MARX AND THE JEWS: ANOTHER VIEW

...it helps the backward Prussians and Austrians advance to the modern point of view where all old social differentiations dissolve in the one great conflict between capitalists and workers...

...One wonders whether Marx might have treated the Jews differently if he had read Graetz's 11-volume history...

...But in this book Marx belabors the publisher of the London Daily Telegraph, and I quote from this at length because it seems to me that private sentiment has indeed been converted into a very public racist attitude...

...Several Jews were seized and brought before the French consul RattiMenton, an unsavory Jew-hater...

...That year William Marr, who had written an antiSemitic tract, Judenspiegel ("Jew's Mirror") in 1862, and who later coined the phrase antiSemitism, wrote Der Sieg des Judentums Ober das Germanentum (" The Victory of Judaism over Germanism...

...Ephraim Gescheit...

...he was attacked viciously as a Jew by Bakunin, Proudhon, and many others, both socialists and nonsocialists...

...She was an active organizer of Jewish workers in London's East End and she learned Yiddish, the better to spread the message of unionism and socialism among the Jewish workers...

...Marx, of course, had written that Feuerbach "regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance...

...Marx's friends Moses Hess, who preceded Marx as a founder of German communism (and later was a pioneer of Zionism), and Heinrich Heine were deeply influenced by the Damascus affair...

...But soon "our line," as it pertains to MullerTellering, was changed...

...is a German Jew intimately 77 connected with all his coreligionists in the loanmongering trade, [and that he is] one of the free masonry of Jews, which has existed in all ages...

...RattiMenton then turned them over to an even more ferocious foe of the Jews, Sherif Pasha, the governor of Damascus...

...Even on the Rhine, where, 95 years ago, with the assistance of the French we chased the aristocrats out of the country and have created a modern industry, where are the Jews...

...Eleanor was closely associated with an outstanding Jewish socialist leader, Morris Vinchevsky, who had emigrated to London in 1879...

...These exist only since the Dreyfus Affair and have taken their toll in this century...

...It is significant that the young Marx, who had not yet completely set Hegel on his head, developed and reiterated in "On the Jewish Question" the stereotyped Jew, the Jew of haggling, usury, shady dealings in commerce and money, the same Jew that appears in Capital and even in more virulent form in Herr Vogt...

...My friend Victor Adler, who is now paying in a prison in Vienna for his devotion to the cause of the proletariat...

...Any sourcebook on the subject informs us of organized, political, ideological anti-Semitism during the last ten years of Marx's life...

...Marx was attacked throughout his life for being a Jew by socialists and antisocialists alike, but never once, publicly or privately, did he proclaim, admit, state, defend, or just refer to himself as a Jew...

...What a heady discovery for a young person: to know not only the past and present but the future...

...There was calculated method to the tactic of supporting anti-Semitic agitation, as Mehring explains in his Neue Zeit article: He [Stocker] reveals one more flash of his proletarian origins when he proclaims Social Democracy the true heir of the Anti-Semitic agitation...

...Much of what Heine was writing would seem to be more in consonance with socialist attitudes than the stereotyping of Jews as capitalists and Judaism as the religion of the huckster and money-monger...

...None of the gentile boys and girls on my block used such elegant metaphors, but their descriptions of Jews often were remarkably similar to that...

...But the authorship is in question...

...It was then, too, that the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke "gave the sanction of his great name to the [anti-Semitic] movement...

...But his translation is adequate, so we go on with Marx: Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist...

...Having absorbed this analysis of the "Jewish Question" we are struck by the stern admonition of Erich Fromm, in his foreword to the book, that to designate this as antiSemitism is "cold-war propaganda...

...It is already known that she told Max Beer she was the only member of her family to be "drawn to the Jewish people...

...Graetz's massive History of the Jews has a vivid account of the Damascus events...

...The rights of authors and magazines must be protected...

...Expressing annoyance that various authors have taken an interest in Marx's antecedents and the contents of his writings about Jews and Judaism, the authors write, in an appendix, that the "core of the problem" is expressed in Engels's statement quoted above...

...Protests against the Damascus affair spread through Germany, France, Italy, faraway America, and even Russia, as Jews of all persuasions joined in solidarity...

...A comment on this article by Henry Pachter will appear in our next issue...

...In a recent biography (Princeton University Press, 1978), Marx's Fate: Shape of a Life, Jerrold Seigel writes: Toward Jews and Jewishness Marx always retained many positive ties...

...A common, native soil is a primary condition, if there [are] to be introduced among Jews better and more progressive relations between capital and labour...

...The political emphasis of this anti-Semitism is noted by the encyclopedia because "it was .. in the passions of party politics that the new crusade found its chief source of vitality...

...Not least of these is, Why is historical materialism inapplicable when dealing with the Jews...

...Today capitalism and labor are inseparable...

...Ironically, the sharpest expose of the financial scandals of the 1870s was conducted by the Liberal political leader Edward Lasker, a Jew...

...The appendix contains Marx's "Theses" on Feuerbach...

...The language spoken smells strongly of Babel, and the perfume which otherwise pervades the place is by no means of a choice kind...

...Thus, even a young possessor of the secret of society's "natural law" experienced a slight twinge when reading in Capital: "The sum of the values in circulation can clearly not be augmented by any change in their distribution, any more than the quantity of the precious metals in a country by a Jew selling a Queen Anne's farthing for a Guinea...

...His insistence on treating `the Jews' as a uniform entity, therefore, seriously weakens the credibility of his analysis," Carlebach writes, with customary understatement...

...Sadly, all evidence is to the contrary...

...An odd aspect of the whole matter is that this book—The Eastern Question, by Karl Marx—has been in circulation for more than 80 years, and it is available at major libraries...

...One of the many accomplishments of Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx—that extraordinary socialist, feminist, . actress, translator, editor, trade union organizer, and fighter for the rights of the Jewish people—was that she, in collaboration with Edward Aveling, her philandering, reprobate husband, assembled many of the articles written by Marx for the Tribune in a book entitled The Eastern Question, published in London in 1897...

...At the congress Vinchevsky told Eleanor he was having difficulty conveying information to the delegates, that he was there representing a number of unions whose members were Jewish...

...Thereupon more than 60 Jewish children were torn from their mothers, locked in a room and refused food, to make their mothers "confess...

...When I read the accurate translation of the Marx thesis it did not shock me as much as it might have in the first instance...

...The anti-Semites do not even know the Jews against whom they howl...

...Ask for the editor in charge of piracy...

...Even the species-relation itself, the relation between men and women, becomes an object of commerce...

...How this "exploitation" of the word Judentum by Marx contributes to the elimination of alienation and to the triumph of humanism, Bottomore does not tell us...

...How then did he react to the Damascus blood libel and its importation into Prussia...

...He was dreadfully thrashed in 1845, and sneered at alike by Jews, Christians and Turks...

...Marx apparently conducted extensive research for this article to trace the Jewish bankers and brokers who participated in the sale of securities for the loan...

...What is the worldly cult of the Jew...

...There we read: Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew...

...Thus Levy's nose serves the Daily Telegraph as an elephant snout, insect palp, lighthouse, and telegraph...

...However, Edmund Silberner, whose studies of the anti-Semitic tradition in modern socialism have become classics on the subject, quotes this article as the work of Marx...

...The nose of the mysterious stranger of 78 Slawkenbergius (see Tristram Shandy), who fetched himself the finest nose from the promontory of noses, was merely a week's talk in Strassbourg, whereas Levy's nose constitutes a year's talk in the City of London...

...Marx wrote: All London's toilets discharge their physical ordure into the Thames through an ingenious system of underground sewer pipes...

...The following year Muller-Tellering was ' an ecstatic supporter of the Cologne Communist trial in which the Prussian government was trying to establish a conspiracy against the state, organized by Marx...

...The first was a reference to history...

...Quoted from: Saul K. Padover, "The Baptism of Karl Marx's Family," Midstream, June/July 1978.] I am entirely in agreement with Henry Pachter that history has suffered from "the virus of psychoanalysis," which "has invaded history departments," and that "peephole information is not historical explanation...

...The tenacity of the Jew is to be explained, not by his religion but rather by the human basis of his religion—practical need and egoism...

...Lichtheim's essay is, in other respects, a most incisive dissection of the long history of "socialist anti-Semitism," with special reference to France...

...anti-Semitism was ubiquitous and anti-Jewish pogroms and riots took place on various occasions during his lifetime...

...After he donned the armor of historical materialism, he enthusiastically adopted anti-Semitic attitudes and arguments...

...Once having discovered "a process of natural history" one did not become unduly disturbed that even in Capital Marx wrote about Jews, not as people, but as capitalist 74 symbols and categories, dirty ones...

...The great art of Levy's nose in reality consists of cozying up to foul odor, to smell it out hundreds of miles away and to bring it forth...

...As for his dark complexion and physical appearance, surely his genes, not his mind, should get the credit...

...Julius Carlebach, whose Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) is by far the best book on the subject, points out that Marx had the necessary personal experience of Jewish communal structure and knew of the stratifications that existed among the Jews...

...Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag—people of whose friendship I am proud, and all of them Jews...

...In August 1893, they traveled together to the international labor congress in Zurich...

...His dark complexion and his physical appearance, recognized in the nickname Moor, were often described as Jewish...

...Besides, the Jewish language is akin to my blood," she told her Russian friend...

...In any case, being both Jewish and a youngster of fifteen when I first read the "Theses" in the Kerr edition, I was impressed by Marx's criticism of Feuerbach, reading here that he considered "only theoretical activity as generally human, while `praxis' is conceived and fixed only in its disgusting form...

...One can read detailed descriptions of Jewish community life also in the work of the noted 19th-century German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz...

...Carlebach cites Jean-Paul Sartre who had described as "lazy Marxism the attempt to turn real men into the symbols of its myths...

...The "classical" Marx biography is Franz Mehring's Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, first published in 1918 (I use here the English translation, London: Allen & Unwin, 1936...

...A few years later, I read an accurate translation of that famous thesis...

...Practical need, self-interest...

...And when they did, it was "only to the extent of declaring that the Jewish aspect of the Affaire was irrelevant...

...The reborn Mehring, the Marxist, writing in the Neue Zeit in 1892, turns 180 degrees and attacks the "campaign of vilification" against Stocker...

...As capitalism grows stronger so does labor...

...Herr Karl Vogt does not concern us here...

...Among the 22,000 Levis whom Moses counted in his march through the wilderness, there was not a single Levi who spelled it with a y...

...I did not know then that the editors were being sensitive to what I was—young, Jewish, and a socialist...

...We have written Telos that it has violated copyright...

...But one had already learned in a Jewish socialist school that the Polish Jews and those in the Pale of Russia numbered millions...

...all sorts and manner of Armenian, Jerusalem, Barbaresque, and Polish beggars, in long robes and oriental turbans...

...In his article on socialism and the Jews, George Lichtheim goes beyond historical dissection of how the anti-Semitic strain grew and flourished within the socialist movement (Dissent, July-August 1968...

...The leader of the political anti-Semitic agitation was Adolf Stocker, whose "philosophical" thrusts were all too familiar...

...One discovered the correspondence of Marx and Engels, not just the letters to Kugelman and other Marxist correspondence...

...Then it dawned on me for the first time in the midst of my socialist activities that I belonged to my unfortunate, slandered, despised and dispersed people...

...He couldn't help but be aware of it, because the European newspapers were filled with it...

...At political rallies the theme of his oratory 85 was that "the Jewish spirit of Mammon corrupts our nation...

...What it did, overwhelmingly, is to convey the stereotypes that have pursued the Jews throughout their history...

...Earlier one had experienced two other twinges in the first volume...

...Marx's italics] It is of more than passing interest that Marx's early writings have been cited as the source of the humanist Marx, the Marx who dissected the alienation bred by capitalism...

...Most of Marx's biographers have been overwhelmed by their subject...

...and as a matter of fact, these Jewish workers are the most exploited and the most miserable ones...

...Here in England we have had three strikes of Jewish workers during the last twelve months, 84 and then we are supposed to practice antiSemitism in the struggle against capital...

...Friedrich Engels Nothing in the recorded utterances of Karl Marx resembles this letter in philosophy, style, or political uses, in regard to his analysis of Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish question...

...In all that time there was just this small portion of a short, but fascinating, article on the Jews of Jerusalem written with compassion about Jews...

...Levy in a nunnery...

...Among the participants was a prominent French politician, who happened to be Jewish, Benoit Fould...

...Mehring concludes that Marx "showed the development of Judaism not in religious theory, but in industrial and commercial practice, which found a fantastic reflection in the Jewish religion...

...a fee was agreed upon and paid...

...For the span of the lives of Marx and Engels, anti-Semitism was widespread, sometimes exploding in antiJewish riots...

...no answer came...

...One became so enthralled by the discovery of the secret of surplus value, the general law of capitalist accumulation, the inexorable law of the growing misery of the working class (this seemed so cogent in the 1930s) that one ignored Marx's references to Jews...

...How else can one react to the use of racist slurs about an opponent of Marx who had the "misfortune" (shared by Marx) of being born of Jewish ancestry...

...Admitting that Stocker often asserted and then retracted statements, Mehring writes: "It was this aspect of his character that was exploited to the utmost by the hired scribblers of moneyed Jewry to present Stocker as a scarecrow of untruthfulness...

...How amazing that the same description of Jews I heard on the block where I was growing up and joined the Young Communist League was current in the times and in the writing of Karl Marx...

...Though vouching for Marx's authorship of all the articles they include, the Avelings note: "In several cases where his correspondence has been turned into leaders, a few words of addition and interpolation have been written in by the American editors, to keep up journalistic appearances...

...But of what use is it for Levy to attack Mr...

...Disraeli...

...Only once, as a young man, by the signing of one petition supporting civil rights for the Jews of Cologne, did he ever remonstrate with the anti-Semites all around him...

...To be sure, if I had to choose, then rather a Jew than Herr von...

...In the same way, through a system of goose quills, the world metropolis daily spits all its social ordure into a big paper-made-central-sewer—the Daily Telegraph...

...What is the profane basis of Judaism...

...Across the seas pirates once did roam, Now they study Marxist tomes at home, Filching foreign articles for Telos, Chortling, "Watcha gonna do about it, fellas...

...The great majority was terribly poor and almost all were victims of discrimination...

...The pre-Marxist Mehring assailed Stocker mercilessly, pointing out how "this miserable demagogue" poisoned and inflamed "our public life...

...for a time he was close to Moses Hess, and he helped the former Cologne communist Abraham Jacoby emigrate to America (where he became an influential physician...

...On the gate leading into the paper-made-central-sewer are inscribed the words...

...it was not yet an organized political force with a philosophy and program...

...According to Mehring the Jewish community had taken "no part whatsoever in the great intellectual labours of the German thinkers and poets...

...In the summation of his article, Marx and the Jews, Pachter writes: "The anti-Semitism that Marx knew in the middle of the last century was largely social...

...That which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion—contempt for theory, for art, for history, and for man as an end in himself—is the real conscious standpoint and the virtue of the man of money...

...In his valuable research, Edmund Silberner disclosed that late in his life Friedrich Engels, then working closely with the Avelings, departed from the shibboleths of Jews as money men, hucksters, and capitalists...

...But unlike his friends—Heine and Hess—Marx left no evidence of any reaction except for what Carlebach calls a "Freudian slip...

...EDS...

...Loan mongering Jews derive much of their strength from these family relations, as these, in addition to lucre affinities, give a compactness and unity to their operations which insure their success...

...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 76 transaction...

...Not without irony, Carlebach suggests, "Perhaps the most original contribution of Marx in relation to the Jewish question was his attempt to convert flesh-and-blood people into a socioeconomic category...

...In 1879, the Anti-Semitic League was founded in Berlin and Dresden...

...Just like my North Carolina friend who thought "Jew" was a verb, not a noun...

...If Marx is the author of "The Russian Loan," in its entirety, the conversion is complete...

...Pachter referred to two Tribune dispatches by Marx along those lines, "The Standing of the European Houses," November 9, 1855 and "The Loanmongers of Europe," November 22, 1885...

...and the Russians were not deprived of their language, their culture, their national existence by the Jews...

...By the time one came to the end of the third volume of Capital one read, with the usual twinge, Marx citing favorably a quotation that: "Jews, Lombards, usurers and bloodsuckers were our first bankers, our original bank sharks, their characters being such as to be called almost infamous...

...After all, I had learned what Marx termed the ultimate aim of his work, "to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society...

...The most curious aspect of this defense of Marx's attitude is the assertion that Marx found a unique way of proclaiming his Jewish identity—by his dark complexion and his physical appearance...

...otherwise they would know that here in England and in America—thanks to the anti-Semites from Eastern Europe--and in Turkey—thanks to the Spanish Inquisition—there are thousands and thousands of Jewish proletarians...

...Hess suggested the establishment of the Jewish state "in the land of the Fathers...

...Marr proclaimed the "new anti-Semitism" whose emphasis was ideological, the financial role of the Jews...

...Furthermore, the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow did not include this article in either the Gesamtausgabe or the Marx-Engels Werke...

...Carlebach points out that Heine, in his Confessions written in 1854, criticized Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and "his obdurate friend" Marx for their misconceived analyses of Judaism...

...there were 206,000 Jews in Prussia in 1843, out of a total population of 15 million...

...In all North America with its millionaires whose wealth can be hardly expressed in our shabby marks, florins or francs, there is not a single Jew among those millionaires, and the Rothschilds are real beggars compared to those Americans...

...the discovery by Frenchmen of the Right and the Left that the longed for fusion of patriotism with socialism had actually been effected in, of all places, Israel...

...In the Kapp book we read: "I am a Jewess," announced Eleanor Marx at the time of the Dreyfus affair, undoing in four 83 words her paternal grandfather's year of cogitation and eventual baptism...

...To people educated in the Marxist tradition, seekers after class analysis and adherents of solidarity...

...One of our editors, in Paris at the time, made a written agreement with Le Nouvel Observateur granting Dissent permission to translate and reprint...

...This extraordinary "statistic" is of passing interest for many obvious reasons—Marx was of Jewish descent...

...Many of these articles [as also some of those in the vein of Engels's quoted above] came from Muller-Tellering (the paper's Vienna correspondent) whose contribution Marx considered to be "the best we have had, absolutely in keeping with our line...

...Protests rose to a crescendo and the Damascus victims finally won their freedom, that is, those who had not died under torture...

...yet, generations of Marx scholars have not bothered to pause, examine the article, and stigmatize this exercise in egregious racism...

...I t has been widely noted that an outstanding weakness of the analysis of the political scene of Europe and elsewhere fashioned by Marx and Engels was their failure to fully apprehend the role of nations, the growth of nationalism and national liberation movements, including the problem of a "potential" Jewish nation...

...if Germany were to conquer France and Italy...

...The smartest highwayman in the Abruzzi is not better posted up about the locale of the hard cash in a traveller's valise or pocket than these Jews about any loose capital in the hands of a trader...

...Both author and journal granted permission...

...Mehring applauds Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and other Young Hegelian critics of the Jews, but he finds the ultimate in Marx's dramatic questions and answers proving that money is the god of the Jews...

...In no other area is this more prevalent than in considering the problem of Marx and the Jews...

...by 1880 the number was a quarter of a million...

...What is his worldly god...

...And it suggests, "It is impossible to doubt, however, that the secret springs of the new agitation were more or less directly supplied by Prince Bismarck himself...

...That erstwhile "progressive" Muller-Tellering, who just happened to be a racist, wrote: "The Jew hunt naturally increases the enthusiasm and interest...

...This, of course, is the real core of the matter, and nothing written by Marx even approximates what Engels wrote here...

...He may, in fact, be stated to have been the first and only cause of a union between all the religions at Jerusalem...

...so long as Mother Nature has inscribed, with the wildest black letters, his family tree in the middle of his face...

...Henry Pachter, in his article, "Marx and the Jews," in the Fall 1979 issue of Dissent, argues that Marx and Engels do not aim "to sow anti-Semitism but to exploit an existing anti-Semitism and make a point...

...After demonstrating how Marx `used antiSemitic invective when it served a propagandistic purpose," Henry Pachter argues that "what matters is whether private sentiments are converted into racist philosophies...

...Heine criticized them for diverting their hatred of the rich into hatred of the Jews, pointing to some obvious facts of history, that the Jews "were excluded from all ownership of land and from all manual trades, being relegated to trading and finance, activities which the church spurned as too low for true believers...

...His book fell on fruitful soil, says the Britannia, for 1873 was a year of financial scandals...

...Some time back we asked the French writer Claude Lanzman for permission to reprint from the journal Les Temps Modernes an article he had written on the Holocaust...

...The cry was raised, "The Jews have murdered Tomaso and his servant in order to use their blood for the Passover celebration...

...it would result in placing the entire German people under police law and in depriving the Jews of their civil rights...

...the reference to Ephraim "the clever" was another anti-Jewish gibe, while Itzik was the favorite Marx designation for Lassalle, as it was among many anti-Semites about almost any Jew...

...Meanwhile, in March of that same year, a Jew in the town of Julich in Rhenish Prussia was charged with ritual murder, in seeming imitation of the Damascus case, but the innocence of the accused was quickly established...

...For it wasn't the Jews of medieval times who drove the British out of their island kingdom...

...As the fall 1980 Dissent came out with our translation of this interview, we found another translation of the Sartre interview in Telos—again, without permission...

...about 8,000 inhabitants were Jews, some 4,000 were Muslims...

...I do so because the early essays present conclusions about the Jews, Judaism, Jewish history that are reflected and built upon in all of his later life and work...

...Mehring has little difficulty with Marx and the Jewish problem because Marx's views on the subject are congenial to him...

...Money...

...Hence at least once a month he attacks the un-British policies of Disraeli...

...Pachter concedes that this is bad enough, "but to judge such outbursts, one must compare them with similar invective against other races...

...The question arises, at what point does private sentiment become converted into a racist philosophy...

...Worse than that, Marx's "dozens of anti-Semitic remarks are disgusting...

...he also devotes scant attention to Marx's references and treatment of Jews when he was no longer a "juvenile...

...The fellow's importunity is also negro...

...This union of Jew and German with its negro sources was bound to produce a strange hybrid...

...Marx continues about Lassalle: "As the shape of his head and the texture of his hair suggest, he is descended from the negroes who joined Moses in his exodus from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother were crossed with a nigger...

...One didn't question Marx for describing Jews, not as a people divided, as a Marxist divided other people, into classes, or into rich and poor or into good and bad...

...The headlines and stories in the press were about Cremieux and the Damascus blood libel case...

...If it can thrive at all in a country it is only proof that not enough capitalism exists in that country...

...the revelations that the Jews—or some Jews—were after all capable of founding a state, and even of defending themselves unaided or practically unaided...

...The above is quoted in David McLellan's Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1973...

...The general war that will break out will break this Slavic union and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations right down to their very names...

...Next thing, we saw the article in Te/os—without permission...

...There can be no doubt that Heinrich Marx had attained that humanistic culture which freed him entirely from all Jewish prejudices, and he handed on this freedom to his son Karl as a valuable heritage...

...Marx wrote: Nothing equals the misery and sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, in the quarter of dirt between the Zion and the Moriah, where their synagogues are situated— the constant object of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins, and living upon the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren...

...The attempt is made in the biography Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, by Boris Nicolaevsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976...

...This information was received with tumultuous applause...

...He went further, and delivered a slashing attack against anti-Semitism...

...That is why I began with the treatment of Jews in Capital...

...Meanwhile, we would advise editors of intellectual journals in the United States: If you are planning to translate and reprint something from a European journal, after gaining permission in the customary ways, perhaps you had better check first with Telos (Box 3111, St...

...Marx wrote every word of that book, and Engels thought it was "the finest polemical work Marx had ever written...

...Moreover, Marx was recognized as a Jew...

...Particularly vivid is the description of the scene near the Amstel in Amsterdam where the House of Moses Montefiore is located: Crowds of these Jewish agents assemble there every day, together with numerous Jewish theologians and...

...Mehring enters the discussion of Marx's essays "On the Jewish Question" with obvious relish...

...Petersburg House of Stieglitz is credited as the major operator in this endeavor and we are informed that Stieglitz...

...Christians and Moslems alike fed the fires with agitation against the Jews...

...Telos is a quarterly published in St...

...In it we read: "Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit...

...Indeed, it is true that Marx and Engels leveled virulent abuse upon many other races and nationalities...

...What is one to say, however, about how Marx characterized a Jewish target of opportunity in his work entitled Herr Vogt...

...T. D. Bottomore, editor and translator of Marx's early writings, including the essays "On the Jewish Question" from which I am quoting, ardently propounds this view...

...Radical as he was, supportive of the early socialist movement, and even though he was a convert to Christianity, he was critical of Marx and others for failing to come to the support of persecuted Jews and also for their distortions of Jewish history and Judaism...

...This is hardly conducive to advancing "scientific method" in the study of history...

...Itzik...

...Here is the index reference to Ferdinand Lassalle, in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe in a single volume published in Berlin in 1930: "Lassalle—Jiidel Braun...

...The latter is distinctive because it is the only item in many thousands of articles, pamphlets, books, essays, and letters, written by Marx over a span of about 45 years, which contains some sympathetic comments about Jews...

...not true if the Gesamtausgabe or the Werke is any guide...

...Jews in Capital were a symbol, and not a very inspiring one...

...Therefore, I wish us Germans—and I count the Viennese among them—a rapid development of capitalism, and certainly not its stagnation...

...And even here in England Rothschild is a man of modest means compared, for instance with the Duke of Westminister...

...between 1840 and 1850, 35,000 German Jews came to America...

...The case in Damascus, however, dragged on...

...How valuable these theses were to young socialists seeking both theoretical understanding and practical activity for the liberation of the working class...

...Seven prominent Jews were "implicated" and tortured, but they refused to "confess...

...Marx explained that society "can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development...

...For example, one year after the Communist Manifesto called upon the workers of all lands to unite, Engels issued a wrathful warnings to the Czechs, the Slovaks, and other Slays in an article published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: With the first successful revolt of the French proletariat . the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be free and exact a bloody revenge from the Slavic barbarians...

...In a footnote to Engels's dire anathema pronounced upon the Slays, McLellan informs us: The Neue Rheinisshe Zeitung also contained a fair amount of anti-Semitism whose generally anti-capitalist tone it facilely considered to be of a progressive nature...

...This strain was so strong, as Lichtheim points out, that it took four years after the Dreyfus case had startled the world for the French socialists to decide to oppose the frameup...

...The St...

...Carlebach describes "the democratic tradition of Jewish communal life, manifested as, it was in secret ballots for communal government, publicly financed education and social welfare and the use of the synagogue service as a forum for complaints and protests...

...our original bankers...

...Elements such as the Jews who "could not be reduced to the national type should be eliminated," Man wrote...

...that the greatest mass was dirt poor and that many thousands were workers and handicraftsmen...

...the first major essays he wrote were "On the Jewish Question...

...Now the Marx correspondence is being published in large editions and read by many who lack the comfort of a knowledge of the "natural law" of society's development...

...The name was Lassalle, but to identify the references by Marx to him in the correspondence from 1854 to 1860, one had to know that "little Jew Braun" was an anti-Semitic sneer by Marx about the original Lassallefamilyname(Marx here is not at all self-conscious about the fact that if the original Lassalle family name was Braun, the Marx family name was Levi...

...Marx met the latter and gave him copies of Capital and The Civil War in France, inscribed with an "expression of admiration and friendship...

...Baptism became a road to "freedom" for some and at one point Prussian officials began to fret about the decline in Jewish taxation...

...Woman is bartered away...

...Vinchevsky later reported: You know what, Vinchevsky," Eleanor said to me, "you write down what you have just told me, the names of your unions and the number of workers, and as translator I will somehow smuggle this into the congress...

...and in Prussia and Austria it is the petty bourgeois, doomed to extinction by the competition of big capital, the craftsman and small businessman, who join the chorus...

...In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets...

...Holy Jupiter, what will happen next...

...Marx unwittingly substituted Cremieux's name for Fould's, in what was evidently a Freudian slip...

...In 1840, a blood libel case against the Jews in distant Damascus shook up the civilized world...

...One was introduced to the private mind of Marx...

...George Lichtheim, in his valuable essay "Socialism and the Jews" (Dissent, July-August 1968), refers to these essays as part of Marx's "juvenilia," thus dismissing them...

...This followed the split between the Chancellor and the Liberals, among whom were many German-Jewish figures...

...We will never know what part carbuncles, his mother, or self-hatred played in fashioning the character and the attitudes of Karl Marx...

...Many socialists and Marxists, understandably, have evaded or rationalized the antiSemitic strand in the work of Marx...

...Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah...

...This very aspect of Marx's life and work is pointed up by his daughter Eleanor who declared publicly that she was the only member of the Marx family who said she was Jewish...

...Heinrich Marx also practiced in the Trier county court and held the title of Justizrat—positions he could only have held by renouncing Judaism...

...I am citing here the early essays "On the Jewish Question" with full knowledge that Marx rewrote them, in effect, in his work The Holy Family, and even though the early essays do not fully reflect the mature Marx and his full-grown theory of historical materialism...

...Perhaps nunnery is a misprint for nonoria...

...Why curious...

...True, Marx had many Jewish acquaintances...

...Lassalle was a Jew...

...The Telegraph a preacher of decency for female stage costumes...

...In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism...

...In the voluminous correspondence there are Marx's brilliant insights into the American Civil War, the peasant rebellion in Russia, the failed revolution in Gemany, the heroism of the Paris communards, and his marvelous tribute to Abraham Lincoln, as a "good man" above everything else...

...Warming to the theme, Mehring writes that for many a decade the adoption of Christianity was an act of civilized progress for the freer spirits of Judaism...

...The von Sethe here was president of the Provincial Supreme Court, and all this is meticulously documented in David McLelland's Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1973...

...Most revealing in this respect is Mehring's interpretation of the reasons for the conversion of Marx's father Heinrich to Christianity...

...The breaking up of estates and farms by Jewish usurers took place on a growing scale during the agricultural crisis in the twenties and as a result it produced a violent wave of anti-Semitism in the Rhineland...

...We wrote to Telos in protest...

...In his article on Jerusalem in the Tribune issue of April 15, 1854, Marx pointed out that the Jews comprised the majority of the permanent population of that city...

...By way of contrast, the Jews of Prussia and of Europe come alive in Carlebach's book...

...They were written in 1843 when Marx was only twentyfive years old and, more important, had not yet fully developed his theory of historical materialism...

...But the claim that Marx retained many positive ties to Jews and "Jewishness" is extraordinary...

...Thus, anti-Semitism is nothing but a reactionary movement of decaying, medieval, social groups against modern society, which is essentially composed of capitalists and workers, and therefore anti-Semitism serves only reactionary purposes underneath its socialistic disguise...

...By that time I was hooked...

...were a very bad crowd, they were greedy usurers, stonyhearted vampires...

...Hess went further:] With the Jews, more than with other nations, which, though oppressed, yet live on their own soil, all political and social progress must necessarily be preceded by national independence...

...Many of our best people are Jews...

...Here we can read that for a time "the voice of the old Jew hatred [was] shamed into silence in much of western Europe, though it was being heard all too loud and clear in Russia and Rumania and in the medieval ambiance of northern Africa and Persia...

...We had, in the words of Marx, discovered the "natural laws" of society's development...

...On the whole...

...There is so much continuity in the symbolism of anti-Semitism that the association by Marx of Jews and huckstering, Jews and money-grubbing, Jews and loan-mongering, Jews and capital, has been a standard of all anti-Semitic propaganda...

...In their introduction to the volume the Avelings explain, "as to unsigned letters and leading articles, the exercise of careful investigation and discretion has been necessary...

...A friend of mine who became a Marxist, even though he grew up in North Carolina, recalls that he must have been fifteen years old before he learned that the word Jew was a noun, not a verb...

...At least in part it survives through the pirating of articles from European journals...

...In 1869 they won de jure civil rights in Prussia, not de facto...

...A stark contrast is offered by the other article, "The Russian Loan," which appeared as the Tribune's leader, or editorial, on January 4, 1856...

...In addition, we owe a great deal to Jews...

...Nor were the nearly 4 million European Jews all moneylenders or loan-mongers...

...he was completing a triumphal tour of Europe following his success in Damascus...

...But it also seems certain that Marx conducted research for this article and that in at least two other articles, indubitably written by him, he considered it proper to attack the villainy of the Russian loan and the Czar's regime on the basis of Jewish participation, along with respectable Christian bankers, in raising the loan...

...The leading German anti-Semitic agitator in the last decade of Marx's life was Adolf Stocker...

...Sadly, it was changed not in recognition of how dangerous it is to use anti-Semitism for anticapitalist purposes or how self-destructive it is to incite the annihilation of "small pigheaded nations...

...it's hard to conceive of socialist movements without Jews, and Marx would have been hard put to avoid them...

...To make these Jews more miserable, England and Prussia appointed, in 1840, an Anglican bishop at Jerusalem, whose avowed object is their conversion...

...Not to mention Heine and Borne, Marx was of purely Jewish origin...

...His predictions stand up rather well, compared with those of that famous Manifesto of 1848...

...At the time of Marx's birth his father was counsellor-at-law to the high court of appeal in Trier...

...Marx was forced to change his religion to avoid becoming, as von Sethe put it, `breadless...

...Before becoming a Marxist, when Mehring was simply a humanitarian, he fought against anti-Semitism...

...Eduard Bernstein, the editor of the London Sozialdemokrat...

...Although the poet also used antiJewish fleers on occasion, he spoke proudly of his Jewish origins and throughout his lifetime stood up in defense of Jews who were under attack...

...The next world war will cause to vanish from the face of the earth not only reactionary classes and dynasties but also whole reactionary peoples...

...Meanwhile, in December of the same year, 81 1840, there was a debate in the French Chamber of Deputies on the question of Sabbath laws...

...He adds that the only Jews who could make contributions, like Eduard Gans and Heinrich Heine, were those who became Christians...

...The signal for change came in 1873...

...furthermore, not until well into his later years did the Jews of Germany acquire formal civil rights...

...it is a variety of feudal socialism, from which we must stay away...

...And perhaps even energetic Marxists might reflect whether historical materialism at its least dogmatic may still be a generator of myths...

...Those in Germany were called Hep Hep riots, taking their name from the cry of the youthful marchers against the Jews...

...The volume edited by Eleanor and Edward Aveling has two other articles about Jews—one entitled "The Russian Loan," the other "War Declared—Mussulman-Christian...

...A few months ago, just before his death, Jean-Paul Sartre gave a lengthy interview that appeared in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur...

...Writing nearly four years later about that debate, Marx says in his book, The Holy Family: Or Critique of Critical Criticism: "Monsieur Cremieux declared on behalf of the French Jews...

...The least that can be said about Marx's version of Judaism and Jewish history is that it required no references or notes since it included no data and no empirical investigation...

...This time we refuse to tolerate such piracy...

...Here's how it happened...

...The Kolnisthe Zeitung sees in this a "curious agreement" between Herr Stocker and the Neue Zeit...

...The American socialists of that day must have been aware of how many Jewish adherents there were in the socialist movement...

...Mehring, however, argues that at that time, "the renunciation of Judaism was not merely an act of religious emancipation but also, and even more so, an act of social emancipation...

...True, that bore a relation to the role of many Jews as traders in Poland...

...At a time when American Communists 75 were far more -concerned about white chauvinism than about anti-Semitism, it was truly shocking for a young Communist to read a letter by Marx, dated July 30, 1862 addressed to Engels, describing the "Jewish Nigger Lassalle...

...An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions and thus the very possibility of huckstering would make the Jew impossible...

...Bottomore notes that the German word Judentum [Judaism] "had in the 79 language of the time, the secondary meaning of `commerce' and in this and other passages Marx exploits the two senses of the word...

...It is timely to recall, in this connection, the extraordinary prescience of Moses Hess—not only the founder of the German communist movement, but also the precursor of Zionism...

...Decency...

...Moses Hess, in his book Rome and Jerusalem, written almost 20 years later, recalls the impact the Damascus blood libel had upon him while, at that time, his thoughts and activities centered on the organization of a proletarian-communist movement in Germany: Twenty years ago, when an absurd and false accusation against the Jews was imported into Europe from Damascus, it evoked in the hearts of the Jews a bitter feeling of agony...

...Trading nations," Marx wrote, "properly so-called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the Gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society...

...The contrast between this statement by Engels and everything written by Marx on the subject is accentuated by an almost plaintive effort to equate Marx's position on the Jews with that of Engels (in later years...

...The fully fashioned stereotype is set down in the second Marx essay, entitled, "Bruno Bauer: `Die Fahigkeit der Heutigen Juden and Christen, Frei zu Werden.'" (The capacity of the present-day Jews and Christians to become free...

...Sartre, on his deathbed, approved...

...Curiously, he explains the stereotyping of Jews by Marx as a fault of the dictionary of that time...

...nor did the Jews exterminate the Germans...

...And already then, though I was greatly estranged from Judaism, I wanted to express my Jewish patriotic sentiment in a cry of anguish, but it was unfortunately stifled in my heart by a greater pain, which the suffering of the European proletariat evoked in me...

...Between 1853 and 1856 Marx wrote extensively for the New York Daily Tribune about the Crimean War...

...Recently, however, New York Times book reviewer John Leonard gleaned from the letters of Marx, selected and translated by Saul K. Padover, that Marx's "vocabulary of abuse is wearisome...

...It seems highly probable that the Tribune editors altered and embellished Marx's original...

...A bad conscience is a powerful pair of glasses through which even Herr Stocker may come to see what we have long since recognized in the light of socialist knowledge...

...I myself was made a Jew by the [conservative weekly] Gartenlaube...

...Hess wrote in 1862...

...Lichtheim goes on to describe an important development that helped offset, in more recent times, the anti-Semitic strain in the socialist movement...

...Some of the gentile boys and girls in Brooklyn grew up thinking that "dirty Jew" was one word...

...It is viciously anti-Semitic and a question has been raised as to whether Marx was the author of the piece in its entirety...

...80 Emigration was another way to escape discrimination...

...Two prominent European Jews, Moses Montefibre of England and Adolphe Cremieux of France went on a widely publicized mission to Cairo and Damascus seeking release of the captive Jews...

...And that, too, is progress...

...One can therefore say without exaggeration that Levy writes his newspaper with his nose...

...Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself...

...Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities...

...Money is the universal and selfsufficient value of all things...

...Louis, Missouri, 63130, no phone number listed...

...As long as Muller-Tellering was using antiSemitism to attack capitalism, that was "fine...

...We discern in Judaism, therefore, a universal antisocial element of the present time, whose historical development, zealously aided in its harmful aspects by the Jews, has not attained its culminating point, a point at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate...

...The contrast between Marx and his friend Heinrich Heine is striking...

...The trip was financed by Jewish communities all over the world...

...The subject of the editorial on the Russian loan was the Czar's effort to bolster his finances for the conduct of the Crimean War...

...In Prussia it is the low nobility, the Junkers, who earn 10,000 marks and spend 20,000 and therefore fall prey to the usurers, who go in for anti-Semitism...

...Among his closest friends were the Jews Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Kugelman...

...we have been in touch with Le Nouvel Observateur regarding further steps...

...But how can one resist speculation about psychological influences, since the family name of Karl Marx had been Levi, spelled with an "i" as it usually is in German...

...Marx at 22 was not yet a socialist and the greater pain that Hess felt because of the suffering of the proletariat was not yet a problem for Marx...

...However, insofar as capital ruins these classes of society, which are reactionary through and through, it fulfills its mission and is useful, whether it be Semitic or Aryan, circumsized or baptized...

...An hour later, at the congress session, she announced in three languages (German, French, and English) that real Jewish workers, organized in eight different unions, had their representative present...

...Eleanor's face was radiant with pride...

...But soon Muller-Tellering was attacking Karl Marx—as a Jew...

...The Players [a London theater journal] advises Levy, as Hamlet did Ophelia, to be gone to a monastery, and particularly a nunnery...

...and we have turned the case over to our attorney...

...In 1879, four years before Marx's death, the anti-Semitic hysteria "spread with sudden fury over the whole of Germany," the encyclopedia records...

...The most painful twinge came when Marx was at his wittiest in Capital, in discussing commodities as money: "The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money...

...It was thrilling to learn that society "can shorten and lessen the birthpangs" of inexorable development...

...Writing on April 19, 1890 to someone who felt, as Mehring did, that anti-Semitism could be turned into anticapitalism, Engels argued...

...Before me lies the 1903 edition of Frederick [Friedrich] Engels's Feuerbash: The Roots of Socialist Philosophy, translated and edited by Austin Lewis, published by Charles H. Kerr & Co...

...They would be disgusting even if they weren't made by someone descended from a long line of rabbis on both sides of the family...

...The first such use of anti-Semitism against Marx by MullerTellering appeared in 1850...

...We go backward in the life of Marx, to his essays "On the Jewish Question...

...Furthermore, the clericals, smarting under the blows of the Kulturkampf, "joined eagerly in the new cry...

...Levy wants to be an Anglo-Saxon...

...However, I must ask you to consider whether you will not do more harm than good through anti-Semitism...

...And by orthodox criteria she wasn't Jewish because her mother was gentile...

...The Jews were delighted," he writes, "when enlightened criticism took the Christian religion to task, for they themselves always cursed it, but when the same criticism turned its attention to the Jewish religion they 82 howled aloud as though humanity were being betrayed...

...Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment, there is one of these little Jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan...

...Louis and devoted to the more scholastic departments of left-wing thought...

...In his Dissent article, Henry Pachter points out that Marx "used anti-Semitic invective when it suited a propagandistic purpose...

...My favorite edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 11th, published in 1911, designates 1873 as the key turning point in Germany toward just that type of organized political anti-Semitism...

...The actual reason is clearly outlined by the historical record...

...In the second volume of Yvonne Kapp's excellent biography, Eleanor Marx (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), there is fascinating data illustrating the pride with which Eleanor Marx proclaimed that she was Jewish...

...Huckstering...

...This Jew organization of loan mongers is as dangerous to the people as the organization of landowners...

...Fromm explains that while Marx "in this paper .. . said some harsh (and in my opinion not always correct) words about what he thought was the Jewish religion, he said equally harsh words about the British shopkeepers, the German philosophers, and the Russians...

...I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word...

...quisquamfaxit oletum [here a stink is made] or, as Byron has translated into fine poetry: "Wanderer, stop and—piss...

...But Cremieux was not even a member of the Chamber at the time...

...Apart from the question whether racism applied to many nationalities is better than exclusive anti-Semitism, there is an astounding lack of symmetry that eludes Fromm...

...Anti-Semitism is a characteristic feature of a backward culture and can be found therefore only in Prussia, Austria, and Russia...

...Heinrich Heine cried out against the Damascus blood libel...

...the lack of such attitudes toward the Jews by Marx raises a number of other questions...

...Eleanor told a Russian friend, Zinaida Vengerova: "My latest linguistic acquisition is Yiddish," in order to spread the socialist message among the immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe...

...Moreover, anti-Semitism distorts the entire picture...

...The paper's publisher was Joseph Moses Levy...

...We discover there were 4.5 million Jews in 1840 of which 3.95 million lived in Europe...

...The libel was concocted in the ancient tradition: Father Tomaso (Thomas), a superior of the Capuchin (Franciscan) order, and his servant disappeared...