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[February 1995; Socialist Outlook 77]

One hundred years ago a large crowd gathered in Paris to witness the public humiliation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who had been convicted of spying for the Germans. The crowd spat and shouted 'kill the Jews' as Dreyfus was stripped of his insignia and his sword ritually broken. Once deported to Devil's Island his case unleashed a violent outpouring of anti-Semitism across France. It took 11 years for the French government to admit that he had been framed and to admit his innocence.

Fifty years after the case Dreyfus' granddaughter died at Auschwitz. Such is the dreadful unity of these two events, which mark the beginning and mid-point of our imperialist century. With hindsight the Dreyfus case can he seen as an ominous foretaste of the power and ferocity of anti-Semitism in this century. Not least because it occurred not in feudal Russia - the land of the pogroms - but in modern industrial democratic France.

It lead Theodor Herzl, who witnessed the affair, to write his famous book The Jewish State, which has become the founding text of modern Zionism. He concludes that it is impossible for Jews and non-Jews to live together: instead an exclusively Jewish State should be established.

The social democrats of the time rejected this. They saw it as a self-imposed isolation - a diversion from the socialist struggle. They saw anti-semitism as a feudal product destined to die away. Under conditions of advanced capitalism the Jews would be gradually assimilated and absorbed: eventually they would cease to be a distinct group.

This assimilation was seen as a desirable outcome. The Jews were not considered a nation because they did not possess a common language and territory. Such an outlook was shared by socialists as diverse as Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky.

Russian social democrats assumed that assimilation would proceed in their country in the same way as Western Europe and North America. Opposition to this approach came mainly from the Jewish Bund. This organisation developed a programme opposed to assimilation demanding recognition of the Jews as a nation. At the 1903 congress of Russian social democrats they demanded the right to he recognised as the sole representatives of the Jewish workers within the party, proposing to turn it into a federation of national groups. This was bitterly opposed by the majority and led to a split.

It seems today that the assimitationists were wrong - the Nazi terror of the 1930s indicates the exact opposite of the process. The crisis of capitalism, linked to the failures of the revolutionary wave that swept through Europe in the century's second decade, produced a new kind of anti-semitism: a product not of feudalism but of imperialism.

This deepening wave of anti-semitism led Trotsky to re-evaluate his views on the whole matter during the 1930s. He saw that the expected assimilation had not occurred and that the Jews had developed further the Jewish language and created a vibrant Yiddish press. He decided that therefore the Jews could be called a nation and that they therefore had the right, if they chose to exercise it, of a homeland of their own. Nevertheless he continued to oppose both Zionist and the Bundist ideas. He opposed colonisation of Palestine because 'there is no such thing on our planet as the idea that one has more claim to land than another'. He argued that the only way a Jewish nation could be brought into existence on the basis of mutual understanding would be under international socialism.

To those who argued that this was utopian Trotsky replied that the immediate task was to campaign for the right to asylum for all those Jews menaced by fascism. This call was taken up by a number of socialist groups under the slogan 'open the gates'. Suffice to say the western governments chose to keep them closed.

For Trotsky the rise of anti-semitism was a product of the crisis and decay of capitalism, further proof that it could no longer contribute to human progress - 'anti-semitism is today one of the most malignant convulsions of capitalism's death agony'. In a prophetic statement of 1939 Trotsky predicted that the next stage in its development may result in the 'physical extermination of the Jews'. 

These views are of particular importance because they combine a commitment to a homeland for the Jewish people with a total opposition to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine.

The choice between assimilation and Zionism is shown to be false. Neither complete denial of Jewish identity nor its affirmation on a racist colonialist basis is necessary.

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