample of the problem faced by Germans with regard to Jewry already in the Kaiserreich — long before the advent of National Socialism. Ahlwardt believes that Germany has been corrupted by the emancipated Jews to such an extent that it is now a matter of urgency that it free itself of their devastating influence. He fears even that Germany’s rival, Russia, may indeed get rid of its Jewish influence earlier than Germany, in which case it will obtain an advantage over Germany socially as well as politically. Though he hopes for an international concord regarding the Jews, he is certain that Germany has a special duty to set an example on account of its central position in Europe. He proposes his own guidelines for dealing with the Jewish Question emphasizing that the Jewish problem is not merely an economic one but also cultural. He places special trust in the Prussian monarchy, which he considers a socialistic one in its concern for the welfare of the entire community. And he urges all the parties of Germany, anti-Semitic or otherwise, to set aside their differences and focus on the main evil confronting the nation, which is Jewry: ‘Therefore, German people, be brave, in the first place remove your deadly enemy whom you have accepted in your midst through falsely understood humanitarianism. Then proceed with determination to prepare for your children the happiness that is possible on this imperfect earth.’

Chapter 24: The way to self-liberation

We should not deceive ourselves about the fact that Germany’s liberation from the Jewish yoke is extremely hard. The German is not equal to the refinement of the Jew. The national wealth of Germany is in large part in Jewish hands. They rule the stock-exchange, trade, the entire credit system, the law, medicine, science and art. In almost all large urban communities they have appropriated the leadership. And the entire budget of such a city becomes a single large means of corruption in the hands of the Jews. The entire administration then becomes an irredeemable rat king, as the story of my life proves sufficiently. But the entire Jewish power is concentrated in the press. This creates everywhere artificial oppositions and confuses the people in all its strata. Entire classes of the population are brought into an opposition with their nationality and denationalised. The Jewish press therefore effects a process of disintegration that in its course must necessarily bring about the end of the fatherland. The Jews make good business first at the establishment of the German Reich and then at its end. At the funeral feast, most of it goes to them. They are the liquidators of the nations damned by them morally and materially. Even in free America one sees this already. Bellamy[2] explains in his Nationalist that America, in its present plunder economics, drifts to its collapse. It is a demon that, since antiquity, drives the Jews to this activity, which must however finally devour them. How can one oppose this enormous Jewish power? They are indeed in the process of taking over even political power and then making the entire state revenue into a single means of corruption, as has happened already in France. Nevertheless, these Orientals entirely lack the gift of state formation and that of state maintenance. They only know presumption and cruelty or cowardly whining. Only the Aryans are founders and preservers of states, and in recent times only the Germanic people.

In the book Rembrandt as Educator,[3] whose publication I consider as a phenomenon of the very first rank, the author says: ‘The German is called to rule Europe as an aristocrat and America as a democrat.’ In order to avoid misunderstanding, I shall remark that here every farmer is considered an aristocrat – and I think fully rightly. Through the Jews the Germanic peoples are in danger of becoming fully corrupt, alienated from their historical calling and conducted to their certain downfall. The inheritors will then unquestionably be the Slavic peoples, for the Latin peoples, in spite of all the veneers of culture, are in decline. It is sad that Germany is so completely blind to the danger that threatens from the East. I am not thinking of the military danger at the moment but of the danger of a nobler culture that could at one time supplant and overcome us. One should not forget that, under all the rubble and dirt, under the corruption of the aristocracy and the high officials and the plague of vodka and Jewry, there lies silent and hidden the ‘ruski mir’,[4] the order of the Russian community. It has maintained itself in accordance with its character in spite of all suppression through the millennia. In fact, it makes every Russian a freer man than all the men of the civilised West are. As a member of a community the Russian has a say on all things pertaining to his immediate horizon, he has to vouch for all and all vouch for him, even the law lies in his hands. Russia, in fact, consists of innumerable small republics in which one does not have a representational system but in which everybody decides for himself. All these republics stand under an all-powerful ruler who decides all political matters as independently as the community decides its own matters. Naturally this great idea is often obscured through the willfulness of the aristocracy and the officials, but it is not dead. Russia is, in its character, socialistic and, accordingly, also — quite logically — also Caesarean. Parliamentarism for Russia is a nonsense and only immature people and Jews strive for it. Pan-Slavism strives for the enormous goal of re-establishing the order of the Russian community in its original purity, to make of Russia, thus, thousands of socialist republics whose common affairs are directed by the Great Father in Petersburg in an absolute and unrestricted manner. If Russia achieves this while the disintegration of Germany by Jewry makes further progress, it will march at the head of culture and head to world-rule without a shot needing to be fired.

In any case I hope that the corruption of the higher bureaucracy, the Jews and vodka will delay the rebirth so long until we ourselves have achieved our liberation and placed ourselves in a position to fulfil our world-mission, for one should not forget that the order of our all-German community, which was however fully destroyed by Roman law, had much in common with the Slavic. When a few days ago the news spread through the world that Russia will get rid of its Jews, a jubilation rang through all anti-Semitic circles. But I was deeply saddened and downcast, for the following sentence has since a long time ago become an unshakeable certainty: That nation which first and most fundamentally gets rid of its Jews and thereby clears the path for its continued development according to its own character is called to be the cultural bearer and consequently also the ruler of the world. Accordingly, for us, the question cannot at all arise whether it is possible that we might get rid of our Jewish rule and Jewish corruption. This must be, and here the question of its difficulty cannot be considered at all.

At present there are three anti-Semitic parties, the Christian Socialist,[5] the German Socialist[6] and the German People’s Party.[7]

The first gets priority. Its leader, the Court Chaplain Adolf Stöcker,[8] founded this party already 70 years ago. It was he who opened the eyes of the largest sections of the population to the Jewish activity. The party is anointed with a very strong drop of socialistic oil. The Court Chaplain Stöcker wishes to build up the new social order on the basis of Christian brotherly love and to preserve for the state in its new social formation its ancient institutions. Naturally he attracted to himself the enormous hatred of all Jews and philo-Semites, and what Jewish hatred means must be fully clear to the reader of my life-story. The man who perhaps concerns himself less with dogmatism than any other of his professional colleagues was decried as an orthodox oaf, sinister, etc. , smeared with filth from all sides and suspected by those in high and low positions. But he stood on such a moral height and was, besides, a public orator to such a degree that already today a quite different spirit would blow over Germany if Prince Bismarck — who for political reasons had granted his protection to capitalism, that is, to Jewry — had not rendered his activity impossible for a while.[9] The fatherland may still hope of great things from him.  Since then, he has shown himself to be more critical regarding the Jewish Question and has, in his plans, ventured sharply only in two cases, those related to education and the legal profession. For this reason he seems to many young anti-Semites not to be sufficiently comprehensive. The party organ of the Christian Socialist Party is Das Volk.

The German Socialist Party has presented its anti-Semitic programme in an elaborate manner since it does not need to observe the caution of a court chaplain. Its programme even has a drop of socialistic oil in it. However, this, the so-called Bochum Programme,[10] has not yet been fully elaborated and I think that in this context much more remains to be done. The party stands on a Christian monarchist foundation. Anti-Semitism is a clear priority in its case and, even if it does not endorse any radical means, the path towards a healthy social progress should be free after the implementation of its programme. Its representative in the parliament is the member of parliament Liebermann von Sonnenberg,[11] former officer of the German Army, who has placed his rich talents, his significant knowledge and his great energy in the service of anti-Semitism. No failure, no persecution, no hardship has been able to make him sway even for a moment. The German aristocracy has found in him an excellent fighter. In a literary way are mainly active for the party Fritsch[12] in Leipzig, König in Witten, Radenhausen[13] in Hamburg and then, especially, also the old master of anti-Semitism, O. Glagau[14] in Berlin, whose writings, especially the book on the Founders,[15] and also German Handicraft and the Historical Bourgeoisie[16] and, finally, the periodically published Kulturkämpfer, must assume the first rank in every anti-Semitic library. The focal point of the party in Berlin remains the so-called Wednesday Club. The party organs are the German Socialist bulletins.

The German People’s Party has its seat in Hessen. At its head stands Dr. Otto Boeckel in Marburg.[17] This is a young, energetic man with much knowledge and a great public speaking gift who, in spite of the greatest tribulations, has removed a large part of Hessen permanently from Jewry. His party at present counts four members of parliament, namely, Dr. Böckel, Zimmermann, Werner and Pickenbach. Its party organ is the Reichs-Herold appearing in Marburg. The party of course is based on a monarchist Christian foundation, but it highly values democratic views and, in contrast the Jewish liberal party, champions protective taxes and the maintenance of our army. Of the outstanding scholars Treitschke[18] and Dühring[19] particularly have appeared decisively against the Jews, though from quite different standpoints. Even Mr. von Hartmann has provided some help, even though quite tame. We cannot go into the other partially very commendable pioneers.  It could not fail to occur that a desire was expressed from many sides that these three anti-Semitic parties might unite into one. This would perhaps be possible since, at the moment, their most important mission, the combatting or removal of Jewry, is indeed their absolute priority. However, every party has also its justified special tasks and therefore the threefold division is not a disadvantage so long as the parties see themselves as parts of a large central army that marches separately but strike together. But mutual promotion and peaceful accommodation are the basic conditions of communal success. Especially the leaders have the sacred duty to come to agreements in a peaceful and friendly manner, to push everything personal into the background and to never let possible differences spoil matters. This seems to me to be especially necessary in the case of the distribution of the electoral districts that are to be won. One must consider together that for every anti-Semite this victory is responsible for his  and sacred matter of the community, which is the future of the fatherland  ̶  and for the numerous troop of martyrs who were driven to death and doom for their convictions.

Besides, an international agreement must be striven for, in spite of all difficulties, and men like Drumont[20] and Schönerer,[21] etc. will perhaps extend their hand to help in that. On this there can be no doubt: like the social question in general, the Jewish question too must be fought out on German soil. On account of its central position, Germany cannot withdraw from this duty but, with the solution of the same, it will also spread happiness and blessings over the entire world. For the time being, I make the following suggestions:

1. Removal of Jews from all official positions, both in the state and in the community, especially also from those of judges and lawyers.
2. Abolition of Jewish emancipation.
3. The placing of Jews under the foreign police, who can at any time search Jewish accounting books and, in cases of irregularities, request immediate deportation.
4. Military exemption for Jews but, in exchange, a sufficient foreigners’ tax and war tax.
5. Nationalisation of the stock-exchange and the Reich bank.
6. Prohibition of futures trading at the stock-exchange.
7. Prohibition of Jews from writing in or owning newspapers that are read by non-Jewish circles.
8. Prohibition of foreigners from possessing land (which law exists also in all of America).
9. Abolition of free enterprise.
10. Prohibition of the naturalisation of baptised Jews.
11. Re-establishment of the religious oath.

Perhaps the legislation of the future will consider it the greatest humanitarianism if the Jews were settled in a well located, extra-European country and transferred there to a situation of feeding themselves honestly and uprightly through farming whereby they could be endowed richly with all necessities. The surplus of their wealth that can no longer be returned to the hundreds of thousands of their victims — whose bones bleach in all parts of the world — should, in the hands of the state, basically facilitate the solution of the social question and therewith the cultural progress of mankind.

As soon as the Jewish question has been solved, as soon, especially, as the Jews have disappeared from the press, the path to an agreement on the social question is cleared. We shall then no longer smear one another with dirt but evaluate every opinion according to its worth.  At present this is impossible since the Social Democratic Party,[22] spurred by its backers, the Jews, no longer discusses but finds itself already in a latent civil war with the other classes of the population. That we find ourselves at the beginning of an international change can be denied by nobody with insight. We must get out of the age of unlimited production into one of goal-orientated production but one without the abolition of individual freedom. We must reach a point where every productive man receives also the reward for his industry, and the state should be helpful to him in this. One cannot circumvent the fact that the main branches of production are organised and that manual workers will likewise be helped by the state. We see these days, in Rome, all that is possible, with goodwill, for the state or the commune. There the butchers struck work, the commune took the slaughter and sale of meat entirely into its hands and had these performed by soldiers.

Every reform has to go through three stages: first, the dissatisfaction with the existing conditions, second the critique, third the positive production. We find ourselves in the second stage now. The entire Social Democracy is nothing but a big, partly justified, critique. Before we come to the third stage, the Jewish power must first be broken, for the Jews sit, like the robber knights of the Middle Ages, in their fortresses and make their regular sorties from there that make all positive productions impossible. On the nature of the positive new creations the most significant men of our times have expressed fundamental thoughts that should already now be practically realised, naturally after the settlement of the Jewish question. I mention only the academic socialists Schmoller, Wagner, Brentano, Schäffle, and then men like Baron von Broich, von Mosch, Fritz Spielhoff and the German American Dr. Schläger, who publishes his carefully elaborated essays in the most diverse journals, thus in the Kyffhäuser, the Bayreuther Blätter, etc. and forms the bridge that binds us to the great English and American social reformers. His last publication on natural law and historical law must have a groundbreaking effect. I further mention the late Archbishop Ketteler, Chaplain Hitze, von Schorlemer-Alst, von Hüne. I characterised as a phenomenon of the first rank already above the publication of the book, Rembrandt as Educator.

Every sentence of this book falls like a ray of light on dark days and can serve as the chapter heading of a new book.

I cite the following sentences from the book, in order to show what the reader can expect of the entire book:

At the beginning of this century Prussia adopted the principle of offsetting the defeats that had been experienced by a strengthening of the scientific power of the nation. At the end of this century Germany should adopt the principle of justifying the victories that were fought for by a strengthening of the artistic power of the nation.

Art must bring back the naïveté that we have lost through science.

We learn from this book that the social question is in no way, as the Social Democrats assume, a question of food but that, in its case, many other higher interests are dealt with. The social question is, in general, not such that it can be solved by one man and in a short space of time but it must be tackled immediately and indeed in all seriousness, for inertia is downfall. ‘Germany’, said Treitschke, in one of his earliest talks, ‘is like a carriage that drives through a valley on a sharp ledge. It must always remain in motion for, otherwise, it will inevitably fall into the abyss.’ Since the precondition for the successful tackling of social reform is the solution of the Jewish question, I consider the latter overdue and the goal of my book is to point quite urgently to the immediate tackling of the same.

You,  German, may direct your love, your respect, your friendship to all productive nations of the world, for every productive nation climbs, often without knowing it, on the ladder of culture, but the parasitical, culture-destroying Jewish people  ̶̶  which seeks to introduce everywhere moral decay and corruption of the existing conditions because it can harvest only in rottenness — you must combat with full awareness and seek to render harmless.

The misery instituted up to now that is manifest especially in the destruction of our national institutions and the national welfare we must look squarely in the eye. We must step forward energetically to eliminate the old injuries and thereby, at the same time, take a vigorous step forwards on the path of culture.

Above all, we must get out of sentimental cosmopolitanism. Only as a sharply defined nationality can we bring to the world the blessing that it may expect from us.

All the nations of the world were of some significance for culture in general only so long as they constituted a firmly closed nationality.

Our greatest poets have therefore presented the love of the fatherland as the holiest and highest duty from which a noble man cannot withdraw even with the best of intentions.[23]

German brothers! Jewry has attempted to rob you of this joy in the fatherland, this love for the fatherland, wherever it could dare to do so. Do not scold the Jews, do not also defend them, but study them. Study Heine,[24] Börne,[25] etc.  Especially that part of the nation that creates values through the sweat of its brow without even being able to enjoy them – and that seemed to be becoming most dangerous to the Jewish Mammonism in recent times — is systematically trained to consciously hate the fatherland.

As far as I can observe, the poison has however not yet penetrated to the innermost core of the national soul. If Jewry is removed, the slag will fall by itself.

Indeed, the love for the patriotic institutions, especially the monarchy, is still little shaken. The feeling of piety towards our ruling house under which our forebears lived for centuries happily and contentedly is everywhere much more alive than Jewry already intoxicated with victory supposes. But it is not feeling alone that binds us inextricably to our ruling family but the deepest most logical thought shows us that the social hereditary monarchy alone can lead us to our historical mission. The monarchy forms a sole stable pole in the flux of phenomena. Modern parliamentarism gives us in the best case a momentary photograph of the current mood. Where a parliamentary government rules, the nation is carried away by such momentary impressions to things that could later cause the greatest injuries. This is the great lesson of the period of conflict from 1861-1866.[26] The momentary mood led the fatherland inevitably to its downfall. When the monarchy ordered a halt to this seizure by the momentary mood, it constituted a real rocher der bronze,[27] and saved Prussia — against its own will — from itself. This opposition often emerges in crises, at that time externally as now internally. Even in the crisis existing at the moment, Germany will be saved from itself by the socialist monarchy.

…  Necessity, however, demands that the socialist hereditary monarchy be a free one. If it were dependent on a particular social class, the demands of the latter alone would be satisfied. Since in Europe, capitalism, that is, Jewry, rules many governments, capitalism alone obtains an essential promotion of its interests whereas the other sections of the population have to satisfy themselves with fine words. The necessity of a stable pole has always been acknowledged in all republics. Senates have been established everywhere that however have not shown themselves anywhere to be sufficiently capable of resistance. There have, moreover, been few real, serious republics in the world in which the population as a whole has participated in the government. There the numerically few classes ruled that were distinguished by birth or by wealth and the actually productive population was more oppressed there than anywhere else. The battle between the patricians and the plebeians in Rome was nothing more than a battle between the aristocracy of birth and of wealth. When Athens moved to a real democracy it succumbed to a quick downfall. The socialist monarchy of the Hohenzollerns is something wholly new in the history of the world and has demonstrated its justification through four centuries that it has created out of a semi-wasteland, out of worthless clods of sand, a prosperous state and given to old dying Europe a new centre and new ideas.

Unfortunately the majority of  nations have, even in their patriotic sections, too little understanding of this. Even in the schools this understanding is little aroused, as, for example, all commercial books narrate much about the wars and heroic deeds – which, however, are of second or third rank among most monarchs of the house of Hohenzollern, and even in the case of Frederick the Great — but little of the creative socialist activity of all the princes that indeed constitutes their actual character. Our fatherland will even in the future march at the head of the nations for the benefit of mankind only as a socialist monarchy, otherwise it will sink back into insignificance and misery.

I am convinced that the Hohenzollerns stand, in their significance for the world, is just at the beginning of their career. All that came up to now formed only the prelude.

On you, German people, is the responsibility now to contribute your own part for the attainment of the lofty goal.  With parliamentarism, which will and must sustain you, the determination of your destiny has been placed in your hands. Contribute your share to it so that the great masses in Germany may again feel well and happy and that everybody may find in it again a real homeland.

Actual and great social reforms are necessary; just a few crumbs cannot be thrown out to the productive masses.

Germany is indeed so rich in noble men capable of self-sacrifice and in great talents. Up to now, however, the same have been set one against the other by Jewry, but if Germany proceeds to the quick removal of these exploitative parasites, men from all sides will once again be united.[28]

Should a real and serious understanding not be possible among all these people who indeed sacrifice everything for the welfare of their fellowmen,  and cannot a real social new order be established in the entire German nation on the basis of such characters? Up to now this was impossible because the Jewish press incited every person against the other and sowed mistrust. If it should retain its influence, things will never change. Therefore, German people, be brave, in the first place remove your deadly enemy whom you have accepted in your midst through falsely understood humanitarianism. Then proceed with determination to prepare for your children the happiness that is possible on this imperfect earth. This will be possible to you under the shield of a powerful socialist hereditary monarchy as soon as you are in a position to speak openly and honestly about the removal of the Jewish press piracy.

Every party has its good side, in each we find people who would sacrifice themselves, along with everything that they possess, for the good of the whole. Such people are to be found even among the Social Democrats. Even there there is idealistic striving. That Jewry has distracted them from the latter and directed them to goals that are eternally unreachable is regrettable, but not irreversible.

Men of all parties, who have not been consumed by selfishness, lust for power, ambition, or are able to overcome these ignoble characteristics in yourselves, unite to first remove the evil Jewish parasite, this bacillus of putrefaction, and then vie with one another dispassionately, summoning all your intellectual forces, in the effort to usher in a serious improvement of our situation. Let everybody be aware that on no side can this be realised without serious sacrifices.

[1] See my translation of Böckel, ‘The Jews – the Kings of our Age’, Occidental Observer, July 3, 2022.

[2] Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American author who advocated state ownership of property and the abolition of classes. In the ninetees he published a newspaper called The New Nation and his followers started a magazine called The Nationalist in 1889. His works inspired the creation of several ‘Nationalist’ Clubs (called that since Bellamy did not consider the term ‘Socialism’ suitable for American society) as well as a short-lived Populist Party.

[3] Julius Langbehn (1851-1907) was a German cultural historian; his Rembrandt als Erzieher was published in1890 (see my English edition, Rembrandt as Educator, Wermod and Wermod, 2017; 2^nd ed. Uthwita Press, 2023).

[4] Russian world.

[5] The Christlich-soziale Partei was founded in 1878 by Adolf Stöcker and formed a major element in the so-called Berlin Movement of the 1880s that was anti-capitalist, anti-liberal and anti-Semitic.

[6] The German Socialist Party (Deutschsoziale Partei) was founded in 1889, during the Bochum Congress, by Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911) and the anti-Semitic writer, Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933).

[7] Ahlwardt is referring to the Antisemitische Volkspartei (Anti-Semitic National Party) founded in the early 1890s by Otto Böckel (1859-1923), who in 1893 merged his group with the followers of Oswald Zimmerman (1859-1910) under the name of the German Reform Party (Deutsche Reformpartei).

[8] Adolf Stöcker (1835-1909) was court chaplain to Kaiser Wilhelm I. A Lutheran theologian, he formed the Christian Socialist Party in order to oppose the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD). His hatred of the Jews was inextricably linked to his commitment to Christian social ideals.

[9] Stöcker’s attacks on Bismarck’s Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder caused Bismarck to withdraw all support for Stöcker in 1881. When Wilhelm I’s son Frederick III became emperor in 1888 (for 99 days) he prohibited Stöcker from speaking publicly on political matters.

[10] The Bochum Programme of 1889 organised by Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Theodor Fritsch sought to combat the influence of international Jewry and reverse Jewish emancipation.

[11] Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911) was an officer of the German Imperial Army who, following the Bochum Congress, established the Deutsch-Soziale Partei that merged in 1894 with Otto Böckel’s Deutsche Reformpartei to form the Deutschsoziale Reformpartei.

[12] Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933) was the author of several anti-Semitic publications including the Handbuch der Judenfrage (1893) and the  Antisemiten Katechismus (1897).

[13] Christian Radenhausen (1813-1897) was a natural philosopher and author of several works including Isis, der Mensch und die Welt (1863) and Christentum ist Heidentum, nicht Jesu Lehre (1881).

[14] Otto Glagau (1834-1892) was a journalist who exposed the fraudulent financial transactions of the Jews in his articles and in Der Börsen- und Gründungsschwindel in Berlin (1876-77).

[15] Der Börsen- und Gründungsschwindel in Berlin (The stock-exchange and factory foundation swindle).

[16] Deutsches Handwerk und Historisches Bürgerthum, 1879.

[17] Otto Böckel (1859-1923) was a German folklorist and anti-Semitic publicist who founded the Antisemitische Volkspartei.

[18] Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896) was a German historian who promoted German nationalism and Prussian authoritarian politics. His works include Politik (1897) and Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1897).

[19] Eugen Dūhring (1833-1921) was a German professor of political economy and author of a detailed study of the Jewish Question, Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage, 1881 (See my English edition, The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral and Cultural Question, London: Ostara Publications, 2019).

[20] Édouard Drumont (1844-1917) was a French anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic writer who established the Ligue anti-sémitique de France in 1889. His most famous work is La France juive (1886).

[21] Georg von Schönerer (1842-1921) was an Austrian pan-German nationalist. Though he adopted anti-Semitic attitudes in the 1880s, he was opposed to the Catholic Habsburgs as well and supported Bismarck’s Prussian supremacism.

[22] The SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) is a Socialist party founded in 1875 that was instrumental in the establishment of the Weimar Republic. It is still a major political party in Germany and its leaders have included Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Olaf Scholz.

[23] Ahlwardt presents here long quotations from Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, and Goethe’s Faust.

[24] Heinrich Heine 1797-1856) was a German Jewish poet and journalist noted for his lyric poetry as well as political poems and articles.

[25] Ludwig Börne (1786-1837) was a German Jewish satirist best known for his collection of letters, Briefe aus Paris, 1834.

[26] The period between 1861 and 1866 was marked by the rivalry between Prussia and Austria and the victory of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.

[27] Bronze rock, a term used by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, who wrote in 1716 in response to the Junker opposition to his proposal to raise taxes: ‘Ich … stabiliere die Souveränität und setze die Krone fest wie einen rocher von bronze’ (I stabilize the sovereignty and set the crown firmly like a bronze rock).

[28] There follows here a brief section on four German personalities, a Pastor Knack, the Socialist Fritz Kunert, a Dr. Bertram and a Catholic nurse Sister Bertha, who belonged to different professional and religious denominations but had in common a deep sympathy for their fellowmen.

That the works of Martin Heidegger might not take pride of place in any Jewish library is axiomatic. Heidegger has been associated with the Nazis from the time of his short tenure as Chancellor of German universities which began in 1932. This was an appointment sanctioned by Hitler himself, and from that moment Heidegger was destined to be blacklisted by international Jewry. Heidegger soon became disillusioned with the new ruling party, however, and left in 1933, his quietism after the war adding to the atmosphere of suspicion and complicity that surrounded him and still surrounds his work. (As we shall see, even Heidegger’s split with the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbiterpartei will be held in evidence against him due to the reasons for his disillusionment).

But the academic debate gradually died down until 2014, when the first of Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks (schwarze Hefte) was published. These were a cross between diaries and working notes Heidegger kept between 1932 and the early 1970s, and this hybrid of personal record and professional note-taking will become significant when Heidegger is accused of a familiar crime; Anti-Semitism.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Columbia University Press, 2017) is a collection of 12 essays looking at the controversy from different academic and intellectual angles, but all centered around the cluster of “anti-Semitic” entries found in these working diaries. The charges against Heidegger — for this is something of an academic show-trial — are two versions of anti-Semitism. The first is what we may call the “normative” type of anti-Semitism, that is, any criticism of Jewry and its traditions deemed “anti-Semitic” by the arbiters, the Jewish lobby themselves. The second operates on a philosophical level and has to do with the Heideggerean concept of “being-historical” Judaism, present not overtly in Heidegger’s jottings, but supposedly ingrained into his philosophy and accessible via remarks made in the Black Notebooks. While criticism of Jews is typically rebranded as anti-Semitism by Jewish activists, and thus made pejorative rather than neutral.

It is a familiar tactic. At the philosophical level Heidegger’s critics use some of the most dubious intellectual strategies drawn from the very dysfunctional academic environment they helped create.

Firstly, a note on Heidegger. To the non-philosopher, his work is obscure and unreadable. The reader also needs some knowledge of the philosophical tradition in which Heidegger is writing to understand where he is situated historically and therefore what it is he’s writing about and in reaction to. Even for those with a firm grounding in philosophy, few in today’s academic environment are likely to engage with the German who is often called — including among these essays — the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century. I would guess (and it is a guess) that if you are, say, an analytical philosopher or a philosopher of mind in a redbrick university in Britain, you will never have read a page of Heidegger. Any degree connected with “grievance studies”, on the other hand, will mention him only in connection with his links to the only man in history who was literally Hitler, and Heidegger’s supposed anti-Semitism.

With all this in mind, I will stay away from the essays which are couched in overtly Heideggerean language, ignore the debate at an ontological and epistemological level, and concentrate on those sentences of Heidegger which stand accused, those little drops of philosophical, anti-Semitic poison that have so exercised the Jewish academic caucus. And it will repay inspection to note further to what use these words of power are put by their alleged victims.

One of the essayists, Sander L. Gilman — a Jewish academic activist if ever there was one — neatly encapsulates the focus of the collection:

The current scandal concerning Heidegger concerns the presence of anti-Semitic content in the Black Notebooks that he kept during the war years. Defenders have stressed the small quantity of such utterances across thousands of pages, accusers that they reflect on the entirety of Heidegger’s philosophy.

What is to be judged as anti-Semitic content? The editor’s introduction provides a definition of anti-Semitism worth quoting in full as it dictates the telos of the collection, its raison d’être, as well as being susceptible to criticism on its own terms:

Anti-Semitism is an attitude or pattern of behavior that is directed against Jews, sprung from rumor, prejudice, and pseudoscientific sources (whether from race theory or simply racist), functioning affectively and/or administratively, and leading to a) defamation; b) universal vilification; c) isolation: professional prohibitions, ghettoes, camps; d) expulsion: emigration; e) annihilation: pogroms, mass executions, death camps. We also deem anti-Semitic anything that is supposed to characterize the Jew as ‘Jew’. In short: anti-Semitism is ‘the expression of hostility and hatred against Jews.

This is quite a definition. Perhaps we are too used to dictionary definitions, with their tendency to brevity. It’s also quite manic. One can imagine it being spoken by a Dalek, the pitch constantly rising, as do the butterfly effects of the merest hint of anti-Semitism. The exponential increase in threat from “defamation” to Holocaust is reminiscent of the “Pyramid of Hate”, an extraordinary visual map partly co-produced by the Anti-Defamation League and relating to that ever-present constant, racism. In this structure, “Biased Attitudes” are at base camp, graduating upwards into “Acts of Bias”, through “Discrimination”, on to “Bias-Motivated Violence”, and finishing with the cherry on top, “Genocide”. Just as marijuana is often described as a “gateway drug” leading to darker addictions, so too “insensitive remarks”, “non-inclusive language”, and “microaggressions” lead inexorably to the death camps. The editor of the collection under consideration uses the same hyperbolic template in the definition noted above.

The inclusion as anti-Semitic of “anything that is supposed to characterize the Jew as ‘Jew’” is a curious proposition. Are only Jews allowed to characterize Jews as “Jews”, in the same way only Blacks can call one another “nigger”? Even when exploiting a pre-fabricated victimhood, the academic Judaic tone is often a quasi-Freemasonic one. Only the Jew can know the Jew. Part of the ferocity of the response to Heidegger’s Jew-criticism is a fear of being known.

It is important to note that there are two schools of defense of Heidegger against the charge of anti-Semitism: those who point out the paucity of apparently offending text, and those who assert that any personal animus towards Jewry was irrelevant to Heidegger’s philosophical project. The first of these defenses is clearly outlined by one of the essayists here, Richard Polt:

The first four volumes comprise 1,753 pages by Heidegger. By my count, twenty-seven pages refer to Jews or Judaism, and these references along with their context easily fit on ten pages. I consider about ten of these pages to be overtly anti-Semitic.

If we were old-school structuralists, we might express that as follows: Rounded up to two decimal places, 0.6% of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks are deemed anti-Semitic even by an author who believes the general charge against Heidegger is justified. This is powerful magic, and Heidegger clearly has an almost occult command of fearsome words of power. So few words, such vast repercussions, with a second Holocaust as its final destination predestined by the performative utterances of even the most casual anti-Semite.

Returning to the introduction, we are introduced to exhibit A, “One of the more infamous statements in the Black Notebooks”, as Heidegger muses over Jewry and national and military boundaries:

World Judaism, spurred on by the emigrants let out of Germany, is everywhere elusive. In all the unfurling of its power, it need nowhere engage in military actions, whereas it remains for us to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people.

If Heidegger is saying that a stateless people can’t raise a standing army, and so cannot meaningfully participate in any warfare, then that is hard to counter as an argument. But it is the question of context the editor raises next that is the key to the whole collection:

Does this mean that the [note above] would be anti-Semitic, or is the whole list not anti-Semitic? The individual points situate themselves within larger contexts, to isolate the exact words as anti-Semitic is to overlook the enabling conditions for such remarks, the contexts, and even the manner of thinking itself. In a text, no statement stands alone, but is made possible by the surrounding context. And what of cases where no anti-Semitic statements are uttered. Is it possible that one could create the conditions for anti-Semitic remarks, encourage those remarks, but without ever uttering any such remark, and nonetheless still be found anti-Semitic?

The editor goes on to qualify this with a crucial sentence;

Anti-Semitism can still be operative even without being fully present in incriminating statements.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, he continues, mean that his work as a whole, his Nachlass, is “susceptible to being developed in anti-Semitic directions”.

This is where we have to be acutely aware of the wiles of post-structuralism, and a detour is necessary to situate Heidegger — and his critics considered here — within this apparently ruinous intellectual movement. A lot of ill-informed nonsense is regurgitated by the dissident right on the subject of post-structuralism, or post-modernism, if you will. The usual suspects responsible for causing today’s academically endorsed epistemological free-for-all are Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan (if anyone reading can understand a word he says, do let me know), Julia Kristeva and others. Their complicity in untethering reason from its post-Enlightenment moorings is justified in many cases, but outside of universities no one reads these people.

Philosophy works via a sort of trickle-down effect, much like the world of fashion design (and the academic world in general). The models in absurd outfits parading the catwalks of Paris and Milan are not wearing anything they expect people apart from pop stars to actually wear, but very watered-down versions of whatever is on display will one day hit the high streets. So it is with post-structuralist thought, and with any influential school of thought throughout history. People didn’t suddenly become thinking individuals, aware of their own being for the first time, the day after Descartes’ Discourse on the Method was published. Science didn’t have a “Kantian revolution” when The Critique of Pure Reason hit the stands, Kant just wrote about reason in such a way that would eventually dovetail with a certain strain of science, i.e., the scientific fields which have to account for the interaction between the observer and the observed. It takes time for philosophical thought to realize its full range of effects, and the worst excesses — or, rather, their misappropriation — of the post-structuralism/modernism born in the 1960s are only now beginning to bear bitter fruit.

But I have a particular interest in the early writings of Derrida, the philosophical essays and books, and a lot of what I read about him when the wind is blowing from the extreme right reads like someone who has read something about someone who has read a bit about Derrida. I’m not seeing any familiarity with any texts or concepts. To read Derrida, you have to realize that this is not philosophy for the people, it is philosophy for other philosophers. But, like a virus from a Chinese lab, the worst strains of Derrida’s “deconstruction” got out and became popularized via a series of Chinese Whispers. Post-structuralist thought is important and insightful, as long as it remains a field exercise. If it escapes the seminar room and starts to infect those in the outside world, we get the results we see all around us once people at university start — closely followed by the media — believing that Derrida really did say that a text can mean anything you want it to mean. I wrote a defense of Derrida here at Counter Currents, with particular reference to Of Grammatology, for those interested. So, overall, the style of post-modern thinking allows for a lot of trickery. It’s the same with Heidegger.

Epistemologically speaking, and in terms of inductive argument, there is dirty work at the crossroads going on in some of these essays.

The overall charges against Heidegger throughout, the parsing out of his alleged anti-Semitism, include accusations of Jewish singularity, the role of the Jews in the domination of the world by the promotion of technology, and their hyper-rationality. Bettina Berto writes of “the putative worldlessness of the Jews, not to mention their abilities for calculation, which have allowed them to participate in the Machenschaft and gigantism that Heidegger argues is destroying the world”. The editor refines the three categories of anti-Semitism in the context of Heideggerean thought. Anti-Semitic thought or writing contains one or all of the following:

1. The idea that Jews would be purely calculative in their thinking.
2. The idea that Jews live by a principle of race.
3. The idea that Jews would be relentlessly devoted to the task of uprooting all beings from being.

The Jewish lobby likes its tropes, and the first two points are exactly tropic in the sense they would understand it. For those who forensically seek anti-Semitism, an oft-repeated criticism — regardless of its accuracy — becomes a “trope”, And tropes are bad.

The third point, however, is less familiar because more properly philosophical. Peter Trawny, whose essay The Universal and Annihilation: Heidegger’s Being-Historical Anti-Semitism opens the collection, also wrote a book entitled Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, and “Being-Historical Anti-Semitism” is his working concept with regard to Heidegger. This highlights a noteworthy aspect of what we might call the Jewish tendency to employ “accusatory defense”. Even when they are being insulted, Jews insist on this being a world-historical event. Even anti-Semitism must be pressed into service to confirm the presence of the Jew in world history, the all-importance of the tribe. This is in-group behavior on the world-historical stage, and not a little narcissistic. Perhaps, with so much vested interest in show-business, international Jewry just can’t resist the limelight.

Mr. Trawny is something of a specialist on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. Considering Heidegger’s appraisal of Judaism as part of a “historical process”, this author notes Heidegger’s opinion on “world Judaism”:

’World Judaism’ is… introduced as a distinctive representative of machination in the narrative of beyng. [Beyng” is a translation of “Seyn”, an archaic spelling intended by Heidegger to give a historical dimension to the concept of Being.] Already the term world Judaism signals a problem. It is not unusual for Heidegger to wish that his words be understood ‘literally’.

I would have thought that “literally” was one of the few words you can’t wrap in inverted commas, but we’ll let that pass. Again, although there is a link to be made, albeit in the context of the looseness of post-modern thought, that does not imply it is valid to make it, or at least to extrapolate any further significance from it. But Mr. Trawny has a text of his own, a Judaic Ace of Spades, in support of his claim that Heidegger has accused world Judaism of all the ills of mankind. He brings in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The section is worth quoting at length, as it illuminates the Jewish manipulation of the Protocols hoax:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion… [shows] a ‘world Judaism’ [which acts] on a global scale and in secret, surreptitiously pursues world domination by modern means, like the ‘international press’. In my opinion, Heidegger did not read the Protocols. Yet he did not have to. They were continually present in Hitler’s speeches and in the propaganda of the ‘Third Reich’. A different source for the concept of ‘world Judaism’ can be ruled out. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are the ‘absolute reference point’ (Wolfgang Benz) for the term world Judaism.

What is interesting here is that Jewish discussion of the Protocols usually revolves around the “blood libel”, an obvious and cartoonish absurdity. But the global domination part is rarely on display, coming out as it does only within the cloistered halls of academia, where not many people will see it. And accusations made of Jewish global triumphalism rely on a related Jewish trait, their worldlessness.

An essay by Sander Gilman finds Heidegger accusing the Jews of “worldlessness”, and thus being opposed to any nation-state other than their own rather hastily — and British-assembled — state of Israel. Gilman, the academic  Jewish activist, writes that all the world’s peoples should be able to be “citizens of the world”, even if that world has been redefined to include the mental geographies of transgender dysfunctionalism. Gilman includes the “borders” of gender as ones which should be freely crossed, and available as such. This harks back to the discussion of “topographies” thematized by Trawny in the opening essay. By virtue of taking no part in the world in national terms, therefore the Jews must take the world as their state. If this is Heidegger’s secret fear, it is hard to see it as an irrational one, a phobia. Jews are past masters at using acceptable conceptual commerce in which to secrete their own contraband cargo. They can and will use any medium, including that of post-modern academia, to keep the emblem of anti-Semitism raised high above the battlefields of the culture wars.

“Worldlessness” or “rootlessness”, the nomadic as opposed to the cosmopolitan way of life, is seen as a natural mode of existence for Jews. Heidegger is spotted describing them as “scheming and rootless”, according to one author, and quotes Heidegger from the Notebooks as referring to their “tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling”. These nomadically honed skill-sets have, of course, proved to be of great evolutionary advantage for world Jewry, and it is a skilled piece of epistemological realignment to cast their being noticed as criticism. It is more like praise.

The most extraordinary thing about Jew-criticism is that it can be recycled and re-used by Jews. I believe there is a principle for this. Several years ago, I was talking to a gentleman I had never met before. We were at a party, with mutual friends in attendance, and so were making small-talk, as party-goers will. His hobby was judo, and I asked him the one principle he thought important to the discipline that would be of use to people who were not versed in the art. He answered within a heartbeat; “Use your enemy’s strength against them”. This is the only protocol of importance to today’s elders of Zion.

Michael Marder’s essay, ‘The Other ‘Jewish Question’”, alludes to Karl Marx’s 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question”. Marder is exercised about how a people can become a question, although an alternative query might be: What might a people do to become a question? Marder finds a failure in Heidegger to turn “international Jewry” into a question, as well as a failure to provide “a concrete figuration, a clandestine ‘agency’… for the nihilistic completion of metaphysics”. Again, Heidegger is accused of equating mankind’s apparent lust for self-annihilation with an existential masochism found only among the hegemonic Jews.

Slavoj Žižek’s final essay, “The Persistence of the Ontological”, looks as though it might be an attempt at academic balance, as it opens with a sub-heading reading “Why Heidegger Should Not Be Criminalized”. The essay takes place largely on Heideggerian terrain, and scarcely mentions the anti-Semitism controversy, but where it does, it adds pointers to the central question of Heidegger’s “anti-Semitism”. Žižek reiterates, for example, Ernst Nolte’s defense of Heidegger’s academic engagement in 1933, that in the wake of Communism — which, after all, fascism was a reaction against — “a moderate fascism was a justified response to the communist threat”. This seems perfectly reasonable: It is unlikely that Heidegger read through and approved the ground-plans for Auschwitz before he accepted Hitler’s job offer. But despite the evidence in the Black Notebooks that Heidegger was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Hitler, the verdict was in a long time before. Heidegger’s waning faith in the Reich was not because of Nazism as such, but due to “the fact that the Nazis also succumbed to technological-nihilist Machenschaft”.

This is the same Machenschaft for which, according to the consensus opinion in this collection, Heidegger blames the Jews. There is a lot of this rather spurious hitching of philosophical wagons to ideological horses in this collection, and the rather libertine approach to critical thought encouraged by “critical theory” is both encouraged by the education system and allows numerous sleights of hand in order to produce an argument.

Žižek provides a review of his colleagues’ preceding 11 essays with a single sentence:

[W]hile anti-Semitism persists and survives Heidegger’s disenchantment with Nazism, one should note that it doesn’t play a central role in Heidegger’s thought but remains relatively marginal, an illustration or exemplification of a central scheme that survives without it.

Žižek notes that, although he has “a consistent ‘theory’ about the Jews”, Heidegger avoids “primitive biological racism”. This despite another author here pointing out that in 1934, shortly before he resigned the rectorship at Freiburg, Heidegger was “demanding… a full professor’s chair in racial doctrine and racial biology”.

It is curious that today, universities have faced effectively the same demands from the Black caucus and has acquiesced in every case. Instead, Heidegger links Jewish global endeavor with “the technological degradation of the totality of Being”. Heidegger, along with Spengler and Evola, warned consistently about the dangers of technology, not just as the runaway mechanization of the world, but also of its consequence, the turning of man himself into no more than a standing reserve for the machines. In our age of AI, this echoes loudly.

As for the question of the Holocaust, Zizek concedes that worried Jews may have a point. “Here it gets really dark”, he notes. A note of Heidegger’s from 1942 turns up in several of the essays collected here:

The highest type and the highest act of politics consists in placing your opponent in a position where he is compelled to participate in his own self-annihilation.

The Holocaust is, of course, portrayed as a fully mechanized event conducted in a managerial and technocratic fashion. It is exemplary of the machination of the world, accusations of which the Jews firmly reject. Again, it only takes a piece of casual association to come up with the following formula:

The Jews have boosted and utilized the rapid growth of global technology and mechanization.
The Holocaust was a technological, mechanized event.
Therefore, the Jews have contributed to their own annihilation.

For the gentile with an eye on world affairs, Heidegger needs no defense. Whatever type of world we find ourselves in — fallen into, Verfallen, to follow Heidegger — it is as it is because of at least some measure of Jewish design. For the academic community, dictated by the protocols of modern Jewry as much as any other intellectual sector, a defense must be mounted. The last line of Zizek’s essay provides half of the case for the defense:

Nothing in the Black Notebooks changes the fact that Heidegger’s thought provides a key contribution to our dealing with [the] ultimate question.

Although this seems like giving a naughty student a gold star to excuse his reckless behavior in class, the point is applicable to any contentious literary or philosophical figure. Their texts are not changed either by their actions, or by fragments of text which can be used as leverage to discredit the whole. And the same argument, mutatis mutandis, applies to the tendency of the Jewish academic lobby represented in these essays to use isolated fragments and extrapolate them into an interpretation of larger texts and the philosophical positions put forward therein. Another essayist here, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, makes the same point:

That some of the most intemperate critics such as Emmanuel Faye have marshaled such evidence to declare Heidegger anathema to the philosophical canon, as if all his insights were thereby beyond consideration, strikes me as a hyperbolic response unbefitting our usual habits of philosophical interpretation.

Of course, this textual sensitivity goes both ways. There are those on the “dissident Right”, as I suppose we are still loosely termed, whose critical stance towards Jewry has long since passed from a healthy and inquisitive skepticism into pathological obsession. I wish I had kept a collection of comments to my pieces over the years from these people, who I think of as the “Goy Division”. Personally, I left what we might call the “Jewish Question 2.0” for some time before addressing it. It seemed too all-consuming, and the reason I call it “The Jewish Question 2.0” seems to me to be that it’s no longer a question of “What do we do with the Jews?” so much as “What will the Jews do with us?” Without wishing to appear obsequious, I then came to read The Culture of Critique by the editor of this magazine. What struck me, apart from the depth of analysis, the credibility of the narrative, and the context and method a psychologist brings to a subject, was the level-headed relation of facts, figures, and cultural phenomena. How different in tone from the Touretter chatterings of the Goy Division. I once wrote a piece elsewhere on a famous British gangster movie, and the very first comment was an essay-length piece on how the Jews run Hollywood. I thought; I know. I know they do. But what has that to do with this film? Valid criticism of Jewry is hardly helped by histrionics.

The Jewish conceptual apparatus of “anti-Semitism” is just that, an apparatus. It has inter-linking parts which function together, it is not just mere placardism, like “racist” or “fascist”, which are just performatives rather than descriptors in any meaningful sense. And its main drive is a simple inversion of reality, a trap which is laid for the unwary anti-Semite to fall into, an anti-Semite so unwary of his condition he didn’t even know he was an anti-Semite until he fell into the trap. When Heidegger writes, in the Black Notebooks, “What is the basis for the peculiar predetermination of Jewry for planetary criminality?,” are we not entitled to ask the same question, if we believe planetary criminality to be the province of the Jews? Why should we not be? Simply by edict, ex cathedra prohibitions not permissible in any court of appeal.

Next year being the centenary of the publication of Being and Time, I intend to read the book again over Christmas, I think for the fourth time. Fortunately, not being Jewish, I will be able to enjoy it once more without the creeping feeling described by Emmanuel Levinas. Robert Bernasconi relates that in 1988, after the publication of a major book in terms of the Heidegger debate, Levinas “reaffirmed his long-standing admiration for Being and Time, but posed the question of whether there was not an echo of evil there”. Levinas himself explained the eerie effect Heidegger’s masterpiece is wont to have on some of its selected readers:

The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognize it. [Italics added].

Intellectual effort is indeed required to make Heidegger into the Devil, but it is in Jewish tribal interests to do so. And that intellectual effort will use all post-modernism’s tricks of the trade to make flimsy evidence stick to a spurious crime. One of the favorite verbs employed by the left is “to demonize”, by which they mean noticing that people from different parts of the world are different colors and behave in different ways. It’s a silly, fortune-cookie motto, like “Othering”, but we may tease a little relevance from it. Heidegger has been thoroughly demonized by the Jewish-academic complex, and it is rather encouraging to see. It means they fear him, which makes him worth studying. It also means they fear his knowledge of their guile, and guile is why the Devil was depicted in the Bible not as a horned demon but as a snake.

This is a collection which is highly recommend to the Heidegger scholar, and worth being aware of should you wish to take the pulse of the contemporary response to White Western philosophy. The modern hunters of racism and Islamophobia learnt their trade from the book of Jewish victimhood, and the first lesson is that anti-Semitism/racism/Islamophobia must be found everywhere, particularly within those cultural enclaves begun, developed, and dominated by Whites, which is almost all of them, and certainly all of them that are of worth. In particular, the closer the criticism to what the professionally offended know to be the truth, the more vociferous the response must be.

Heidegger’s comments on Jews and Jewry in the Black Notebooks are obviously over the target, and that is why there is so much flak. Anti-Semitism in the greatest philosopher of the last century may be a dangerous glitch for the academic Jewish complex, but it is a design feature for those who wear their anti-Semitism with a measure of pride, because they have thought it through rather than responded to that thought with the instinctive horror Adam shows in Eden when he understands what it is the Devil has done.