Socialism of Fools : Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism / Michele Battini ; Translated by Noor Mazhar and Isabella Vergnano
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SOCIALISM OF Capitalism & Modern Anti-Semitism michele battini SOCIALISM OF FOOLS C6901.indb i 1/27/16 10:26 AM C6901.indb ii 1/27/16 10:26 AM SOCIALISM OF FOOLS CAPITALISM AND MODERN ANTI-SEMITISM MICHELE BATTINI TRANSLATED BY NOOR MAZHAR AND ISABELLA VERGNANO columbia university press New York C6901.indb iii 1/27/16 10:26 AM columbia university press Publishers Since 1893 new york chichester, west sussex cup.columbia.edu Originally published as Il socialismo degli imbecilli. Propaganda, falsificazione, persecuzione degli ebrei by Michele Battini. © 2010 Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino. Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Battini, M. (Michele), author. [Socialismo degli imbecilli. English] Socialism of fools : capitalism and modern anti-Semitism / Michele Battini ; translated by Noor Mazhar and Isabella Vergnano. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-17038-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-231-54132-9 (e-book : alk. paper) 1. Antisemitism—Europe—History—19th century. 2. Antisemitism—Europe—History— 20th century. 3. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 4. Christianity and other religions— Judaism. 5. Christianity and antisemitism—History—19th century. 6. Christianity and antisemitism—History—20th century. 7. Capitalism—Europe—History—19th century. 8. Capitalism—Europe—History—20th century. 9. Jews—Persecutions—History— 19th century. 10. Jews—Persecutions—History—20th century. I. Title. ds146.e85b3813 2015 305.892'404—dc23 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover Design: Martin Hinze References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. C6901.indb iv 1/27/16 10:26 AM CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. “Is the Palestine Capitalist Here?” 13 2. European “National Socialism” and Its Propaganda 75 3. Th e Dark Core of Italian Civilization: Fascism and the Path of Paolo Orano 111 4. An Interpretation of Anti-Jewish Anticapitalism 145 5. Th e Shoah, Social Anti-Semitism, and Its Aft ermath 181 Notes 215 Index 305 C6901.indb v 1/27/16 10:26 AM C6901.indb vi 1/27/16 10:26 AM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS first and revised version of chapters 1 and 2 had A been discussed at the seminar of the Italian Academy of Columbia University of New York, where I was Alexander Bodini Re- search Associate Fellow in Culture and Religion in the autumn of 2008, and later published in Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Th eory 16, no. 4 (December 2009): 615–634. Chapter 3 develops a hypo thesis I discussed at the Université de Grenoble II, in May 2007, on the occasion of the international symposium Antisémitisme national et in- ternationalisation de la question antisémite. Italie fasciste et France de Vichy, in the framework of a research project funded by the Fondation pour la Mé- moire de la Shoah of Paris. Chapter 4 originates from some refl ections I de- veloped, at the invitation of Gianni Sofri, in January 2006, on the occasion of the “Giorno della memoria” (Day of remembrance) held by the City Council of Bologna. Chapter 5 takes up some ideas discussed at the conference Storia, verità, diritto (History, truth, the law) organized by the Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea (Italian society for the study of contem- porary history) and by the Giunta Centrale per gli Studi Storici (Central com- mittee for historical studies) of the Università di Roma–La Sapienza, in April 2008. Th e manuscript is fi nally the result of a dialogue with Carlo Ginzburg, which took place on the occasion of the seminar held by the Department of History of the Università di Pisa, in April 2008, Il paradigma indiziario (quasi) trent’anni dopo (Th e circumstantial paradigm [almost] thirty years later). C6901.indb vii 1/27/16 10:26 AM viii acknowledgments I record my sincere thanks to Carlo Ginzburg, Ira Katznelson, Nadia Urbinati, Stathis Gourgouris, Andrew Arato, Federico Finchelstein, Neni Panourgia, Andreas Kalyvas, Marie-Anne Matard, Gilles Pécout, Fabio Levi, Stefano Levi Della Torre, David Bidussa, and Guri Schwarz; the conversations I had with them on specifi c topics at diff erent stages of the composition of the book were illuminating and precious. C6901.indb viii 1/27/16 10:26 AM SOCIALISM OF FOOLS C6901.indb ix 1/27/16 10:26 AM C6901.indb x 1/27/16 10:26 AM INTRODUCTION his book focuses on a break that constituted a T change of fundamental importance in the history of European cultures: the morphological transformation of the millenarian anti-Jewish Christian tradition, shaped between the fourth and fi ft h centu- ries, into a new anti-Semitism that grew from hostility to the legal emancipa- tion of the Jews in the late eighteenth century. Emancipation was won in 1791 for the fi rst time, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citi- zen in revolutionary France. Aft er a few years, the anti-Semitic propaganda opposed emancipation by launching a frontal attack against the rights of citi- zenship and those who were considered responsible for it: the thinkers of the Enlightenment, above all, the writers of the German Aufk lärung and the Jew- ish German Haskalah , together with their interlocutors, the philosophes and chrétiens éclairés , on the other side of the Rhine. Th e constitutional state and political emancipation eliminated the discrimination that for centuries had guaranteed the segregation of the Jewish communities from Christian socie- ties of Europe. It also removed the control over the banking, commercial, and fi nancial activities of the Jews that the monarchies had exploited to sustain their courts. So with the advent of the market society, the old stereotype of Jewish usury was transformed into an attack on what economists and soci- ologists later called “capitalism.” Th e anti-Semites identifi ed the capitalists with the Jewish fi nanciers and therefore made the latter the scapegoats for the crises of the modern industrial economy, caused, according to them, by fi nancial speculation, that is, usury. C6901.indb 1 1/27/16 10:26 AM 2 introduction My hypothesis is that this anti-Semitic anticapitalist literature arose in the context of the intransigent Catholic reaction against the revolution in political rights, the free market, and secularization. For instance, in 1806 Viscount Louis de Bonald began the propaganda campaign against the Jews of the French Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, which soon led to grave limitations on the legal equality and citizenship rights of the Jews. Th is was the new para- digm that arose in those years: the old enemies of Christianity had become equal to all other citizens and in fact constituted a hostile power within the national Christian community; thanks to the democratic guarantees they had obtained, the Jews could now with impunity conspire to use their economic power to conquer political power. As a consequence, the fi ght against “Jew- ish” capitalism should have been directed against its main protectors, namely, liberal institutions and the constitutional state. Th is paradigm spread in the early decades of the ninetheenth century via intransigent Catholic texts and among the antiliberal “social” economists and the authors of the church’s social doctrine; then a Fourierist writer, Alphonse Toussenel, appropriated it around 1845. With the work of Pierre-Joseph Prou- dhon, the paradigm circulated widely among the socialist associations of skilled and unskilled craft smen and workers. Proudhon, an economist, was fully aware of the Christian social doctrine’s hostility to free market. In the last decades of the century, this paradigm reappeared anew in the texts of the Catholic and nationalist writer Édouard Drumont, in the proclamations of the Christian Social propagandists of the Habsburg Empire, and in the litera- ture of the anti-Semitic German leagues and of some socialists of Lombardy and Veneto, Italy. Th e Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a late expression of this history. In the syndicalist and nationalist texts, and in particular in those of the Italian Paolo Orano (and also those of Maurice Barrès), the new anti- Semitic paradigm reappeared in its fi nal version, the one that fueled the press campaign preceding the anti-Jewish legislation in Central Europe and Italy between 1933 and 1938. Th e foregoing is a summary of this book. In studying the relevant texts and documents, the main diffi culty was maintaining a detached stance in order to avoid errors of anachronism, such as interpreting the words of the authors and protagonists according to their meaning today. Th e risk of anachronism is highest in the case of the word “usury,” which played a decisive role in the rep- resentation of the Jews as enemies of society. Th is interpretative precaution led me to single out the texts, documents, and sources that contributed to the def- inition of the comprehensive ideology as “anti-Jewish and anticapitalist” (and C6901.indb 2 1/27/16 10:26 AM introduction 3 not simply “anti-Semitic”). I do not use the term “anti-Jewish anti capitalist paradigm” as a general concept but as the result of detailed and philological analysis of texts and the consequent attempt to arrive at a generalization and interpretation. Th e only way to deal with the great quantity of texts, docu- ments, and sources of anti-Jewish literature and propaganda (sources oft en published but later forgotten) is a fi rsthand analysis of a limited series of them, identifi ed by my specifi c question.