This chapter is a philosophical essay, divided into seven numbered sections. It analyzes the psychological, economic, theological, and political foundations of antisemitism in Western civilization.

Section I

The authors open with two competing doctrines about antisemitism: the fascist claim that Jews are an “antirace” whose destruction is a precondition for human happiness, and the liberal claim that Jews form a group defined solely by religious tradition. They claim both are simultaneously true and false.

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that fascist doctrine is “true” because fascism has imposed it. Jews have become the designated scapegoat for the destructive energies of a dysfunctional social order in which workers are exploited. The image projected on Jews reflects the fascists’ own craving for total possession and unlimited power. The authors redefine race not as a natural feature but as a regression to nature as pure violence—the bourgeois individual’s self-assertion within a barbaric collective. Jewish persecution cannot be separated from a social order whose underlying substance is violence.

Section II

As a mass movement, antisemitism is driven by a leveling impulse: the insistence that no one should fare better than ordinary people. Its economic gains for ordinary participants are negligible; its real reward is collective permission to attack others. For rulers, antisemitism serves as a distraction, redirecting anger away from the real sources of social inequality. It is also a mechanism of social compliance, warning of the dangers of non-conformity. Rational counterarguments fail to weaken it because rationality itself is bound to power. Anti-Semitic behavior is a ritualized pattern of civilization, most visibly expressed in pogroms. It is unleashed when people stripped of genuine subjectivity are set loose as agents of meaningless violence. Victim groups are interchangeable, and members of one persecuted group can become perpetrators once empowered by the collective norm. There are no born anti-Semites. Followers feel hatred because they have never experienced genuine fulfillment, while the powerful instigators may feel no authentic hatred at all.

Liberalism granted Jews property but denied them political and social authority. Meanwhile, the apparent ability of Jewish people to become prosperous independent of power enrages those systematically denied both. In a society where politics had become inseparable from commercial interests, Jews are perceived as anachronistic materialists by those who had made business and profit the governing principles of their lives.

Section III

Bourgeois antisemitism has a precise economic function: to conceal exploitation in production by redirecting blame onto the sphere of trade and finance. Merchants and financiers, who visibly handle money, absorb the resentment that should rightfully be directed at factory owners. 

Historically, Jews were excluded from many forms of landownership and production, thereby pushing them into trade, lending, and other parts of the economy concerned with the circulation of goods and money. As intermediaries, they helped extend capitalist relations across Europe, a development that devastated the craftsmen and farmers it displaced. The authors argue that industrial capitalists’ hostility toward Jews is self-hatred in disguise: They project onto the Jew their own parasitic role, making antisemitism “the bad conscience” of those who call themselves producers while living off others’ labor (144).

Section IV

Nationalist antisemitism claims to have discarded religious prejudice in favor of biological ideas of race, but the authors argue that religious hostility survives in a new form. The Enlightenment weakened Christianity’s traditional beliefs while preserving its institutional shell. Fascism then channeled the resulting unfulfilled longing for meaning and belonging into racial groups defined by ethnicity. Among the pro-fascist “German Christians,” a religion of love was replaced by antisemitism.

The authors trace antisemitism through the history of Jewish and Christian theology. Judaism’s abstract, universal God retains traces of humanity’s ancient fear of nature but offers liberation from mythology by refusing to represent God as a natural object or human figure. Christianity makes the divine less fearsome through the human figure of Christ and the principle of grace but committed a founding philosophical error: It made the finite absolute. Declaring a mortal to be God spiritualizes rather than overcomes magic. Unlike Judaism, which integrated ritual into collective life and thereby rationalized social labor, Christianity severed the sacred from the profane, leaving secular authority to govern the world and the Church to administer salvation—a promise it cannot guarantee. Ordinary believers therefore treat Christianity as a magical nature religion. Thinkers who acknowledged the uncertainty at the heart of religious belief, such as Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Barth, were consequently the most tolerant of differing beliefs. Those who repressed the uncertainty were compelled to confirm their own salvation through the destruction of those who refused the same surrender of reason. Horkheimer and Adorno interpret Christian hostility toward Jews as the hatred of the followers of the Son against adherents of the Father. This hatred directed at those “who know better” is the religious root of antisemitism (147).

Section V

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that antisemitism appeals to visceral aversion: a compulsive revulsion toward whatever is not fully absorbed into social utility. Using an example from Wagner’s opera Siegfried—the hero’s inexplicable contempt for the “dwarf” Mime—as a starting point, the authors trace this reaction to archaic biological reflexes predating rational consciousness. Civilization progressively suppressed direct imitative behavior (mimesis), replacing it with organized ritual and then with rational labor. What repels people in others is often precisely the suppressed mimetic behavior they carry in themselves but cannot acknowledge.

Political antisemitism harnesses this response. Fascist ceremonies and ritualized gestures provide socially licensed occasions for mimetic release that civilization otherwise prohibits. Antisemites compulsively imitate the very gestures, vocal tones, and physical features they falsely attribute to Jews. Fascist leaders—Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Goebbels, and the American radio preacher Charles Coughlin—function as licensed performers who, through exaggerated speech and gestures, enact by proxy what ordinary members of the collective are denied. The mechanism requires Jews as its object because visible cultural differences allow forbidden desires to be redirected into socially approved aggression. “Hygienic purging” ironically persecutes Jews for “unclean” instincts when Jewish religious tradition was among the earliest to introduce ideas of ritual purity. 

Section VI

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that antisemitism is grounded in “false projection”—the inverse of mimesis. Healthy cognition is open to the world and allows what individuals encounter to change their perceptions. False projection imposes the subject’s own unacknowledged fears and desires on the external world. The persecutor projects their anxieties and impulses on the victim. In fascism, this individual pathology becomes political doctrine.

Drawing on Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Hermann von Helmholtz, the authors argue that all perception involves a projective element; the difference between healthy cognition and paranoia is the presence or absence of self-reflection. Deprived of reflective feedback, the paranoid subject cannot distinguish self from world and endlessly recycles its own contents in a closed delusional system. Followers respond to the fascist leader because their own paranoid tendencies resonate with his. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, the authors associate the specific content of projection in socially forbidden drives—typically repressed “homosexual aggression” (159)—displaced outward and attributed to the designated group.

The authors posit that large-scale industry is destroying individual moral conscience by eroding independent thought. Responsibility is replaced by performance within an apparatus, and people identify with externally supplied values rather than working through internal conflict. Jews are the institutionally guided target for this collective projection because their cultural image embodies exactly what the dominated secretly covet: well-being without dominance, belonging without borders, faith without mythology. The authors propose that only by recognizing the Jew as a fellow human being—freeing thought from the grip of power—could “the Jewish question” become a genuine turning point in history (165).

Section VII

The authors state that “there are no longer any genuine anti-Semites” (165). The last authentic ones were 19th-century agitators, whose hostility still expressed a recognizable, if distorted, personal conviction. Today, this kind of personal conviction has been replaced by “ticket thinking”: People adopt prepackaged ideological platforms in their entirety rather than forming specific views through lived experience. Antisemitism has become part of the “fascist ticket,” subscribed to alongside anti-unionism and anti-Bolshevism. It can therefore flourish even in areas without any Jewish population, because experience has been entirely displaced by stereotypes.

Late-industrial society has regressed to judgment without reflection and thinking is treated as an unproductive luxury. The individual, once a relatively autonomous economic unit with a complex inner life, has been dissolved by large-scale production. External hierarchies and mass culture now perform the functions once served by conscience and ego, rendering personal moral decision-making obsolete. Fascist antisemitism must therefore manufacture an enemy. The antisemite becomes an “employee” executing economic and administrative verdicts through persecution. 

Antisemitism’s status as an interchangeable ticket item within a political package offers grounds for hoping it could simply be removed. Horkheimer and Adorno argue, however, that this transition is blocked. Progressive politics suffer from the same loss of independent thought as fascism, and ticket mentality itself is an enemy of difference. The chapter concludes that if Enlightenment could achieve genuine self-awareness and break its own self-imposed limits, it might overcome the pathology it has generated.