Hunting Jews

This chapter discusses the hunt for Jews. In the course of their history, hunts for Jews went schematically through three major mutations: hunts by mobs, then hunts by states; religious hunts, then racist hunts; murderous hunts, then genocidal hunts. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the new strategic project of extreme right-wing movements was to mobilize anti-Semitic hunting against the existing state apparatuses, to intensify the power of political subversion exercised by such hunting packs and to turn around what had long functioned as a safety belt for state authority to make it a means of seizing state power. But if their strategy later proved to be historically capable of attracting a crucial fraction of the dominant social strata, that was also because in doing so its function of diverting social antagonisms did not disappear: it smothered the class struggle by means of race war, even at the price of destroying the old forms of state power.