The Second International and the "Jewish Question"

Internationalism, Zionism, and Antisemitism

Between its founding in 1889 and its collapse during the First World War, the Second International positioned itself as the chief institutional expression of international socialism. It aspired to offer a universal theory of emancipation grounded in class struggle, historical materialism, and proletarian internationalism. Yet on the question of Jewish repression and political representation, socialists had no ready-made answers. The International remained formally opposed to antisemitism and consistently hostile to Zionism. At the same time, it failed to develop a coherent theory of Jewish workers as a collective subject. The result was a persistent contradiction. Jewish oppression was acknowledged, but Jewish political distinctiveness was denied. This tension was never resolved and exposed a structural weakness in socialist internationalism at the turn of the twentieth century, allowing former communists to fall for the antisemitic politics of interwar Europe. Not only did antisemitism persist, but Jews, both as a result of the antisemitism and the lack of clear analysis, turned away from socialism and towards Zionism, particularly in the mid twentieth century, as it seemed to resolve the contradiction, albeit in a truncated way. The trend was already established long before the Holocaust, but it is important to understand today for a true socialist approach to the Jewish question and the state of Israel today.