In 1919, Vladimir Lenin delivered a speech titled “On Anti-Jewish Pogroms,” in which he declared that “antisemitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews.” On the surface, this sounds unequivocally condemnatory. Yet once one reads the entire speech, it becomes evident that Lenin, ever the strategic ideologue, was less interested in defending Jews than in weaponizing antisemitism to attack capitalism, the monarchy, and the bourgeoisie. As he put it, “we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital.”

In other words, the problem with antisemitism, for Lenin, was not the hatred of Jews per se; it was that such hatred diverted the masses from the true revolutionary struggle. In sum, being “against Jews” was wrong only insofar as it weakened the workers’ movement.

This makes his earlier writings all the more revealing. Just a decade prior, the same Lenin who publicly equated “enmity toward the Jews” with enmity toward the proletariat composed a scathing denunciation of Zionism. In “The Position of the Bund Party,” he accuses Zionism of being a “reactionary” movement and called for dismantling the “Zionist idea of a Jewish nation.”

This distinction, tolerating Jews as individuals while rejecting Jewish nationhood, would become foundational to the Soviet antizionist campaign and signature to antizionism in the West today. Lenin’s ideological separation of Jew from........

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