When Heinrich Heine addressed what conversion from Judaism to Christianity meant, he declared baptism to be “the entrance ticket to European culture.” The poet was never at ease about his own baptism in 1825 and, oddly, suggested that there was something political, actually conservative, about what he did. As if chastising himself, he wrote a poem, “To an Apostate,” which brands Eduard Gans as a “scoundrel.” This Hegelian legal philosopher, who had played an important role in the development of Jewish historical studies, had also become a Christian. Heine misrhymed scoundrel – Schurke in the German – with “Burke,” as in Edmund, the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a bible of modern conservatism.

Heine was no conservative but he was deft at wordplay; it often allowed him to evoke with subtle jibe and even to mock himself while he mocked others. Had he been reading Burke with Jews in mind, though, he would have found in the Reflections of 1790 comments that resemble those made half a century later by a friend of his. Karl Marx, in his essay “On the Jewish Question” (1843), identified Judaism with huckstering and capitalism and called for its transcendence. Jews, power, money – these words, or equivalents, repeated together like notes in a musical motif that aim to provoke this or that allusion in a listener's mind, constitute a constant feature in anti-Jewish discourse. Burke was as frank as Marx. He worried that a future generation of aristocrats might “resemble … money-jobbers, usurers and Jews.” He worried about revolutions captured by “Jew-brokers contending with each other [as to] who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.”

I start with this intellectual history in order to make an assertion and ask some questions.

The assertion: anti-Jewish notions and language are promiscuous. They mate with different viewpoints, both within and outside the left. The questions: Is anti-Zionism becoming the entrance ticket to the left? Is there a Zionist problem within the left? Or rather within parts of it, that reiterate, perhaps consciously but perhaps not, older tropes of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in contemporary discourse and then rush to immunize themselves from criticism by saying, “I am not antisemitic, I am anti-Zionist”?