In the Israeli political philosopher Shlomo Avineri’s recent biography of Karl Marx, he asserts that his subject’s “Jewish origins and background did leave significant fingerprints in his work, some of them obvious and others less so.” Born to Jewish parents, Marx was baptized as a child, shortly after his father converted to Christianity in pursuit of a legal career. His sole piece of writing on Jews per se brims with anti-Jewish invective and crass stereotypes. While Avineri does not attempt to downplay this, he does suggest some possible mitigating factors, e.g., that Marx slandered the Jews for purely tactical reasons. Daniel B. Schwartz writes in his review:

This reading would be more plausible were it not for the fact that Marx repeatedly used anti-Jewish slurs in his [private] letters. Avineri notes perhaps the most egregious example of this—Marx’s suggestion that Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the first working-class mass movement in Germany, represented a “combination of Judaism and Germanism with the basic negro substance” because of “the shape of his head and the growth of his hair.” Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. Marx also commonly referred to Lassalle in his correspondence as “Jüdchen” and “Jüdel” (little Jew) or “Itzig” [the Yiddish equivalent of Isaac] and “Baron Itzig,” [all clearly demeaning turns of phrase]. And Lassalle wasn’t the only object of Marx’s anti-Jewish scorn.

As for Avineri’s contention that Marx might have attempted to backtrack from his anti-Semitism in his and Friedrich Engels’s book The Holy Family, Schwartz is equally skeptical:

It may indeed be that Marx was trying to repair things in The Holy Family. But in light of the considerable evidence of anti-Jewish feeling in his private writings, it is not clear to me that his remorse was more than tactical. The likeliest explanation for Marx’s treatment of Judaism in “On the Jewish Question” is that he shared the derogatory stereotypes of Jews as exploiters and Judaism as an “egoistic” religion that were common even among European liberal and revolutionary thinkers at the time. While it is possible that he was seeking to strategically distance himself from his Jewish origins, it is equally, if not more likely that this was simply Marx, [unfiltered].

Somewhat surprisingly, Avineri has nothing to say about Marx’s Jewishness in his assessment of his afterlife. Jewishness, I would contend, has proved far more influential in Marx’s reception than it ever did in his life and work. . . . [A]ssertions of Marx’s Jewishness were a major trope of the right-wing opposition to socialist parties and trade unions in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, nowhere more evident than in Hitler’s and the Nazis’ broadsides against “the Jew Karl Marx” and “Judeo-Bolshevism.” This survives today on the alt-right. Yet Marx’s Jewishness has also been seized upon by Jewish socialists, who frequently celebrated Marx as a Jewish folk hero who was one of their own.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.