Reading notes: The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate By Enzo Traverso

The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate 

By Enzo Traverso 

Translated by Bernard Gibbons

Brill, [2018]

 

The below are my underlinings/highlightings of Traverso. My own thoughts appear, if at all, as [N.B.].

Jay

Historicising the Marxist 'Jewish Question': Preface to the Second Edition

....the purpose of this book was not to propose a new 'Materialist conception of the Jewish Question'; it was to sketch an intellectual history of such a debate, exploring the multiple connections relating Judaism and Marxism, the Jews and socialism, ideas and historical experiences made by actually existing human beings.

....Against Judaism and anti-Semitism, Marxism offered them a post-national, cosmopolitan and universalistic perspective. In Poland, where its introduction corresponded with the birth of a modern Yiddish culture, Marxism favoured the secularisation of the Diaspora, claiming national cultural autonomy for an 'extra-territorial' Jewish minority living in the middle of other ethnic and national groups (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, German, etc.). Repudiating their religious heritage, the Jewish Marxists of the Tsarist Empire invented a modern form of citizenship for a national minority disconnected from a homogeneous territory. The Bund and the Poale Zion became the major expressions of a peculiar Judeo-Marxism, which offered solutions for a 'Jewish Question' conceived as the oppression of a national minority. Judeo-Marxism, nonetheless, is a label that can pertinently be applied to the Marxist Jewish intelligentsia of Central Europe as a whole, those who were certainly assimilated but also recognisable as a group with a well-defined social profile.

....This book tried to conceptualise Judeo-Marxism – in my eyes, this remains one of its major achievements – but it probably did not pay attention enough to the dangerous affinities existing between such a definition and Nazi language, which was obsessively pervaded by the epithet 'Jewish Bolshevism' ( jüdischer Bolschewismus).

....It is quite evident that this view was a distorting mirror of a real historical fact: Marxism was the inheritor of the 'radical Enlightenment'7 and it is equally true that the emancipated Jews had become the most enthusiastic and creative representatives of this intellectual and political tradition. They easily identified with the abstract humanity posited by the French Declaration of Human Rights of 1789 until conceiving, theoretically with Marx and practically with Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the project of a world revolution. They radicalised an idea of justice – extending it to the colonised peoples – that had been affirmed and violently contested since the French Revolution.

....association of the Jews with Enlightenment is also one of the keys for explaining the Marxist misunderstanding of the 'Jewish Question' . This book provides much evidence of the Marxist underestimation of the strength, persistence and depth of modern anti-Semitism, a phenomenon it mostly depicted as an anachronistic survival of backward, conservative social layers, a form of obscurantism inevitably condemned to disappear with the accomplishment of modernisation. Pogroms were a stigma of Russian primitivism and the Dreyfus Affair a late expression of French anti-Republicanism. Nazi anti-Semitism was the lethal disease of 'decaying' capitalism, not the ideology of a modern totalitarianism. In a similar way, Marxists held Judaism itself as a legacy destined to be dialectically 'sublated' (aufgehoben) in a socialist world, where a universal community of equals would have replaced present national and religious cleavages. 

....underestimation of anti-Semitism and this perception of Judaism as an archaic vestige of a pre-modern world were deeply rooted in a teleological vision of history that, in spite of some isolated, critical questionings, shaped classical Marxism in the wake of the classical Enlightenment. This interpretation of the 'Jewish Question' applies, with few exceptions, from Marx to Abram Leon, covering the entire history of the debate reconstructed in this book.

....After the war, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) was probably the first attempt to integrate the Holocaust into a Marxist vision of history that radically broke with any form of teleology. Taking into account certain formulations of this seminal book, one could suggest that they turned upside down the old teleology and presented Auschwitz as the dialectic accomplishment of civilisation. Instead of creating the premises of an emancipatory historical break, the conflict between productive forces and the social relations of production had increased class domination to the point of establishing a modern totalitarian form. Thus, the Nazi camps were the emblematic expression of a process of the 'self-destruction of the Enlightenment' , deprived of its emancipatory potentialities and reduced to blind, purely instrumental ratio.12

....Adorno and Horkheimer's book could be considered as the real conclusion – in the form of self-criticism – of the Marxist debate on the Jewish Question.

....After the war, this classical debate was virtually extinguished. 

....A Jewish intelligentsia permeated by Marxism, nevertheless, survived in exile, concluding a theoretical disputation outside of its original framework. 

....until the end of the war nobody seriously took Zionism into account: neither the United Kingdom (the Balfour Declaration referred to a 'homeland' rather than to a Jewish state), nor the Jewish Diaspora (the overwhelming majority of the Jews who left Europe between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War went to the Unites States, Western Europe and Latin America, not to Palestine), nor even the Arabs, who were convinced that Zionism would disappear from the Middle East with decolonisation and the end of the British protectorate.17 Marxists were certainly not alone in underestimating the Zionist capacity to build a Jewish state.

....Nationalism had pushed the old world into a tragic impasse and Zionism was nothing but a Jewish caricature of European nationalisms. Zionism, furthermore, tried to 'use' anti-Semitism as a chance for increasing Jewish emigration to Palestine instead of fighting it. Since Herzl, the purpose of Zionism had been the creation of a Jewish state with the agreement of the great powers, not the struggle of the Jews of Eastern Europe against tsarism, then of the whole continent against anti-Semitic fascism. Nationalism united the Jews, transcending their class divisions, and thereafter paralysed the class struggle in the Diaspora. All Marxist currents generally shared these axioms, including those – like the Polish Bund – that recognised the legitimacy of a Jewish national claim and even those – like the small minority of Marxist Zionists led by Ber Borokhov – that associated the birth of a Jewish state with a national liberation struggle and socialist revolution. It was only at the end of the 1930s that the legitimacy of a Jewish national consciousness began to be recognised, with a tangible taste of self-criticism, by a strongly Westernised, classical Marxist like Trotsky....

[N.B. "underestimation of anti-Semitism" (or its "overestimation") is for a communist a question of the historical conjecture and political context. In the period 1967-2003 we dismissed any question of antizionism as a variety of Jew-hate as a bad-faith method of attacking the Palestinian liberation struggle. But by the early 2000s it had been clear for more than a decade that antizionism itself had become a variety of the "socialism of fools," a strain of middle class left Jew-hate akin to the old Moscow-style Stalinist antizionism. JR]

....Differently from many other academic quarrels, the Marxist disputation on the Jewish Question did not finish because of 'natural' exhaustion, when all its actors had displayed their arguments. It was destroyed in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps and suffocated by Stalinism, throughout its multiple campaigns against communist heresies and 'cosmopolitanism'. 

....After the Holocaust, Jewish culture became less and less Marxist and, conversely, Marxism became less and less Jewish. The axis of the Jewish World

....According to Perry Anderson, Western Marxism was the product of a historical defeat of the workers' movement in inter-war Europe, which resulted in a double displacement, both geographical and theoretical: from Eastern and Central Europe to the West; from economy and politics to philosophy and aesthetics. He could also have added a Jewish dimension. Saying that until the 1930s Marxism had mostly spoken Russian and German implicitly means it had been written and spoken, to a very large extent, by Jewish Marxists. This objective assessment does not try to revisit the history of Marxism through an ethnic lens, simply to recall the social and cultural background of its rise and spread during its 'classical' period. When Anderson delivered his severe judgement on Western Marxism – 'method as impotence, art as consolation, pessimism as quiescence'23 – he presented it as the result of a historical defeat, but did not mention the Holocaust, to which this defeat was inextricably bound....

.... As a whole, the Marxist debate on the Jewish Question has not been the object of new investigations, even if some original works focusing on specific issues have been published.26 Among the topics scrutinised in this book, the only two that have since deserved an extensive re-consideration are the Holocaust and Walter Benjamin's politics….

To be continued

Introduction

1 Marx, Radical Enlightenment and the Jews

2 The Jewish Marxist Intelligentsia

3 The German and Austrian Marxists (1880–1920)

4 Russian Marxism (1900–20)

5 Jewish Marxism

6 Gramsci and the Jewish Question

7 From Weimar to Auschwitz: Anti-Semitism and the German Left

8 The Messianic Materialism of Walter

 Benjamin

9 The Theory of the People-Class: Abram Leon

Conclusion