ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses modern antisemitism as a distorted response to the abstract forms of domination characteristic of capitalist society, focussing on circulation, commodity fetishism, and the value form. Drawing on Marx, Critical Theory, and Moishe Postone, it argues that antisemitism constitutes a false critique of capitalism that personalises and naturalises impersonal social relations by projecting exploitation, crisis, and abstraction onto Jews as imagined agents of money and circulation. This projection obscures the exploitation embedded in production while reinterpreting systemic contradictions as intentional wrongdoing. The chapter further demonstrates that this misrecognition is closely connected to gendered ideologies. Sexism structures the same ideological field through dichotomies of production and reproduction, purity and corruption, rootedness and mobility, casting women as figures of consumption, sexuality, and unproductive circulation. Antisemitic and misogynistic stereotypes converge in fantasies of greed, sexual excess, and parasitism, particularly in discourses on sex work, emancipation, and consumption. The chapter traces these constellations from fin-de-siècle capitalism through National Socialism to contemporary Islamist antisemitism, showing how moralised anticapitalism displaces social critique onto Jews and women alike. It concludes that antisemitism and sexism function as stabilising ideologies that defend capitalist and patriarchal domination by masking their structural foundations.
