AS FAR AS CAN BE DISCERNED from Sherry Gorelick's review of Mario Kessler's On Anti-Semitism and Socialism (New Politics,
No. 43, Summer 2007), neither Professor Gorelick nor Kessler appear to be aware of two
essential sources on the subject, which I would like to bring to readers' attention.
The Marxists
and the Jewish Question. The History of a Debate, 1843-1943, by the Italian Marxist Enzo
Traverso (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994) covers the difficult history of European Marxists'
efforts, far from fully successful, to comprehend what "The Jewish Question" was about. The
one-sided assumption that Jewish life and religion were a historical anachronism, something that
would naturally disappear with the end of their specific economic function in the development of
capitalism, also implied that the medieval legacy of Jew-hatred would vanish as well.
It wasn't only the
fact that the Jewish population in Eastern Europe was a distinct though non-territorial nationality
that was obscured by this theorization. The possibility of a new and even more virulent, racialist
revival of Jew-hatred -- anti-Semitism -- was also overlooked by thinkers and parties who
envisioned an inevitable evolution toward socialism.
In the Russian
context, Traverso emphasizes the contribution of the Bundist leader Vladimir Medem, who
argued that genuine international solidarity was not antagonistic to the consciousness of specific
nationalities, but arose from their development and mutual recognition. (It should be remembered,
however, that the Bund's split from the all-Russian socialist movement arose from the Bundists'
unacceptable demand for a monopoly on the organizing of Jewish workers.)
On these matters
Kessler appears to cover similar territory, and from what I've seen of his work his specific
contributions on the politics of East German Communism are important.
However,
regarding Karl Marx's writings "On the Jewish Question" and his purported anti-Semitism,
Professor Gorelick has it almost all backwards and completely wrong. For a full unraveling of this
all-too-conventional mythology it is essential to consult Hal Draper's Karl Marx's Theory of
Revolution. Volume I: State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977),
specifically Chapter 5 ("Implementing the New Direction," on the Jewish emancipation
controversy) and the appendix Special Note A, "Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype."
The first critical
point missing in Prof. Gorelick's discussion is what Marx's debate with the Hegelian "leftist"
Bruno Bauer was about: Marx was fighting for full political and civil rights for Jews, which Bauer
opposed. For Marx, this was quite consciously a cornerstone of the struggle to separate religion
from the state -- to make religion a private matter having no bearing on citizenship -- and in turn
part of the struggle for democracy. (This is what Draper means by "the new direction," i.e., the
recognition that the struggle for socialism runs through, not against the battle for democracy -- in
short, what led Marx to Marxism.)
Bauer's position
against "Jewish emancipation" rested on two shifting arguments. First, as a "left" posture he
proposed that it wasn't just Jews who needed political emancipation, but everyone who needed
emancipation from religion in general. After Marx disposed of this drivel, Bauer presented the
view that Jews and Judaism were a particularly evil "huckstering" entity that didn't deserve rights.
It shouldn't be surprising that Bauer shortly evolved from left-Hegelianism to a reactionary and
anti-Semitic politics. It was against this view that Marx, although employing the Hegelian rhetoric
from which he hadn't quite yet "emancipated" himself, argued in "On the Jewish Question" that
Jewish "huckstering" was now part and parcel of "Christian" (i.e. bourgeois) society. In short,
demonizing Jews in the name of Christian superiority was a bankrupt argument.
By pulling out
quotations along these lines without reference to the politics of the debate or the confusing
contemporaneous terminology, post-facto commentators constructed the absurdity of Marx's
"anti-semitism" and even, in a vague rendering of the self-hating Jew smear, a myth that "Marx's
personal biography predisposed him to anti-Semitism."
The second critical
point is that what we would now consider abusive references to the Economic-Jew stereotype
were universal in the discourse of the 1840s. This was true not only among people who didn't like
Jews and Judaism, but equally so among gentiles who liked and admired Jews, and among Jews
themselves -- including, in particular, Jewish proto-nationalists like Moses Hess, the progenitor of
Zionism. Draper documents this reality with full details that can't be reviewed here.
The fact that this
view of Jewish history and economic functioning was warped, and that it was already dissolving
via class differentiation among Jews and the general development of capitalism, doesn't negate the
fact that it had some historical basis in the emergence of capitalism from feudal Europe. But as
Draper stresses (KMTR v.I, p. 608): "The real issue of the time had nothing to do with the use of
language about Judaism based on the universally accepted Economic-Jew stereotype. The real
Jewish question was: For or against the political emancipation of the Jews? For or against
equal rights for Jews?
"This was
the Jewish question that Marx discussed, not the one that dominated the minds of a sick society a
century later."
That Marx disliked
religious Judaism -- a medieval rabbinic Orthodoxy through which religious authorities (with state
approval) exercised a quasi-totalitarian, even Taliban-like control over Jewish communities -- is
beside the point. A growing sector of middle-class German Jews were rejecting it as well, turning
to the new movement of Reform Judaism; but as Marx had no interest in Jewish affairs per
se he wouldn't have paid much attention.
According to
Professor Gorelick, Mario Kessler criticizes Marx's inattention to the rise of racialist anti-
Semitism in Europe and the 1881-82 Russian pogroms, and the emergence of a Jewish labor
movement in Eastern Europe; but this is anachronistic as these developments emerged either after
his death or in the final year of Marx's life when his health gravely deteriorated. It is hardly
surprising that Engels took up these subjects vigorously in the following decade.
No doubt Karl
Marx failed to anticipate twentieth century genocidal Nazism (only a tiny handful of people, like
the poet Heinrich Heine, had an instinctual premonition of such possibilities), as well as relativity
theory, quantum dynamics, nuclear weapons and global warming. Nor could he imagine that his
1843 polemics on Jewish emancipation would someday be read through the prism of late 20th and
early 21st century identity politics. I don't see how he can be severely faulted on these
counts.
