An extract from a private letter to an unnamed person published with the consent of Engels and the addressee in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung of May 9, 1890.

‘On Anti-Semitism’ (1890) by Frederick Engels from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895. Translated by Dona Torr. International Publishers, New York. 1936.

To An Unknown Correspondent. April 19, 1890.¹

…Anti-Semitism is the characteristic sign of a backward civilisation and is therefore only found in Prussia and Austria or in Russia. If an attempt at anti-Semitism were made in England or America it would simply be ridiculed, and in Paris Herr Drumont² after all only excites an ineffective little one-day sensation with his writings–which are incomparably superior in intelligence to those of the German anti-Semites. Added to which, now that he is coming out as a candidate to the City Council, he himself will have to declare that he is as much. against Christian as Jewish capital! And even if he represented the opposite point of view people would still read Herr Drumont.

In Prussia it is the small nobility, the junkers–who with an income of 10,000 marks spend 20,000 and therefore fall into the hands of the usurers–who foment anti-Semitism, and both in Prussia and in Austria it is the petty bourgeois, the handicraftsman, the small shopkeeper, sinking into ruin owing to the competition of large-scale capitalism, who form the chorus and scream in unison with them. But if capital destroys these classes of society, which are reactionary through and through, then it is doing what it is its function to do and whether it is Semitic or Aryan, circumcised or baptised, is doing a good work; it is helping forward the backward Prussians and Austrians until at last they reach the modern position in which all the old social differences are resolved into the one great contradiction between capital and wage-labour. Only where this is not yet the case, where there is as yet no strong capitalist class and therefore also no strong wage-earning class, where capital, being still too weak to control the whole national production, has the Stock Exchange as the main scene of its activity, and where production is therefore still in the hands of peasants, landowners, handicraft workers and similar classes surviving from the Middle Ages–only here is capital predominantly Jewish and only here is anti-Semitism to be found.

In the whole of North America, where there are millionaires whose riches can hardly be expressed in our miserable marks, gulden or francs, there is not a single Jew among these millionaires, and the Rothschilds are regular beggars compared with these Americans. And even here in England, Rothschild is a man of modest means compared, for instance, with the Duke of Westminster. Even with us on the Rhine where, with the help of the French, we hunted the nobility out of the country ninety-five years ago and created a modern industry for ourselves, where are the Jews?

Anti-Semitism, therefore, is nothing but the reaction of the mediæval, decadent strata of society against modern society, which essentially consists of wage-earners and capitalists; under a mask of apparent socialism it therefore only serves reactionary ends; it is a variety of feudal socialism and with that we can have nothing to do. If it is possible in a country, that is a sign that there is not yet enough capital in that country. Capital and wage-labour are to-day inseparable. The stronger the capital the stronger also the wage-earning class and the nearer therefore the end of capitalist domination. To us Germans, therefore, among whom I include the Viennese, I wish a right merry development of capitalist economy and in no wise that it should sink into stagnation.

Added to this, anti-Semitism falsifies the whole position of affairs. It does not even know the Jews it howls down. Otherwise it would know that here in England, and in America, thanks to the Eastern European anti-Semites, and in Turkey, thanks to the Spanish Inquisition, there are thousands and thousands of Jewish proletarians, and that these Jewish workers are in fact the worst exploited and most wretched of all. Here in England we have had three strikes of Jewish workers within the last twelve months, and then we are expected to carry on anti-Semitism as a fight against capital?

And apart from this, we owe much too much to the Jews. To say nothing of Heine and Börne, Marx was of purest Jewish blood; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best people are Jews. My friend Victor Adler, who is at present paying in prison in Vienna for his devotion to the cause of the proletariat, Eduard Bernstein, editor of the London Sozial-Demokrat, Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag-people of whose friendship I am proud, are all Jews! Have I not been turned into a Jew myself by the Gartenlaube³? And indeed if I had to choose, then rather a Jew than “Herr von…”!⁴

NOTES

1. This fragment from a private letter was published with the consent of Engels and of the person to whom it was addressed, but without mentioning the name of the latter, in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung of May 9, 1890.

2. DRUMONT, EDOUARD (1844-1917). French journalist. In 1886 published an anti-Semitic book, La France juive (Jewish France) which had a certain passing success. His later publications of the same kind awoke no response.

3. Gartenlaube [“The Arbour “] periodical. [Ed. Eng. ed.]

4. Von, German prefix indicating aristocratic birth.

International Publishers was formed in 1923 for the purpose of translating and disseminating international Marxist texts and headed by Alexander Trachtenberg. It quickly outgrew that mission to be the main book publisher, while Workers Library continued to be the pamphlet publisher of the Communist Party.

PDF of later edition of book: https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.227457/2015.227457.Selected-Correspondence.pdf