LETTERS
Editors: Permit me to point out an error in fact in Jean BlochMichel's article "Anti-Semitism and the French Right" (Summer 1980). Lucien Goldmann was neither a "former anarchist" nor was he...
...The public tends to be ideologically conservative or moderate, but programmatically liberal...
...Ask them if the government should help the public obtain medical care, see that everyone has ajob, aid the cities, solve the energy crisis, and they will generally say yes, too...
...He charges that Mehring misrepresented the motives of Heinrich Marx, Karl's father, in embracing Christianity—"the ticket of admission to polite society," Heine had said in his mocking tone...
...I have a few brief comments about his reply...
...How unhistorical...
...It was Mehring who first shouted `foul" to Marx's unfair epithets directed at Ferdinand Lassalle...
...I see two reasons...
...In that volume the reader will find the documents that describe the differences between the Mehring before and after he became a Marxist, with respect to antiSemitism...
...He will find that where Marx speaks of "long-nosed Jews and evil smell," Heine uses the same words...
...In Marx there is the latter, not the former...
...But given the framework of his thinking, one cannot hold his idealism against him...
...Ahlwardt, who was an investigative reporter, had uncovered the fact that faulty rifles had been supplied to the German army by one Israel Lowi, and concluded that a Jewish conspiracy tried to "emasculate" the German defense...
...Mehring had many Jewish friends (among others, Rosa Luxemburg) and at all times condemned anti-Semitism...
...184...
...a few years of the Reagan administration should wake up a lot of people...
...Of course, after the Holocaust, one has become sensitive to all expressions of prejudice...
...The victories the reactionaries will win will not be easy to live with but may be a godsend...
...They may be able to hamstring or even roll back some of the civil rights laws, and they may win sdme victories over labor, conservationists, and consumers...
...Heinrich Marx could have retained his title of Justizrat (a mere visiting-card matter, which however mattered in title-crazy Prussia) and could have earned his "bread" as a lawyer (though he could not be a civil servant except by special decree) without converting to Christianity...
...Almost half the eligible electorate (47 percent) did not even bother to vote...
...But as Mehring and also McClellan (Clark's witness) point out, there was no liberal synagogue in all of Prussia, and the only alternative to Jewish orthodoxy was the enlightened Protestant faith of Lessing: Heinrich Marx's conversion reflects his advanced convictions...
...where Marx says "sewers," Heine wonders from which "Polish cloaca" a certain Jew had emerged...
...Ask the public if government should be smaller, and they will generally say yes...
...The last quotation is from the period before Mehring's conversion to Marxism (of which Clark says that then Mehring was "simply humanitarian...
...2 of the series "Judentum and Umwelt") is full of Marxological gems since the author has made it his business to read every book from which Marx ever quoted and knows as much about what Marx left out as others know about what he said...
...they were guilty by association...
...Peasants and craftsmen and lower civil servants are its recruits...
...Mehring deserves this epithet still less, since he was writing at a time when no Social Democrat could be an upper-echelon civil servant or a tenured professor...
...Reagan's simple ideas will look awfully silly when he is burdened with complex problems he clearly does not understand...
...Since he denied all fatherlands and nations—why should he have paid allegiance to one that, then, had not yet been claimed in modern, national terms...
...While I agree with most of what Howe says, the analogy that appeals to me is the self-inflicted wound...
...PosrcRIPT: When I wrote my article on"Marx and the Jews" I did not know that Helmut Hirsch, a respected Marx scholar formerly at the International Institute for the History of the Labor Movement in Amsterdam, had just published a book on the same question...
...q The Self-Inflicted Wound Editors: In his essay on the 1980 election in the Winter 1981 issue, Irving Howe evokes the analogy of a traffic accident...
...but, of course, not if they have to give up anything themselves...
...and Ashbrooke (R.-Ohio) campaign to gut what is left of affirmative action...
...With the only exception of Moses Mendelssohn (whom Mehring duly mentions in his work on Lessing), all Jews who made a contribution to German letters before 1860 were baptized: Heine, Borne, Gans, Neander, Rahel Varnhagen, Dorothea Schlegel, Fanny Lewald, Marx, Lassalle...
...He was a Marxist sociologist and he died peacefully in 1970...
...Second, Hirsch argues that the strange references to America in the essay serve a strategic function: here was a Christian country that nevertheless was given over completely to Schacher (bargaining, haggling, commercialism), and Marx quotes Tocqueville to that effect...
...This is almost as true of those who identify themselves as conservatives as it is of those who classify themselves as moderates and liberals...
...But Hirsch has also collected a long list of passages in which Marx shows compassion for and solidarity with Jews...
...This charge ballooned, and it was discovered that inspection officers had taken bribes although the rifles were usable...
...Having finally elected their darling, they will find that he will now abandon most of them and their policies, and will fail to implement most of those measures he did support...
...Neue Zeit, vol...
...The public said no, and who could blame them...
...Moreover, in 1891 the Conservative party inserted an anti-Semitic plank into its program, and in 1896 no fewer than 16 candidates running as "anti-Semites" were elected, a number not reached again until 1924...
...You can bet that if medical costs continue to rise, unemployment remains high, cities continue to decay, 234 the public will expect Reagan to ameliorate these problems...
...MITCHELL ABIDOR Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Mehring the Marxist appraised Stoecker as almost a second Luther...
...Herr Hofprediger Stoecker, 1882...
...You may ask, If that's true, why did the people vote against so many liberal incumbents...
...In 1892 Mehring was writing as a civil libertarian...
...Moreover, Carter and the Democrats deserved to lose...
...It also explains the fact that anti-Semitic agitators are such dubious characters, not only politically but almost always morally, too...
...The incumbent party not only failed to ameliorate the domestic and international problems that burden the nation, it allowed many to become worse...
...People were talking in the language of their age...
...All it could do was offer a misery-worn public four more years of the most incompetent Democratic president to burden the White House and the nation in the 20th century...
...Clark would rather see him converted for exclusively opportunistic reasons, but Mehring still followed the honor code of German intellectuals according to which such an insinuation would have been utterly disrespectful...
...Zionism, like anti-Semitism, did not arise before the end of the 19th century...
...233 Third, Hirsch admits, not without indicating his revulsion, that Marx used dirty language against many friends behind their backs, among them those expressions that have been called anti-Semitic and that betray also racial bias against Negroes and Slays...
...But Joseph Clark has it wrong...
...What purpose did Marx have in mind, whom did he wish to support and whom did he wish to challenge when he wrote the famous essay on "The Jewish Question...
...First, because they were a part of the party that failed...
...The pre-Marxist Mehring saw in Stoecker a miserable and dangerous demagogue...
...nor that anti-Semitism was actually directed against the Jews...
...Both placed the formal rights of the murderer above the substantive protection of his victims...
...HENRY PACHTER JOSEPH CLARK Replies: The most important thing I can say about Henry Pachter's rejoinder is what a loss his death has been to all of us...
...though there are also anti-Jewish slurs...
...This explains those symptoms of anti-Semitic agitation that often seem so strange...
...Alas, this was not true only in the crude sense of "bread" but still more in a cultural sense...
...Our major problems—energy, inflation, unemployment, productivity and monopoly— are most serious and complex, but neither major party seems to comprehend that we are past the tinker-andpatchwork stage...
...Mehring understood, better than most Marxists, that 232 anti-Semitism had deep roots, and therefore he did not think that the disgrace of Stoecker would stop it...
...Normally I would not answer Joseph Clark's "other view," because he does not refute any of my contentions...
...But Massing added: "No other writer so consistently combined his attacks on anti-Semitism with sarcastic comments on philo-Semites" (p...
...I agree heartily with the characterization of Paul Massing's Rehearsal for Destruction as a classical monograph...
...But the hard-core right-wing people are in for a very bitter experience...
...As BlochMichel said, though he was killed in broad daylight Goldman's killers were never found...
...Senator Hatch now suggests that construction costs be lowered by reducing construction workers' salaries...
...But he has slandered a man to whom we owe respect and gratitude, and I must defend here Franz Mehring...
...in fact Clark charges, in his last paragraphs, that Marx was not a Zionist...
...In the country of purely capitalistic culture the so-called Jewish spirit of money worship can be seen as being practiced not only by honorable Christian gentlemen but even by clergymen...
...in short, like Mehring, Heine thought that "both the rabbi and the monk stink...
...the first quotation was from his Marxist period (Clark says that Mehring here defended the anti-Semitic agitator Adolf Stoecker...
...Whoever denies this has not spent the last ten years in Berlin...
...Second, because the public is schizophrenic about our government...
...The reactionaries among Reagan's followers will be a real threat to labor, minorities, the poor and the middle class...
...These natural supporters of the Democratic party opted out because they saw no viable alternatives...
...Stoecker had lost his position as court preacher because of his political activity, largely through the influence of the liberal philo-Semitic establishment, and while Mehring continued to attack Stoecker politically, he deplored the circumstances of his fall...
...The American public is schizophrenic on this topic...
...Lucien Goldmann was neither a "former anarchist" nor was he killed by the neofascist Police Honor...
...Rather, it was Pierre Goldman, author of Souvenirs obscurs d'un Juif polonais ne en France, contributor to the left-wing daily Liberation, and collaborator on Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, who was killed while on his way to visit his wife in a maternity hospital...
...Mehring had reasons to complain about the liberal philo-Semitic establishment in Berlin, which had hounded him out of the editorial office of the Volkszeitung, but even before this experience and long before he had turned Marxist, he had attacked the Jewish press mogul Sonnemann (Frankfurter Zeitung) for mixing business with news interests...
...He may have been mistaken...
...Such actions should stimulate the complacent to reenter the political arena...
...Reagan and the Republican party did not win, Carter and the Democratic party lost...
...indeed, an even more rabid demagogue arose at once, in the person of Hermann Alwardt...
...By perusing carefully the correspondence and other expressions of the circle of Marx's friends (going so far as to compare the passages they had marked in their books and to point out imprecise citations) Hirsch has become convinced that Marx and Bauer had quarreled over precisely the Jewish question, when Bauer had maintained that emancipation was impossible and Marx that emancipation was necessary...
...this he contrasts with the 1892 Mehring in the Neue Zeit who deplores the liberal press attacks against Stoecker's anti-Semitism and cites Mehring's praise for Stoecker's proletarian origins, which may still lead him "to see what we have long since recognized in the light of socialist knowledge...
...Massing then quotes extensively from the 1882 Mehring article, which sharply criticizes Stoecker's antiSemitism...
...HARRELL RODGERS Houston, Texas...
...Not only to complete the bibliography should attention be drawn to this very exhaustive study, but because it makes a number of important points...
...Matthew Passion against Bach...
...As to Heine, his life and work reveal many spirited attacks against the Jew-haters and frequent defense of Jews under attack by anti-Semites...
...The early Mehring feared the effects anti-Jewish rabble-rousing might have on the Jewish group...
...Three best-selling novels were dealing with the passing of noblemen's estates into the hands of Jewish speculators, and the Panama scandal and some stock exchange affairs brought Jewish names to public notice—and then came the affair of the "Jewish rifles...
...he may have underestimated the power of nationalism...
...he wrote four long articles, chiding Ahlwardt for his demagoguery and charging that by denouncing the Jews he had shielded the corrupt officers...
...313): Mehring's development illustrates the impact of the revolutionary theory on the evaluation of political anti-Semitism...
...His greatness was expressed in the utopia that all exclusiveness would be abolished—why should he have sponsored the exclusiveness of one people...
...small owners are desperately wrestling with big capital...
...The small volume Marx and Moses (181 pp., Frankfurt: Peter D. Lang, 1980—as vol...
...The democratic left must be ready to play a role in helping the party take advantage of these opportunities...
...But here precisely I find a contradiction in the criticism that Jews level at Marx: they charge that he did not care for Jews as Jews...
...This Apathy party was composed primarily of young people, minorities, and blue-collar workers...
...The phenomenon interested him exclusively as a manifestation of the class struggle...
...The first point had been made earlier by Hal Draper but is here pursued with penetrating ingenuity: cui Boxo...
...I wish I could spare my friend Joe Clark the next correction...
...To its suffering followers, the party could not even admit its failures...
...Strom Thurmond wants to repeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act...
...Yet had Carter been reelected, he would have failed just as badly...
...Jessie Helms intends to cut back on Food Stamps...
...The day when people want their own government services cut, that day I will believe that the public wants less government...
...But the public did know that Carter has failed miserably, and they were willing to support any alternative they did not outright have to fear...
...Its core is social misery...
...Mehring was delighted...
...Millions of Americans, including minorities and the working class, have become complacent...
...Representatives Walker (R.-Pa...
...But the mass movement of anti-Semitism reflects the narrow-minded resistance of the petty-bourgeoisie against the rage of big capital...
...Again: Marx and the Jews Editors: This is a response to Joseph Clark's "Marx and the Jews: Another View" (Dissent, Winter 1981), which was motivated by my "Marx and the Jews" (Fall 1979...
...As to Joseph Clark's quotations from Heinrich Heine, I have to disappoint him...
...The public's negative vote certainly did not give Reagan a mandate to turn the clock back...
...America also shows that emancipation—separation of state and church—is perfectly practical...
...This new mobilization, along with Reagan's predictable failures, will provide the Democratic party with an excellent opportunity to reestablish itself...
...Reagan, simple, amiable, even a little fatherly, finally convinced them to ignore all those nutty things the press had been claiming he had said...
...here he names some well-known big capitalists] originates in sheer jealousy of Jewish capital...
...Marx, on the contrary, denied the existence of racial differences, and of all national differences...
...Most among the minority of the total electorate who did vote for Reagan would have found it difficult to list any of the policies he advocated—though they consisted mostly of a series of simple applause lines...
...He was a distinguished scholar and a toughminded thinker...
...Trust Ronnie, he pleaded...
...I feel that Mehring here comes off with flying colors...
...But 10,000 people followed his body to Pbre-Lachaise cemetery...
...11, p. 547.] In his classical monograph "Rehearsal for Destruction" (in Studies in Prejudice, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, 1949), Paul Massing devoted a full chapter to "The Case of Franz Mehring," and concluded that "no Marxist journalist or historian made "the repulsive spectacle of anti-Semitism" so often the point of departure for a criticism of capitalist society as he did...
...People really do yearn for less government...
...Desperate for relief, millions decided it was worth the chance...
...If he does not, he will be dismissed, just as Carter was...
...These are the main theses of the essay...
...Massing writes (p...
...I may call Neier a self-flagellating Jew and a spineless liberal, but not an anti-Semite...
...In fact, the article in which he describes the plight of the Jerusalem Jews is one of the few where this very unsentimental writer rises to chords of moving plaint...
...In my essay I tried to make a distinction between the low social esteem in which Jews had to live 150 years ago and political anti-Semitism...
...In taking this attitude he did exactly what Aryeh Neier and the ACLU have done in supporting the Nazi march through Skokie (an attitude endorsed by several Dissent editors in a controversy [Spring 1979] in these pages...
...Later, Mehring no longer believed that there was a Jewish problem...
...His Enemy Number One was always the Prussian "System...
...He should read Heine's pamphlet aimed against Borne or the Confessions...
...Can one hold Shylock against Shakespeare or The St...
...He was never a man to flinch from an issue, and he boldly criticized "the participation of the more mischievous elements of Berlin's Jews in bogus stock swindles," in the railway scandal and other embarrassing ventures that resulted "in deep animosity against the Jewish character among the cultured groups of Berlin society...
...Nor did the election indicate that the public wanted a reduction in government programs and services...
...where Marx fulminates against usurers, Heine knows "stores where one can buy below factory price and still be fleeced...
...On December 6, 1893—that is, some time after his conversion to Marxism, which, Clark says, turned him into an antiSemite—he wrote in the Neue Zeit (the foremost socialist weekly of the time): Court preacher Stoecker is traveling around the country peddling the witty [geistreich, a denigrating epithet] assertion that "the Jews" Marx and Lassalle had attacked king and fatherland in order to divert the attention of the masses from the stock exchange About another anti-Semitic demagogue, Ahlwardt, Mehring wrote in 1892, the year from which Clark quotes his "anti-Semitic" utterance: Anti-Semitism as practiced by...
Vol. 28 • April 1981 • No. 2
