GROWING PAINS OF SPANISH SOCIALISM: MARX AND THE JEWS
Pachter, Henry
It is not because his life was too short that Moses could not enter the promised land, but because it was a human life. —FRANZ KAFKA I: Psycho-History vs. Marx Histories of socialism usually...
...A hundred years earlier, Voltaire had said: "Christians are uncircumcised Jews," and Germans had always called their Christian usurers "white Jews...
...VI: From Usury to Capital Anyway, the essay "On the Jewish Question," which has aroused so much controversy, does not reflect Marx's mature thought...
...According to Seigel (Marx's Fate, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 145) Marx came into his own when in 1844 he eventually rejected the ChristianGerman philosophy and embraced "Jewish" materialism...
...one after the other the Russians, the Danes, the Prussians, the "Ur-Teutons," the "Balkanians," the Croatians, the Slovenians have stood in the path of revolution and therefore are subjected to national or racial slurs...
...his interaction with his contemporaries rather than his dreams about his ancestors...
...Thus Mircea Eliade writes in The Sacred and the Profane (pp...
...since religious instruction belonged to the high school curriculum, writers and painters were able to draw freely on the rich imagery of the Biblical stories...
...In "On the Jewish Question" Marx took the first painful step away from primitive anticapitalist protest, but he still used the mystified language and imagery of that romantic rebellion...
...even socially successful, baptized Jews, like Rahel Varnhagen, complained about it...
...Heinrich Graetz, the great Jewish historian, wrote in his 12-volume Geschichte der Juden passages like this: Twisting and turning, lawyers' tricks, wit, and prejudiced rejection of what transcends their horizon...
...For instance, among middleclass German Jews one never spoke of money...
...in the case of Marx's and Engels's attitude to race and religion, the evolution of their thoughts out of the Hegelian left is so logical, and the relatedness of that evolution to the political and social developments of their age is so direct and open, that the search for hidden psychological sources seems redundant or misleading...
...He was suspicious of Jews like Lassalle, who wished to become part of the German establishment...
...Marx yearned to overcome the split between the Sabbath Jew and the workaday Jew, between workday and holiday...
...For to him, alienation is not a general Weltschmerz, not the Kafkaesque consciousness of impotence vis -a-vis unknown powers, but the specific separation of the worker from his work, from its product, from his fellow workers and, as worker, from his humanity...
...Ibid...
...Was it, then, an echo of the prophetic tradition, as some have asserted...
...His letters burst with obscenities...
...From their Olympian seat the two leaders judged Liebknecht's opposition to the founding of Bismarck's Reich "silly," for German unity had been one of their earliest political aims...
...to identify for primitive anti-Semites the enemy they should fight: "the Jew in themselves...
...They don't know honesty and justice .. they rejoice in cheating...
...Not surprisingly, Sombart also adjusted himself to the Nazis and published a book on German Socialism in 1934...
...Voila Marxism exposed as the fantasy of the Jew who failed to grow up, and only three small points remain to be explained: • A million Jewish boys have overbearing and overcaring mothers, but one becomes Karl Marx, the other—Portnoy...
...his relations to the Movement rather than his family relationships...
...What is even stranger, they form a rather non-germane second part to a 30-page essay whose bulk is a spirited defense of Jewish emancipation...
...Class Struggles in France, C. P. Dutt, ed., New York: International Publishers, p. 114.] X: The Marginal Man This passage shows that Marx did not use Jewish symbolism in any way that would be different from the thousands of references in German magazine literature...
...They were "marginal" not only as Jews with respect to the main culture, but even more so with respect to the Jewish squares...
...and I agreed...
...His analysis of the Jewish question shed light only on half of the problem: alienation in a money economy...
...Therefore he no longer needed the synecdoche of "the Jew," citing the particular in place of the general...
...But Jews used the same language too...
...to denigrate capitalists by branding them as "Jewish...
...It disarms the enemy by saying in a witty way: Yes, you are right...
...But, Marx goes on, precisely because it has reached its peak, the tide must turn—by virtue of another Hegelian law Judah's fall is imminent: When society succeeds in transcending the empirical essence of Judaism—haggling and all its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible precisely because his particular consciousness no longer has an object...
...Ibid., p. 304-305...
...Moreover, he transformed these instruments to suit his own purposes...
...But then Marx was tempted to deal with the relationship between the Jewish and the Christian religions, respectively, and human freedom...
...The Christians have become Jews...
...nor do the historical betrayals of the German bourgeoisie ever doom the Germans as inexorably as they doom other nations in the eyes of Marx and Engels...
...In view of all these facts the charge that Marx suffered from Jewish self-hate and tried to conceal his Jewish birth seems pure speculation, if not worse...
...But while he shared the prejudices of all Victorians, he also gave warmhearted public support to all national movements: Indian, Italian, Czech, Polish, Irish, and especially to those that were directed against German-Austrian overlords...
...He covers his ignorance with brilliant formulations, but he is unsure and repetitious, groping for the right words and often leaping from the economic base to the ideology and back instead of studying the mediations...
...He was wrestling with the problem of the unity of theory and practice...
...But by 1844, only one year after publication of the essay "On the Jewish Question," Marx was able to analyze this problem without resorting to the old visual aid—personalizing money in the Jew...
...In the now-famous "Eleven Theses on Feuerbach" he criticizes the philosopher for contemplating theory only, "while practice can be grasped only in its dirty Jewish form of appearance...
...If he seems to flee from his family, he feels shame for all business-minded families...
...to deny the Jews a particular and special existence as an estate, but to assure their safety as citizens...
...to say for the first time: in order to obtain political change, you must change the social system...
...In the following section I shall show what place it occupies in the development of Marxism, as against the primitive anticapitalism of Marx's predecessors...
...to show that religious strife concealed economic strife...
...Although only a few Jews had profited from the system, it had spread all over the civilized world...
...They were interested in the sources of Marx's ideas rather than his emotional inspiration...
...they shared certain national prejudices of their age, which may have colored their political judgment...
...However, when Jews were not with the oppressors but were the oppressed, he was on their side...
...It is the alienated essence of man's work and being...
...my point here is that their views on Judaism were a function of their social philosophy...
...Having pleaded in various ways for Jewish civil rights, Marx now turns to the Christians, asking Who are you to deny us...
...V: Marx Before Marxism Although we can explain the essay "On the Jewish Question," we may still find it unsatisfactory...
...His materialist turn would come soon...
...Let us begin with Marx's treatment of money: Whatever is found to be abstract in the Jewish religion: the contempt of theory, of art, of history, of man-as-end-in-himself, that is the actually conscious point of view of man-themoneymaker, his virtue...
...and it disarms the anti-Semite by anticipating his scoffing comment...
...He had learned from Feuerbach that in erecting idols man only worships the image he has of himself...
...Some who with good reason think they are disciples of the young Marx, write today: Abolish the computers, and you will render the "Jew" impossible...
...All nationalities were the object of his slurs, and Jews cannot claim any privileged place in the order of Marx's wrath...
...according to Bebel, who liked to quote the coinage, it was Engels who said "antiSemitism is the socialism of idiots...
...Ibid, p. 243.] At this stage of his development, Marx still saw "money" as the embodiment of all evil— the incarnate alienation of man from his creative powers...
...The recent biographers Fritz Raddatz and David McLellan come down against Kiinzli's exaggerations, and Jerrold Seigel totally reverses Kunzli...
...But if Marx was concerned with man as a social being, why did he then confuse the social with the economic...
...In the case of Russia, by contrast, Marx's hate of the Czar and of the whole "Asiatic mode of production" seems to color his view of the Russian people...
...I shall try to show that the term "anti-Semitic" as we understand it today does not apply to the author of "On the Jewish Question" and to his contemporary audience, which understood his meaning in the context of the Hegelian philosophy and its language...
...the proletariat is no "Chosen People...
...it is a gratuitous snicker for those who took this language for granted...
...and cited only for identification of context.] This, of course, is pure Hegel, and its logic is carried along by ' the antithetical phraseology...
...Neither Stendhal's Leuwen nor Balzac's Nucingen, both of whom were modeled after James Rothschild, have conspicuously Jewish 453 features...
...I don't hold with tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner...
...but immediately upon emancipation, the buried message of social justice burst forth again in a crop of small and great prophets...
...A self-deprecating joke may be a means of asserting superiority: he who reveals his weakness or his shame is the stronger in spirit...
...This is the theme of Arnold Kunzli's erudite and voluminous Karl Marx: Eine Psychographie (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966...
...Marx may have had only a rudimentary education...
...Jewish self-hate in due time prevented him from coming to terms with his messianic heritage and, forced to look for another "chosen people," he invented the proletariat...
...They worshipped an invisible, alien, abstract god whom they carried everywhere—like money, indeed, but perhaps in a sense slightly different from the interpretation that Marx gave the association...
...Marx was what one might call a smothering Jewish mother and never allowed Karl to grow up and develop mature relationships...
...It has robbed the whole world, both human and natural, of its specific values...
...Impoverished handicraftsmen, too, became victims of this same liberalism that benefited the Jews: the revolution emancipated their persons from the shackles of privilege and their business from the shackles of the guild system...
...Jews will not be reduced to an economic paradigm...
...In these fifty years, however, psychohistory has progressed...
...The Marxian view of humanity and its future, therefore, is not closer to the Jewish prophets than it is to other visionaries— Joachim da Fiore, Thomas Munzer, some Russian Narodniki, or British Levelers...
...a superb work of financial journalism...
...Marx considered it his decisive contribution to the theory of revolution that he found it neither in a divine scheme of history, nor in the logic of a Hegelian World Spirit, nor in the ethical commands of reason, but in the socially active forces of men...
...Silberner believes that Marx and Engels were anti-Semites in their early career...
...The gentiles resented their superiority in Talmudic logic...
...he received freedom of property...
...In the same article he also applauded the efficient, culture-wielding, railway-building Yankees for having taken "rich California from the lazy Mexicans" (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, February 15 and 16, 1849...
...says candidly that it does not make much sense...
...This valet's view of history sometimes yields interesting results on some level, but peephole information is not historical explanation...
...And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge...
...In his private correspondence Marx was even harsher on backwardness...
...To be fair: they often ridiculed and denounced the stupidity, meanness, and cowardice of the political establishment in Germany, and condemned German nationalism and imperialism...
...3), which still reverberate in a footnote of Das Kapital: Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold...
...Fritz Engel, 465 quoted by Eduard Fuchs, in Die Juden in der Karikatur, Munich: Langen, 1921...
...If Marx had tried to hide his Jewishness, he could not have been successful...
...The unpleasant fact is that he was no model character and especially nasty when he spoke of rivals...
...but "abolishing the Jew" does not mean to abolish anti-Semitism...
...He saw "Jews" as the personified symbols of that power...
...In an era of rapid modernization, members of an oppressed minority may have to make painful choices...
...Neither they nor Marx had turned their backs on Jewry, and Marx's daughter Eleanor proclaimed her Jewishness in public, although she knew nothing about Judaism...
...Marginality, however, occurs not only in the case of those who exist between two cultures coexisting simultaneously, but even more when one culture is encroaching upon another or when a main culture disintegrates...
...Several years later he found it necessary to have his children baptized too, and only his Dutch wife held out a little longer...
...Or Lenin's, Liebknecht's, and Bebel's...
...The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism...
...In fact, without that distraction, the problem became clearer to him and to his readers...
...as gentile cant prescribed, one had a "calling" (Beruf...
...However varied the ideas and careers of All translations from the German, unless otherwise identified, are my own...
...Benjamin Disraeli, "the alien patriot"—never allowed anybody to forget that they were Jews...
...Among the martyrs of anarchism also were Gustav Landauer and Erich Muhsam...
...Was Marx, perhaps, not an "anti-Semite" but, on the contrary, one who upheld the ethics of Judaism against the morals of the Jews...
...Many Jews were followers of Saint-Simon, others helped to lay the foundations of Social Democracy: Moses Hess, Stefan Born, Ferdinand Lassalle, and, towering above them all, Karl Marx...
...In The German Ideology he compares philosophy with masturbation...
...To Sum Up: The Anti-Semitism that Marx knew in the middle of the last century was largely social...
...we do not know whether she kept some Jewish customs after baptism...
...see an English version of the part relating to Marx in Historia Judaica XI, 1949...
...At this time, however, Marx had developed the full dialectics of exchange relations and was in possession of an adequate terminology for the analysis of capitalism...
...But on every Friday evening of a sudden, in the twilight the enchantment leaves him and the dog once more is human...
...But ideologies must be taken seriously, and Marx was too much involved in Hegelian and Feuerbachian rationalism to see the force of the romantic reaction...
...If ever the crudest conception of the relationship between economic interests and ideology can be proven true, it applies to the German antirationalist philosophy, which is so closely connected with anti-Semitism...
...Apparently aware of all this, Saul Bellow says: "In America, certain forms of success require an element of parody, self-mockery, a satire on the thing itself...
...Now he proceeded to reduce this self-image of man to the social image: theology merely reflects economic conditions: Let us set aside the Sabbath Jew and consider the actual, secular, everyday Jew...
...It is not apocalyptic but Promethean...
...That Marx and Engels were children of their time is, perhaps, nowhere as painfully apparent as in their attitude toward Jews, especially in their younger years...
...Borne, Heine, and the young Marx had imbibed the ugly language in which "Itzig" (diminutive of Ignatius, a common name among East European Jews) stands for everybody who talks with his hands...
...in repudiating the Jewish religion he fights the state of alienation in which society forces the thinking human being to live...
...Incidentally, this is the only place where Marx attacks the House of Rothschild...
...The language that had once been aimed at "usurers" now was leveled at the bourgeoisie as a class...
...To be precise, the middle class I have referred to here would probably be ranked as "upper middle" by American sociologists...
...Such a turn from the particular to the universal requires an intellectual reorientation, or rather a shake-up of all former premises, a tearing-away from tribal, religious, and national moorings, the conception of a total revolution...
...This seemed to him the very embodiment of all perversions, condemning man to a truncated existence...
...it is the alienating and alienated, self-alienating power of the human species...
...such talk merely distracts us from studying the phenomenon of fascism...
...In the East as well as in the West, Jews are seen as representing the rule of rationality, alienation, abstraction, materialism, bureaucracy, and other invisible powers...
...We find these jokes in the works of two great apostates, Ludwig Borne and 452 Heinrich Heine, next to passionate pleas for the civil rights of Jews and moving lamentations on the Jewish plight...
...Sammler's Planet, Penguin, p. 67...
...Their historical function had been to introduce capitalism, or, more precisely, a religion compatible with acquisitiveness, calculation, and money...
...also the Rumanians, the Transylvanians...
...The newest review of the entire material, judicious and comprehensive but adding little really new, is by Julius Carlebach: Marx and the Radical View of Judaism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978...
...cit., who cites a number of warm pronouncements by Engels after his alleged "conversion" from his early anti-Semitism...
...Only poor Jews are dirty...
...the king aggrandized the manipulators of money, whose religion was compatible with the abstract, invisible power that was encroaching upon traditional life...
...By banishing religion from the public sphere, man was not freed from religion...
...Easton and Guddat, eds., p. 248.] These strange lines in the Hegelian manner form the conclusion of Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question," appearing in the same Yearbook from which I have quoted the idealistic exaltation of the German proletariat...
...467...
...That Jews felt the "German misery" twice as hard is obvious...
...The great historian of mores Eduard Fuchs (incidentally, not a Jew), a friend of Rosa Luxemburg, felt that self-deprecation "is that form of self-emancipation which relieves the Jew of the onerous pressure of social humiliation...
...While he deplored the destruction of the ancient Indian culture, he saw it doomed anyway by frequent invasions and suggested that it would be better for the Hindus to be subjected by British than by barbarian conquerors: "The British have broken up the self-sufficient inertia of the villages, and railways will supply the new art of communication" (New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853...
...In his later practice of IdeologieKritik Marx was more subtle...
...Marx and the daughters, a touching reminder that the great challenger of middle-class morality and his immediate followers were still living this side of liberation...
...Rejecting his parents, he developed a strong aversion to their Jewish background and behavior...
...though the Jews did not rule, Marx said, their spirit did...
...It is the general whore, the procuress of mankind...
...There is no Marxian soterology...
...He answered in great philosophical detail and, quoting the French and American Constitutions, showed that Bauer failed to distinguish civil from human rights...
...Ou it y a de 1'argent, it y a des juifs," said Montesquieu in Persian Letters LX...
...I shall also contend that one is not entitled to draw psychological inferences from this essay, unless one has a thorough grasp of its terms...
...The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat...
...With unconcealed pride Engels commented on Bismarck's victories in the Franco-German war of 1870, and Marx allowed that the superiority of the German arms would also help Marxian socialism to win out over Proudhon's brand...
...Aber jeden Freitag Abend In der Dammerstunde plotzlich Welch: der Zauber, and der Hund Wird aufs Neu ein menschlich Wesen...
...Both Marx and Engels used national epithets against individuals...
...In this book Engels mentions anti-Semitism only briefly (p...
...Where they ought to have analyzed the functions of banking—good Christian firms like Neuflize, Hottinger, Laffitte, and Perier—they were content to shout "A bas les Rothschild...
...A big load, which the narrow approach of this essay could not carry...
...Rationalism is the word that united Judaism and capitalism...
...As to their sensitivity to his approach in "On the Jewish Question," I hope to have shown that at least partly this is due to the difficulties this essay presents to 461 anybody who is not steeped in the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach and in the language of early socialism...
...This was the world in which Marx grew up...
...Said Saint Paul: "Not he is a Jew who is a Jew externally but he who is a Jew inside...
...In particular, his attitude to Judaism and Jews seems to be very much in tune with the notions that he found in his environment...
...A novel like Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, for instance, which strikes us today as antiSemitic, could be found in many Jewish households, although the rapacious, unscrupulous Itzig, with jargon, kaftan, and all, was presented there as the prototype of parasitical capitalism...
...The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of Man...
...Other socialists, like Proudhon and Fourier, never outgrew the primitive stage and never reached Marx's analytical clarity...
...Contrary to appearances, he is not attacking the Jews but is saying, That which everybody thinks is characteristic of Jews has been perfected by this Christian society: The Jew has emancipated himself inasmuch as the spirit of money has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations...
...He who knew Shakespeare so well might have quoted Shylock: Hath not a Jew eyes...
...Similarly, Marx's persistent expectation of 463 the revolution has been interpreted as an echo of the messianic prophecies...
...Just as he tried to smear the czar, the Prussian king and his finance minister by associating them with "Jewry," so he now attacks the Christian businessman: Judaism has survived...
...This was the same Duhring against whom Engels wrote the series of articles, which then became the most popular introduction to "scientific socialism...
...They saw them as "kikes" and used language that was common among their contemporaries...
...Traders—Leipzig, 1916...
...It is possible, however, to explain and interpret these attitudes without resorting to psychoanalytical theories...
...Suppose Kunzli is right—what caused millions of people to identify with the fantasy of this inefficient, immature Jew...
...Some may acquire a totally new identity—Johann August Wilhelm Neander (Mendel) became a great Protestant theologian, Friedrich Stahl the theorist of German Conservatism, Eduard Gans the oracle of orthodox Hegelianism...
...For Jews this has been both a theological and an existential problem, and it has been expressed symbolically in these lines from Heinrich Heine's poem "Princess Sabbath": Hund mit hiindischen Gedanken Kotert er die ganze Woche Dutch des Lebens Kot and Kehricht, Gassenbuben zum Gespotte...
...but he maintained the most cordial relations with his Dutch-Jewish uncles, and his wife and daughters shared these affections...
...But such strictures were political, never racial or ethnic...
...Those early socialists were indeed fighting the cult of the Golden Calf, and "money" was their enemy: What God is for its theoretical life, money is for the perverted world's practical life—the alienated wealth of men, their life-activity that has been sold off...
...Marx saw that this was possible only if one was content to operate "inside one's skull" in a manner that Hegel already had ridiculed...
...The mere occurrence of such references, therefore, does not permit any inferences regarding the author's personal involvement...
...and Kurt Lewin, Resolving Conflicts, New York: Harper, 1948...
...Finally, when several Jewish writers answered Bauer and the latter rebutted them in his own paper, Marx came back to the charge and fully supported Bauer's Jewish critics (in two chapters of The Holy Family, 1845...
...Nevertheless, it is the Germans who were called by Hegel's World Spirit to take the lead in the next stage of history...
...A useful concept in analyzing an aggressive reaction to cultural crises is "marginality," lack of identity between two cultures, failure to integrate, lack of "belongingness...
...The question whether Marx was "antiSemitic" centers mostly on his controversial essay "On the Jewish Question," which he published in 1843...
...The messianicprophetic message must be transposed from a context in which it no longer makes sense to one that transcends both the minority world and the greater world of the environment...
...Practical need, interest...
...That he was an angry man, no one doubts...
...It was simply trying to do too much at the same time: — to answer an anti-Semitic argument made by Bruno Bauer...
...Two hundred other middle-class Jews lived in Trier with their families...
...In a biographical context, the volume is of some interest because the three contributions 456 by Marx reflect his rapid progress from Young-Hegelian idealism to Feuerbach's humanist materialism, and beyond, toward historical materialism...
...To some Jewish rebels, however, a lucky combination of history and tradition has given the opportunity of converting the problem of personal or tribal salvation into a message for all mankind...
...Mammon has become our God," Engels complained in this same Yearbook, though of course he was not the first to say so...
...These exist only since the Dreyfus Affair and have taken their toll in this century...
...Just so capitalism, which places an artificial, calculated, and manufactured strangeling into the natural, creaturelike world...
...IV, Hanover: Verlag fur Literatur and Zeitgeschehen, 1964, p. 187...
...Engels, too, was not above appealing to anti-Semitic prejudices for purposes of propaganda, though in his case no Jewish mother can be cited as the real object of his hate...
...finally, in the Communist Manifesto, criticizing primitive socialism as a whole...
...Then the roles were reversed...
...He, who was always scrupulously honest in quoting sources, never makes the connection between his own ideas and those of the Jewish prophets, or the church fathers (which might have been suggested by Hegel), or Saint Augustine...
...From then on, he no longer used the language of the early socialists, the anti-usury, anti-Semitic ideology of primitive anticapitalism...
...Therefore, what has been said of Jews may be even more true of intellectuals...
...1.] VIII: The Unresolved Question I think the essay "On the Jewish Question" is unsatisfactory...
...because the practical Jewish spirit has perpetuated itself in Christian society, and here it even has attained its highest development...
...The truth is that the joke may do three things: it expresses Schadenfreude at the failure of misplaced ambition...
...hence, he concluded, Jewish emancipation would have to wait until everybody had become an atheist...
...still we all know the embarras of poor relations...
...A French socialist wrote in 1844, the same year Marx's Yearbook appeared, "I call by the despised name of Jew every dealer in money, every unproductive parasite who lives off other men's work" (Alphonse Toussenel, Les Juifs rois de 1'Epoque...
...As this hope grew more radical, they thought that the democratic revolution in Germany would transform itself into the social revolution, and being equipped with the heritage of German idealistic philosophy, the underdeveloped German proletariat would lead the socially and economically more developed West: In Germany no particular servitude can be broken without breaking all kinds of servitude...
...He made that point with finality twenty years later, in Das Kapital: "All commodities, however shoddy they may look, however malodorous they may be, in faith and truth are money, internally circumcised Jews" (vol...
...But he also had a considerable stock of anti-German, anti-British, anti-Polish, anti-Russian invective...
...To discredit a loan that the hated Czar tried to place at the London Stock Exchange, he denounced the involvement of the Jewish bankers who expected to profit from the transaction ("The Standing of the European Houses" and "The Loanmongers of Europe," New York Daily Tribune, November 9 and 22, 1855...
...Marx was also attacked as a Jew by one Eduard MullerTellering, who had been a contributor to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and later in exile became an enemy, and by Wilhelm Marr, also a former associate, who was to become the foremost anti-Semitic agitator in the Bismarck era (in fact, he is credited with having invented the term anti-Semite in 1879...
...Characteristically he chose Protestantism in a Catholic province, and he remained on good terms with his brother, the chief rabbi of Trier...
...Hannah Arendt is probably right in remarking that first of all Marx was an intellectual: "The anti-Jewish denunciations by Marx and Borne cannot be understood except in the light of the conflict between rich Jews and Jewish intellectuals...
...Kurt Tucholsky created "Wendriner," a Jewish philistine whose inane comments on current events made both him and his enemies look foolish...
...What is the worldly need of the Jew...
...At the same time these assimilated Jews were highly conscious of the chasm that separated them from the mass of their coreligionists...
...Likewise, when he wished to denigrate a measure to increase the circulation of money, proposed by the Prussian Minister of Finance, Marx cited "a book On Circulation by the Jew Pinto, a famous stockjobber of the 18th century," and thereafter always referred to the Minister as "Pinto Hansemann" as though the Jewish surname made him look foolish (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 1849, passim...
...Though obviously only a minority of Jews could be usurers, a man who was about to hock his watch might say "I am going to the Jew" as readily as, not so long ago, a New Yorker who took his dirty shirts to the laundry might say "I am going to the chink...
...its historical mission is to abolish itself, neither to be elevated nor "saved": The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness...
...More to the point, we learn that Mehring used an edition of the Marx-Engels correspondence that had been piously purged of dirty words and anti-Semitic expletives...
...Bargaining...
...It has been answered affirmatively, before Kunzli, by Eugene Kamenka in "The Baptism of Karl Marx" (Hibbert Journal, LVI, 1958) and by Edmund Silberner in Sozialisten zur Judenfrage (Berlin: 1962...
...Conversely, as revolutionary socialists, most of them had to shed other parts of the Jewish tradition (notable exceptions were Moses Hess and Isaac Steinberg), to reject their parents, to liberate themselves from the confines of their social, national, and religious origins through a more or less vehement gesture of rebellion...
...but that does not mean to say that the problem wrought decisive quirks in his character or significantly influenced his thinking...
...In this political sense Marx and Engels cannot be called "anti-Semitic," nor does their attitude to persons of the Jewish faith show any discriminatory pattern...
...A twofold tension then becomes the spring of a prophecy: to open the doors of the ghetto, which cannot accommodate the ideas of the new century, to open the doors of bourgeois society, which is unable to contain all the new energies streaming into it...
...Marx hated Jewish Babbitts as much as he hated Babbitts in general, especially German ones...
...Marx did not yet possess the terminology to deal with the questions he was opening up (the most glaring defect: he still says money where he means capital...
...then analyzing those conditions and developing tools for a new social science...
...What is his worldly God...
...Handelsleute and Juden als solche," said Borne, and similar sentiments are found in Maximilian Harden—editor of Die Zukunft and a convert—in Walter Rathenau, and other Jewish intellectuals...
...coming from the school of philosophical idealism, he was still looking for a way of endowing practice with some kind of halo and was shocked to find it only in its "dirty," raw and unidealized form...
...All history shows that only three nations are capable of living...
...Times have changed, and with them our knowledge, our sensibilities, and our interests...
...Moreover, this same Yearbook, of which Marx was a coeditor, contains two further contributions with a strong pro-Jewish slant...
...my translation...
...Nor is anti-Semitism simply a matter of economic classes...
...coward valiant...
...Easton and Guddat, eds., p. 240.] Fine so far...
...later he became a precursor of Zionism, nevertheless retaining Marx's friendship...
...The trader deprived himself of the pleasures of all-around activities, and he deprived the community of insight into the relations between its members...
...In the latest biography Fritz Raddatz—the distinguished literary editor of Die Zeit—takes pains to trace the rabbis on both the father's and the mother's side down to famous Talmud scholars of the 16th century in Lvov and Padua (going back 13 generations, every Jewish family probably can come up with a famous Talmud scholar...
...they do not, in a man like Graetz, indicate Jewish selfhate or anti-Semitism, but parallel exactly the feelings a German gentile might express about Polish gentiles...
...I replied: Maybe, but doesn't it fly...
...Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law," Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, 1843—hereafter referred to as the Yearbook...
...This work has been carried down to recent theories (including the Frankfurt School) but fails to come to grips with New Left anti-Semitism...
...Ruge called Marx "a skunk and a slanderous Jew" and considered socialists "a gang of atrocious Jewish souls...
...The proletariat, by contrast, will have to build a bridge into unknown territory, develop principles of its own, create thoughts for which there is no model(The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte...
...By immersing themselves in German middle-class culture, classical literature, and patriotism, they hoped to fend off the specter of pogroms: by repudiating their poor relations they hoped to escape the opprobrium that attaches to the "dirty" Jews...
...Meanwhile, individual Jews had the alternative of emancipating themselves by converting to Christianity...
...I, German edition, p. 162...
...Marx developed this angle in the "Economic-Philosophical Manuscript" of 1844: Money is the visible divinity, it is the conversion of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the general confusion and perversion of things...
...Very well—emancipation from bargaining [Marx always uses the Yiddish word, also used in German, schachern haggling] and money would be the selfemancipation of our era...
...To confuse this with the sensibilities of a minority means to obliterate Marx's specific contribution to social psychology, nay to deny him credit for any original contribution...
...Modern sociology would demand a study of the mediating links, a baring of the psychological mechanism, a closer determination of the nature of the relationship— whether it is causal or a mere parallelism...
...Bad enough...
...It is interesting to note that Marx was especially provoked by the impertinence of this latter proposition...
...451 Likewise, the considerable body of literature that has been written about Marx's kvetches, and especially about his "anti-Semitism," is largely irrelevant to an understanding of his thought...
...Marx's contemporaries, therefore, needed no guidance to understand his meaning...
...He takes over the Judeo-Christian eschatological hope of an absolute end to history...
...His quarrel with his mother (probably over finances) has fed the theory that he wished to deny his family...
...One has to hear the irony here: Bauer had said that Christianity had attained the "highest development" in religion—which now stands revealed as a reflection of economic relations.] The Jew is only the special manifestation of bourgeois society's Judaism...
...Dog with doglike thoughts all the week, a cur, he noses through life's mire, dung, and leavings butt of mocking street gangs...
...More subtly, Proudhon seems to hint at Marx, writing "Jews are counterfeiters in trade and in philosophy...
...The service they performed might be necessary, but it could be performed only by outsiders, unclean people—untouchables who were allowed to live on sufferance, as a privilege granted by the sovereign...
...VII: Anti-Semites vs...
...Father Marx was as upright a patriot and liberal as one could find in Prussia...
...The constitution of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals is accomplished in the same act...
...Mr...
...His mature works transcend both the traditions with which he grew up and his original revulsion from them...
...An example occurs in his article on the Polish revolution, published in the same paper on April 29, 1849, under Marx's editorship...
...As a general rule, I would suggest to the psycho-historians a sort of Occam's Razor: that historical phenomena, and ideologies in particular, should be seen in terms of the situation out of which they have grown and 466 that psychological explanations should not be sought unless the analysis of general conditions yields no satisfactory explanation...
...The specialization of the Jews, money trading, was at once the most outrageously dehumanizing and crippling activity and the most noxious for the community...
...prostitution is used as a symbol for the condition of the proletariat...
...The same goes for Tucholsky, Borne, for Heine, Kafka, Kraus, and others...
...they merely have more reason to resent such derangement of taste in one of their sons...
...Marx's views on Judaism were a function of the development of his social thought...
...Then came the First World War, and the Kaiser needed the help of every Jewish banker in Germany...
...AntiSemites drew effective arguments from the resentments of the traditional classes, especially in Germany where nostalgic resistance against the Enlightenment and Liberalism was always confused with the resistance against French domination: The Jewish religion appears to be totally a work of the intellect: a creation purposely injected into the organic world order to destroy everything natural, to subject it and to replace it by its own mode of operation...
...Indignantly Engels replied: "They counted the Jews as Germans although this meanest of all races could not have any relation of kinship with [the Assembly in] Frankfurt, neither by its jargon nor by its descent, except perhaps by its lust for profit...
...The Jews missed the boat of history in 1849, when their leading cadres, together with the entire German middle class, abandoned the revolution...
...Mrs...
...it left each man free to err in matters of faith...
...if you tickle us, do we not laugh...
...Marx I n the preceding sections we have encountered the romantic Marx, the warmhearted seeker after human nature and critic of inhuman conditions—a man different from the cool scientist and tyrannical dogmatist whom the public associates with "Marxism...
...But if Wendriner was an expression of Jewish self-hate, Babbitt and Caspar Milquetoast must be called expressions of American self-hate and the term then becomes quite meaningless...
...But the cartoonist's Jew, the Jew whom the anti-Semite knew, spoke candidly of profit, and the German Jew was ashamed for him...
...Hence its importance for the Jews...
...Finally, as Melvin Lasky points out in Utopia and Revolution, "Marx was not interested in utopia, but in revolution...
...H. P. these men and women might have been, it is reasonable to assume that some elements of the prophetic and messianic tradition may have contributed to the formation of their intellectual profile...
...He had accused Marx of lacking radicalism, because his own idea of revolution was that it must bring total liberation at once...
...Their god was a god of Justice above all...
...In other words: Marxism is the opposite of a Sorelian myth, a Christian eschatology, or a Jewish prophecy...
...Behold, the great historian of capitalism found no difficulty in now ascribing all those Jewish traits of heartless, calculating mercan462 tilism to—the British (Handler and HeldenHeroes vs...
...They were the visible Jews, hated and despised by the gentiles...
...The classless society and the disappearance of social strife find their closest precedent in the myth of the Golden Age .. which Marx enriched by the Judeo-Christian idea of a final battle between Good and Evil...
...this alien essence dominates him...
...What is the secular basis of Judaism...
...Ibid., p. 245...
...Moses Hess, quoted by Jerrold Seigel, in Marx's Fate, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 115.] The author, five years older than Marx and his close friend, was a mystic and messianist...
...In a letter to Engels (MEW XXX, p. 259) he also called Lassalle "negroid," adding a low speculation about his mother...
...Jehovah's people, so the workers are the property of capital...
...See Everett Stonequist, Marginality, New York: Scribner, 1937...
...By 1844 he already was able to answer: Let us study the banking system...
...Philosophy cannot be realized without abolishing the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without realizing philosophy...
...Judaism has survived not in spite of but because of history...
...old young...
...The word Jewish is added here for emphasis...
...thereafter he did not think it necessary to refer again to the subject of Jewishness, except to express disapproval when Marx used epithets in bad taste against Lassalle...
...In the generation of the Second International, Jews became so visible among the socialist leaders that Viktor Adler tried to restrain their zeal: Bernstein on the right wing and Luxemburg on the left, the brilliant Austro-Marxists and many of the Russians, both Marxist and Populist: Trotsky, Isaac Steinberg, Axelrod, Martov...
...We shall again encounter this "Pinto the Jew," who crossed swords with Voltaire.] The middle-class German Jew tried hard to be seen as someone very different from his distant cousin...
...Next to the tree of Liberty, therefore, grew "the poisoned root of anti-Semitic socialism" (George Lichtheim, op.cit., p. 414...
...Even the relations between man and wife become an object of haggling: women are bought and sold...
...says that no clinical evidence supports the theory that Marx acted out of Jewish self-hate...
...Ibid.] Except for the peculiar language and the elegant antithesis, these are not Hegelian subtleties...
...nor does it help us understand the sociological phenomenon of left-wing antiSemitism...
...I do not find that the Jewish heritage is needed to understand Marx's 464 intellectual development...
...In reading Marx's denunciation of Jewish usury or pushiness, one gets the impression that he is doing just that...
...What matters is whether private sentiments are converted into racist philosophies...
...to plead for total emancipation, and for a secular, democratic state in general...
...The essay should be read as one that allows us a peek into Marx's workshop— like many originally unpublished manuscripts that an unkind posterity later analyzes under the microscope, it is a warming-up exercise, decidedly pre"Marxist" in both tone and idea...
...As an example of his attitude, Bauer had written two treatises on the Jewish question wherein he proved that a Christian state cannot emancipate the Jews without denying its own essence...
...Kunzli knows that little Karl objected to being weaned and begrudged his younger siblings their place at the mother's breast...
...Bruno Bauer, too, had taken it for granted that "the Jews own all...
...As a black man may call another "nigger," Jews disseminate the lovingly self-deprecating jokes about scared, crafty, and chutzpah-prone coreligionists—jokes that the uninitiated consider a sign of Jewish self-hate but the connoisseurs allow to melt on their tongues as fruits of refinement, and that they like to interpret as expressions of freedom or proof of maturity...
...on the other, the counterrevolution, i.e., all Slays except the Poles...
...he received religious freedom...
...I have shown in particular that the essay "On the Jewish Question" represents a transitional stage in Marx's thinking, and that his mature thought was totally free from any idols of the tribe, of the cave, and of the marketplace...
...One will never understand the attitude of Karl Marx to the "Jewish Question" unless one realizes that middleclass Jews had every incentive to emphasize what separated them from these lower-class Jews...
...Alienation is not only a condition for the successful operation of capitalism, it is also the consciousness of being a stranger in that society...
...Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases...
...Moreover, we learn that he had knowingly withheld from the comrades embarrassing intelligence of the son Marx had fathered with his maidservant—information that had also been kept from Mrs...
...Bauer had argued that Christianity, being "the most developed" faith, was only one step away from total liberation...
...Of marginal characters Jessie Bernard wrote: "Since they cannot be either Jews or gentiles, they must destroy everything they stand for" (in Jews in a Gentile World, I. Graeber and S. H. Britt, eds., New York: Macmillan, 1942...
...it was not yet an organized political force with a philosophy and program...
...Whether he had a grudge against his father or suffered from a smothering mother seems irrelevant in face of the fact that thousands of others also mounted the barricades in 1848...
...in his economic notebooks most authors are Scheisskerle (shitters), Malthus is ridiculed because of his many children, and only Adam Smith and Ricardo (though a Jew) never seem to deserve any epithet...
...What may need explanation is the violence of that revulsion...
...Money...
...Hence the anti-Semitic expletives against Lassalle...
...But to judge such outbursts, one must compare them with similar invectives against other races that had incurred the wrath of these strict censors...
...X: "Jewish" Marxism Marxism is, or originally was, a protest against the "purposeful rationality" it called capitalism...
...it makes brothers out of incompatibles...
...They were an elite, not of their own tribe but in the German middle class...
...her German was grammatically imperfect and her spelling atrocious...
...Hereafter this edition is referred to as Easton and Guddat, eds...
...Intellectuals are known to announce such disintegration...
...his idea of historical materialism is still too crude to be plausible...
...It was skewed because its intended target was hidden by the rhetoric of the manifest subject matter...
...Neither Hess nor Marx proves how monotheism hangs together with the leveling power of money...
...Jews were despised in ancient Rome because they would not eat with the gentiles nor sacrifice to the gods of the land or to the emperor...
...III: The German Heirs of Philosophy There is more of this in Marx's correspondence and notes...
...He criticized and denounced the Jewish bourgeoisie as part of the German and the English bourgeoisie...
...foul fair...
...At the same time the article denounced the "Teutonic money-grubbers," and the intention clearly is to throw opprobrium on a Prussian king who condescends to ally himself with Jews...
...Marx's father Heinrich, himself a deist and liberal, had to convert in order to keep his government job, since some of the emancipation laws that the French Revolution had brought to the Rhineland had been revoked after Napoleon's defeat...
...As I shall explain later, however, it is not entirely unmotivated in terms of Marx's intellectual development...
...In polemicizing against his father Marx denounces middle-class society...
...To his valet no man is a hero," says the proverb—to which Hegel answered: Precisely, because he is a valet...
...Let us look for the secret of the Jewish religion in the actual Jew...
...Similarly, Salo W. Baron wrote: "They become a menace to the equilibrium of the general as well as the Jewish society around them" ("Modern Capitalism and the Jewish Fate," in Menorah, XXX: 2, 1942...
...Kant and Fichte are fond of flying into the air, seeking there a distant land I only try honestly to understand what I find in the streets...
...Fifty years ago Otto Ruhle—an anarcho-communist, friend of Karl Liebknecht and later Cardenas's adviser on education—published a Marx biography, based on the psychology of Alfred Adler, which explained that Marx's rebelliousness stemmed from Jewish inferiority feelings, and the troubles in the First International from his carbuncles...
...Graetz, incidentally, exchanged books with Marx...
...but there were in the county ten times as many Jewish peddlers, cattle dealers, small-time usurers, and others whom the classmates of young Karl Marx had in mind when they spoke of "the Jews...
...As a young man he put it into verse: Kant and Fichte gern zum Ather schweifen, Suchten dort ein (ernes Land...
...it evades the real questions, and F. Raddatz (op.cit...
...However obnoxious I find the Israelite beliefs, Bauer's view seems to me too one-sided [abstrakt...
...At the time Marx wrote "On the Jewish Question," he had just been through a harrowing experience...
...The mischief is not as new as some of its practitioners think...
...the gods of the soil died...
...From then on we can watch him dissociate himself step by step: first explaining how imperfectly the symbol of "the Jew" reflects the conditions that create the symbol...
...Its aim is obviously not to sow anti-Semitism but to 454 exploit an existing anti-Semitism and make a point...
...for us, however, a little sense of humor is needed to place the essay in its "period" context...
...they are most sensitive to the shortcomings of the culture in which they grew up...
...When he writes a pamphlet against Bakunin, he begins, "The Russian, Bakunin," as though this characterization could predispose the reader against his opponent...
...In many of these respects the life of Karl Marx was so typical that older biographers hardly felt the need to dwell on details...
...In the revolution of 1848, Marx forgot altogether the Jewish reference frame of his earlier diction, and naively accused the bourgeoisie in its entirety of verschachern, selling the revolution down the river...
...The joke is a protective weapon, a strategy to prevent others from laughing at Jews: Wit is a good weapon, but more suitable for the weak than for the strong, more appropriate for the oppressed than for the overlords...
...But when Jewish jokes telescope that point in a brilliant punch-line, other sociologists will write books on "Jewish self-hate...
...the essay "On the Jewish Question" was a reply to another former mentor, friend and sponsor, Bruno Bauer...
...Shortly afterward, Marx and Ruge were to part company...
...The former were meant to protect the latter...
...They were both men of the Enlightenment, which anti-Semitism seeks to deny...
...But you really don't have to be Jewish to display German haughtiness vis-a-vis the Russians: when Bakunin tried to organize the Slavic resistance against German-Magyar domination in the Hapsburg monarchy, Engels berated him in almost racist language, pointing to the gratitude the Slays owe the Germans, who civilized them, and to the impossibility of founding viable states with such slovenly nations...
...It existed long before capitalism...
...For its content it depends too much on ideas of the so-called German Socialists whom Marx was soon to surpass and condemn in the Corn458 munist Manifesto four years later...
...What do we know about Engels's Jewish mother...
...the German term biirgerliche Gesellschaft is used ambiguously, meaning both civil society and bourgeois society.] 457 The intention of the essay should now be clear, especially if we place it in the context of the Yearbook, where it was published...
...are the characteristics of the Polish Jews...
...This reservation should also hold for Marx's attitude to his ancestors...
...in America Morris Hiliquit and the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman...
...It was voiced first by Eugen DUhring, an anti-Semite and Marx's rival for intellectual leadership in the German Social Democratic party (in his Kritische Geschichte der Nationalokonomie, 1879, p. 490...
...Bakunin responded in kind by calling Marx a treacherous Jew...
...My own approach will be historical...
...With greater sophistication, we now know that the carbuncles were not the cause but the effect of Marx's failures...
...Nationalokonomie and Philosophic" in Die Fruhschriften, Landshut, ed., Stuttgart: Kroner, 1953, p. 299.] There he also quotes those lines from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (act 4, sc...
...He declared that he was no anti-Semite but merely (!) wished to keep the Jews out of the German universities...
...By the way, Marx thought Balzac a superb observer of the bourgeoisie...
...They all proved that the narrowness of the Jewish ghetto could be overcome only if every group left the narrowness of its ghetto, and the larger city, too, was transcended...
...205-207): Marx takes over and continues one of the great eschatological myths of the AsiaticoMediterranean world: the redeeming role of the Just (the chosen, in our day: the proletariat) whose suffering is to change the ontological status of the world...
...Marx knew that baptismal water does not wash birth defects away, and after the revolution he warned the Jewish bourgeoisie that "siding with the counterrevolution will not save you from being sent back into the ghetto...
...It is the universal, self-constituted value of all things...
...One must assume that he was as conscious of the problem as other ex-Jews...
...The others have the mission[!] to be swallowed by the revolutionary storm and to perish [quoted by Roman Rodolsky in Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte, vol...
...The taste of this form of mimicry has developed into a special characteristic of the Jewish intellect...
...Civil emancipation did not mean equality in all spheres of human endeavor...
...Bauer was a Young-Hegelian theologian who denied that Christ ever lived, and a radical democrat who did not believe in political action...
...In Marx's time such Jews still had to step down from the sidewalk whenever a Christian gentleman demanded it, and only one child per family was allowed to marry and live within the city...
...Money debases all the gods of man and turns them into commodities...
...Quoted by David McLellan, in Karl Marx, New York: Harper Colophon, 1973, p. 86...
...A mere book review, it also is a mere transition piece...
...Later, in the Diaspora, the Jews responded to persecution with a fervent messianic faith (which need not, of course, be socialist...
...He is not preaching anti-Semitism but trying to defuse it...
...to introduce a new method revealing the social roots of ideological and theological conflicts...
...The other is a skillful pastiche in which the commanding general's wife wishes to walk her dog in a public park "forbidden to dogs and Jews...
...Later, when the Poles disappointed Engels, they too were thrown into the dustbin of history...
...Their intellectual development remained arrested at a stage where they still needed to see the abstract power of money embodied in the particular person of the Jew...
...Carlebach also makes the astute remark that if there was hate, it was not necessarily "Jewish" self-hate...
...Nevertheless, it seems legitimate to ask why Marx came down so hard on the Jews...
...Come, damned earth Thou common whore of mankind...
...It is the mimicry of a WestEast differential in cultural development that already appears in 18th-century documents: I know, Sir, that the German Jews have nothing in common with the Portuguese Jews except a certain religious ritual, but that their mores betray no real similarity between them [Ephraim Justife: Lettre a Andre Pinto, Juif Portugais, 1758...
...But in their political-philosophical beginnings both Marx and Engels had shared the Young-Hegelian hopes for the Grossdeutsche revolution that was to bring "unity, justice, and freedom...
...but where Marx resolved the Jewish question into a question of capitalism, Sombart resolved the social question into a Jewish question...
...It is well reflected in European literature, and its stereotypes were accepted even by Jews...
...It may even be that Marx was more critical of Jews than of other tribes because that is how most people show their concern for their family...
...I hope to have shown that his views on Jews and Judaism can and must be understood in their historical context, and that even those that we find unpleasant and deplorable did not in their original setting have the meaning we associate today with the notion of anti-Semitism...
...these also developed and changed in response to changes in his social views, and in fact he contributed to the reshaping of the environment...
...Marx also quotes Thomas Munzer, the peasant leader of the Reformation, who declared it intolerable that creatures of God should be owned by others...
...Jewish sensibilities have been hurt to the quick by Marx's bland identification of Judaism with money, and Jewish commentators have remarked that it was written without knowledge about things Jewish and without benefit of theological or sociological research...
...Such expressions of liberal sentiments were typical among German Jews...
...All who knew him and left memoirs have testified that he looked Jewish (Liebknecht, Ruge, Mevissen...
...And elsewhere he denied that he had any message for the proletarians but "merely to make the workers aware of what they will find themselves led to do...
...Carlebach, the latest to review the whole material (op.cit...
...Toward such comprehension and an illumination of this problem only Marx himself has made a contribution and, after him, George Lichtheim ("Socialism and the Jews," first published in Dissent, now in his Collected Essays, New York: Viking, 1972...
...he was chairman of the local lawyers' guild, organizer of a "banquet" that dared to petition the absolutist government, and spokesman for the Jews...
...the subjective basis of Judaism—practical need—is humanized, and the conflict between his individual, sensuous existence and his species existence is transcended...
...He was not freed from the egoism of trading but received freedom to trade...
...IV: Schachern De-Theologized I n this scheme of things the Jews had once occupied a place...
...This phrase is not mentioned by Silberner, op...
...Werner Sombart, Die Juden and das Wirtschaftsleben—The Jews and Capitalism— Leipzig: Duncker, 1911, p. 242.] Clearly, this goes back to Marx's indictment of "money...
...Merchant of Venice, act 3, sc...
...One is a chronique scandaleuse about the Duchess of Baden and her Jewish lover who was cruelly expelled by the peasants, written by Bernays...
...Some Jews seem to take comfort in the revelation that the man who killed six million of them may have been a sex pervert...
...Wrong right...
...Radical Germany cannot be revolutionized without revolutionizing everything from bottom to top...
...has asked me to help with a parliamentary petition on behalf of the Jews...
...Out of its own entrails bourgeois society ceaselessly reproduces the Jew...
...This is fantasy: in The Communist Manifesto, the victory of the proletariat is said to "end the pre-history of Mankind," and in Das Kapital Marx compares the proletariat with the Chosen People only ironically: "as the Jews are...
...Again, "abstract," in Hegelian jargon, means one-sided.] The last point is made frequently in early socialist literature...
...While everybody may have utopian dreams at a certain age, the task of restructuring the world may become a lifetime obsession for some...
...it expresses sadness at the conditions that make the joke possible...
...Marx indeed has expressed his disgust with Jewish parvenus...
...The article from which I have quoted had been submitted to the Yearbook and it is therefore not surprising to read there: Money is the jealous God of Israel before whom may stand no other god...
...This led Marx to introduce, for the first time, what thereafter became the "economic interpretation of history," or Ideologie-Kritik...
...Easton and Guddat, eds., p. 246.] These claims are made in an apodictic manner...
...455 No one can doubt the sincerity of Marx's internationalism, and we must often admire the soundness of his judgment on national revolutions...
...II: The Jews Marx Knew When Franz Mehring wrote his classic biography of Marx sixty years ago, he was content to mention that the founder of scientific socialism was "descended from a long line of rabbis...
...In 459 his earliest studies of economics he had been baffled by the phenomenon of the division of labor...
...The pietistic-aristocratic relatives of his fiancee, Jenny von Westphalen, had objected to their marriage, and her family had cut his mother, then a widow...
...In the Middle Ages the Jews were "dusty travelers" journeying from fair to fair, taking root nowhere, strangers everywhere...
...Watching a blimp, a psychoanalyst once made me notice that it was a penis symbol...
...There is no finer way of self-protection as long as one does not have a club or one's upbringing prevents him from using it...
...It has not only a world to conquer, but must go under in order to make room for the men who are fit for a new world...
...But whatever the emotional motive for this yearning may have been, the idea and the categorical instruments to deal with the problem he had received from Hegel and Feuerbach...
...or even more subtly—the carbuncles were his subterfuge to prevent himself from getting out of the rut to which he was irretrievably addicted, an addiction the infant is said to have acquired in order to stay dependent on his mother...
...This is it That makes the wappen'd widow wed again...
...Conscious of both the Paradise they lost and the other they did not gain, such persons live under tensions that may turn their genius toward total alienation and destructiveness (Weininger, Drumont) or to the creation of a personal vision of 450 Paradise...
...They did not participate in the rites that were needed to make the soil fertile and to weld the nation into blood brothers...
...Recently, the virus of psychoanalysis has invaded history departments, and now posterity must learn all about a subject's suckling and weaning, sex life and pathology...
...Before him, Moliere had proved that you don't have to be Jewish to behave like a nouveau-riche, and after him an American sociologist wrote a book on the ostentatiousness of the leisure class...
...but then, anyone living under the conditions of the Prussian police state and facing the intellectual crisis of the 1840s might have looked for a radical philosophy— witness the proliferation of radical and liberal magazines despite harassment by censorship and police...
...Doch ich such nur tiichtig zu begreifen, Was ich auf der Strasse land...
...For the context, see Writings of the Young Marx, Loyd Easton and Kurt Guddat, eds., New York: Anchor Books, p. 264...
...Shlomo Avineri has tried to correct this sort of misunderstanding in his essay "Marx and Jewish Emancipation" (JHI, XXV, 1964), in which he emphasizes Marx's distinction between civil society and political society, between human emancipation and political emancipation, between brotherhood of men and equality before the law, between bourgeois and citizen (both words are Burger in German...
...Marx, too, had a poor view of the lesser breeds...
...Thus much of this will make black white...
...Liberation was to be complete...
...Marx never published the "theses," but even in his published works he used antiSemitic invective when it served a propagandistic purpose...
...Money is the product of mutually estranged men...
...Lasky's translation, in Utopia and Revolution.] In Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher (the Yearbook) he wrote: "We do not face the world with a new principle: `Here is the truth, here kneel down.' We develop new principles for the world out of the principles of the world" (Easton-Guddat, eds., p. 214...
...If you prick us, do we not bleed...
...After she has wrenched permission from her reluctant husband, the Jews come to claim that they ought to have at least the same rights as the dogs since they share their disabilities, too...
...So Marx: "The existence of a suffering humanity that thinks and of a thinking humanity that is oppressed will be unpalatable to the philistines who are thoughtlessly enjoying themselves" [Easton and Guddat, eds., p. 210.] The work of many Jewish writers demonstrates similar traits, either as an explicit topic or in more subliminal ways...
...la petite difference...
...Marx never answered these attacks but allowed Engels to deal with them...
...they secede from it most vociferously, they articulate all contradictions and resentments...
...As in Hegel's famous chapter, the master became dependent upon the servant...
...In the passage just quoted, therefore, "Judaism" and "Jewishness" are metaphors, rhetorical devices to get at the substance, which is the money-grubbing gentile...
...The representatives of the aristocracy and of the clergy expressed their resentment: Jews are the carriers of rationalism, commercialism, bureaucratic government...
...Marx was not writing on the Jewish question but on the question of money...
...He was not freed from property...
...Abolish money and you will abolish the Jew," he had suggested...
...All previous revolutions, Marx remarks in another context, draped themselves in the garment of an ideal nation—the Puritans impersonated the Hebrews crossing the desert, the French bourgeoisie imitated the virtuous republicans of ancient Rome...
...he worships it...
...In the case of Hitler there may be such an irrational residue...
...their contempt for German institutions and German philistines, e.g., was overlaid by their hopes for the German future...
...Other Slavic minorities in the Austrian monarchy are even worse off: though not guilty of counterrevolution, the Czechs and Slovaks are unable to make their own revolution successfully—the Hegelian World Spirit has condemned them to remain geschichtslos, without history, the worst insult a Prussian can fling at another nation: On the one hand the revolution: Germans, Magyars, Poles...
...As we shall have to remember presently, Marx enjoyed using this style, which he had learned from the master...
...136 of the German text) as "a specifically East Prussian superstition inherited from the Middle Ages...
...Others, who also "bought the ticket of admission" (baptism)—Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne, both great German patriots and democrats...
...They value freedom only as the freedom to bargain [schachern]," the Neue Rheinische Zeitung declared on November 3, 1848...
...Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions...
...Carlebach makes the distinction more sharply than it probably should be made, but on principle one can concede that it is anybody's damned right to dislike Jews or Italians or blacks or, for that matter, WASPs...
...base noble...
...The nineteen-year-old student told this in a long letter to his father, and he acknowledges his intellectual debts in later writings...
...The hilarious and sad incident, said to be true, is reported by Arnold Ruge, the coeditor of the Yearbook and a Young-Hegelian philosopher...
...his nickname was "The Moor" because of his dark complexion, and he could have sat for Michelangelo as a model for one of his prophets...
...Marx Histories of socialism usually begin with the Old Testament prophets, mighty preachers against usury and "those that buy the poor for silver," visionaries of a golden age and messengers of perpetual peace...
...Whenever Marx was angry at Lassalle's presumptuousness he called him that—or worse—behind his back...
...A letter to 460 Ruge, dated March 1843, reports that "the President of the Israelites here [in Cologne where Marx was editor of the liberal Rheinische Zeitung...
...Today "the Jew" no longer symbolizes money, yet the Jewish question is still with us—and precisely in those countries where not money but Marx is said to rule...
...In 1843 Marx had answered: Look at all those white Jews, the Christian bankers...
...Like all radicals, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ardently supported the Polish cause, while the German National Assembly in Frankfurt opposed it, pointing to the great number of Germans living in the provinces that Austria and Prussia had annexed from Poland...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
