Socialists and the Jewish Question
Part of an ongoing series:
Number 3: Internal Squabbles of the Socialists
Number 2: State and National Social Programs
Number 1: The Social Question
My anonymous author has also been, unfortunately, noted for his enthusiastic anti-semitism. Even more unfortunate is the fact that most of his intellectual predecessors are different only in degree, not in kind.
This problem seems to be much worse in Europe than in America. I conjecture that the reason is that partly due to the historical association European Christians made between Jews, who were not bound by Christian laws against usury, and partly due to the influence Karl Marx asserted onto socialist dogma. The former led to such oddities as rumors that the Black Death came from Jews' poisoning of wells. The latter is a subject of great controversy.
Karl Marx came from a line of rabbis. However, his father had himself baptized as a Lutheran in order to keep his job as a lawyer. The start of Marx' antisemitic actions is the essay "The Jewish Question". Although Marxists would defend the essay by accusing the critic of only making a superficial reading, the accusation is not that easy to dismiss. The essay's approach is three-sided: 1) Jews are "hucksters", 2) that is not really an argument against Jews, per se, but against religion and its entrapping nature. However, he is basically saying that (3) religion is bad, and since Jews are by definition identified with their religion, it follows that they are bad. They wouldn't be, if they would only swear off religion. It is the intellectual's equivalent of the school bully's tactic of saying hurtful things but then excusing himself with, "just kidding - you know it's only a joke, right?"
If this essay, penned by a 25 year old Marx, were all to the story, we could simply dismiss it as the work of a confused young man. Unfortunately, Marx' antisemitism seems to run deeper. As Joshua Muravchik explains in Heaven on Earth, the sentiments contained in this essay recurred in his private correspondence. A year after this essay, he distinguished between "theoretical" activities and "dirty-Judaic" practical activity. 12 years later, he wrote "Christ drove the Jewish money-changers out of the temple, and that the money-changers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again to be Jews is perhaps no more than a historic coincidence." Three years later, he mocked the nose of Joseph Moses Levy in something otherwise masquerading as political work. Finally, in Das Kapital, he wrote that "The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy the may look, or however badly they smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcized Jews. " Muravchik also notes in a footnote that Marx' personal correspondence was particularly hard on his rival for the control of German Socialism, Ferdinand Lasalle, referring to him as "Itzig" (something like "Himey"), our n*****, and "the Jewish n*****" (yes, that n-word), references to Lasalle's "swarthiness".
Unfortunately, the socialists' antisemitism did not share Marx' grave. Engels wrote, "Jews are known to be cheated cheats everywhere, but especially in Austria." And others, including Kautsky, seemed to accept many of the antisemitic sentiments without accepting the "solutions" proposed to the "Jewish Question". Lenin and Stalin were not noted for being friendlier to Jews than the Tsar's family. Indeed, I am struck by the fact that in those countries where socialism took hold first and deepest, the anti-semitism seems to have been part and parcel of the conversion: the Dreyfuss Affair in France, the various purges in Russia, and finally the abomination in Germany, cradle of socialism. Antisemitism is not a subject about which I read, so I'm afraid I can't get any deeper into it, but it seems to me that my protagonist for the past few posts is not terribly far out there in terms of *what* he believes, but only in *how strongly* he believes it.
Number 3: Internal Squabbles of the Socialists
Number 2: State and National Social Programs
Number 1: The Social Question
My anonymous author has also been, unfortunately, noted for his enthusiastic anti-semitism. Even more unfortunate is the fact that most of his intellectual predecessors are different only in degree, not in kind.
This problem seems to be much worse in Europe than in America. I conjecture that the reason is that partly due to the historical association European Christians made between Jews, who were not bound by Christian laws against usury, and partly due to the influence Karl Marx asserted onto socialist dogma. The former led to such oddities as rumors that the Black Death came from Jews' poisoning of wells. The latter is a subject of great controversy.
Karl Marx came from a line of rabbis. However, his father had himself baptized as a Lutheran in order to keep his job as a lawyer. The start of Marx' antisemitic actions is the essay "The Jewish Question". Although Marxists would defend the essay by accusing the critic of only making a superficial reading, the accusation is not that easy to dismiss. The essay's approach is three-sided: 1) Jews are "hucksters", 2) that is not really an argument against Jews, per se, but against religion and its entrapping nature. However, he is basically saying that (3) religion is bad, and since Jews are by definition identified with their religion, it follows that they are bad. They wouldn't be, if they would only swear off religion. It is the intellectual's equivalent of the school bully's tactic of saying hurtful things but then excusing himself with, "just kidding - you know it's only a joke, right?"
If this essay, penned by a 25 year old Marx, were all to the story, we could simply dismiss it as the work of a confused young man. Unfortunately, Marx' antisemitism seems to run deeper. As Joshua Muravchik explains in Heaven on Earth, the sentiments contained in this essay recurred in his private correspondence. A year after this essay, he distinguished between "theoretical" activities and "dirty-Judaic" practical activity. 12 years later, he wrote "Christ drove the Jewish money-changers out of the temple, and that the money-changers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again to be Jews is perhaps no more than a historic coincidence." Three years later, he mocked the nose of Joseph Moses Levy in something otherwise masquerading as political work. Finally, in Das Kapital, he wrote that "The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy the may look, or however badly they smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcized Jews. " Muravchik also notes in a footnote that Marx' personal correspondence was particularly hard on his rival for the control of German Socialism, Ferdinand Lasalle, referring to him as "Itzig" (something like "Himey"), our n*****, and "the Jewish n*****" (yes, that n-word), references to Lasalle's "swarthiness".
Unfortunately, the socialists' antisemitism did not share Marx' grave. Engels wrote, "Jews are known to be cheated cheats everywhere, but especially in Austria." And others, including Kautsky, seemed to accept many of the antisemitic sentiments without accepting the "solutions" proposed to the "Jewish Question". Lenin and Stalin were not noted for being friendlier to Jews than the Tsar's family. Indeed, I am struck by the fact that in those countries where socialism took hold first and deepest, the anti-semitism seems to have been part and parcel of the conversion: the Dreyfuss Affair in France, the various purges in Russia, and finally the abomination in Germany, cradle of socialism. Antisemitism is not a subject about which I read, so I'm afraid I can't get any deeper into it, but it seems to me that my protagonist for the past few posts is not terribly far out there in terms of *what* he believes, but only in *how strongly* he believes it.
<< Home