1. Metrics of Moderation?

So, what brings some of today’s global Far Right to pro-Jewish statements in the first place? Publicly defending Jews may offer an elusive element of moral self-licensing by people who themselves are known for racist and even antisemitic speech. More tangible motivations, however, are plain to see; far-right proclamation of identification with Jews has a mainstreaming and normalization potential, normalizing not only their leaders, organizations, and parties, but also their radical agenda. In the 20th century, racial antisemitism has become the most visible marker of the quintessential far-right Fascist movement—Nazism—and therefore shorthand for whether ideas are just rightwing or well beyond the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. The underlying logic is that if antisemitism is an index of illiberalism, then anti-antisemitic proclamation even by the Far Right could be seen as metrics of moderation.

To be sure: supporters and leaders of the Far Right could occasionally deradicalize, and this may indeed take the shape of standing up against antisemitism. We should not ignore that. Yet, there is a historical context to it, which one should not naively overlook: The Far Right has been open enough about its strategic efforts of self-legitimation. A prime example is offered by the National Front (rebranded as National Rally), whose policy of “De-Demonization” (Dédiabolisation) under Marine Le Pen, banished the openly antisemitic, pro-Vichy supporters, and in return yielded historic electoral breakthroughs, while clinging to its core anti-immigration platform.

As Bardella’s above statement reveals, though, self-legitimation quickly expanded to a delegitimization of one’s political opponents—be they left-wing or Muslim immigrants—as the source of antisemitism. Similarly, as of late 2023, some MAGA leaders have positioned themselves as defenders of the Jews in fierce questionings of university presidents over antisemitism on campus.

There are other tangible motivations to glean from recent far-right gestures on behalf of Jews. From the earliest days of his career, Steve Bannon presented himself as upholding “Judeo-Christian values,” an adjective which has inclusive and exclusive functions at different points in time. “Judaeo-Christianity, for him,” wrote a commentator, “is a rallying cry against Islam. … It is not doctrine or practice.”Footnote ³ The German anti-Muslim PEGIDA (founded 2014), though rife with antisemitism, also made vocal pro-Israel stands, waving Israeli flags in its demonstrations, and courted Jewish sympathizers.Footnote ⁴ This, then, should be seen as recruitment of Jews as symbolic allies against other outgroups.

Christian Nationalists present another motivation altogether: a theological-Millenarian one. The American Evangelical CUFI (Christians United for Israel), the largest pro-Israel advocacy organization in the United States has long supported the Israeli political right (e.g., West Bank settlements, and right-wing advocacy organizations). They represent a Millenarian motivation, viewing the state of Israel theologically as fulfillment of the prophecy, and as a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—who in 2018 still blamed wildfires on secret “Jewish Space Lasers”—wrote in her 2023 memoir that she has “donated to the Temple Institute in Israel, a fund that helps rebuild the Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Israel.”Footnote ⁵ The tension between her two statements, less than five years apart, is intriguing.

The functions and motivations of 21^st-century far-right “Pro-Jewish” gestures, then, are manifold. In addition to self-legitimation and Millenarian motivation, far-right “philosemitism” is used by some to strike a blow on their political opponents: (1) to deepen fissures on the Left regarding Israel, antisemitism, and Jews, (2) to generate a chilling effect on some left-wing activism, and (3) to provide a righteous angle for the Anti-Immigration, Anti-Arab, or Islamophobic agenda, by presenting those outgroups as the main source of contemporary antisemitism.

Gerard Daniel Cohen’s recent study of European philosemitism of the past eighty years offers us a much-needed historical depth. His sophisticated book presents multiple post-Holocaust philosemitic discourses, which evolved over time and were manifested across Europe’s political ideological spectrum. While his book deals mainly with antifascist, leftwing, or center-right philosemitism, it also addressed reactionary and far-right participants in the philosemitic discourse, especially since the 1980s, in the so-called Third Wave of the Far Right. The above-mentioned “De-Demonization” of the French National Front began by distancing the party already in the 1980s from open antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The Italian Far Right exhibited similar moves shortly thereafter. A bit later, the Austrian Jörg Haider of the FPÖ came close to the gestures of 21^st-century Far Right, when he stated his fear for our “Jewish friends,” who are ostensibly threatened by “the high degree of Muslim presence” in Austria. These early gestures became ever more frequent and almost self-evident in the early 2000s. The Dutch Geert Wilders of the PVV (established 2006) has been a supporter of Israel (and especially of the Israeli Right) throughout his career, viewing it as a bastion of a Judeo-Christian West in its struggle with an Islamic world. The Far Right in East Central Europe, and especially in Hungary, viewed Israel as a model of an ethnic democracy (akin to Orban’s “Illiberal Democracy” prototype).Footnote ⁶

It has been over forty years, then, that European far-right actors made “Jew-friendly” gestures, which eventually granted them greater respectability. That respectability, in turn, had to do with the prevalence of the philosemitic discourse in post-Holocaust Europe, across the political spectrum. Cohen concluded his timely book with a warning, that this far-right appropriation of the philosemitic discourse, and its occasionally McCarthyist praxis, may generate a backlash, “a vengeful ‘anti-philosemitism’ [which may] function as the antisemitism of the 21st century.”Footnote ⁷

This decades-long participation of elements of the European Far Right in philosemitic discourse, obviously, does not mean that the Far Right as a whole became philosemitic. Far from it. It does, however, indicate a far-right ambivalence about Jews, which seemed previously out of the question. It strikes me as indicative of the great impact of the Holocaust on European political culture over those years. Whereas in the past, open antisemitism effectively mobilized support to far-right political movements, in the long wake of the Holocaust, it has deterred potential supporters. The reactionary participation in the philosemitic discourse indicates also the new “threats” targeted by the Far Right (Immigrants, particularly from the Muslim world). Hence, the role previously played by open antisemitism may no longer be necessary.

2. Questioning philosemitism

However we choose to chart the long history of what we have now come to call the Far Right, antisemitism has been a pillar of it. There was a distinct antisemitic dimension already in Justus Möser’s late 18^th-century critique of the market, and in Joseph de Maistre’s reactionary rejection of Enlightenment ideals. Standard works of intellectual history have long analyzed the link between the rise of political antisemitism and the emergence of proto-Fascism in continental Europe of the late 19th century.Footnote ⁸ A few generations later, in the 1920s–1940s, most Fascist movements grew even more antisemitic than their predecessors, with racialist, anticapitalist, or antisocialist reasons. In the United States, antisemitism became a key aspect of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Across countries and generations, then, the ostensible otherness of Jews proved useful in communicating far-right critiques of Liberal democracy and other purported modern ills. While its centrality waned after the Holocaust, far-right antisemitism persisted. Antisemitism remained—to apply Shulamit Volkov’s term—a persistent “cultural code” also in the postwar Far Right, be it in Poujadism, in the John Birch Society (Revilo P. Oliver, being a prime example), or in the early Front National. All this is not to deny that antisemitism existed (and exists) across the political spectrum, Center and Left, included. The point, rather, is to highlight the utility of antisemitism for far-right critique, and the degree to which it has become a self-evident rhetoric to articulate myriad far-right grievances.Footnote ⁹

There is a historical context, a recurring thought pattern, and an inner logic to this anti-Jewish legacy. When far-right critique focused on (Christian) religious traditions, as it often did, it found in Jews more than a religious Other. Jews—by virtue of Christianity’s roots within Judaism—needed to be superseded, replaced. Jews, in this thought pattern, embody a certain immorality that needed to be abolished.Footnote ¹⁰ When far-right critique focused on peoplehood and citizenship, it found in Jewish emancipation (i.e., citizenship in a non-Jewish state) an intolerable assault on national identity and sovereignty. Familiar late 19^th-century examples, which articulate this narrative argument, include Wilhelm Marr’s Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (1879) and Édouard Drumont’s La France juive (1886). Also, when far-right critique took an anticapitalist turn, Jews emerged as a singular target, unlike all other outgroups. For historical reasons, in the Christian West “the image of commerce was closely connected to that of the Jew, who was regarded as avaricious, and as an outsider and wanderer, able to engage in so reviled an activity as moneylending because he was beyond the community of shared faith.”Footnote ¹¹ And so, while the animosity was targeted against the Jews, the underlying motivation of far-right antisemitism was to reform the respective national ingroup by “de-Judaizing” it.

Does this antisemitic legacy mean, then, that the Far Right could never include philosemites? Not necessarily. This, of course, depends on our definition of these dialectically linked concepts—antisemitism and philosemitism. Those definitions, in turn, are always dynamic, polemic, and contested. Contemporaries may be surprised to realize, for example, that the term antisemitism was created as an ostensibly dignified self-designation, while philosemitism began as a term of derision, attributed to political adversaries. Nowadays, antisemitism is often taken for granted and imagined as an almost ahistorical continuum (“The Longest Hatred”). Philosemitism, conversely, is regularly suspected to be a bogus term. In both academic and public discourse, it is frequently assumed to be nothing but an apologetical bad faith posture. In his overview of the scholarship, Maurice Samuels noted that for most scholars, “antisemitism and philosemitism are not opposites, but rather partake of a similar process of generalization and stereotyping.” Indeed, philosemitism and antisemitism are understood by some as two types of “Allosemitism,” that is, two types of viewing Jews as fundamentally distinct from the rest.Footnote ¹²

The paradigm of skepticism, however, leads to a scholarly dead-end in the study of philosemitism (and arguably to a political dead-end when combating the Far Right). Following recent scholars, I too, believe that “our aim should not be to expose ‘false’ or self-interested philosemites, or to identify ‘true’ ones, but rather to comprehend the significance and function of positive perceptions of Jews and Judaism within their broader intellectual frameworks.”Footnote ¹³

3. Three unlikely case studies from the German Empire

Far-right ambivalent identification with Jews or participation in philosemitic discourses is not a post-Holocaust affair. Its history goes further back. Many 19^th-century far-right thinkers can be characterized as ambivalent antisemites. Charles Maurras, founder and thinker of the Action Française, came to distinguish during the Great War between various Jewish groups, identifying some as fully assimilable. Even before, in the German Empire, early völkisch thinker, Julius Langbehn, in his (1890) Rembrandt as Educator distinguished between “Noble and Ignoble Jews,” stating that “a genuine Jew of the old faith has unmistakably something noble in him; he belongs to that ancient moral and intellectual aristocracy from which most modern Jews have deviated.”Footnote ¹⁴ Even the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s drew such distinctions. In 1926, Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans differentiated between “true Hebrews,” whom he considered assimilable and separated from “true Americans” only by religion, and Eastern Jews, whom he deemed inassimilable and not genuinely Jewish. He thus claimed, paradoxically, that only “true Jews” could become true Americans.Footnote ¹⁵ While such statements still have only little to do with philosemitism stricto sensu, they share the thought pattern (Good Jews versus Bad Jews), which allowed some in the Far Right to identify with Jews in some way or another. The history of far-right ambivalent identification with Jews may be as old as the history of political antisemitism, and drawing from the same useful notion of Jewish Otherness.

So far, this article mentioned, with hardly any detail and context, a variety of pro-Jewish gestures by the Far Right from different times and places. It did so in order to establish the existence of a longer history of far-right ambivalent identification with Jews, and mainly to dispel the impression that what we witness currently is a sign of new moderation. I would like now to offer a detailed analysis of three case studies of intellectuals from Germany, from far-right circles, which later intersected with Nazism. The völkisch movement, rooted in the late 19th century, and the Conservative Revolution, born at the end of World War One, were two ideological groups in early 20th-century Germany, which neatly fit the 21^st-century category of Far Right.Footnote ¹⁶ Both movements were exceedingly antisemitic, with a core committed to outright Redemptive Antisemitism, that is, a vision of German renewal wholly reliant on the decline of the Jews. And yet, as we shall see, there were significant players even in these movements who openly entertained a more “Jewish friendly” approach. Why they did so is something we will be able to glean by detailing the respective episodes.

Völkisch poet Börries von Münchhausen (1874–1945) created in 1900, along with Zionist Art Nouveau artist Ephraim Moses Lilien, the philosemitic book Juda, which both orientalized Jews and idealized them as an Urvolk, a model of proud and rooted nationhood. The book’s opening poem, “To You,” illustrates how Münchhausen’s poetic philosemitism relied on biblical imageries, as markers of a lost Jewish Golden Age. In this poem, the “scorned people” of the Jews, the “lost tribe,” returns to its national greatness, youth, faith, and happiness by returning to its historical land: “Scorned people, I will show you the way/Out of hatred and scorn to the happiness of your youth. /Lost tribe, I will point out the paths to you/And your paths’ password is named: Back! / Back to the beauty of psalms once sung/Back to the holy brook by Anathoth/Back to your homeland’s balsam palm trees/Back to your old, great God! […] Be that which you are, ancient Israel. / Your God still lives, and his pillars/are still before you today. Hear, O Israel.”Footnote ¹⁷

Zionist contemporaries saw this gesture as very significant. The Zionist leader, Theodor Herzl, wrote to the poet, praising him as “a Byron” for the Jewish cause, likening him to the English romantic poet’s commitment to the Greek national cause. “The development of the aristocratic poet Münchhausen in his attitude toward Judaism,” wrote another Zionist contemporary, “has something exemplary about it: It is the inner overcoming of hatred toward Jews.”Footnote ¹⁸ The book had great success in Jewish circles, becoming Münchhausen’s first best-seller.

For his part, the increasingly völkisch poet came to regret his affinity with Jews a few years later. In 1907, for example, he dramatically cooled down his stance, when he unapologetically proclaimed aversion to Jews and other forms of racism as a benign part of human nature. Jews, he concluded, have no viable or dignified path of integration, and should thus do “the noble” thing: assert their Jewishness, cling to their distinctiveness, and celebrate it.Footnote ¹⁹ By 1911, his public philosemitism gave way to hostility. Cozying up to völkisch antisemite historian of literature, Adolf Bartels, Münchhausen wrote that he no longer was the same person he was when he wrote Juda. He assured Bartels that he saw a solution to the so-called Jewish Question “in the elimination of the foreign body [Fremdkörper] through Zionism,” which he “would like to call a national process of suppuration [Eiterungsprozeß].”Footnote ²⁰ After World War One, Münchhausen was openly and radically antisemitic, as if trying to undo any affiliation with Jews. In a notorious 1926 essay, for example, he presented “the Jew” as a murderer of a “German soul.”Footnote ²¹

But, while it lasted, what was the motivation and inner logic of his philosemitic gesture? Given Münchhausen’s career as a literary nationalist, his poetic idealization of biblical Jews has to be seen as a mirror image of the revival of the medieval German ballad. He theorized the nation through premodern literature, after all. In both cases, the Germanic and the Hebrew, a mythical national past constituted a Golden Age to which the Volk should return. Indeed, as was mentioned above, in an interesting twist, the Jewish Other was set for Germans as a model of ethnic existence. At the very same time, however, the book was a sugarcoated imperative of segregation. Indeed, it was a call to leave the diaspora (Germany, in this case) and return to Palestine. While presenting this return as salvation to modern Jews—“scorned people” and “lost tribe”—the other side of that coin, albeit tacitly, was a Germany free of Jews. In addition, his explicit praise for imaginary biblical Jews was an implicit defamation of real, non-biblical, modern Jews. In short, Münchhausen presented a model of benevolent segregation, built upon a backhanded compliment for Jews. Like many philosemitic gestures, it was founded upon an implied juxtaposition between “Good Jews” (living happily and safely in their land, language and religion) and “Bad Jews” (uprooted and failing to integrate). With the book Juda, Münchhausen offered fellow-Germans an ancient model of rooted, un-hyphenated nationhood. At the same time, this model was diametrically opposed to the ideal of full Jewish integration. Münchhausen, ultimately, did not offer the “scorned people” a better inclusion here, in Germany, but only there, in far way Palestine. Given that limited offer, his conversion to open racial antisemitism seems less surprising.

Compared with Münchhausen’s episode of literary philosemitism, the second case study that we will now present was more firmly rooted in the völkisch movement and spanned some twenty years. That second episode began in 1913, as völkisch religious and education reformer, Wilhelm Schwaner (1863–1944), befriended the most famous and powerful Jew in Germany at the time, Walther Rathenau (1867–1922). Their friendship was a highly unlikely one. Schwaner was honored in völkisch circles primarily for his 1904 Germanic Bible (Germanen-Bibel), which represented the pursuit of an “ethnic religion” or “specified religion” for the Germans (arteigene Religion), imagined in opposition to both Roman Catholicism and Judaism. While some in Schwaner’s orbit envisioned a strictly Germanized Christianity, others pointed to a neopagan revival of sorts. Over the years, Schwaner inched closer to that neopagan horizon, and in May 1912 he cofounded the “Germanisch-deutsche Religionsgemeinschaft” (GDRG, Germanic-German Religious Fellowship), openly conceived as a religion for “Aryans” only, which explicitly demanded members to declare not having a single “drop of blood of the yellow, black, or Jewish race.” But shortly thereafter he felt he went too far, and that he could never fully take the neopagan path. He aspired to a Germanic Religion, then, “not … in opposition to Christ, but on the way to Him.”Footnote ²² Within that year, he broke with neopagan affiliates and left the religious Fellowship he created. It was at the end of this year, and in this corrective context, that he reached out to Rathenau.

Through their friendship, which was public, Schwaner explicitly projected a deradicalized völkisch vision, with a concept of Volk, which would no longer be determined by blood, and into which countrymen of different ancestry could assimilate. The friendship began abruptly, almost surprisingly, with a letter Schwaner wrote to Rathenau. In it he praised Rathenau as a “Noble Jew,” which had to do with viewing him as a fully Germanized man. To his völkisch readers and disciples, Schwaner presented Rathenau as a spiritual teacher and as a natural affiliate of their movement. Rathenau for his part appreciated the conversation and the positive attention, but pushed back occasionally, and exposed persistent cracks in völkisch ideology. Over time, his reservations made their way into Schwaner’s own writing and openly transformed it. In their correspondence, Schwaner presented himself as a converted man. He was blinded before by race theory, he confessed in 1916, but through Rathenau he has seen the light and was committed to mending his thought and action and to reforming his movement: “I have finally abandoned that path, even as I cling to the faith of my ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers.’ Ever since, I tolerate no hate speech…, and I try—especially in my circle of influential friends—to correct what I have experienced as wrongheaded and as un-German, unhuman, and ungodly. I broke with any kind of antisemitism, any kind of anti at all.” Schwaner’s new sensibilities became increasingly clear. His new Volkism had “nothing to do with color and breeding-line, but with the soul.” He published major essays boldly restating his racial worldview, in which, instead of the ideal of racial purity, he advocated the ideal of rejuvenation through some intermixing, and refuted the racial homogeneity of the German and Nordic past.Footnote ²³

In the Weimar Republic and following Rathenau’s assassination (June 1922), this alternative völkisch path only become clearer, named itself as of 1926 the Noble völkisch path (edelvölkisch), and soon came out—unlike the rest of the völkisch movement—in support of the democratic Weimar Republic. In 1931—when the Nazi Party was already the second largest in the Reichstag, and the most dominant force on the Right—a member of Schwaner’s movement wrote an essay with the title “The Old and the New Swastika,” spelling out how their “noble” and original volkism differed from its inferior, vulgar, Nazi counterpart.Footnote ²⁴ Regretfully, once Hitler became Chancellor, Schwaner and his movement were nazified within months, if not weeks. Nothing remained from their vision of a different völkisch path, in which Jews could be part of the German Volk and partake in its religious revival.

Unlike Münchhausen’s literary philosemitism, which focused on an idealization of certain mythical Jews, the agenda of Schwaner’s movement is better understood as “anti-antisemitism,” and focused on an empathetic consideration of certain real, contemporary Jews. The function of the public association with Rathenau and the anti-antisemitic stance served an inner reform within the völkisch movement. The core of that reform was a turn away from race-centered neopaganism. When Schwaner praised Rathenau and rejected antisemitism, he did so knowing that it would deepen fissures within the movement. Those who could not stomach it would certainly have too fanatically racist a concept of Germanic Religion, and he thus would be happy to see them leave his movement. This is not to say that he did not mean what he said about Rathenau, Noble Jews, or antisemitism. Schwaner and his movement (the Volkserzieher Movement) remained part of the greater völkisch movement, they were still thought in racial terms, and still clung to völkisch symbols like the swastika. They did not become Liberals, even during their relative de-radicalization, in the years 1913–1933.

The third and final case study we will explore in this article did not just identify with certain Jews or praise them, but made explicit demands of them, in ways that are comparable to the Far Right today. That episode occurred during World War One, when burgeoning Volk-theoretician and Conservative Revolutionary, Max Hildebert Boehm (1891–1968), aggressively courted a young generation of Cultural Zionists with the claim of like-mindedness, shared interests, and potential alliance. Just a couple of years later, Boehm would gain notoriety as a leader within the extremely antisemitic Young Conservatives (Jungkonservativen) and will make a career crafting an elaborate and influential academic theory of the Volk and its significance. His theory—conceived as an alternative to the Wilsonian worldview and as a compass for Germans after Versailles—would posit the self-subsistent autonomous and well-defined Volk, rather than the abstract and impersonal state, as the primary agent in history and the fundamental building block in politics. His was “a Volk concept that does not tolerate a plural,” and which had no interest in hyphenated identities. This was bound with a Volk-centric “realist” understanding of inter-ethnic relations, stating its “demand that the struggle between nationalities and peoples should not be abolished, but” should merely be “bound to chivalrous forms.”Footnote ²⁵

Boehm may have seen his fraternization of young Zionists during World War One as a “chivalrous form” of a national struggle. He, who was found unfit for military service, established himself early in the war as a journalist-commentator. In late 1915, he published “On Jewish-German Spirit.”Footnote ²⁶ At its core, the essay was a scathing review of “Germanness and Judaism,” published earlier that year by German Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen. Cohen’s Liberal vision of a German-Jewish affinity, Boehm insisted, was out of touch with reality. In the consciousness of real Jews and real Germans “dwells an antipathy of the blood, which is based on reciprocity.” Real Germans and real Jews, he claimed, wish to maintain their national distinctiveness. “Cohen’s attitude,” he wrote, is “a humiliating renunciation of one’s [Jewish national] essence (Wesenheit).”Footnote ²⁷ A response to Cohen’s hypothesis, Boehm claimed, must come not only from German nationalists like himself, but also “from the standpoint of self-assured Jewishness.” This is where he brought Cultural Zionists into the picture. Boehm then presented the “impressive” Zionist anthology Vom Judentum as a Jewish response to Cohen’s thesis. In that volume “a large number of mostly younger Jews of Zionist cast of mind try to raise awareness of the distinctiveness of their religious Volk-essence. What distinguishes the strong spirit of this new Jewry above all from Cohen’s attitude is its clear awareness of its origin in the East and, as such, of itself as the opposite of all European-Western spirit.”Footnote ²⁸

Accordingly, Boehm declared the young Zionists as partners in the great separation of Volk-groups: “And this is how the separation (Scheidung), the new cultural division, takes shape: we Germans together with … the [Zionist] young Jewry, which has gained self-confidence […] see the common enemy in that strongly Jewish-permeated Europeanism (stark jüdisch durchsetzten Europäertum).”Footnote ²⁹ Authentic Jews for him are not Europeanized. Authentic Germans and Europeans—not Judaized. Boehm, then, countered Cohen’s “hypothesis of close elective affinity” with an elective affinity of self-segregating nationalists—Germans and Jews.

An early Zionist response appeared in the first issue of Der Jude, edited by young Zionist thinker Martin Buber, in April 1916. The author, Moses Calvary, tacitly rejected an alliance with German hyper-nationalists, but explicitly corrected Boehm’s distortion of the Zionists’ cultural identity: we may be different from our German neighbors, but we are still not simply Orientals, and we remain committed to certain German values.Footnote ³⁰ This Zionist rebuttal apparently did not change his mind, and three months later, Boehm published a laudatory review of Der Jude. There he presented young Zionists, yet again, as valuable interlocutors of comparable völkisch worldview. He portrayed Der Jude as “the new organ of self-assured Jewry,” endowed with a clear “Jewish standpoint,” which it did not blur. “In their announcements” contributors to Der Jude manifested to him a “clear determination, as a direct consequence of which one might expect a divorce (Scheidung) in cultural-national affairs.” The Jewish magazine’s essays thus struck Boehm as “documents of an uncommonly pure and believing völkisch worldview.”Footnote ³¹

Meanwhile, in the winter of 1916–17, Boehm was assigned to work for the German General Staff’s library. There he made the fateful friendship of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a foremost figure in the Conservative Revolution.Footnote ³² In January 1917, in this new setting, Boehm continued his engagement of Zionists and took it further in his essay “Spiritual Zionism and Jewish Assimilation.” Interestingly, he presented Cultural Zionism now also as a Conservative Revolution.Footnote ³³ What he claimed to see was not just ideological similarity, but “a strange convergence” of ethnonationalists: “warm-hearted Jewish and European nationalists, move closer together against the tepid ones, against the abstract subjectivists, who participate in the cultural leveling and flattening of the whole world …, and in disavowing individual [Volk] spirit, out of which all concrete cultural assets are born.”Footnote ³⁴ In that spirit of new “sincerity,” underlying this convergence, Boehm now advanced to the most audacious part of his essay: Since Volk is an either-or phenomenon, it is a matter of decision. It takes more than proclaiming distinctiveness and resisting assimilation. It always entails a heavy price to be paid. For Zionists, it should mean giving up German citizenship and settling for a legal status of resident aliens.Footnote ³⁵ This is a revealing moment in Boehm’s aggressive courting of Zionists, in which his motivation was further exposed.

In April 1917, young Zionist novelist Arnold Zweig published his critical response to Boehm’s aggressive courting. Zweig’s response was written as a confrontation, as a proud Jewish response to Boehm’s “disturbing, unsolicited and hurtful” words, his “commanding tone,” and general disrespect.Footnote ³⁶ Two months later, Zweig published a second part of his damning response to Boehm. Identifying Boehm’s desire to pit one Jewish group (the Zionists) against another (Jewish Liberals), Zweig concluded his essay proclaiming “We love Europe of the spirit, as German Jews we love this German country… We are not assimilated and have never been divided.”Footnote ³⁷

In August 1917, Boehm published his final and most aggressive engagement of “positive Jewry.” The title of the essay was “Emancipation and Will to Power in Modern Jewry” and it appeared, unbelievably, in the Zionist Der Jude. Footnote ³⁸ In it Boehm doubled down on his offensive claims and voiced antisemitic tropes in even greater detail and conviction. He refused to note the Zionist rejection of his vision of an antiliberal alliance with them. Undeterred, he saw his thesis of “elective affinities of German and Young-Jewish nationalism” confirmed: the very attention young Zionists took of his previous essays, and their thorough (albeit critical) responses were proof enough for him.Footnote ³⁹ In a contradictory manner, then, he cared little what Zionists actually said but was proud to be able to claim a dialog with them.

In this final essay, he spelled out a classic tale of Jewish conspiracy: “Cosmopolitan Jews (Weltjuden),” Boehm accused, “hold the universe in the palm of their hands, and have no intention of letting go.” They do so through the might of Jewish capitalism and the ideology of emancipation. The outcome is “the concealed Judaization of Europeanism, and above all of Germanness.”

The only original twist he added to this commonplace antisemitic fantasy is the role he attributed Zionism in this drama: eventually the Zionist “will have to experience the immeasurable means of power of his own nation [that is of Cosmopolitan Jewry] as they will be directed against him.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Sooner or later, he believed, “Positive Jewry” will have to join hands with German völkisch nationalists against the shared adversary.Footnote ⁴¹ Boehm may have believed that it would eventually happen, but as of August 1917, after almost two years, he gave it a rest. In his writing henceforth Jews and Zionists were mentioned only very rarely. When the Nazis came to power, he fully supported their anti-Jewish policy and their racial laws. He would achieve prominence in German academia under the Nazis as professor for “Volk-theory and Volkstum-Sociology,” and would join the Nazi party in 1937.

4. Conclusion: Apples and oranges?

A longer history of far-right Jewish friendly gestures—which ranged from ambivalence to philosemitism of sorts—clearly existed. It drew from notions of Jewish Otherness, and hence, while not a permanent aspect of the Far Right, it was consistent enough to emerge whenever historical–political contexts were opportune. If we look at it for insights into pro-Jewish statements of the contemporary Far Right, however, we should be mindful of both similarities and differences.

There is a significant similarity of thought pattern across time here. A dualistic motif emerges from the three case studies presented, which seem to apply to the 21st century as well. They distinguished—often explicitly—between Good Jews, authentic ones, who are ostensibly the exception in the present, and Bad Jews, inauthentic ones, who currently tend to be the norm. Münchhausen’s Good Jews were Biblical Jews devoted to their faith and living on their soil. Their negative counterpart, it follows, were godless and cosmopolitan contemporary Jews. Schwaner’s “Noble Jews” were those fully Germanized. He maintained the juxtaposition of “Good” Germanized Jews and their “bad” counterparts, who remained strangers to the German Volk. Boehm’s “Positive Jewry” was somewhat of a mix of Münchhausen’s and Schwaner’s. While his “Positive Jewry” mostly presented Jewish nationalists affirming their ethnic distinctiveness, it also included a largely imaginary group of young Jews, who, understanding that nationalism is an either-or proposition, made, what he called “a terrible sacrifice” and “switched over to Europeanism in clear and unveiled consciousness, thereby giving up [their] own past.” For Julius Langbehn, the “Noble Jew” was premodern and religious—an adherent of the “old faith” who belonged to an ancient moral and intellectual aristocracy abandoned by modern Jews. For the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1920s, the crucial distinction was between the assimilable “true Hebrews,” and ostensibly unassimilable Eastern Jews. These few examples alone already manifest how one person’s “Good Jew” was another man’s “Bad Jew,” and vice versa.

This dualistic thought pattern is present at least implicitly in all far-right “philosemitism,” past and present. To be sure, the “Good Jew, Bad Jew” thought pattern is not uniquely Far Right and can be traced across the ideological spectrum. Emily Tamkin has recently analyzed a parallel inner Jewish discourse of Good and Bad Jews.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, the thought pattern fits nicely to the term of “Jew-Splitting” which Bruno Chaouat and others use, mainly to analyze the Left.Footnote ⁴³ Although not unique, considering this binary pattern still effectively exposes the distinctive motivations of far-right gestures.

This far-right juxtaposition of Good and Bad Jews was (and is) intended to change Jewish conduct and affinities. Jews were expected to affirm their distinctive Jewish ethnicity or to disown it; to cling to ancient Jewish religious traditions, or to disavow them; often—as in Boehm’s case—they were expected to join forces with the Right in attacking the alleged Bad Jews (old-school Liberals, like Hermann Cohen). Such attempts for Jewish recruitment are part of the 21^st-century Far-Right’s Jewish friendly gestures (this is perhaps most evident in the MAGA movement and the AfD). It is not only recruitment as voters, but, very much like Münchhausen, Schwaner, and Boehm, the recruitment of Jewish sympathizers as symbolic assets. Notably, a generation ago Mahmood Mamdani identified and analyzed a comparable American “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” discourse with similar aspirations. The implication of that juxtaposition, Mamdani wrote, is that “Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcised from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims.”Footnote ⁴⁴

At the same time, this juxtaposition was (and is) intended even more crucially to instruct and change the conduct of members of the non-Jewish in-group. By imagining authentic Jews as an ethnically thinking and ethnically acting collective, as Münchhausen did, members of the non-Jewish majority are encouraged to think and act more along ethnic lines. National states often failed to cater to Jewish difference. Some far-right ethnonationalists seek to overcome the challenge of cosmopolitan Jews, or of Jews of hyphenated identity, by claiming that authentic Jews, just like “us,” have a clear-cut national identity. When Münchhausen’s poem told Jews “Be that which you are, ancient Israel,” he implored fellow-Germans to be that which they ostensibly have always been: members of a clearly defined ethnic culture. This is not unlike the current far-right view of Israel as a model ethno-state. By presenting the authentic Jew as either religiously traditional (Münchhausen) or Conservative-Revolutionary (Boehm), non-Jews are coaxed into assuming these attributes.

Segregationists like M.H. Boehm could praise Jews for their cultural distinctiveness, their ethnic consciousness, even their religious otherness, for which earlier political antisemites used to fault them. Münchhausen, Boehm, and their 21^st-century counterparts point to a general feature of stereotyping, which often attributed the outgroups “vices” which one would view as desirable “virtues” if applied to one’s ingroup (e.g., larger families, strict endogamy, emphatic traditionalism, etc.). While the centrality of antisemitism in the long history of the Far Right lends philosemitic gestures unique significance, there are analogous xenophile gestures by the Far Right toward other minority outgroups, which are also worthy of further investigation. In all those cases, the Far Right, past and present, sought to legitimate itself and expand its potential base of support by claiming not to be motivated by hatred and animosity. At least in Schwaner’s case, this was attached to an attempt to reform, deradicalize, and mature the movement. On the whole, this aspect fits the pattern of mainstreaming, which is often thought of as distinctive to the 21^st-century Far Right, but which was certainly part of the history of its predecessors as well.Footnote ⁴⁵

Historical perspective teaches us that far-right Jewish friendly gestures are almost invariably based, implicitly or explicitly, on a juxtaposition of Good Jews versus Bad Jews. That latter (“Bad Jews”) category rests on an Othering of Jews. Consequently, in order to better understand a seemingly pro-Jewish gesture and its far-right function, we should reflect first on who is supposed to represent the implied Bad Jew category.

Finally, let us reflect on the ways in which contemporary far-right “philosemitism” differs from the past episodes described here. The historical watersheds are evident enough. After the Holocaust, open antisemitism was largely delegitimized and a robust philosemitic discourse emerged, which eventually spread across the political–ideological spectrum. Jewish statehood since 1948 has dramatically changed the way people across the ideological spectrum think about Jews and Jewishness. Even as antisemitism persisted, the immediate “threats” the postwar Far Right targeted were not Jews but tended to be the Left and immigrants. Furthermore, the contemporary Far Right is on the rise, and it is more normalized and powerful than it has ever been since WWII. In great many countries, the Far Right is in power. Indeed, current Israel itself (2025) is ruled by a far-right coalition.

This is, then, an entirely different historical context in which contemporary Jewish-friendly gestures of the Far Right are articulated. But beyond the new context, two major differences stand out. As far as their content is concerned, the 20th-century Jew-friendly gestures were founded on an assumption of Jewish alterity: Jewish awareness of their ethnic and cultural distinctiveness was both presented as exemplary, in and of itself, and as key for natural alliance, or at least harmonious coexistence (“Good fences make good neighbors”). The 21^st-century Jew-friendly gestures, by contrast, are founded on an assumption of Jewish proximity: Jews are either praised or protected as part of “our” Western culture, of “our” European civilization, and of “our” of Judeo-Christian values. This gives a good sense of the new function of pro-Jewish stance within the Far Right. Within this new stance, Jews are frequently contrasted with a negative depiction of outgroups deemed foreign, problematic, and potentially both anti-Jewish and anti-Western. This precisely was articulated by Bardella and other far-right participants in the Jerusalem conference “On Combating Antisemitism”: Contemporary antisemitism, they claim, is powered by unchecked immigration and Islamism. The enemies of Europe, in that far-right narrative, are also enemies of the Jews and of the State of Israel. Jews, whether they wanted to or not, are thus mobilized as symbolic allies in that anti-immigration front. What we could learn from this new feature of far-right mobilization of Jewish symbolic allies is to probe if praise for Jews is an implicit vilification of other outgroups.

Perhaps the most noteworthy difference between past Jew-friendly stances from the Far Right and contemporary ones is the degree of the Jewish buy-in. While Zionists, especially Herzl, were initially thrilled with Münchhausen and his book, that brief episode went nowhere. There was neither a Zionist counter-gesture, nor a continuation or expansion of that literary engagement. Zionists at the time were more taken with Münchhausen’s aristocracy than with his hyper-nationalism. Soon Münchhausen distanced himself from his past literary philosemitism, and that which seemed like a dialog was officially over. The Schwaner-episode did not generate in Jewish circles much beyond curiosity. As Schwaner moved his movement away from antisemitism, he expected Rathenau to lead a parallel effort, and actively and vocally lead German Jews in the path of wholehearted assimilation. Rathenau declined that thankless role.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Boehm episode was even more explicit: Zionists like Arnold Zweig forcefully rejected the claim for affinity with völkisch nationalism and the idea of an antiliberal alliance. This may slightly understate Jewish agency and participation—one could point, say, to warm relationship as of the 1960s between Israeli PM Golda Meir and American evangelist, Billy Graham—and yet, until recently there was no Jewish pursuit of an official, public alliance with political Far Right.

A common-sense distrust of far-right Jew-friendly gestures remained largely intact also in Israel until well into the 21st century (e.g., despite Jörg Haider’s Jew-friendly statements in the 1990s, Israel responded firmly to the forming of the first FPÖ coalition, in 2000, and withdrew its ambassador to Austria). Things began to change in the new century. At first, these were rather isolated cases such as the 2003 Israel visit of Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, and 2010 low-profile Tel Aviv visit of the far-right Eurosceptic “European Alliance for Freedom.” As of Netanyahu’s third government, in 2013, a bond with the “pro-Jewish” Far Right has become an almost self-evident policy, and the old reservations seem all but forgotten.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is hard to imagine an undoing of this state of affairs without a revival of the Israeli Left. The Jewish buy-in to far-right beyond Israel is a more complicated issue. Historicizing far-right “philosemitism,” as attempted here, may hopefully caution people from taking those pro-Jewish gestures at face value.

Ultimately, however, the dangers posed by far-right pro-Jewish gestures are not the degree of Jewish buy-in—disturbing as it may be—but rather the ability of such statements to normalize the Far Right. Defenders of Liberal Democracy should take this threat seriously and recognize that such far-right gestures are effective only in certain discursive contexts, in which they too—as opponents of the Far Right—have a role to play, modeling a truly democratic approach to Jewish difference.