Overview

In Socialism of Fools, Michele Battini focuses on the critical moment during the Enlightenment in which anti-Jewish stereotypes morphed into a sophisticated, modern social anti-Semitism. He recovers the potent anti-Jewish, anticapitalist propaganda that cemented the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in the European mind and connects it to the atrocities that characterized the Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, counter-Enlightenment intellectuals and intransigent Catholic writers singled out Jews for conspiring to exploit self-sustaining markets and the liberal state. These ideas spread among socialist and labor movements in the nineteenth century and intensified during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Anti-Jewish anticapitalism then migrated to the Habsburg Empire with the Christian Social Party; to Germany with the Anti-Semitic Leagues; to France with the nationalist movements; and to Italy, where Revolutionary Syndicalists made anti-Jewish anticapitalism the basis of an alliance with the nationalists. Exemplified best in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous document that ""leaked"" Jewish plans to conquer the world, the Jewish-conspiracy myth inverts reality and creates a perverse relationship to historical and judicial truth. Isolating the intellectual roots of this phenomenon and its contemporary resonances, Battini shows us why, so many decades after the Holocaust, Jewish people continue to be a powerful political target.

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Reviews

Written with passionate language and a careful reconstruction of ideas and historical documents, this is an extraordinarily interesting and original book that will appeal to historians, political theorists, and scholars of cultural studies, religion, and Jewish studies. Battini engages with the vast primary and secondary literature with such mastery that he leaves the reader feeling well and truly informed. -- Nadia Urbinati, Ph.D., Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies, Columbia University Socialism of Fools is an erudite and important book on the nature of modern antisemitism as seen through the words, thoughts and ideas of antisemites themselves. Thoughtful, insightful, enlightened and based on huge scholarship, Battini's voice is much needed in the context of current debates on the history of antisemitism. -- Robert Fine, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick

Written with passionate language and a careful reconstruction of ideas and historical documents, this is an extraordinarily interesting and original book that will appeal to historians, political theorists, and scholars of cultural studies, religion, and Jewish studies. Battini engages with the vast primary and secondary literature with such mastery that he leaves the reader feeling well and truly informed. -- Nadia Urbinati, Ph.D., Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies, Columbia University Socialism of Fools is an erudite and important book on the nature of modern antisemitism as seen through the words, thoughts and ideas of antisemites themselves. Thoughtful, insightful, enlightened and based on huge scholarship, Battini's voice is much needed in the context of current debates on the history of antisemitism. -- Robert Fine, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick Conceptually and historically acute, this outstanding study powerfully illuminates the modernization of anti-Jewish impulses, especially their anti-capitalist emphases, during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Offering learned readings of a wide array of sources in the aftermath of Jewish Emancipation, Socialism of Fools persuasively emplaces the era's anti-Semitic ideas and movements within the larger context of Europe's economic, social, and political transformations and offers a provocative coda about current conundrums. -- Ira I. Katznelson, author of Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press).

Author Information

Michele Battini is professor of modern history and the history of politics at the University of Pisa, and 2015 visiting professor at Columbia University of New York and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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