The Jewish Question: A Marxist interpretation

“We must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary, the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the Jew in his economic and social role. The preservation of the Jews contains nothing of the miraculous.”

Leon traces the historical rationalizations of anti-Semitism to the fact that Jews became a ‘people-class’ of merchants and moneylenders in the centuries preceding the domination of industrial capitalism. And he explains how in times of social crisis renewed Jew-hatred is incited by the capitalists to mobilize reactionary forces against the labour movement and to disorient the middle classes and layers of working people about the true source of their impoverishment.