Antisemitism in the global populist international

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between antisemitism and international politics, specifically the potent role that antisemitism plays in the development and maintenance of the global populist international. After briefly sketching the history of modern transnational antisemitism, I make two principal arguments for why antisemitism should be of more direct concern for the scholarship of International Relations. First, antisemitism serves as a powerful interpretive framework for contemporary far-right populist movements that are challenging the current international order. Second, antisemitism is shaping the formation of new international alliances. The strategic use of antisemitism in far-right populist foreign policy has changed, as evidenced in the increasing decoupling of attitudes towards Israel from antisemitism against diaspora Jews and a rise in pro-Israel policies of far-right antisemitic parties and movements. I conclude by reasserting that International Relations should understand antisemitism as one of the interpretive foundations of the global illiberal resurgence.

Keywords

antisemitism far-right international order international relations populism transnationalism

On 6 January 2021, one of the men storming the US Capitol in an insurrection attempt incited by then US President Donald Trump was pictured wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Camp Auschwitz’. Under this, the words ‘Work Brings Freedom’ were printed, a clumsy translation of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, the slogan hung at the entrance to the Auschwitz death camp complex. Another rioter brandished a flag with a swastika (Adkins and Burack, 2021). A systematic analysis of the US Capitol insurrectionists who identified as Christian nationalists or QAnon cult supporters also showed a very strong tie to antisemitism (Djupe and Dennen, 2021). Across the Atlantic, during the 2020 presidential election in Poland, state television and leading politicians from the ruling Peace and Justice (PiS) party accused the main opposition candidate, then mayor of Warsaw, of being an ‘agent of a powerful foreign lobby’ trying to ‘satisfy Jewish claims’ because of his support for restitution of property stolen from Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust (Inotai and Ciobanu, 2020). And on and on. Across Europe, East and West, in the United States, in Brazil, and everywhere in-between.

Far-right populist leaders, parties, and movements in different countries have different priorities, specific agendas, a diverse set of grievances and resentments (Mexican immigrants, gays and lesbians, Muslim refugees, Eastern European plumbers, big cites, universities, transgender bathrooms, Syrian asylum-seekers, international bankers, feminists, the list is endless). These grievances are not always aligned – the Brexit populists railed against Polish migrant workers in the United Kingdom and against ‘EU bureaucracy’, while Polish populists were obsessed with ‘gender ideology’ and the LGBTQ movement which did not seem to bother the Brexiteers much. But they often end up converging on one dimension – antisemitism. It can be crude as Trump’s Holocaust denying supporters, or the Lithuanian politician who claimed on Holocaust Remembrance Day that ‘Jews shared the blame for the Holocaust’ (Liphshiz, 2021), or it can be expressed in dog-whistles as when Neil Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party as well as Brexit Party, wrote of ‘unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives based on secret recommendations from the big banks’ (Walker, 2020). All these forms, however, lead to the same place – the power, attraction, and use of antisemitism in otherwise diverse populist movements.

While there was a moment in the scholarship of radical right populism that considered antisemitism to be largely removed from its political repertoire, even referring to it as a ‘dead prejudice’ mostly replaced by Islamophobia and anti-Romism (for a review, see Wodak, 2018), this is clearly not the case. Antisemitism is alive and well, even thriving, but it manifests itself in different new mutations that reflect contemporary international realignments, strategies, and desires in the 21st century.

Defining antisemitism is particularly difficult and precarious as the very problems of definition often lie at the core of various antisemitic arguments (Waxman et al., 2021). Is antisemitism a ‘hatred’ of Jews, or of Judaism (or is it, instead, fear), is it the same sentiment from antiquity through the Enlightenment, the long 19th century, the Nazi era until today? Is it ‘eternal’, the longest hatred, or is it fundamentally modern and historically contextualised? How does it relate to anti-Zionism and – most problematically in our contemporary moment – how does it relate to attitudes towards Israel and its policies? It is important for the purposes of this article that the scope of what is being analysed is clear. I use Helen Fein’s classic definition of antisemitism:

a persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collectivity manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore, and imagery, and in actions – social or legal discrimination, political mobilisation against Jews, and collective or state violence – which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews (Fein, 1987: 67, emphasis in original).

The question this article explores is the relationship between antisemitism and contemporary international politics. For reasons of theoretical scope, I focus here only on far-right antisemitism. There is a vibrant (and often very contested) scholarly discussion about the extent to which there exists a distinct antisemitism on the left, which is focussed on its opposition to many of Israel’s policies, especially its occupation of Palestinians. While this strain of antisemitism has led to some very ugly reckoning within major left parties, most recently the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian debate is outside the scope of the immediate interest of my article.

Specifically, I ask in this article, why is antisemitism often the common denominator among far-right populist movements, parties, and leaders? What specific organising, ideological, and cultural purpose does antisemitism serve for these groups? What is its value and what is its purchase? Antisemitism, obviously, is not new and has provided a foundation to many nationalist and populist movements throughout history. The objective of this article is not to reiterate that obvious point. Instead, it is to analyse the changing forms of antisemitism as they relate to our present global populist moment. Contemporary versions of antisemitism have taken on new forms such as the transnational antisemitic obsession with George Soros, which in its focus on allegedly murky and mysterious role of global capital seamlessly ties populist movements that otherwise differ on many other dimensions. It is, therefore, important to analyse antisemitism not only as a local or national phenomenon that rises and recedes in any particular country but as a truly transnational force that underpins a vision of the global populist international order.

It is this feature of antisemitism as a specific form of transnational populist glue that should make it of core interest to the larger field of International Relations (IR). Antisemitism is clearly not the only conspiracy theory and prejudice that pervades far-right populist movements – racism and Islamophobia are just as foundational to these ideologies and provide their own versions of the transnational populist glue. While there is a surge of interest in populism in IR (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019; Heiskanen, 2021; Kinnvall, 2019; Steele and Homolar, 2019; Stengel et al., 2019; this special issue), IR as a discipline, however, has so far stayed largely away from engaging with antisemitism as a direct object of analysis (for rare, recent contributions, see Lockwood, 2021, on antisemitism and the global financial crisis and Barnett, 2020, more broadly on Jews in international society).

My focus on transnational antisemitism, therefore, contributes to the growing scholarship on the relationship between populism and international politics, but also to the broader ongoing discussions about the structure of the international order and the conflict between the international liberal consensus – itself, let us not forget, rooted in racism (Barder, 2021; Búzás, 2021; Vucetic, 2011) – and its global illiberal challenges (Abrahamsen et al., 2020; Adler-Nissen and Zarakol, 2021; De Orellana and Michelsen, 2019; Drolet and Williams, 2018). It illuminates the ways in which antisemitism impacts IR by creating a shared cultural and political worldview that has real and direct international political consequences, such as forging of new strategic partnerships and alliances, and so should be of central interest to IR.

The article proceeds as follows. I first very briefly sketch the patterns of modern transnational antisemitism and outline how they relate to the historical position of the Jews and the ‘Jewish issue’ in international society. I then develop an argument for why we should understand antisemitism as an interpretative epistemic framework and illustrate it with examples of contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, such as the transnational obsession with George Soros. I then discuss ways in which the strategic use of antisemitism in populist foreign policy has changed. Specifically, I identify the biggest point of departure of contemporary far-right antisemitism from its earlier manifestations – the growing decoupling of attitudes towards Israel from antisemitism against diaspora Jews, the pro-Israel policies of otherwise antisemitic populist parties and movements, and their embrace by Israel. For reasons of scope, methodologically, my contribution takes up selected cases and public statements as examples and illustrations of my main theoretical argument and does not represent an exhaustive analysis of all expressions of contemporary far-right antisemitism. Instead, cases of antisemitic discourse in varied far-right populist movements are selected to illustrate the broader phenomenon that motivates the research interest of this article.

Brief outline of modern transnational antisemitism

The repertoire of antisemitic claims against the Jews has varied over time but some charges have remained stubbornly the same – Jews have been accused of murdering Christ, ritualised murder, blood libel, usury, intermarriage. A racialised version of antisemitism – the one taken to its apotheosis in Nazi ideology – constructed Jews as lazy, frail, inferior, decadent, and physically less than able, but also hyper-sexualised and immoral. Antisemites have often viewed Jews as both weak and pathetic but also conspiring, cunning, and all-powerful in their efforts to rule the world (Rensmann and Schoeps, 2010b). As Jonathan Judaken (2018: 1125) has observed, ‘the concept of the Jew shapeshifts’.

While classical antisemitism, particularly before the modern age, was mostly based on religious intolerance and Judaism’s perceived threat to Christianity, and especially the Church, in modern times feelings generated against Jews have been constructed in the political and social arena. Typically, modern antisemitism posits that the Jewish people as such presented a ‘problem’. Starting in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic France, to secure Jewish loyalty to the state, Jews were required to strictly conform to state regulation. To that end, they were also required to relinquish the institutionalised organs of local Jewish self-government and to become a confession alongside the other groups (Barnett, 2020).¹

Emerging modern (mid-19th century) antisemitic constructions of ‘the Jews’, then, objected to the fact that Jews were now to be considered as fully belonging to the state, as citizens. The negative image of Jewry as a composite of supposedly ‘non-native’ or ‘alien’ residents was the new construction that antisemites placed on the Jewish image – and along those lines, the Jews were constructed as ‘aliens within nations’, as ‘cosmopolitan anti-nationalists’ (Wodak, 2018: 65–66).

This conceptualisation of Jews, combined with descriptors such as ‘rootless’ and ‘wandering’ coincided with a series of other complaints about Jews who were said to undermine the desired sense of moral order, of ethnic homogeneity, of public loyalty, of the relationship between the citizen and the ruler, and of national and state identity. ‘Jews’ – as a constructed trope in anti-Jewish discourse in modern Europe – were historically portrayed as a constant source of fear and anxiety for European nations (for an exploration of anxiety as a source of antisemitism, see Judaken, 2015). The apparent mismatch between the simple systems of cultural, national, and racial categorisation and classification that modern antisemites favoured and the inchoate character of ‘the Jews’ underpinned this notion of ‘fear’ of ‘the Jew’. The Jews, therefore, became embodiments of problems and ills of modern society that are not specifically related to the Jews themselves, but to what they represent.

The Jews and international orders

The Jews in modernity, then, became not just threats to individual nation-states, but also to the developing international order that was built on romantic nationalism and organised into a system of distinct emerging nation-states. This transnational order was, fundamentally, a Christian order which ‘needed protection from the Jews’ (Barnett, 2020: 239). Jewish nationalism and self-determination were internally contested in that there were deep divisions among the Jews themselves about whether they should organise and fight for self-rule, some form of independence and, ultimately, a state of their own, or whether they should improve on their diasporic existence, be proudly cosmopolitan and focus on acquiring rights and privileges in their host nations. This tension between the vision of Jewish self-actualisation through nationalist self-determination (what is today, often imprecisely, referred to as Zionism) versus a cosmopolitan life in the diaspora remains to this day.

The content of the antisemitic framework also changed with the times. Since the late 19th century, Jews became increasingly seen as very powerful, what today is referred to as the ‘Jewish lobby’ – and this is mostly because in this period Western Jews began to organise and provide financial aid to much more impoverished and endangered Jews in the East. It is this transnational mobilisation that created a variant of transnational antisemitism that focused not on Jews’ racialised otherness, but instead on their outsized – mostly financial – power (Barnett, 2020). It is in this period – the late 1800s – that the term ‘antisemitism’ first appears in the writing of German intellectuals who warned of the ‘Jewish threat’ but already conceptualised it as transnational, not only a national problem (Feldman, 2018: 1140). The influential antisemitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its rapid transnational diffusion produced a convergence of the already existing theories of Jewish conspiracy and world domination and provided a blueprint for 20th-century antisemitism (DellaPergola, 2020: 13).

IR as a field has engaged very little with the problem of antisemitism directly and the position of the Jews in the international order, more broadly. But attention to antisemitism and the ‘Jewish problem’ reveals that it was central to many foundations of international orders over time. In the Middle Ages, Jews were constructed as the Other in a way that was necessary for the development of Christian identity (in ways sometimes similar and sometimes different from the Othering of Muslims), which underpinned the European medieval international order (Costa Lopez, 2016). The ‘Jewish problem’ in modernity is the problem of the international order not being able to deal with diversity, nor with the transformation of religious communities into a secular international system (Barnett, 2020: 247–248). For Nazis, also, the Jews presented a problem of international order. The Jews were a challenge for Nazi ideology because the Nazi project was aimed at elimination of any and all diversity within the national unit (Barder, 2021). The Jews had no place in this order, but neither did other globalists and transnationalists, such as communists (Beller, 2009: 146).

Antisemitism also helps explain in part the crisis of the international liberal order today. Jews – or more, precisely, the construction of the ‘Jews’ in modern Europe – have historically created a sense of fear and anxiety because they defy easy systems of categorisation and classification, especially as it relates to national identities (Judaken, 2018: 1133–1134). It is this lack of familiar national structure, the inability to fit into the neatly established categories of the nation-state, ethnicity, or race that creates a sense of disorder and ontological insecurity (insecurity over one’s identity), which is one of the critical motivations for contemporary populist movements (Steele and Homolar, 2019). The political purchase of antisemitism for contemporary far-right populist movements is its immediate challenge of the liberal international order and this order’s rhetorical commitments to diversity and cultural pluralism – concepts that have often been constructed as ‘the Jewish problem’ that needed expunging from the national body politic.

Antisemitism as an interpretative framework

As I survey manifestations of antisemitism in contemporary populist movements, I follow Cas Mudde’s widely used definition of populism as an ‘ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups’, pitting ‘the pure people’ against a ‘corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004: 543). Much contemporary research has documented that we live in a moment of significant populist surge – from the successes of Donald Trump and Brexit to consolidation of power of populist parties in Hungary and Poland, strength of populism in Italy, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on. But even countries where populists are not in power have seen a dramatic rise in populist support – in France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Austria, and many other places. Furthermore – and critical for the purposes of my argument – the current moment of populism is fundamentally a transnational phenomenon, and it is its global dimension and global orientation that distinguishes contemporary populism from its earlier, more domestic-facing, iterations (Wajner, this special issue).

There is much evidence that antisemitism is on the rise around the world (Liphshiz, 2020). Survey after survey shows that there is an increase in expressions of antisemitism, most of it – but certainly not all – spreading on social media like wildfire (DellaPergola, 2020). The rise in antisemitism has coincided with the rise and strengthening of far-right populist movements, which have deployed elements of the transnational antisemitic repertoire, most often the idea of Jewish capital control, Jewish globalism, and cosmopolitanism but, increasingly, the threat of Jewish-financed and facilitated international migration flows.

Not all populist movements are imbued with antisemitism, and for those that do they may not utilise antisemitism in quite the same way or to the same degree. The purpose of my analysis here is not to evaluate which populist parties are more and which are less antisemitic – scholars have already done much work on this (e.g. Rensmann and Schoeps, 2010a; Wodak, 2018). Instead, my goal is to unpack the antisemitic worldview and understand what antisemitism offers to far-right populism as its own system of meaning. I understand antisemitism in this context, then, as an interpretive framework, and an epistemic commitment and code through which far-right populists order the world (Hobbs, 2017: 19).

Thinking of antisemitism as an interpretative framework is helpful because antisemitism, of course, is deeply paradoxical and contradictory and even within the parameters of its own conspiratorial framework makes no sense. The antisemite ‘can never lose an argument’ – there is always a way in which ‘the Jewish question provides a template for misrecognizing the world’ (Fine, 2016: 780). Antisemitism needs to be understood, instead, as ‘syncretic’, and as less of a consistent ideology than a narrative repertoire of myths, images, and attitudes, a pool of resources, an ‘ideological syndrome’ (Wodak, 2018: 66), from which various elements are pulled out and repurposed as the contemporary political needs arise. It acts as a ‘discursive resource’ (Waxman et al., 2021: 15). Antisemitism, in this manner, is similar to other conspiracy theories that are attractive to populists (freemasons, Illuminati, anti-vax, covid-19/Bill Gates/5G chip, QAnon, and so on) as it destabilises the epistemic foundation of the ‘elite’ knowledge and elevates the ‘common sense’ of the ‘people’ (Castanho Silva et al., 2017).

As an interpretative framework, antisemitism provides an immediately useful blueprint for far-right populism. It easily separates ‘the pure people’ (the national ethnic majority) from a ‘corrupt elite’ (Jews, with their outsized power, but also their allies and co-conspirators), defines who belongs, who is alien, who is morally righteous, and who is corrupt, and offers a clear and legible script populists can follow. Antisemitism is useful for far-right populism because it is plastic, it is adaptable, but also because it is inherently contradictory and can thus be utilised in seemingly any context, in pursuit of any argument, as there are no wrong answers – Jews are weak and pathetic but they are also super powerful; they are inferior, but they also control the world. It is the perfect baseline for far-right populism because it means everything and nothing and it is about constructing the perfect enemy, the perfect elite, and the perfect antidote to the people, to the volk. Contemporary far-right populist antisemitism, then, often has very little to do with the actual Jews as Jews and more to do with the contemporary construction of what ‘the Jews’ represent in the current international order.

Antisemitism’s enduring power lies in its ability to construct ‘the Jews’ to represent whatever populists reject (communism, or capitalism, or neoliberalism, or multiculturalism, or pluralism, or feminism, or cosmopolitanism). These constructed ‘Jews’ are both real people who are harmed by antisemitism and antisemitic violence but are often also enemies constructed as ‘Jews’ who may or may not be Jews at all. Historically, this process is perhaps most clear in the construction of the concept of Judeo-Bolshevism (Żydokomuna, as it is often referred to after the Polish term) in the run up to the Holocaust (and endured in its aftermath), where Jews were blamed for bolshevism and the Russian revolution, were constructed to all be communists, and communists were constructed to be Jews, and this mutual constitution led to both of their annihilation (Hanebrink, 2018).²

Contemporary antisemitism is often implicit. It manifests itself in a ‘coded’ or ‘latent’ form, which often does not mention Jews directly but engages in dissemination of easily recognisable antisemitic tropes, sometimes referred to as ‘antisemitism without Jews and without antisemites’ (Stögner and Bischof, 2018: 430). Often these tropes involve global market financiers, or ‘greedy speculators conspiring against nations’ without an explicit mention of Jews (so that a charge of antisemitism can be easily refuted), while still trafficking in tropes and stereotypes that the public will immediately recognise and interpret.

In Austria, this was the frequent tactic used by far-right media, who would often refer to ‘high finance, locusts, financial sharks, Wall Street, or the American East Coast’ to convey an antisemitic message (Stögner and Bischof, 2018: 433). These populist resentments against ‘the elites’ or ‘the banks’ then become imbued with antisemitism through specific codes and stereotypes used in far-right populist communication. At the same time, contemporary far-right populists often use the strategy of ‘calculated ambivalence’ (Engel and Wodak, 2012), a form of discursive plausible deniability, when dual messages are being conveyed within the same statement, and addressed to different audiences. As Ruth Wodak analysed extensively, far-right actors often use caricatures, cartoons, or sarcasm to convey antisemitic messages, only to immediately reject accusations of antisemitism by arguing that the genre of communication was humour; ‘it was all just a joke’. This strategy helps explain how far-right populists communicate coded or hidden antisemitic messages and simultaneously deny their antisemitism (Wodak, 2015).

More fundamentally, contemporary far-right populism easily incorporates antisemitism because populism is built around a sense of collective insecurity faced by ‘the people’ and a threat that various others (and those others can easily be represented as ‘Jews’) present to group cohesion, identity, and a sense of self. Populists then mobilise public support by offering a sense of ‘societal security’, a promise that they, and only they, can secure ‘the people’s’ sense of identity, which is under threat by outsiders, and by an ever expanding field of danger, be it migration, or LGBT rights, or Islam (Kurylo, 2020; also Steele and Homolar, 2019).

Antisemitism in contemporary far-right populism, further, is often directly related to a sense of cultural identity and identity politics – it has become a marker of political identity, a shorthand for a particular set of political views that transcend just attitudes towards Jews. For example, as separate studies of Hungary have shown (Kovács, 2011; Kovács and Szilágyi, 2013), far-right populist movements use antisemitism as a form of cultural code, a communicative function through which not just (or not even primarily) the Jews, but also a much broader cultural context that the Jews have come to represent, is rejected. This context includes economic and cultural globalisation, specifically the

conflict between cosmopolitan and national interests, the consequences of joining the process of international integration as the loss of national sovereignty, and the social consequences of the economic and political transition as the result of being at the mercy of colonial masters (Kovács, 2011: 258).

The Jews, then, came to be represented as symbols of this national destruction and as demarcation of what is ‘national’ from what is ‘anti-national’ (Kovács, 2011: 260).

Antisemitism in contemporary far-right populist movements, then, is best understood as a frame and a meaning through which populists imagine a desirable, new international cultural order. This involves recasting the political stakes into a global conflict over radically different visions of the role of the nation-state, sovereignty, and pluralism in the 21st century. Describing a particular populism of the radical right, Drolet and Williams document how this movement’s narrative of doom involves ‘an essentialist interpretation of culture as being either “lost” or “under threat” (. . .) and the eradication of another “incompatible” or “hostile” culture from a given territory is imperative for the survival of one’s own’ (Drolet and Williams, 2018: 306).

The antisemitic framework with its ready-made concepts of incompatibility, hostility, and threats presented by anational Jews or their national agents provides this narrative with readily legible script, with clearly identifiable enemies and allies. It provides a response to the dislocations of economic and cultural globalisation by presenting them as a result of a conspiracy between globalist unaccountable elites and immigrants and other cultural minorities they support, guide, and finance (Filc, 2020: 52). This framework also lends itself easily to transnational mobilisation and diffusion (Miller-Idriss, 2019), as many of the far-right populist movements attracted to antisemitism often build on very similar ‘narrative themes and rhetorical conventions’ across different national contexts (Hogan and Haltinner, 2015: 534). The populist goal here has transcended the national and has become explicitly transnational. As Viktor Orbán declared, ‘The battlefield is in Brussels. At home, we’ve done what we could’ (quoted in Kalmar, 2018: 418).

Transnational antisemitism, then, is legible across borders and across national populist movements (Miller-Idriss, 2019: 28–29). It is vital to the construction and maintenance of a counter-cosmopolitan transnational mobilisation (Rensmann and Schoeps, 2010b: 47). Exploring some of the themes of contemporary far-right antisemitic populism through the case of anti-Soros mythology helps bring to focus some of the contemporary unifying threads of this antisemitic zeitgeist.

George Soros and the antisemitic mind

It appears remarkable that so much of the contemporary visible, high-profile, international antisemitism has focussed on one man, George Soros. A Hungarian born Jew, Holocaust survivor, Soros acquired considerable wealth in the United States as a hedge fund manager, wealth that he has spent the last 40 years investing in liberal and progressive causes around the world. Inspired primarily by Karl Popper’s vision of an ‘open society’, Soros was especially attracted to the idea of multiculturalism, free press, and human rights, and it is on this basis that his network of Open Society foundations was established across East and Central Europe after the fall of communism. He has also maintained a considerable interest in progressive causes in the United States and has been a significant donor to the Democratic Party (Vogel et al., 2018).

One genealogy of the anti-Soros conspiracy myth traces its first full elaboration to the writings of the American neo-Nazi Lyndon LaRouche in 1996 (Kalmar et al., 2018). However, antisemitic insinuations against Soros and his organisations swirled widely in Eastern Europe even earlier, as Open Society institutions began work in Hungary in 1984, to significant regime opposition and resentment. The global vitriol against Soros culminated in an attempt on his life in a pipe-bomb mail attack in 2018 by a supporter of Donald Trump.

What makes anti-Soros conspiracies useful for analysis of the contemporary antisemitic zeitgeist is their truly global character. Turkish president accused Soros of working to destroy and divide nations, Malaysian government of creating the Asian financial crisis, Macedonian ruling party of creating a national government impasse, Israeli prime minister of consorting with Iran against Israel, Romanian politician of bringing ‘financial evil’ to the country, Slovakian prime minister of financing anti-government protests, Hungarian prime minister of flooding the country with migrants, Trump of paying Central American refugees to seek asylum in the United States, Fox News of hijacking American democracy, and on and on (Kalmar et al., 2018; Tamkin, 2020b). Soros is an enemy of populist leaders everywhere, and they ascribe to him whatever national problems they find most acute.

What makes the obsession with Soros unique to our time is the simultaneous expression of classic antisemitic tropes and the bizarre sub-conspiracy that Soros, a child Holocaust survivor, was also a Nazi collaborator. The inanity and offensiveness of this conspiracy notwithstanding, it is widely shared on the populist far-right, especially in the United States (Coaston, 2018). It is relevant to the extent that it combines the enduring repertoire of antisemitism with the post–World War II (WWII) delegitimation of Nazism, and somehow puts it all together. Even today’s antisemites know that calling someone a Nazi is the ultimate discreditation, and so they are constructing a framework where their antisemitism is being shielded by the easiest mark of all – the universal hatred of Nazis.

This convoluted image of George Soros as not really a Jew, but instead the real Nazi is shared across the antisemitic populist International – it is the same idea that the Hungarian commissioner of culture was referring to when he lamented that populist and anti-multicultural Poland and Hungary today were Europe’s ‘new Jews’, while he called Soros ‘a liberal Fuhrer’, responsible for the ‘poisonous gas’ of ‘multiculturalism and open society, which is deadly to the European way of life’ (Radio Free Europe, 2020). The minister later retracted this comment, as Wodak’s concept of ‘calculated ambivalence’ would predict. It is the same theme expressed by Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor turned Trump close confidant, who said of Soros, ‘he is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is’ (Stracqualursi, 2019). Soros, for Giuliani, is dangerous as he is intent on destroying the US government ‘because of his sick background’ (Sokol, 2020) – presumably, his ‘Nazi collaboration’.

The unifying thread of many of these anti-Soros conspiracies is the charge that he is interfering to cause national disturbance and disorder. This element of the antisemitic repertoire has a long history. During the civil rights era in the United States, for example, Jews were accused of (and some paid with their lives for) organising and mobilising African American social movements, as American racists did not view black Americans as capable of organising themselves (Webb, 2011). Contemporary far-right populist antisemitism sees Jews (personified in George Soros) as organising and mobilising international refugee and migration flows – from Syria and the Middle East, or from Central and Latin America. The idea here is the same – non-white minorities are incapable of their own emancipation, and it is instead the Jews who are pulling the strings from behind the scenes, in their own effort to destroy the national culture and way of life.

This particular dynamic – the threat of powerful globalist elites and the domestic undesirables they allegedly support and manage – has been clearly evident in the United States, where Donald Trump’s populism has frequently employed antisemitism as a framework in its anti-immigration and anti-refugee projects. It is Trump and his populist Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement that have used the existing antisemitic frames to portray their various enemies – mostly the Democratic Party, but also social movements such as Black Lives Matter – as being in the pocket of Jews and influenced by global Jewish capital (Reuters, 2020; Tamkin, 2020a).

Most directly, MAGA populism has endangered American Jewish lives – there were more physical antisemitic attacks in the United States in 2019 than ever since the tracking in the United States began (Anti-Defamation League, 2020). Most tragically, in 2018 a Trump supporter influenced by Trump’s populist anti-immigration message, murdered 11 American Jews during service at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh – the deadliest antisemitic pogrom in the history of the United States. Significantly, the killer disclosed in his various online posts that he was going after the Jews because they were committing ‘genocide’ against his (white) people. He specifically singled out George Soros for ‘secretly controlling’ a caravan of Honduran refugees (Burton, 2018), as well as Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (Tamkin, 2020a), which before helping Hispanic immigrants come to the United States helped resettle thousands of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Jews, in this case, were to blame for the principal MAGA populist concern – the out-of-control immigration and ‘white genocide’.

While the attention is so often on Soros, he is but a today’s version of the antisemitic target onto whom the nation’s ills are projected. Before Soros there was Rothschild, and before Rothschild there was Dreyfus. This is how transnational antisemitism operates – it fixates on Jews as agents of disturbance of the nation, as leading, designing or financing protest and dissent, all with the purpose of destroying a particular international order that populists want to preserve.

New alliances: The rise of pro-Israel antisemitism

So far, I have outlined the main features of contemporary far-right populist antisemitism and demonstrated the many ways in which it shares continuities with its earlier manifestations. Along so many dimensions, antisemitism of today is similar to antisemitism of yesterday. However, amid all the continuities, there is a striking new feature of many of today’s populist parties which have carved out a political space in which, simultaneously, they engage in and deploy antisemitism as a framework and a worldview, while also performatively and declaratively positioning themselves as staunchly pro-Israel. It is this new, pro-Israel antisemitism that deserves much more theoretical attention than it has so far received. This dimension of today’s populism also points to the continuing importance of antisemitism for global politics and foreign policy. Understanding the phenomenon of pro-Israel antisemitism also helps us understand other issues of core concern to IR – such as formation of new alliances in a changing international order.

To the extent that pro-Israel overtures of explicitly antisemitic far-right populist leaders (Orbán, Bolsanaro, Trump) have received any sustained scholarly attention, they have been understood as a form of philosemitism, often defined as a particular love of, or interest in the Jews. A comprehensive recent report on this phenomenon identified ‘emerging cooperation and changing attitudes of the populist radical right towards Jews as a new wave of Philosemitism’ (Rose, 2020: i), a new strategy that far-right populist parties and leaders use to reposition themselves more towards the acceptable political mainstream. In this narrative recasting, the emphasis is no longer on the Jews as being an enemy of the volk. Instead, the Jews are seen as inherently anti-Muslim (as they perceive Muslims as a threat) and therefore aligned with the populists’ other contemporary agenda – Islamophobic anti-immigration, while Israel is hailed as a ‘European frontier against the Arab world’ (Rose, 2020: i). In the words of Filip Dewinter, leader of the Belgium far-right party Vlaams Belang, ‘Israel is a sort of outpost for our Western society, an outpost of democracy, of freedom of speech, of protecting common values within a hostile environment’ (quoted in Kahmann, 2017: 405). For Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, Israel is ‘the West’s first line of defense’ against Islam. For the far-right English Defense League, ‘Israel is on the front line of Islamic extremism and jihad’ (Rose, 2020: 7). This new populist international order, then, imagines Jews as part of a constructed ‘Judeo-Christian’ world, which only defining factor is elimination of Islam. This order does not welcome Jews for being Jews but for providing a barrier to Muslims.

Interpreting this new populist strategy as an example of ‘philosemitism’, however, misses its key motivations, ones that, in fact, are deeply rooted in antisemitic thought. For one, it is quite clear that much of this new pro-Israel strategy is firmly based on the antisemitic concept of ‘powerful Jews’, whose support is courted for a particular political goal (e.g. fight against Islam). For example, far-right populist Sweden Democrats explicitly admitted, ‘pressure from Israel can help us in the long term . . . Legitimize our parties in Europe!’ (Kahmann, 2017: 403). Or, as Dewinter said:

It’s very important to me as leader of a right-wing national party to say that we respect the State of Israel and the Jews. To all of those who regard us as neo-Nazis, we say: ‘No, we want good relations with the Jews’ (quoted in Kahmann, 2017: 405).

Examples of this new embrace of the Jews from otherwise antisemitic leaders abound across the populist spectrum. Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, which traces its roots directly to Austrian Nazis and who himself was once arrested in a march modelled after Hitler Youth (Times of Israel, 2017), said, ‘if the Jews accept us, then we won’t have any problems’ (quoted in Rose, 2020: 17). Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right National Front with deep antisemitic roots, declared to French Jews that the Front was ‘the best shield to protect you’ – the same Marine Le Pen whose two closest associates are Nazi sympathisers who hosted concentration camp-themed ‘striped-pajama’ parties (Colborne, 2017; Nossiter, 2017), and the same Le Pen who continues to deny French involvement in the Holocaust (Taub, 2017). Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch far-right Forum for Democracy has appeared publicly wearing a Jewish yarmulke, while another representative of this party in the Dutch Senate routinely makes the crudest of antisemitic ‘jokes’ on Twitter (of the Mein Kampf and Sieg Heil variety) only to respond by stating her support of Israel (Barr, 2020; Rose, 2020: 33).

Significantly, however, this relationship between populist parties and Israel has become reciprocal, where the Israeli far-right welcomes these overtures and recognises these parties as partners in the international fight against Islam and its perceived threats to Israel’s existence and way of life. For example, in 2010, representatives of four far-right European parties – all with significant and sustained antisemitic legacy – Vlaams Belang, Sweden Democrats, Austrian Freedom Party, and German Freedom Party (since disbanded) signed a ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ with their Israeli counterparts, which referred to fundamentalist Islam as a global and existential threat, and defined signatory parties as ‘defenders of democracy and human rights, fighting at the forefront of the battle for Western democratic values’ (cited in Kahmann, 2017: 403).

Furthermore, Israeli government has openly embraced these populist antisemitic movements, as long as they claim to be pro-Israel. In addition to already mentioned ties with various far-right leaders, Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been particularly friendly with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (Pardo and Gordon, 2018: 402). Netanyahu’s embrace of Orbán – he called him a ‘true friend of Israel’ (Ben Zion, 2018) may seem especially remarkable considering Orbán’s history of antisemitic statements, most notoriously his classically antisemitic tirade in 2018, ‘They are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs’ (Colborne, 2018).

Not only did Netanyahu have no problem with Orbán’s antisemitism, but he in fact joined him in denouncing the pernicious influence of George Soros. This is because, in Netanyahu’s vision of Israel, Soros’s embrace of universalism and multiculturalism embodied in the Jewish diaspora is itself a vision to be rejected as it clashes with Netanyahu’s vision which is one of strengthening the state of Israel as the nation-state of all Jews (Times of Israel, 2019), the only legitimate state that Jews should call home. It is the vision that all but eliminates Jewish emancipation in the diaspora, and one that echoes old splits between the Zionist and the diasporic vision of Jewish life (Zonszein, 2017).

Netanyahu’s position should also be understood strategically – his short-term goal was expanding the alliance of pro-Israel governments in the European Union, where criticisms of Israel have often been strong regarding both Israel’s occupation of Palestinians and its hostility with Iran. Israel has not only courted populist parties and leaders, even those with explicit antisemitic narratives (Barnett, 2018), but has worked closely with Eurosceptic parties on the European populist right to change various EU resolutions and documents in its favour, further undermining the democratic process and legitimacy of EU institutions (Pardo and Gordon, 2018). And from the perspective of far-right populist parties, this expansion of transnational linkages with like-minded parties and leaders, such as Netanyahu, increasingly functions as a way to secure both internal and external political validation and legitimacy (Wajner, this special issue).

But from a broader perspective of contemporary populist movements, the reason why many of them have no problem with Israel, beyond the crude support of Israel’s far-right Islamophobia, is that they see it, in many ways, as similar to their own national ideal. Israel, as a nation-state, is institutionalising an exclusionary view of who does (Jewish ethnic majority) and does not (non-Jewish Arab minority) belong as an equal citizen. Israel of the Netanyahu government, of the exclusionary 2018 Nation-State Law,³ which established Israel as only the state of the Jews – is a natural friend to contemporary far-right populists. Furthermore, contemporary populists may have found particular affinity with Netanyahu himself, who presented himself as a populist leader in the classic tradition of Juan Perón or Getúlio Vargas, positioning himself as both the father and caretaker of the nation and its interests.⁴

But this affinity does not make far-right populists philosemitic; it makes them shield their antisemitism in the embrace of the Israeli flag. This populist pivot towards Israel, therefore, should be understood as both antisemitism-washing and an ideological attraction to its far-right government and its far-right, exclusionary policies. When Israeli far-right politicians advocate for ‘return of immigrants’ to where they came from, they speak the language of far-right nativists and populists everywhere (Abrahamsen et al., 2020: 102).

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to position antisemitism as a direct object of study in IR. I made two arguments to that end. First, I demonstrated ways in which antisemitism served as a powerful interpretive framework for far-right populist movements that are challenging the current international liberal order. Second, I showed how antisemitism was instrumental in shaping foreign policy strategies of countries and producing new international alliances.

These insights are important for the broader IR scholarship because they offer a way of understanding contemporary far-right antisemitism – its malleability, its repertoire, its historicity – as a way of understanding our current moment of transnational populism, a political issue of core interest to IR. They also help us understand that the ways in which international normative and cultural orders are constructed have impact on our understanding of international recognition, legitimacy, and international hierarchies more broadly. The contribution of this article is not only in understanding antisemitism per se, but in exploring what antisemitism tells us about international orders – how they are constructed, maintained, and contested.

Finally, while the scope of this article was limited to antisemitism on the populist far-right, it is important to acknowledge not only the very real existence of antisemitism on the populist far-left – most recently hotly debated within the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, but also in other leftist populist movements such as Chavismo in Venezuela or Podemos in Spain. Limiting the scope of analysis to the populist far-right should not marginalise antisemitism on the populist far-left. Instead, it should serve as an opportunity to think through some similarities and differences that distinguish the expression of antisemitism across the ideological spectrum.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants in the special issue workshop on the study of populism in International Relations, held in March 2020, especially the special issue editor Georg Löfflmann, as well as Hakki Tas and Daniel Wajner for extensive comments and suggestions on the early draft of this article. I am also very grateful to Eugene Finkel and Eli Lederhendler who have commented on earlier and different versions of this material, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers at the BJPIR.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jelena Subotic

Notes

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