PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH°

PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH° (1809–1865), French Socialist and anti-Jewish theorist. For Proudhon, the Jew was the "source of evil," as "incarnated in the race of Shem" (Césarisme et christianisme, 1 (18832), 139). He accused the Jews of "having rendered the bourgeoisie, high or low, similar to them, all over Europe" (De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise (1858), 458). In his "diary," published posthumously, he called them an "unsociable race, obstinate, infernal… the enemy of mankind. We should send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it" (Carnets, 2 (1961), 23, 337). Proudhon's unremitting hatred of the Jews was probably influenced by bonald and by fourier , but above all by his own xenophobic passion for France, which he saw as "invaded by the English, Germans, Belgians, Jews," and other foreigners (France et Rhin (18672), 258). In the France of the first half of the 19th century, Proudhon was the mainstay of a grass-roots socialism, which has been seen as an early version of National-Socialism. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme, 3 (1968), index; R.F. Byrnes, Anti-semitism in Modern France, 1 (1950), index; E. Silberner, Sozialisten zur Judenfrage (1962), index.