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
___
Introduction
....prologue and the conclusion of the Marxist debate on the Jewish Question: Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question), written in 1843 by the young (and not yet Marxist) Marx, and Abram
Leon's The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (written during the Second
World War and published in 1946).
....in Central and Eastern Europe that the great majority of the world's Jewish population was concentrated at the turn of the century; it was there that a Jewish proletariat and workers' movement took shape; it was there, too, where tradition and modernity, feudalism and capitalism, anti-Semitism and Emancipation were intertwined, that the features of a new Jewish Question, founded on the nationality-assimilation dialectic, were outlined.
It was in the countries of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire alone that Marxists raised certain fundamental questions in approaching the Jews: What were the historic roots of the really-existing Jewish communities? Were the Jews a nation or a caste? Was there a historical future for the Jews or were they doomed to assimilate into the nations among which they lived? What was the nature of anti-Semitism? Neither in Western Europe (in France, England, or Italy) nor in the United States (where, nonetheless, there was a Jewish socialist current of some importance) did a Marxist debate develop around these problems.
....anti-Jewish tradition of Proudhonian and Blanquist socialism, which marked the
history of the French workers' movement until the end of the nineteenth century, was outside Marxism. It is possible to find a consideration of the Jewish Question among certain French socialist or anarchist intellectuals who were influenced by Marx's thought, such as Jean Jaurès, Paul Lafargue, Georges Sorel, or Bernard Lazare, but their writings cannot be considered as contributions to a debate within French Marxism
..... In 1791, the Revolution granted civic rights to French Jews, and the Napoleonic conquests extended them to the Dutch, Belgian, and German Jewish communities. Despite the delays and setbacks imposed by the Restoration, Austria-Hungary granted emancipation in 1867 and Germany did the same between 1869 and 1871. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet has stressed, the French Revolution was taken as a model: Jews should no longer live as a nation but should become fully fledged citizens of the nation (in this case,
France).
....eighteenth-century rationalists supported the 'naturalisation' of the Jews, implicitly recognising their status as foreigners in the Christian world.
....The term Emancipation (Emanzipierung) appeared in the 1830s and was widely diffused after the 1848 revolutions. It was an emotionally charged concept but it did not change the old approaches; Emancipation was still seen as the means to help the Jews shed their negative dispositions.
....dissolution of their social and cultural identity'.6 The Jewish intelligentsia itself internalised this attitude. Moses Mendelssohn, the foremost figure of German-Jewish culture at the end of the
eighteenth century, fought for the linguistic assimilation of the Jews and for the abandonment of Yiddish, which he despised as a 'jargon.'
....of progress transformed Jewish assimilation into a sort of dogma. It is true that in Germany the emancipated Jews remained in several respects 'outsiders' or, in Hannah Arendt's definition, parvenus who still carried with them the traces of their past as pariahs.
....Gershom Scholem bitterly observed that the process of assimilation meant that the Jews
struggled for Emancipation 'not for the sake of their rights as a people, but for the sake of assimilating themselves to the peoples among whom they lived'.
....United States, Jews were torn between national autonomy (an American Yiddishkeit) and assimilation over a period of about fifty years, from 1880 to 1930.
....Despite the prodigious efforts of Engels, Daniel de Leon, and the Third International to 'Americanise' Marxism, the latter remained almost invariably a vehicle of 'outsiders', a flag of struggle for immigrant workers and a theory elaborated by marginalised, heretical intellectuals.3 Within this current, Jewish Socialists found their place as Jews, without being obliged to declare their faith in assimilation.
....With the disappearance of the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe, Jewish identity was redefined, globally, by the experience of genocide and by the birth of the state of Israel.
....nineteenth century saw the Jewish Question reappear under new forms. Alongside the birth, in Germany and Austria, of modern anti-Semitism – no longer merely peasant but predominantly middle-class, no longer simply religious but above all racial….
....entire Marxist debate focused on a single
issue: assimilation. Marxist culture adopted a unilateral interpretation of Jewish history, inherited to a large extent from the Enlightenment, which identified Emancipation with assimilation and could conceive the end of Jewish oppression only in terms of the abandoning of Jewishness.
....of progress transformed Jewish assimilation into a sort of dogma. It is true that in Germany the emancipated Jews remained in several respects 'outsiders' or, in Hannah Arendt's definition, parvenus who still carried with them the traces of their past as pariahs.9 The democratic and liberal intelligentsia, however, tried to ignore this awkward reality. Gershom Scholem bitterly observed that the process of assimilation meant that the Jews
struggled for Emancipation 'not for the sake of their rights as a people, but for the sake of assimilating themselves to the peoples among whom they lived'.
....Although Jewishness underwent a deep cultural and social metamorphosis during the process of its secularisation and modernisation, the Jews did not disappear and continued to be perceived as Jews.
.....Poet Ludwig Börne described it in ironical terms: 'Some reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon me for it, but all think of it'.
..... The Marxism of the Second International, shaped by positivism and evolutionistic determinism, welcomed the idea of Jewish
assimilation as the inevitable and desirable result of the 'path of history.'
....the young Marx, for example, who identified authentic emancipation with the 'liberation of society from Judaism'; of Victor Adler, who
desired the 'death of the Wandering Jew'; and of Karl Kautsky, according to whom 'the Jewish nation can only triumph by disappearing'
....Kautsky ....link between the Geldmensch of Marx and the 'people-class' of Leon. The reduction of Jewish otherness to commerce, a socio-economic function that the Jews had fulfilled over several centuries, should have 'scientifically' explained the process of assimilation. The development of capitalism put into question and finally broke the isolation of the Jewish caste, 'de-Judaising' its members. Given that capitalism was the bearer of assimilation, those Jews who preserved their own particular consciousness were perceived as reactionary and anachronistic. To a certain extent, the theory of the people-class appeared as an objective description of the Jewish historical condition, but the explanation of the whole of Jewish history through an economic function inevitably obscured its cultural dimension, which was as much religious as secular.
.....In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, any assimilationist perspective came up against
the existence of a Jewish nation and working class.
.....There was a terrible resurgence of anti-Semitism in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, a period in which
the assimilation of German and Austrian Jews appeared as an irreversible and accomplished fact
....capitalist development and the Westernisation of the Tsarist Empire broke down the walls of the
ghetto, but at the same time the rise of anti-Semitism perpetuated the cleavage between Jews, Russians, and Poles.
...., in Eastern Europe, only a narrow nucleus of the intelligentsia could truly assimilate (and become assimilationist). Here the struggle for emancipation merged with the formation of a national consciousness. The Jewish workers' movement embodied this aspiration, combining it with the internationalism and universalism of the socialist tradition
....Marxists of the Tsarist Empire developed a wealth of approaches to the Jewish question: assimilationism (Russian and Polish Social Democrats), national autonomism (Bund), and Jewish nationalism (Zionists). For Lenin,
Martov, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, assimilation remained the dominant historic tendency, whereas Vladimir Medem and Ber Borokhov demanded the right of the Jews of Eastern Europe to their own national existence. This latter position, nonetheless, was the point of departure of two distinct (and often opposed) trajectories. Borokhov essentially inverted the theory of Kautsky.
According to the German theoretician (and Lenin, Stalin, and Rosa Luxemburg shared his point of view), the anomaly of a nation deprived of a specific territory and economy could be resolved only by assimilation. Borokhov, on the contrary, argued that the solution was the 'normalising' of the Jewish nation, giving it a territory, an economy, and a state (Palestine). For his part, Vladimir Medem thought that the development of capitalism tended to separate nation and territory, thus creating the conditions for a modern Jewish national community rooted in language and culture: Yiddishkeit.
Medem criticised the abstract internationalism of the Bolsheviks in the following terms:
Anybody who has the least familiarity with the national question knows that internationalist culture is not a-national. An a-national culture,neither neither Russian nor German nor Polish … but a pure culture is an absurdity. In order to attract the working class, the internationalist ideas need
to be adapted to the language spoken by the workers and to the concrete national conditions in which they live. Workers should not be indifferent to the condition and the development of their national culture, for it is only through it that they can participate in the internationalist culture of democracy and the world socialist movement. It is obvious, but V[ladimir] I[lyich] turns a deaf ear to all this.
Russian Social Democrats .... did not accept
'the idea that the Jew existed for himself, and not as a negativity of which he must liberate himself'.
....Russian Jews were recognised in the 1920s as a nation with a modern culture. Since the October Revolution, Yiddish culture – under all its forms, scientific, literary, and artistic – was encouraged and experienced a great expansion, although, at the same time, the pluralism of Jewish life almost disappeared. The Bund and different currents of socialist Zionism still existed in Poland, whereas in the Soviet Union they rapidly joined the Bolshevik party.
....Western Europe, ..... Paralysed by the conflict between Social Democracy and the Communist party, the German left was unable to understand the immense danger Nazism represented and underestimated its anti-Semitism...
....The Holocaust was the product of the combination of a racist ideology with the instrumental rationality of capitalism. But it was impossible to envisage such a combination if one interpreted history as a linear development of the productive forces, and the source of uninterrupted social progress. Teleological Marxism, therefore, was unable to understand either anti-Semitism or fascism.
[N.B. I think Traverso has Marxism confused with the 'Whig interpretation of history.' His 'teleological Marxism' and 'positivism' is part and parcel of the same straw-man petty bourgeois left anti-Marxism we've seen with the Hegelizers and back-to-Kant thinkers that have plagued the working class vanguard since 1956. Likewise, his caricature of the scientific socialism of the Second International is simply a way of waging war against the political clarity of Engels, and of the fact of the lifelong political agreement and collaboration of Marx and Engels. JR]
…. At the end of the nineteenth century, the German and Austrian Socialists had largely underestimated the danger of anti-Semitism, considering it as an embryonic stage in the development of the anti-capitalist consciousness of the exploited masses. In 1923, during the period of the French occupation of the Ruhr, the German Communists had repeated the same error. The irresponsible illusion that anti-Semitic fascismdemagogy was in the last analysis useful to the anti-capitalist mobilisation of the workers only resulted in the hindering of the comprehension of the immense menace represented by Nazism.
....Christian origins of the anti-Semitic phenomenon were hardly ever mentioned in Marxist literature, and the passage from religious anti-Judaism to the völkisch conception of the Jews as a foreign and dangerous race was never studied in any satisfying fashion. The attitude of the Socialists, in general, was to consider anti-Semitism as a tactic employed by the dominant classes to divide the mass of workers and exploit the prejudices of the middle class. Of course, this was true to a large extent, but such an analysis was far from an understanding that grasped the phenomenon in all its historic complexity.
[N.B. Clearly Traverso has no interest in a Marxist approach to Jew-hate. He prefers 'in all its complexity,' but does not even hint at a class approach to the question. Is Jew-hatred a product of racism and Christianity? This is a gross ahistorical caricature. Capitalism no more prepares in an undifferentiated way for Jewish assimilation than it does for uninterrupted progress of political rights in general. Capitalism in crisis uses Jew-hate as a default to disorient and deflect working class militancy and independent working class political action. JR]
.....In the 1930s, Trotsky ....His innovations were taken up only partially by Abram Leon, who
put the finishing touches on the Marxist conception of the Jewish Question while remaining in the methodological and conceptual framework established by Kautsky: the caste became a people-class, a broader but fundamentally analogous notion.
....problem of assimilation was then at the heart of this debate
....essentially concealed a constant attempt to suppress the Jewish Question. Rosa Luxemburg explained this attitude in very clear terms, writing
that 'for the disciples of Marx and for the working class a Jewish question as such does not exist'
....recognise that this suppression has continued until today. In the post-war period, Marxists have produced some remarkable analyses of Zionism but have rarely tried to assess the history of the debate on the Jewish Question inside the left.
....Those historians who have concerned themselves with the Bund and with socialist Zionism – their works are often cited in this book – are almost entirely Jewish historians and not Marxists, or, in other words, historians of the Jewish Question and not historians of socialism.
....I have tried to reconstruct a debate, putting together its pieces. Jewish socialism has been erased from the map of Europe; it is necessary to prevent it from being erased from history….
To be continued
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
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments