Zionism, the Marxist Critique, and the Left
Laqueur, Walter
OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM IS AS OLD as Zionism itself; it has come from many directions, Jewish and non-Jewish, Left and Right, religious and atheist. It has been asserted on the one hand that...
...The New Left critique of Zionism and Israel reminds one of Marx's famous dictum that all great events in history appear twice —the second time as a farce: after Kautsky— Otto Heller...
...21 Lenin: Sochineniya, 2nd Russian ed., vol...
...it certainly entailed fewer complications than the Zionist endeavor...
...His views had not basically changed when he returned to the subject after the war...
...But this was not at all likely, for the political conditions were rapidly becoming worse: "Whatever Zionism does not attain within the next few years, it will never attain at all...
...The Jews have become an eminently revolutionary factor [Kautsky wrote], while Judaism has become a reactionary factor...
...Consequently, the appeal of Soviet Communism has declined among Jews both within Russia and outside...
...Marxists should not allow their emotions and the memories of Auschwitz to drive them to support the wrong cause...
...whether the practical difficulties on the road to national autonomy could be overcome was another question...
...it satisfied the ideals of the nationalist petty-bourgeois and was in absolute contradiction to the internationalism of the proletariat...
...Subsequently, he wrote with sympathy about the work of the Labor Zionists...
...What in comparison had Zionism to offer...
...Far from being a result of the development of productive forces, Zionism reflected the petrifaction of capitalism...
...No one, least of all the Soviet authorities and the Jewish Communists, wanted to be reminded of the affair...
...But since Marxist analysis and prediction have been belied by recent history, there is no assurance that it will be borne out by future developments...
...34 The composition of Deutscher's hail of fame is open to dispute, and it seems a little far-fetched to equate Freud's and Heine's attitude toward their fellow Jews with Leon Trotsky's and Rosa Luxemburg's...
...But this concept never made much sense in Eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews was concentrated, nor does it provide an explanation for pre- and postcapitalist anti-Semitism...
...Yet while it lasts, what are the Jews to do in those countries in which assimilation is just not possible...
...The critics of a later day, Communist, Trotskyite, or New Left, base their arguments in all essentials on his, with occasional differences of detail and emphasis...
...They all looked for ideals and fulfillment beyond Judaism...
...He will continue to live in the memory of man as man's greatest sufferer, as he who has been dealt with most severely by mankind, to whom he has given most...
...Being citydwellers the Jews had the qualities most required for the progress of humanity...
...On the contrary, it was likely to become much more acute...
...He did not include the Jews in this scheme but, unlike Bauer, he did not expressis verbis exclude them...
...it aimed not at following the line of necessary evolution but at putting a spoke in the wheel of progress...
...pp...
...For with the emergence of a Jewish nation and the state of Israel, the question whether Zionism was a good or a bad idea is no longer of political relevance...
...But with the advance of industrial capitalism, the barriers were gradually broken down, the Jews obtained equal rights, and many were absorbed by the peoples among whom they lived...
...I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto...
...15 (1896-97), p. 186...
...15 Neue Zeit, vol...
...Those who had any first-hand knowledge of the Jewish problem were now more aware that the issues involved were much more intricate than they had originally believed...
...Present difficulties quite apart, Zionists claim that recent history has shown that the Marxist concept of nationalism, of the nationstate in general and anti-Semitism in particular, is at best, grossly oversimplified...
...3 In the past the Jews had 8 Karl Kautsky, Rasse and Judentum (Berlin, WALTER LAQUEUR been an exclusive hereditary caste of urban merchants, financiers, intellectuals, and a small number of artisans, who from generation to generation had bequeathed certain traits peculiar to these strata...
...their fate in Czechoslovakia and Poland was no happier...
...Even in West Germany where the New Left has devoted much time to the study and critique of Zionism, it did not go much beyond the traditional arguments of anti-Zionism as it had been voiced before World War I by the German-Patriotic Anti-Zionist Committee 8 1 31 Zur Kritik, op...
...10 With anti-Semitism on the rise the Jews in Europe were condemned to be passive onlookers, not active participants in the revolutionary struggle...
...Even the demand for national cultural autonomy ("the most refined and therefore the most pernicious kind of nationalism") was thoroughly harmful...
...By 1945 most socialists recognized the right of the Jewish people to a national home...
...Ibid., p. 202...
...this figure should suffice insofar as the "class interests" of Jewish haute finance are concerned...
...while assimilation is still the aim, the conditions for making this policy a success do not exist...
...The idea that Zionism reflects the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie to have a market of its own is childish...
...Berlin n.d...
...Partly it was the result of insufficient and incompetent planning, but basically it was not the fault of the authorities...
...Mixing his metaphors and similes, Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologist, wrote in 1922: Some of the locusts that have been sucking the marrow of Europe are returning to the Promised Land and are already looking for greener pastures...
...There was no chance that they would ever become a majority in Palestine...
...they all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting...
...It did therefore not come as a surprise when, after the Six-Day War and shortly before his death, Deutscher wrote a bitter attack on Israel in which he argued (as he had done 40 years earlier) that Arab nationalism was progressive while Jewish nationalism was reactionary, that Israel represented neoimperialism in the Middle East, preached chauvinism, etc...
...Jean Longuet, (Karl Marx's grandson) one of the leaders of French socialism, declared in 1918 that the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine deserved the support of international social democracy...
...mus (Hamburg, 1922), pp...
...25 Heller's Untergang des Judentums ("Downfall of Judaism") presented the Stalinist case...
...Social Democracy was not against Zionism in principle, he argued, but since the (bourgeois) Zionists were trying to achieve their aim not by a liberation struggle but by bargaining with Turkey, and since they were moreover preaching class solidarity and national separatism and did not reject religion, international socialism could not support them.'6 In English socialist circles, Zionism was condemned as reactionary through and through, with such Russian-Jewish emigres as Theodore Rothstein taking a leading part in denouncing the movement.'' On occasion more sympathetic voices were heard...
...But the message of internationalism is not pronounced with the same measure of conviction as in the works of the socialists before 1914...
...Both Bundists and Zionists welcomed Renner's scheme and adapted it for their own purposes...
...33 Ibid., p. 126 et seq...
...It all depended on whether a particular national movement served or impeded the cause of revolution...
...Trotsky wrote in his autobiography that nationalist passions and prejudices were incomprehensible to him from his earliest childhood, that they produced in him a feeling of loathing and moral nausea...
...Marx and Engels shared the view of their liberal contemporaries that cultural, economic, and social progress was gradually overcoming national exclusivity and that the world (or Europe at any rate) was moving toward internationalism...
...a There was no longer any doubt 5 Ibid., p. 207...
...for Jews and Judaism represented a destructive element and their policy therefore was aimed at reducing Jewish influence and getting rid of as many Jews as possible...
...A few years later, Heller and many other Jewish Communists lost their lives in Nazi extermination camps or in one of the Soviet prisons from which there was no return...
...After the publication in Revue Socialiste of a proZionist article commenting on the Kishinev massacre, an editorial note dismissed the belief in Palestine as the home of all Jews as a myth...
...By and large Zionism remained a marginal issue for European social democrats...
...assimilation was to be actively furthered...
...It could have been argued that, however much the Jews resented the demand to give up their national identity, the price asked was not too high if in return they received complete equality before the law, and if eventually all nations were to undergo cultural assimilation...
...At best, Jews in Palestine would come to outnumber the Arabs, and the new Jewish state, although not embracing the great mass of world Jewry, would 1914...
...Leon seems not to have been particularly concerned about the advent of fascism, for the "very exacerbation of antiSemitism prepares the road for its disappearance...
...Jewish colonization in Palestine must collapse as soon as the Anglo-French hegemony over Asia Minor (including Egypt) collapses, and this is merely a question of time, perhaps of the very near future...
...This remained the attitude of the Jewish leaders and theoreticians of Austro-Marxism, and the advent of fascism did not make them change their mind...
...J. Moses, ed...
...Pacificists condemned it as a violent movement...
...9 The disappearance of the Jews would not be a tragedy like the disappearance of the American Indians or the Tasmanians...
...But 14 Rudolf Springer [Karl Renner], Der Kampf der oesterreichischen Nation um den Staat (Leipzig, 1902), passim...
...62-63...
...But there is every reason to assume that the Soviet attitude would have been negative even if considerations of foreign policy had not been involved...
...The sooner [this social ghetto] disappears, the better it will be not only for society, but also for the Jews themselves...
...24 Kalinin, president of the Soviet Union, predicted that in 10 years Birobidzhan would be the cultural center of the Jewish masses...
...19 Time was working against Zionism, but while it did its mischief it was the duty of every socialist to combat it, and not to be neutral...
...But even Nordau, the most alarmist of all Zionist leaders, was in retrospect too optimistic, claiming in many speeches and articles before World War I that it was unthinkable that whole Jewish communities would be destroyed as they were in the Middle Ages...
...A A T THIS POINT Kautsky deviated from the views of Marx and Engels, who attached little importance to national self-determination...
...He declared that he felt too much a German to join the Zionists, but added that he followed their activities with sympathy...
...In the Ukraine and the Crimea, predominanty Jewish areas even received regional autonomy and in March 1928 it was decided to set aside a special area in the Far East, Birobidzhan, for Jewish settlement...
...regressive development...
...22 Ibid., p. 141...
...It was the paradoxical consummation of the Jewish tragedy that the decay of bourgeois Europe had compelled the Jew to embrace the nation-state...
...Zionism, the last, most desperate and most 25 Otto Heller, Per Untergang des Judentums (Vienna, 1931), pp...
...It has been asserted on the one hand that the Zionist goal was impossible to achieve, on the other that it was undesirable, and by some that it was both illusory and undesirable...
...its analysis has been more fully confirmed by recent history than the predictions of its critics...
...They were first and foremost citizens of the world and only secondarily German, Austrian, or Russian nationals, Socialists of a later day held the same view, and in this respect there was no substantial difference between revolutionaries and re formists...
...In Western Europe the as 23 Quoted in J. Leftwich, What will happen to the Jews...
...Anti-Semitism, or "the Jewish peril," was given a new lease on life by the reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against liberalism...
...National antagonisms have not declined in importance, even in countries where Communism has prevailed...
...17 From Justice, October 21, 1899...
...Rosa Luxemburg complained to a friend (Mathilde Wurm) in 1917: "Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows...
...26 1bid., pp...
...The case of Otto Heller is of symptomatic interest...
...wretched kind of nationalism, was thus breathing its last...
...But the Jews in Spain and Southern Italy were expelled despite the fact that usury was not widespread among them, nor have the pogroms of 1006 (the First Crusade) anything to do with the social structure of the Jews of Western Europe...
...Zionism weakened them in this effort by encouraging ambitions that amounted to desertion of the colors...
...Die Loesung der Judenfrage (Berlin, 1907), passim...
...If so, they would be the first and only Soviet citizens, in the same sense that the German Jews had been almost the only liberals and republicans in the Weimar period, a position both unenviable and, in the long run, untenable...
...Of the many Jewish Communists in the West who gave enthusiastic support to the Soviet cause in the 1920s and '30s few were those who did not leave the party in disappointment...
...15 A few years later another (Jewish) contributor explained Zionism as the reaction of the Jewish bourgeoisie to modern anti-Semitism...
...They coud maintain their own cultural institutions such as schools, clubs, newspapers, and theaters...
...aries, she showed symptoms of that familiar phenomenon, Jewish self-hatred...
...It is difficult to take seriously the vulgar Marxist theses of Leon's present-day disciples in the United States, France, and Germany about the history of the Jewish people, anti-Semitism, and Zionism...
...The Marxist-Leninist thesis is based on the assumption that Communist regimes would successfully tackle the Jewish problem and that as a result the Jews as a group would 10 Zur Kritik der zionistischen Theorie and Praxis (Frankfurt: Resistentia, 1970), p. 39...
...It had been argued that the temporary victory of the counterrevolution, despite its appalling consequences, did not necessarily refute the socialist thesis about the ultimate absorption and assimilation of the Jews in their native countries...
...the Soviet Union and the other Communist countries have moved steadily away from the internationalist ideal toward a new form of national socialism...
...5 Zionism, to summarize Kautsky's view, was not a progressive, but a reactionary movement...
...1e Neue Zeit, vol...
...But if there were no Jews left in Communist Poland in 1970 this happened not as the result of the emergence of a "new and higher type of man," as Kautsky predicted, but in a manner reminiscent of the exodus from Spain in the 15th century...
...For national-cultural and linguistic antagonisms were only manifestations of the economic antagonisms created by capitalism...
...In brief, after the revolution a "Jewish Commissariat" was established to deal with the specific problem of the Jewish population...
...Later, greater emphasis was put on the industrialization of the Jewish population...
...Hebrew was banned, but Yiddish could be freely used during the 1920s and '30s...
...According to Marx and his disciples, such as Kautsky, the Jew was the representative of modern capitalism or, to be precise, of commercial capitalism...
...Thus America's war against Mexico was progressive because it had been waged in the interest of history, and Germany's annexation of Schleswig was justified in the name of civilization against barbarism, of progress against the status quo...
...and 40 years later yet another generation of critics...
...pp...
...Unlike most other Marxists who dealt with the problem, he was familiar with the writings of the theoreticians of labor Zionism...
...In the 1930s patriotism returned with a vengeance, the national heroes of Russian history were restored to a place of honor, and nationalism became a factor of growing importance in Soviet domestic policy...
...The nation and the state have become a reality to the joy of some and the distress of others...
...WALTER LAQUEUR even in the 1930s it was no more than about $1.5 million...
...Arab opposition is not surprising, but attacks have come from other quarters too, including the Catholic Church, Asian nationalists suspicious of European intruders, Arabophile European politicians and orientalists, and the Communists...
...the emergence of a Jewish state in the 19th century would have created fewer problems...
...it is as legitimate, or illegitimate, as other national movements— or nations...
...As far as he personally was concerned, his Jewish origin must have appeared an unfortunate accident of birth and a matter of considerable embarrassment...
...Events have taken a similar course in the Soviet Union...
...The Austrian Marxists, who faced the nationality problem in an acute form, were aware of the weakness of this aspect of Marxist theory and provided in the works of Otto Bauer and Karl Renner a more sophisticated analysis...
...there was in their view no justification for any specific Jewish solidarity or national separatism...
...It might seem they should have welcomed a movement that intended precisely this, namely, to reduce the number of Jews in the various European countries, but in fact they have frequently turned against it...
...26 Heller freely used Kautsky's similes without acknowledging their origin...
...According to Kautsky, the traits derived from the primitive races of man tended to disappear as economic evolution progressed...
...Zionism was psychologically understandable as a reaction to cruel persecution, but born of despair and based on a myth, it was, like all other forms of nationalism, reactionary and reprehensible...
...The fact that Herzl and Nordau intended to carry Western civilization to the East would not necessarily have shocked them as it did liberals of a later day...
...Later, Moscow's alliance with the Arabs made a firm anti-Israeli policy imperative...
...He conceded that East European Jews might have to emigrate, but a rescue action on their behalf was not to be coupled with the idea of a Jewish state, which in any case would face insurmountable obstacles...
...they had no continuous territory of their own, serving as a political framework and a national market...
...The Jews have been difficult to absorb for capitalist and Communist societies alike...
...It was a historical mistake, an impossibility, since it tried to detach the Jewish question from the problem of commodity production with which the fate of Jewry was indissolubly connected...
...It was an anachronism, contradicting not just the laws of historic development but common sense...
...They could argue, as some did, that the problems of individual nations have to be subordinated to the higher interests of the world revolution and that, seen from this vantage point, the Jewish problem was not the most important...
...Palestine was too good or too important to be given to the Jews, who in any case had lost the capacity to build a state of their own...
...But events in the Soviet Union were taking a very different course from what Lenin had anticipated...
...52-53...
...the Jewish idea would not find its fulfillment in a territorially limited homeland...
...Deutscher's instinctive rejection of the 37J• Deutscher: The non-Jewish Jew (London, 1968), p. 111-12...
...This did not, however, affect their basic conviction: that the coming socialist revolution would solve the Jewish question wherever it existed, and that meanwhile everyone had to participate actively in the struggle for the liberation of the working class in his country of origin...
...Not liberalism, but only a victorious proletariat could bring complete emancipation...
...According to Pernerstorfer, another Austrian socialist leader, it was up to the Jews to decide whether they were a nation or not...
...This was not a real living nation...
...Pernerstorfer thought that the Jews in Eastern Europe would survive in the long run only if they got an independent state.'¢ Such individual voices apart, the attitude of international social democracy toward Zionism remained hostile until World War I. Neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the German socialists, dismissed Herzl's Judenstaat as utopian and unworthy of serious consideration, a beautiful cloak in which a nation no longer alive was to appear on the historical stage for the last time, to disappear after that forever...
...But it would probably not be Palestine, and in any case the whole problem would hardly find a solution under capitalism...
...Zionism was reactionary and chauvinistic...
...Kautsky's views have been given at some length because they remain the most consistent and systematic exposition of the Marxist arguments against Zionism...
...More recently the Trotskyite critics of Israel have claimed that Israel provoked the war of 1967 because it could not overcome its economic crisis...
...Karl Renner developed a highly complicated concept of nonterritorial autonomy as the only feasible way to safeguard the interests of minorities in a multinational state...
...The Jewish proletarians and the starving artisans of Eastern Europe pose a very different question: next year in a socialist society...
...Those advocating abstract internationalist principles are usually influenced by the interests of the nations to which they belong...
...it emerged precisely because, in contrast to the liberal and Marxist analysis, it assumed that the Jewish question would not disappear in the foreseeable future...
...an English socialist journal promised that once the class struggle was won, the Jews too would find a place in the sun to shape their own national destiny...
...The ideological rationale for socialist anti-Zionism was provided by Karl Kautsky, for many years the most respected interpreter of Marxist doctrine for West and East European socialists alike...
...When Herzl tried to gain their support they poked fun at him and threw him out...
...WALTER LAQUEUR The demand for national cultural autonomy was therefore ridiculous...
...Zionists were unlikely to be impressed by this argument for more than one reason...
...Among the founders and early leaders of the German Communist party there was a majority of Jews...
...compatible with Marxism...
...21-22...
...Perhaps the Jews did need a territory of their own after all, even under socialism...
...It could be argued with equal logic that Mark Rudd and Miss Dohrn joined the Weathermen because they received not enough pocket money at home...
...Among the Jews of Eastern Europe, for specific economic and social reasons, the call for national solidarity, i.e., Zionism, had found a considerable echo, but it had no future...
...1 Some anti-Semites welcomed Zionism, others denounced it in the sharpestterms...
...Even such staunch anti-Communists as Haim Zhitlovsky, one of the theoreticians of Jewish socialism, and the sociologist Lestchinsky were deeply impressed...
...How was a powerful industry to be developed in Palestine...
...He showed little interest in the problem, and while he commented on a great many issues in world politics at one time or another he hardly ever dealt with Jewish affairs...
...Herzl and Nordau are attacked by the New Left for having been "inveterate pessimists," for having maintained the "inevitability of anti-Semitism...
...2 Rosenberg demanded the outlawing of Zionism as an enemy of the German state, and the indictment of Zionists on the charge of high treason...
...Only 3 or 4 percent of them were connected with agriculture, the remainder were city-dwellers, scattered all over Russia, not constituting a majority in any single province...
...There was no doubt that they had the right to national existence...
...London, 1936), pp...
...Forty years after its foundation, Birobidzhan was a drab provincial region with about 25,000 Jewish inhabitants, a small percentage of the total population...
...This was the time when belief in the Soviet Union was at its height: Stalin had stamped out unemployment and illiteracy, he had liquidated neurosis, crime, juvenile delinquency, and alcoholism...
...Once world revolution had prevailed, the national problem would lose its acuteness...
...In Galicia and Russia they were not a nation either, but had remained a caste, through no fault of their own but that of the anti-Semites...
...Axelrod declared in 1917 that he was now in favor of the realization of the aims of Zionism...
...These were the years of the world economic crisis, of the rise of fascist and anti-Semitic movements all over Europe...
...Next year in Birobidzhan...
...Of symptomatic interest were the changes in the attitude of leading socialists of the older generation, such as Paul Axelrod and Eduard Bernstein, who earlier had sharply opposed Zionism...
...This was not necessarily a disaster in Zionist eyes, but it certainly underlined the argument that the position of the Jews in the revolutionary movement was highly problematical...
...He predicted that Jewish Luftmenschen and intellectuals would again congregate in the cities and the Palestinian proletariat would become more class-conscious...
...A New Left critic of Zionism wrote in 1970 that subsequent events have shown that Trotsky and Zinoviev, Kamenev and Radek had been right, not the Zionists...
...If you ask them about Palestine, they 23 J. V. Stalin: Marxism and the National Question (New York, n.d...
...But they were singled out for attack in Stalin's last years, and again later under his successors...
...Next year in the Crimea...
...some delegations at the meetings of the Socialist International before 1914 were almost exclusively Jewish...
...It was above all the WALTER LAQUEUR growing discrepancy between Bolshevik theory and practice that made the Communist case unconvincing...
...In some respects he went beyond them asserting that nationalism even in its most justified and innocuous form was in 20 Neue Zeit, vol...
...The Wandering Jew will thus at last find a haven of rest...
...It was easier then to be optimistic in this respect than after 1945...
...The dream of a Siberian Palestine did not last...
...they were the natural protagonists of cosmopolitanism, the advocates not of nation-states but of internationalism...
...7 All one could hope for therefore was that the number of victims would not be great: But the dangers to the Jews who are lured to Palestine by a Messianic aspiration do not exhaust all the baleful effects of Zionism...
...B Ibid., p. 213...
...The Jews are expendable...
...Furthermore, Zionism rejects as unreasonable the demand that the Jews should subordinate their national aspirations to the higher interest of the future ideal world state—which may (or may not) come into existence one day, and may (or may not) be superior to the present order...
...Zionism was obnoxious and reactionary because it impeded assimilation.20 After the war Bernstein admitted that he had underrated the importance and persistence of anti-Semitism...
...cit., p. 7. Shorn of the ideological underpinnings, it always amounted to proving that Arab nationalism was progressive whereas Jewish nationalism was evil...
...For Zionism was 18 Ibid., quoted on pp...
...29 A. Leon, Conception materialiste de la question Juive (Paris, 1946...
...Zionism had inspired its followers to great creative achievements...
...It was easier to denounce Zionism than point to an alternative, for the prospects of the nonJewish Jew acting as pioneer and apostle of internationalism in an intensely nationalist world were clearly not very promising...
...The poor, weak Jewish settlers in Palestine would be the chief sufferers in this battle, "the least able to defend themselves, as well as least capable to escape...
...They will accept the view that the nation-state is not the final goal of human history but only a transitional stage...
...And as far as anti-Semitism is concerned, Zionism has a strong case...
...According to their theories the Jews originally migrated from Palestine because economic reasons forced them to do so...
...Gandhi wrote that as a spiritual ideal Zionism had his sympathy, but by the use of force the Jews had vulgarized and debased their ideal...
...As an "absolute minority" lacking a common territory, they were, unlike the Czechs, doomed as a nation, bound to be absorbed into the cultural community of the European nations.12 While not rejecting Jewish national culture and opposing compulsory assimilation, Bauer thought it would be wrong for the Jews to insist on national autonomy because this would retard the inevitable historical process...
...137, 149...
...Kautsky and the Marxist fundamentalists remained opposed, and the attacks emanating from these circles were harsh in both form and content...
...12 Ibid., p. 366 et seq...
...He was impressed by the idealism of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine and their achievements, which had to convince anyone who had doubted Jewish energy and resolution.4 But Zionist enthusiasm was not likely to persist...
...But he had no clear answer for the perplexed Jewish revolutionaries of his own time...
...13 The non-Jewish leaders of Austro-Marxism took on occasion a more lenient view of Zionism...
...i Graf Leo Tolstoi ueber die Juden, O. Perga-2 Alfred Rosenberg, Der staatsfeindliche Zionisment, ed...
...This in a way was an understatement of her position, because, like some other Jewish revolution s* Ibid., p. 26...
...1 ' Before 1914 the only major exception to this wholesale rejection of Zionism by the Left was the circle of the Sozialistische Monatshefte, a revisionist journal edited by Josef Bloch in Berlin which pursued an independent line on this as on many other issues...
...Capitalist decay was the basis for the growth of Zionism, but at the same time it was the reason for the impossibility of its realization...
...The young Marx did publish an essay on the Jewish question, but it is of greater interest to the student of metaphysics than of history...
...The present essay, part of a larger study, deals with the Marxist and neo-Marxist critique of Zionism...
...ZIONISM, THE MARXIST CRITIQUE, AND THE LEFT That assimilation was desirable was axiomatic for Bernstein as it was for Kautsky, his chief antagonist...
...What kind of a nation was this, Stalin asked, that consisted of Georgian, Dagestani, Russian, American Jews, and so on...
...In Eastern Europe, too, not only Zionism but even less ambitious forms of Jewish nationalism such as Bundism, with its demand for cultural-national autonomy, were emphatically rejected by the leading socialists...
...Whereas Kautsky had originally regarded a common language as the decisive criterion for the existence of a nation (later he added a second criterion: territory), Otto Bauer defined a nation as a community of fate, culture, and character: "An aggregate of people bound into a corn ZIONISM, THE MARXIST CRITIQUE, AND THE LEFT munity of character by a community of fate...
...In 1928, other leading social democrats— including Louis de Brouckere, Vincent Auriol, Camille Huysmans, George Lambury, Arthur Henderson, and Rudolf Breitscheid— joined a "Socialist Committee for Working Palestine...
...There were many Jews in the leadership of the European and American socialist parties...
...WHATEVER TROTSKY'S QUARREL with the old-guard Bolsheviks, he did not disagree with their policy toward the Jews...
...Birobidzhan would be a Jewish republic, a center of genuine Jewish socialist culture...
...What kind of race, whose members lived in different parts of the world, spoke different languages, never saw each other, and never acted in concert...
...they were still expected to give up their national identity and to become assimilated, but it was no longer clear whether they should try to become Russians, Ukrainians, or Turkmen, or whether to be Soviet citizens tout court...
...About East European Jewry they were ignorant, and as for the Jews in the West they shared the liberal belief that assimilation would solve that problem...
...THE ZIONIST RESPONSE to the Marxist critique can be summarized as follows: Marxism has been mistaken in underrating the importance of nationalism in recent history...
...laugh...
...The Jews of the West had already achieved the highest degree of assimilation in the civilized countries...
...e !bid., p. 211...
...But this was by no means an original or specifically "Marxist" attitude...
...its argument was borrowed by and large from Kautsky, though the "renegade" Kautsky was for different reasons by that time no longer in the good books of the Bolsheviks...
...Persecution, the slaughter of millions of Jews, is a regrettable episode, but the revolutionary socialist is concerned with the future of all mankind...
...Deutscher's opposition to Zionism was based in the last resort on the liberal critique of the Jewish national movement...
...There were two forms of defense against this pressure: proletarian solidarity and Jewish solidarity...
...The Jews, it is further argued, were persecuted in the Middle Ages because they engaged in usury...
...The appeal to the Jews of Germany not to be seduced by the siren song of the Zionists but to stay in their native country was not exclusively Communist either...
...disappear...
...Lenin's rejection of Jewish nationalism was based on the writings of Kautsky and Otto Bauer, whom he frequently quoted...
...It is perhaps far worse that Zionism is wasting the fortunes and resources of the Jews in a wrong direction, at a moment when their true destinies are being decided on an entirely different arena, for which decision it would be necessary for them to concentrate all their forces...
...it has come from many directions, Jewish and non-Jewish, Left and Right, religious and atheist...
...Zionism was a phenomenon frequently observed among a dying people...
...Marx, Engels, and their immediate disciples were preoccupied with the problems of class and class struggle...
...When it appeared in the bookshops, Hitler's brownshirts were already marching through the cities of Germany...
...the only question was whether they would reach it by peaceful concessions or by a period of savage guerrilla warfare and bloody insurrections...
...The Soviet attitude toward Zionism has remained consistently hostile...
...2 (1891-92), pp...
...Its main weakness is that it does not provide clear answers for the present and the forseeable future...
...It would have been unthinkable to permit substantial numbers of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Palestine, since this would have been tantamount to an open admission of the failure of Soviet nationalities policy...
...Zionists concede that it was a historical misfortune that the Jewish national movement appeared so late on the historical scene...
...Leon Blum and Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky thought of themselves above all as members of the international socialist movement...
...Deutscher must have felt that his strictures against the evils of nationalism might conceivably influence some Jews, but he cannot have been confident about their effect on the Russians, the Chinese, and other nations, "socialist" or nonsocialist...
...But the book had one major flaw: it ignored the writing on the wall...
...How were the Jews to be induced to work in agriculture...
...9 Ibid., p. 246...
...the Jews were a mixed race, but so were the non-Jews...
...what does the future of a small people matter in the global context...
...Quotations are from the English edition, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (Mexico, 1950), p. 210, et seq...
...222, 228...
...they frequently referred with contempt to "lousy little peoples" whose interests were to be ignored in the higher interest of history...
...Stalin, writing in 1913, elaborated Lenin's view, defining a nation as a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and mental constitution expressed in a community of culture...
...According to this definition the Jews were of course not a nation...
...There is little in this that could not be found in earlier Marxist writers, not even the far-fetched thesis that economic developments in Europe compelled the Jewish bourgeoisie to create a national state in order to develop its productive forces...
...la A. Szanto: Der Zionismus — eine nationalistische and reaktionaere Ulopie (Berlin, 1930), pp...
...To this vital question no convincing answer has come forth from the Marxist critics of Zionism...
...More attention was devoted by the Zionists to the strictures of Isaac Deutscher, perhaps because, unlike the Trotskyite and New Left writers, he was a well-known literary figure who reached a wide public and who, because of his background, was bound to know more about the subject than they did...
...having lost this function, he was bound to disappear...
...They had in common their rootlessness and their vulnerability...
...But Zionism is not concerned with these distant prospects...
...At its best Zionism is the impotent effort of an unfit people to achieve something constructive, but in the main it makes available to ambitious speculators a new field in which to practice usury on a worldwide scale...
...But as a national movement and a Weltanschauung, its validity can neither be proved nor refuted...
...Z Z IONISTS PAID LITTLE ATTENTION to the views of Leon and other Trotskyite ideologists, for wherever they differed from Kautsky and the Bolsheviks they offered (to put it mildly) no startling new insights...
...Nor was this belief limited to committed party members...
...Bernard Lazare was almost alone in sympathizing with the new movement...
...18, 23...
...It differed from Kautsky in adopting a more virulent tone...
...It was a persuasive theme, and, if its ideological premises were accepted, logical and consistent despite its shrillness and arrogance...
...A systematic study of national movements was undertaken only later on, toward the turn of the century, especially in countries where these issues were of particular importance and urgency, as in prewar Austria...
...Judaism was doomed because it had lost its privileged, monopolistic position in capitalist society...
...it was shared, for instance, by the Bundists...
...the sooner it was liquidated the better for the Jews...
...Deutscher, too, regarded Zionism as a profoundly reactionary movement, but he admitted that the Bolsheviks had taken an overoptimistic view of the chances of solving the Jewish problem...
...These settlers are founding a home in the taigas of Siberia not only for themselves but for millions of their people...
...See also"On the Jewish Question," in Fourth International, December 1945...
...But Deutscher still believed that basically Zionism was a reactionary force...
...What is Jerusalem to the Jewish proletarian...
...The Polish, German, or Austrian working class neither needed nor wanted the Jews as 7 Ibid., p. 212...
...it was not a constructive effort, but on the contrary a mere ruse, part of the conspiracy to establish Jewish world rule...
...Its bankruptcy "was final and irrevocable," Otto Heller wrote in 1931 in a much discussed book...
...At the same time the social conditions for a revival of anti-Semitism had disappeared...
...The "money Jews" (as Herzl called them) wanted nothing of the sort, least of all in a backward province of the Ottoman Empire...
...ZIONISM, THE MARXIST CRITIQUE, AND THE LEFT about the final victory of the "Arabian" (sic) people...
...quoted from the revised English translation, Are the Jews a Race...
...On the contrary, it had to warn the masses against any nationalist illusions and to welcome every type of assimilation unless based on coercion...
...Even the bestialities of Hitler had not shaken him in his belief that Jewish nationalism was bound to generate reactionary tendencies, namely the resurrection of a language that had been dead for almost 2,000 years and the rebirth of an antiquated religion...
...THE FAILURE OF BIROBIDZHAND there was much sympathy in the West for the Soviet Union, the only country in which Jews were believed to be secure and in which the Jewish question was said to have been solved...
...But no one could seriously maintain that petrified religious rites and vanishing psychological traits were stronger than their socioeconomic and cultural surroundings, which were inevitably leading to assimilation.23 The Bolsheviks sincerely intended to solve the Jewish question in Russia by giving full freedom to all Jews...
...Soviet Jews had no desire to build a second Zion on the shores of the Amur...
...236-237...
...A detailed survey of the Jewish policy of the Communist party of the Soviet Union lies outside the range of this article...
...By the late 1920s most socialists had realized that even if Zionism was mistaken, the Second International and its affiliated parties had no ready alternative answer to the Jewish problem...
...Zionism was a product of the petty bourgeois stratum in European Jewry, a counterrevolutionary movement...
...WALTER LAQUEUR MARXISTS AGREE with the liberal critics of Zionism in regarding assimilation as desirable, and rejecting Zionism for trying to impede this inevitable process...
...Thus the Jewish problem in the Soviet Union has remained unsolved...
...Zionism was the last appearance of Ahasuerus, the Eternal Jew, on the historical scene, and he had reached the end of the road...
...One single Jewish community, Berlin, spent more each year on social welfare than the Jewish Agency for building Palestine...
...At one stage in his career he engaged in public soul-searching, writing in 1954 that he had abandoned his anti-Zionism which had been based on his confidence in the European labor movement: "If instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler's gas chambers...
...21 Marxists had to fight against any form of national oppression, but it did not follow that the proletariat had to support the national development of every nation...
...ZIONISM, THE MARXIST CRITIQUE, AND THE LEFT Some of Trotsky's disciples took a greater interest, and while they made no significant theoretical contribution (for their views, too, were based on Kautsky), their opinions have a certain historical relevance, for they later influenced the New Left in its antiZionist outlook.28 The chief Trotskyite ideologist on Zionism and the Jewish question was the Belgian A. Leon, a former member of a socialistZionist youth movement...
...30 Leon was arrested by the Germans a year or two after these lines were written and died like millions of other Jews in a Nazi extermination camp...
...Perhaps Marx was mistaken: some events keep repeating themselves—the third time as theater of the absurd...
...It 0. Bauer, Die Nationalitaetenfrage and die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna, 1907), p. 135...
...The views he expressed were shared by thousands of young Jewish Communists all over Europe who were firmly convinced that Communism and no other movement was capable of solving the Jewish question...
...For this is more or less what the Zionist-socialist theorist Borochov had predicted, but in contrast to Borochov, Leon regarded it as a 28 See for instance N. Weinstock, Le Sionisme contre Israel (Paris, 1968...
...It is interesting to compare this list of non-Jewish Jews with Kautsky's (Spinoza, Heine, Lassalle, Marx), and with Otto Bauer's (Spinoza, Ricardo, Disraeli, Marx, Lassalle, Heine...
...Having reached the conclusion that Zionism, not excluding its extreme left wing, was incurably reactionary in character, Leon invested considerable efforts in refuting it: other national movements in Europe had been closely linked with the ascending phase of capitalism, whereas the Jewish national movement appeared on the scene only after the process of the formation of nations was approaching its end...
...32 The Jewish state, he wrote in a moment of weakness, had become a "historical necessity and a living reality...
...Originally it was rejected as a tool of British imperialism...
...All theoretical considerations apart, Kautsky saw in 1914 insurmountable obstacles on the road to the realization of the Zionist aim...
...French socialists were even less interested, and certainly not favorably inclined...
...See also, E. Pernerstorfer, "Zur Judenfrage," in Der Jude, 1916-17, p. 308...
...Judaism for Marx was a totally negative phenomenon, something to be got rid of as quickly and as radically as possible...
...the year before Hitler came to power there was not a single one among the 100 Communist deputies in the Reichstag...
...ZIONISM, THE MARXIST CRITIQUE, AND THE LEFT While socialism had many followers among the Zionists, socialist theory, especially the Marxist variety, was for a long time hostile to the Jewish national movement...
...For it would not be a decline into degradation but an ascent to an immense field of activity making possible the creation of a new and higher type of man...
...was it the "reactionary character of Judaism" that was responsible for this, or the fact that the Jews are an "eminently revolutionary factor" and thus likely to disturb the peace of postrevolutionary regimes...
...Many of his antisocialist contemporaries reacted in exactly the same way...
...Dimanstein, its head, promised that a Palestine would be built in Moscow by making the masses productive, and by organizing Jewish agricultural communes...
...8 Kautsky was referring to Eastern Europe, where the fate of 8-10 million Jews was to be decided, and since emigration could not help them, their destiny was intimately linked with the prospects of revolution...
...The topic is fascinating but now mainly of historical interest...
...Jews have played a leading part in the early phases of all Socialist and Communist parties, but almost everywhere they have been squeezed out...
...This left the Jews in a vulnerable position...
...Zionism no doubt can be subjected to trenchant criticism from different points of view...
...6-8 et seq...
...There was, however, no longer a consensus on these lines in socialist ranks...
...173-74...
...In the East, under socialism, the Jewish question had been solved once and for all: Next year in Jerusalem...
...In these conditions total assimilation has become difficult if not impossible...
...The right of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine was recognized in various resolutions of international socialist congresses between 1917 and 1920...
...Only a few thousand Jews came, and most of them turned back within a few months...
...27 27 Forward (Yiddish), January 28, 1937...
...In Central and Western Europe assimilation was about to be completed, Szanto wrote in 1930: "Anti-Semitism is merely engaged in rearguard actions...
...Since all these Bolshevik leaders fell victim to Stalinism, the argument is not exactly convincing...
...Next year in Jerusalem...
...A A FTER WORLD WAR I many socialists modified their attitude...
...Here the belief in a specific Jewish spiritual mission is replaced by a purely secular credo...
...far from contributing to the solution of the Jewish problem it was trying to sabotage the absorption of the Jews in their native countries...
...Bernstein, father of the reformist trend in German social democracy, also joined the pro-Palestine socialist committee in 1928...
...autonomy was demanded on behalf of a nation whose existence was yet to be proved and whose future had not been recognized...
...His colleague Leon Blum even became one of the non-Zionist members of the Jewish Agency in 1929...
...They were denounced as cosmopolitans and nationalists at one and the same time...
...In Western Europe early Zionism was regarded by socialists as a romantic, utopian, reactionary aberration...
...17, p. 118...
...16 (1897-98), p.600...
...These two failed precisely because they were "rootless Jews" and did not realize the depth of national feeling in Germany and Russia which made it illusory to pursue an internationalist policy...
...for the Jewish question could be solved only after the victory of world revolution...
...Vandervelde, one of the most respected figures of the Second International and for many years its chairman, visited Palestine in the 1920s...
...The possibility of Jewish assimilation in a truly internationalist society such as Lenin envisaged cannot be excluded, but such a society does not exist...
...33 Zionism had worked from the outset for a purely Jewish state...
...30 Ibid., pp...
...Where could space be found for a Jewish state, since all regions in the civilized world had been preempted...
...Such a vision does not lack consistency...
...OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM IS AS OLD as Zionism itself...
...Before 1914 he, too, had favored the denationalization of the Jews who, he said, no longer had any specific mission...
...Unlike the liberals, they did not believe that all national movements were equal...
...WALTER LAQUEUR on the whole, English socialists did not pay much attention to the issue...
...Deutscher, theoretically at least, was aware of the dilemma...
...quoted in E. Silberner, Sozialisten zur Judenfrage (Berlin, 1962), p. 262...
...The erstwhile follower of the Galician Rabbi of Ger emerges as a modern, socialist "protest rabbi," 35 unshaken in his belief that the world is moving away from national sovereignty and the nation-state toward internationalism, and that the message of the world of tomorrow, the message of universal human emancipation, is the one Jews should retrieve, not their misplaced enthusiasm for parochial nationalism...
...It was announced that by 1937 at least 150,000 Jews would be living there...
...C C OMMUNISM WAS NOT BESET by such doubts, claiming that it did have a solution...
...The official Communist case against Zionism, once advocated with so much ardor and conviction, no longer presents a serious ideological challenge...
...19 (1900-1901), p. 324 et...
...other nations too have come and gone in history...
...But with the rise of nationalist and anti-Semitic currents their position became more difficult and they grew more conscious (and selfconscious) of their Jewish origin...
...Then the Jews would be absorbed, would cease to exist as such...
...The liberals, too, were convinced that a man's national origin was not of great importance...
...It would be interesting to know why elsewhere in the Near East economic factors had other effects...
...ZIONISM, THE MARXIST CRITIQUE, AND THE LEFT Jewish national movement went deeper and was in a way quite unconnected with the conflict between Israel and the Arabs...
...As a result Jewish capitalists would lose interest, and without capital the process of rebuilding would come to a halt...
...This was not to be deplored...
...After World War II many Marxists, such as Harold Laski, admitted that their views on the Jewish question had been mistaken and accepted the necessity of a Jewish state...
...There was tremendous enthusiasm among Jewish Communists abroad...
...They would have rejected Zionism for reasons of Realpolitik, because it appeared too late on the international scene and was not strong enough to accomplish its self-proclaimed task...
...Two years later, antiSemitism in its most rabid form had seized Germany and continued to expand all over Europe despite the confident announcement that anti-Semitism had lost its "social fours dations...
...did the Jews really want a state on the pattern of Serbia, Rumania, or Montenegro...
...Whoever is not against it is for it...
...WALTER LAQUEUR allies...
...ZIONISM, THE MARXIST CRITIQUE, AND THE LEFT similation of the Jewish bourgeoisie, as well as of the lower middle class and the workers, was an irresistible process...
...18 Quoted in the .Leo Baeck Year Book, X (London, 1965), p. 275...
...I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victim in Putamayo, the Negroes in Africa...
...It denied the right of self-determination of nations and proclaimed instead the doctrine of historical rights...
...it was something mystical, amorphous, nebulous, out of this world...
...not a marginal phenomenon, it was a cancerous disease...
...All the Jewish geniuses throughout recent centuries, he wrote in his credo, the great revolutionaries of modem thought such as Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud, had been heretics...
...London, 1926), p. 89 et seq...
...some were downright reactionary...
...most of their leaders did not believe in the success of the Palestinian experiment, for both ideological and practical reasons, but after 1918 their tone was on the whole sorrowful rather than angry...
...shortly before their demise they suddenly feel a new lease on life, only to expire the more quickly...
...The annual budget of the World Zionist movement after Herzl's death amounted to some $10,000...
...after all, he did mention the vulnerability of the cosmopolitan Jew...
...fascism, he predicted, would accelerate the proletarianization of the middle classes...
...The Palestine dream will long have receded into history when in Birobidzhan there will be motor cars, railways and steamers, huge factories belching forth their smoke...
...The Marxist analysis (like the liberal analysis) may be correct sub specie aeternatis, history may move in the direction of one world, with equality for all races, nations, and peoples...
...What of the more distant prospect...
...Toward the end of his life, he slightly modified his position...
...The Jews would not become more numerous than the Arabs, nor would they succeed in convincing the Arabs that Jewish rule could be to their advantage...
...One of the few exceptions was an article in Iskra in 1904 in which he called Herzl a shameless adventurer and referred to the "hysterical sobbings" of Zionism...
...11 The Jews were still a nation, especially those in Eastern Europe, but everywhere they were in the process of ceasing to be one...
...Kautsky was sure that the Palestinian adventure would end in tragedy...
...they wanted to get rid of them, or, at best they regarded them as an embarrassment in their political struggle...
...T T HE MARXIST CRITICS did not foresee the victory of fascism and the extermination of the majority of European Jewry...
...It would be difficult to imagine that Lenin, an internationalist second to none, would have referred with such dismay to "special Russian sorrows...
...89-90...
...The oppressed Jews of Russia and Galicia were to become equal citizens of the new socialist society...
...The appeal to the Jews to participate in the revolutionary struggle in their homeland was no doubt well-meant, but even on the assumption that the interests of the Jews and the revolution were identical, it was not practical politics...
...Neue Zeit, vol...
...33 This refers to a group of German rabbis who publicly dissociated themselves from Herzl after the appearance of The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) and were called by the Zionists Protest Rabbiner...
...Lenin had no doubt been sincere in his belief that mankind was inexorably moving toward internationalism...
...Zionism, according to a pamphlet by Alexander Szanto (to provide a fairly typical example), was a harmful illusion...
...32 (1913-14), quoted in Silberner, Sozialisten zur Judenfrage, op...
...the disappearance of the ghetto would not give rise to melancholy longings...
...Tolstoy said that Zionism was not a progressive but basically a militarist movement...
...a growing number of fellow travelers were influenced by it, and Hitler's seizure of power only strengthened them in their conviction...
...29 Judaism had been indispensable in precapitalist society, but capitalism had destroyed the social bases on which Jews had for centuries maintained themselves...
...0 0 NLY TOWARD the end of the 19th century did the Jewish issue assume greater importance in socialist thought and policy, partly as the result of the spread of antiSemitism...
...nevertheless be predominantly Jewish in character...
...The Marxist appeal to Jewish toilers and intellectuals to share in the class struggle in their native countries was not practical politics in Germany in 1933, and it has encountered obstacles to a greater or a lesser degree everywhere...
...Otto Heller wrote: The Jews have gone into the Siberian forests...
...Recent experience had taught him, he said in an interview in 1937, that his old hopes for assimilation had been overoptimistic...
...Such attacks, far from solving the Jewish problem, helped to perpetuate it...
...All the Jews had in common was their religion, their common origin, and a few remaining national characteristics...
...They were bound to remain parasites, and Zionism was therefore a sham...
...Poale Zion was an active member of the Second International, much to the dismay of anti-Zionists like Szanto...
...Like them he regarded Zionism as a wholly reactionary phenomenon...
...wherever they had other occupations, there were no pogroms...
...Friedrich Adler wrote in 1949 that he and his father (one of the founders of the party) had always considered the complete assimilation of the Jews both desirable and possible...
...22 Jewish national culture was the slogan of rabbis and bourgeois, and its advocates were therefore enemies of the proletariat...
...This question was answered by history long ago...
...He had pro duced a new type of man, and in the process anti-Semitism was rapidly disappearing...
...It is like a weight of lead attached to the feet of the Jews...
...Assimilation might have worked within generations as a result of intermarriage and the absence of Jewish education, if the Jews had been left in peace...
...THE COMMUNIST CRITIQUE of Zionism had its heyday in the 1930s but later lost much of its appeal, and not just because Birobidzhan had failed to offer a serious alternative to Palestine...
...For Plekhanov and the men of his generation the Bundists were merely "Zionists suffering from seasickness...
Vol. 18 • December 1971 • No. 6
