Today, “humanism” usually denotes a secular ethical outlook that stresses human dignity, reason, tolerance, individual rights, and scientific inquiry. In mid-19th-century Germany, however, the term repeatedly referred to something far more radical: a philosophical movement derived from Ludwig Feuerbach that many contemporaries regarded as a bridge to socialism and communism. That original meaning has largely vanished from present-day usage.
An intellectual genealogy runs from Hegel through Feuerbach to socialism. Hegel had already replaced traditional Christianity with a philosophical system centered on Reason. Feuerbach went farther, declaring that God was simply a projection of human qualities. As he summarized his own development: “God was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last.” Human beings, not God, came to be the center of philosophy, and Feuerbach’s circle concluded that every sociopolitical institution should be “humanized.”
Friedrich Engels observed in 1845 that virtually all German communists were Feuerbach’s followers, while most Feuerbachians turned communists. Thus, humanism grew principally from German idealism, and socialism crystallized from humanism. In that perplexing climate, the term did not signify individual liberty in the current sense; it meant subordinating individual interests to humanity conceived collectively. Humanism was understood as the vehicle for dissolving the individual into the community and converting private property into collective property.
Feuerbachians considered religion, monarchy, and private property as forms of alienation: Human beings projected their powers onto external authorities and then found themselves dominated by them. From the outset, this humanism was an openly anti-Christian current.
Leading German socialists such as Karl Marx and Wilhelm Marr framed the conflict as one between Christendom and Marxistdom. To be fair, their formative arguments were equally hostile to every religion, including Judaism. In the nineteenth century, humanism therefore functioned as both a smokescreen and a trampoline for socialist revolution. Progressivism played a parallel role, focusing more on demands for progressive taxation than on human progress. Feuerbachians held a quasi-transhumanist faith that humanity could become God; godlessness was merely the first step toward a worldwide proletarian revolution, supplemented by additional political techniques aimed at their collectivist goal.
Wilhelm Marr was a classic Feuerbachian radical. He reportedly carried Feuerbach’s opus The Essence of Christianity everywhere and founded a secret society dedicated to spreading “humanist” ideas. At one point he competed with Marx for leadership of the German left and lost. The two men shared a common ideology and a personal antagonism; the chief difference was that Marx remained a theoretician, whereas Marr was a practical revolutionary.
Marr insisted that revolutionaries should avoid detailed positive programs, which frequently breed internal disagreement, and should instead unite around pure opposition to the status quo. His treatise on secret societies in Switzerland captures the nihilistic, negationist phase of this humanism: “The masses can only be gathered under the flag of negation. … We make war against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism.”
That was an extraordinarily radical stance. Marr’s humanism was not mere secularism; it was an anti-establishment, revolutionary doctrine directed at the destruction of existing society.
John Rae’s 1884 book, Contemporary Socialism, confirms the point: Humanism envisioned the radical Feuerbachian maxim that God is dissolved into Man, monarchy into democracy, private property into collective possession, and the isolated individual into “social man.” Rae states unequivocally that “humanist and communist became nearly convertible terms” and that “socialism was the humanism of common life.”
Marr emerged directly from this atmosphere. Before becoming famous as the man who introduced the pre-existing term “antisemitism” into the political lexicon, he was a Feuerbachian humanist, atheist, and revolutionary agitator who preached negation and hostility.
Steeped in that milieu and carrying Feuerbach’s book, he absorbed a worldview of radical negation and human-centered materialism. His later antisemitism can be read as a distorted continuation or inversion of those same ideas: “Jewishness” was identified with the egoistic, particularist, and alienating forces that Feuerbachian humanism sought to overcome through community, atheism, and social transformation. In this reading, true humanism required purging the “Jewish” element that supposedly perpetuated older theological or capitalist alienations under new guises.
Marr was not alone. Many early socialists and radicals — Fourier, Proudhon, numerous Young Hegelians, and substantial strands within leftism — expressed economic, racial, or cultural anti-Jewish prejudices. They saw Jews as emblems of finance capital, middleman roles, or cosmopolitanism that obstructed national or proletarian solidarity. Later anti-capitalist and antisemitic activists regularly employed a comparable scholastic structure, portraying finance, money, or “Jewish influence” as alien powers dominating authentic humanity.
When the negation of Jews acquires an explicit political background, it becomes antisemitism: Jews are cast as the obstacle against which non-Jews can bond and form a coherent left-wing political force. Marr did not “rediscover” antisemitism in his 1879 pamphlet plainly because leftists disliked Jews; he reincarnated it as a means of securing voting blocs, forging alliances, and gaining power. In short, Marr was one of the earlier “community organizers.” His contemporaries would have also recognized Adolf Hitler as a fellow practitioner of the same cynical technique — consolidating support among non-Jews by alienating Jews — rather than as a mere primitive Jew-hater. For certain currents on the left, Jews are expendable in the pursuit of unrestricted power and an unreachable utopia.
Modern humanism, secular or otherwise, claims to have shed these radical left associations. Both humanism and antisemitism have deep socialist roots, but decades of left-wing polishing have buried those origins. Marxist currents helped preserve and radicalize the word “humanism,” but modern humanism made up modern precisely by concealing much of its collectivist and revolutionary content. The coinage of “humanitarianism” further obscured any resemblance to the nineteenth-century term. Present-day humanitarians remain strikingly selective: Global attention has often focused substantially more intently on “Palestinian needs” while remaining predominantly indifferent to Israeli ones.
In conclusion, the connection between nineteenth-century humanism and antisemitism is both historical and moderately doctrinal. Humanism did not explicitly list antisemitism among its foundational principles. Rather, almost all influential European antisemites were formed within the radical humanist coalition and proceeded with its conceptual habits, revolutionary methods, and political techniques into a later, deliberately murkier context. The journey from Feuerbachian universalism to Marr’s antisemitism remains one of the most paradoxical intellectual trajectories of nineteenth-century Europe.
History’s greatest disguise may not have been the invention of a new ideology, but the survival of an old one under a new and increasingly sanitized name.
[Originally published in American Thinker]
