"Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews.
In other countries, too, 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. Hatred towards the Jews persists only in
those countries where slavery to the landowners and capitalists has
created abysmal ignorance among the workers and peasants. Only the most
ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that
are spread about the Jews. This is a survival of ancient feudal times,
when the priests burned heretics at the stake, when the peasants lived
in slavery, and when the people were crushed and inarticulate. This
ancient, feudal ignorance is passing away; the eyes of the people are
being opened.
It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the
working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all
countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the
majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital;
they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews
there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among
the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to
sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different
nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by
the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers.
Shame
on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on
those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards
other nations.
Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital."
Included in Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 252-253:
Joseph Stalin — Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States
In answer to your inquiry :
National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
J. Stalin
January 12, 1931
First published in the newspaper Pravda, No. 329, November 30, 1936.
