60. Antisemitism and the Proletariat.
One of the worst forms of national enmity is antisemitism, that is to say, racial hostility towards the Jews, who belong to the Semitic stock (of which the Arabs form another great branch). The tsarist autocracy raised the hunt against the Jews in the hope of averting the workers’ and peasants’ revolution. “You are poor because the Jews fleece you,” said the members of the Black Hundreds; and they endeavoured to direct the discontent of the oppressed workers and peasants away from the landlords and the bourgeoisie, and to turn it against the whole Jewish nation. Among the Jews, as among other nationalities, there are different classes. It is only the bourgeois strata of the Jewish race which exploit the people, and these bourgeois strata plunder in common with the capitalists of other nationalities. In the outlying regions of tsarist Russia, where the Jews were allowed to reside, the Jewish workers and artisans lived in terrible poverty and degradation, so that their condition was even worse than that of the ordinary workers in other parts of Russia.
The Russian bourgeoisie raised the hunt against the Jews, not only in the hope of diverting the