Bakunin’s antisemitism took five main forms. Firstly, on a number of occasions Bakunin unnecessarily pointed out that somebody he did not like was a Jew. One of Bakunin’s main political opponents in the 1st International was a Russian Jew named Nicholas Utin, who was an ally of Marx and Engels. In August 1871 Bakunin wrote a text which was later referred to as his Report on the Alliance. Within the text he labelled Utin a “little Jew” who manipulated other people, especially women, on four occasions. A year later in October 1872 Bakunin again referred to Utin as “a little Russian Jew” in his unsent letter to the editors of La Liberté. Bakunin made similar remarks about other individuals. Within Statism and Anarchy, which was published in 1873, Bakunin complained that German workers were “confused by their leaders – politicians, literati, and Jews” who “hate and fear revolution” and have as a result “directed the entire worker population” into parliamentary politics.
The second main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was the belief that Jewish people were united as a singular entity, rather than being a broad and diverse ethnic, cultural or religious group composed of distinct individual people acting independently of one another. Bakunin claimed in his March 1872 letter to the Jura Federation that “the Jews of every country are really friends only with the Jews of all countries, independently of all differences existing in social positions, degree of education, political opinions, and religious worship.”
The third main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was the belief in an international Jewish conspiracy which played a key role in running the world via control of commerce, banking and the media. In 1869 Bakunin was critiqued by a German Jewish state socialist called Moses Hess in an article which was published in the radical paper Le Réveil. Bakunin responded in October by writing a long unpublished letter titled To the Citizen Editors of Le Réveil. Bakunin’s other title for the letter was Study of the German Jews. Within the letter he wrote that,
I know that in speaking out my intimate thoughts on the Jews with such frankness 1 expose myself to immense dangers. Many people share these thoughts, but very few dare to express them publicly, for the Jewish sect, which is much more formidable than that of the Catholic and Protestant Jesuits, today constitutes a veritable power in Europe. It reigns despotically in commerce and banking, and it has invaded three-quarters of German journalism and a very considerable part of the journalism of other countries. Then woe to him who makes the mistake of displeasing it!
Bakunin’s friend Alexander Herzen reacted to this racist letter by complaining to Nicholas Ogarev, “why all this talk of race and of Jews?”.
The fourth main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was intimately connected to the previous one. Bakunin not only believed that an international Jewish conspiracy played a key role in running the world. He also believed in a specifically Jewish conspiracy against him within the 1st International. The history of the 1st International is very complicated and for the purposes of this essay all you need to know is the following. In September 1872 Bakunin was expelled from the 1st International at its Hague Congress for being a member of a secret organisation called the Alliance. Marx and Engels were mistakenly convinced that Bakunin was attempting to use the Alliance to take over the 1st International and become its dictator. Due to this false belief Marx and Engels went to great lengths to guarantee Bakunin’s expulsion from the organisation, which included them creating fake delegates. Bakunin, in contrast, correctly thought that Marx, Engels and their supporters were attempting to take over the 1st International and convert the General Council, which was supposed to perform only an administrative role, into a governing body which imposed state socialist decisions and policies on the organisation’s previously autonomous sections. One of the ironies of history is that, a key reason for why Marx and Engels did this is that they thought it was necessary in order to counter Bakunin’s non-existent attempt to become dictator of the International and impose his anarchist programme on the organisation.
The fifth main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was his stereotyping of Jews as wealthy bankers. In Statism and Anarchy he asserted that the creation of the German nation state in 1871 was,
nothing other than the ultimate realisation of the anti-popular idea of the modern state, the sole objective of which is to organise the most intensive exploitation of the people’s labour for the benefit of capital concentrated in a very small number of hands. It signifies the triumphant reign of the Yids, of a bankocracy under the powerful protection of a fiscal, bureaucratic, and police regime which relies mainly on military force and is therefore in essence despotic, but cloaks itself in the parliamentary game of pseudo-constitutionalism.
This kind of antisemitism was not a one-off occurrence. Bakunin’s most widely read work is a pamphlet called God and the State, which was first published in 1882 and is a long extract from his unfinished 1870–2 text The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.
In other texts Bakunin linked his antisemitic beliefs about Jewish bankers with his critique of state socialism. Bakunin’s main critique of state socialism was that social movements should not use the means of seizing state power to achieve the ends of socialism because it would not result in the abolition of all forms of class rule. The minority of people who actually wielded state power in the name of the workers, such as politicians or bureaucrats, would instead constitute a new ruling class who dominated and exploited the working classes and focused on reproducing and expanding their power, rather than abolishing it. This argument was not antisemitic and has been made by anarchists from Jewish backgrounds, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
Bakunin was, however, a racist and so argued that one of the groups which would benefit from the seizure of state power by socialists were Jewish bankers specifically. He thought that just as Jewish bankers benefited from state centralisation under Bismarck so too would they benefit from state centralisation under the rule of a socialist political party. Bakunin wrote in his unsent note Personal Relations with Marx that,
What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralisation in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which. speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail ...