Works, Vol. 13, July 1930-January 1934, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing 
House, 1955, p. 30

"Anti-Semitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States"
Joseph Stalin

In answer to your inquiry: 

National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of 
the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the 
most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the 
blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the 
working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in 
the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be 
irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a 
phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites 
are liable to the death penalty.

J. Stalin
January 12, 1931