For the left, the defining characteristic of Hitler's national socialism which allowed them to categorize it as non-leftist was its racism, manifested mostly as hatred of Jews. Communism -- so the story goes -- didn't have the same sort of racist tinge, but treated Jews and other minorities well. So international socialism (Communism) was leftist, but national socialism (Nazism, Fascism, etc.) was rightist.

Of course, even though Jews were instrumental in setting up the first Communist revolution, Soviet Jews soon found themselves threated and marginalized: Stalin's little-known "Doctor's Plot" attempted to use charges of "Zionism" ("During the investigation and trial of the anti-state conspiratorial center we discovered a new channel by which treachery and espionage penetrate into the Communist Party. It is Zionism." [1]) to initiate a Soviet Holocaust.

The show trial was meant to initiate a carefully constructed plan in which almost all of the Soviet Union's two million Jews, nearly all of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, were to be transported to the Gulag---in cattle cars. Between the January announcement and Stalin's death a month and a half later it became clear that careful plans had been laid for the transfer and "concentration" of Soviet Jews.[2]

As mentioned, the Plot was prevented by Stalin's timely death, but the USSR continued to persecute Jews and other ethnic minorities internally (to levels which far exceeded US racism), and internationally realigned itself as the major financial of anti-Israeli Arab nationalism.

Canaries?

Coal miners, the argument goes, used to employ canaries to detect poison gases. Birds have a much higher rate of respiration, so they will die first when noxious gases are released which would threaten miners' lives. So it has been argued that European antisemitism was the dead canary which signaled the encroachment of toxic political ideologies.

Contemporary critics of "Zionism", which is today resurgent on the left, hasten to assure us that criticism of Israel does not equate with or imply latent antisemitism. Of course, Israel is a nation, and nations do things wrong, and why should Israel be insulated the same criticisms which would apply to any other nation? I agree entirely.

But, to the contrary, the criticisms I hear seem to apply rules which aren't applied elsewhere. To cite just one example among so many: Fences are being built all over the world. North Korea lies behind a fence. Europe is building fences along its eastern borders. And Egypt is struggling to make sure it has a strong fence around Gaza -- but somehow these fences don't seem to be criticized much. (Palestine also shares borders with Jordan and Syria (and there are fenced-in Palestinian refugee camps in these nations also, but nobody seems to have noticed.)

Fences are wrong, but mostly only for Israel.

So it doesn't surprise me that a recent survey seems to confirm that anti-Zionism correlates strongly with antisemitism.

Drs. Kaplan and Small examined the views of 5004 Europeans, roughly 500 individuals sampled from each of 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The authors' main publicized results confirmed their (rather commonsensical) a priori hypothesis: anti-Israel sentiments strongly and independently predicted the likelihood that an individual was Antisemitic in a graded manner, i.e., the more anti-Israel (on a scale of zero to 4), the more a person was likely to be Antisemitic.

This makes sense: Where once Jews thrived throughout Europe, today there are more Jews in Israel than anywhere else in the world. Post-Holocaust, Jews are largely absent from Eastern Europe, and are fleeing Western Europe for safety in Israel. Today it becomes impossible to manifest antisemitism without taking a swipe at Israel, since, to paraphrase the quote attributed to bank-robber Willie Sutton, "that's where the Jews are."

"Christian" Antisemitism

That conclusion might seem obvious, perhaps, but perhaps someone needs to tell it to the Methodists, who are, in official church reports, calling the creation of Israel "the original sin" and objectively seem to blame Israel for the world's woes. Like recent Presbyterian efforts, they are attempting to get the nations of the world to economically isolate Israel. (Though they decry use of the same tactics against Cuba!)

The Christian churches of Medieval Europe were, as we know, guilty of antisemitic hatred and persecution. But the record was mixed: while some persecuted and hated Jews, some, such as the Bishop of Speyer and many others defended Jews, passed laws protecting Jews, or otherwise acted positively towards them.

There are certainly two ways of reading the bible on this question. Some see Jesus as anything but a Jewish rabbi (more of a figurehead for whatever passing political trend seizes us), imagine Jesus was only killed by Israeli (and not Roman) authorities, and imagine that Christianity (as Gnostics like Marcion argued) should be viewed as utterly distinct from the God of the "Old Testament." These "Christians" tend to reject the notion that it was necessary for Jesus to die to forgive their sins, and often bristle at the idea of "original sin" -- that humanity (them in particular) needs a good "saving", morally.

Others believe that Jesus died for the sins of all humanity -- not just one nation or ethnicity. They believe that we all have a propensity towards evil, selfishness, and scapegoating ("original sin") and thus we share in responsibility for Christ's death. Given our propensity towards evil, we are sceptical about humanity's ability to bring about God's kingdom on earth though human efforts.

So it's no surprise to see the Methodist church officials, above (who also tend to be more utopian in their political beliefs) implicitly repudiating their own "original sin", projecting it instead onto "Israel", their imagined enemy.

You cannot guard against something you cannot see.