In the 2001 film The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling as Daniel “Danny” Balint, a Jewish-born neo-Nazi, the protagonist asks whether antisemites hate Jews for entering spaces where they supposedly do not belong or for remaining separate; for hoarding money or displaying it; for being communists or capitalists. His conclusion is that none of these purported explanations is the real reason: Jews are hated “because they exist.” The contradictory accusations are merely interchangeable rationalizations devised after the hatred has already been established.

“Do we hate them because they push their way in where they don’t belong? Or do we hate them because they’re clannish and keep to themselves? Because they’re tight with money, or because they flash it around? Because they’re Bolsheviks, or because they’re capitalists? Because they have the highest IQs, or because they have the most active sex lives? Do you want to know the real reason we hate them? Because we hate them. Because they exist. Because it’s an axiom of nature that just as man longs for woman, loves his children, and fears death, he hates Jews. There’s no reason. If there were, some smartass k*** would try to come up with an argument, try to prove us wrong. And of course that would only make us hate them more. In fact we have all the reasons we need in three simple letters: J-E-W. Jew.”

“Do we hate them because they push their way in where they don’t belong? Or do we hate them because they’re clannish and keep to themselves? Because they’re tight with money, or because they flash it around? Because they’re Bolsheviks, or because they’re capitalists? Because they have the highest IQs, or because they have the most active sex lives?

Do you want to know the real reason we hate them? Because we hate them. Because they exist. Because it’s an axiom of nature that just as man longs for woman, loves his children, and fears death, he hates Jews.

There’s no reason. If there were, some smartass k*** would try to come up with an argument, try to prove us wrong. And of course that would only make us hate them more. In fact we have all the reasons we need in three simple letters: J-E-W. Jew.”

The claim in part confronted within this narrative is that Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)—and therefore Communism—is commonly regarded as part of a “Jewish plot,” by anti-communist Antisemites in particular. This strange allegation, however, is easily dismantled with even a modicum of historiographical surface-scratching or even common logic and critical thinking.

More importantly, the bizarre internal contradictions of this newly-resuscitated meme-educated pseudo-intellectualism reveal the allegation for what it is: a pretext for attacking Jews regardless of any actual Jewish practice or beliefs, loyalties, economic positions, religious commitments or political orientations. As with the narrative observations of Danny Balint, Jews are simultaneously and paradoxically condemned as both capitalists and communists; wealthy financiers and impoverished revolutionaries; rootless cosmopolitans and clannish separatists.

The charges and accusations against the Jewish people change whenever circumstances require them to. This is because the accusation was never based upon coherent reasoning in the first place. Such claims were merely pretexts for anti-Jewish hatred.

In his 1946 essay Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) argued that antisemitism is a game of Bad Faith. The antisemite manufactures absurd claims to force Jewish people into a defensive posture, not for truth, but to validate the antisemite’s own prejudices and power.

This remains painfully relevant in the age of TikTok historiography, meme-based political education and algorithmically cultivated outrage. A generation conditioned to consume historical claims in fragments encounters the allegation that Marx was Jewish and Communism was consequently a Jewish conspiracy. No serious investigation of Marx’s life, religious formation or writings follows. Jewish ancestry is simply converted into Jewish identity, Jewish identity into collective culpability, and collective culpability into a conspiracy theory implicating millions of people who had nothing to do with Marx or Marxism.

Ancestry Is Not Religious or Communal Identity

Karl Marx had Jewish ancestry. Both sides of his family included Jewish ancestors, as did a considerable number of assimilated and converted European families. That biographical fact is not in dispute. But ancestry alone does not establish a person’s religion, communal affiliation, intellectual tradition or self-understanding. Treating Jewish ancestry as an indelible racial essence ironically accepts the........

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