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 notes here
Introduction notes here
Notes on Chapter 1: Marx, Radical Enlightenment and the Jews
Marx and Engels's approach to the Jewish Question
fundamental interpretations:
a. first is theological and deals with Jewish Messianism as being one of the pillars, albeit subterranean and hidden, of Marxism
b. the second considers Marx – or at least the young Marx – as an anti-Semite
c. third, on the contrary, sees Zur Judenfrage (1843) as the point of departure for a scientific analysis of the Jewish Question.
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Karl Löwith... In his Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (1949), he claimed to have discovered, beyond the 'ideological' conception of history as the history of class struggle, the traces of a 'transparent messianism' that had its 'unconscious root in Marx's own being, even in his race'.
....Löwith established a series of formal correspondences between Marxism and monotheist Judeo-Christian theology: a) between the bourgeoisie/proletariat antagonism and the Christ/Antichrist conflict as the foundation of history; b) between the concept of the proletariat and the idea of the chosen people, i.e. between the perspective of a revolutionary liberation and the expectancy of a resurrection-redemption; c) between the conception of communism as the transition from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom and the theological vision of the advent of the kingdom of God as the passage from the Civitas terrena to the Civitas Dei.2 These correspondences prove, according to Löwith, that Marxism shares the same teleological conception of history as Hebrew and Christian theology.
....There is, however, no doubt that Marx never developed this parallel and founded his theory on the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, for which he never had to borrow from the sources of Judaism.
....structural homologies between Marx's theory and Jewish Messianic thought do not reveal any elective affinity ( Wahlverwandschaft) such as that established by Max Weber between the Protestant ethic and capitalism, which implies a form of symbiosis, if not a veritable fusion, between the two related elements.8 Explaining historical materialism through Marx's Jewish unconscious is pure speculation, an interesting hypothesis, but not an interpretation supported by convincing evidence.
....One could share the point of view of Shlomo Avineri, according to which the 'eschatological element' "....detectable in Marx should not be attributed to the Judeo-Christian tradition but rather treated as the consequence of his 'Hegelian antecedents'."
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....second interpretation of Marx's approach, which is as scattered as it is contestable, portrays him as an anti-Semite
....This interpretation is often based on the extrapolation of certain phrases wrenched out of context and completely de-historicised. It retrospectively projects onto Marx's text a century of later history and recasts it as a necessary landmark in the road to genocide. It amounts to an ahistorical reading ....
....As Detlev Claussen has pointed out, this method arises from a Judeocentric vision of history, which eternalises anti-Semitism by considering it as the only possible relation between Jew and non-Jew. In this way, '....the non-Jewish Jews are transformed automatically into traitors, the French Lumières into a form of anti-Jewish atheism, German idealism into Lutheran anti-Semitism and Karl Marx into German Radical....'
....Istvan Meszaros compares the attitude of Marx to that of the French utopian socialists.17 The anti-Semitism of Alphonse de Toussenel, author of The Jews, Kings of the Epoch (1845), or of the philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who supported the clos-ure of all the French synagogues and the deportation to Asia of the Jews, not only reproduced some stereotypes on the Jewish usurer, banker, or speculator, but explicitly rejected their emancipation. George L. Mosse pertinently observed that Marx's argument 'was opposed to all forms of racism, because it was favorable to the complete assimilation and the abolition of conflicts between men. Marx definitively distanced himself radically in his conclusions from the French socialists who wished to expel or annihilate the Jews'.
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....Apart from these two interpretations – Marx as Jewish theologian and Marx as anti-Semite – there is a third, symmetrically opposed to the second but similarly ideological.
....In 1931 the Stalinist Otto Heller wrote that in his essay, Marx had found 'the key to the explanation of the entire history of the Jews, of their particular situation inside society, as well as the means of putting an end to it'.21 Fundamentally similar judgments, although more sober and nuanced, have been expressed by Antonio Gramsci, Abram Leon, and Isaac Deutscher and, more recently, by Daniel Bensaïd.
....Bundist Vladimir Kossovsky was one of the few, at the beginning of the twentieth century, who criticised Marx's youthful study as being foreign to the materialist conception of history.
....Marx's arguments belonged to the philosophical battle of the radical Enlightenment. He saw in money and trade not only the very nature of Judaism but also the features of modern bourgeois society. Consequently, Jewish and human emancipation coincided with the transcending of reified social relations. The final result of this process could only be the disappearance of Judaism, not rejected but sublated and absorbed into universalism. Far from being anti-Semitic, this approach was rooted in the tradition started two centuries earlier by Spinoza.
...., Marx's youthful work reveals both a pre-Marxist conception of capitalism and many commonplaces of the democratic radicalism of his time. It also includes the premise of a future idea of assimilation, which is a link between his juvenile left-Hegelianism and his mature communism. The limits of his essay deserve careful scrutiny that can be syn\thetised in a few points.
....a. Marx claimed civic rights for Jews as a condition to the solution of the fundamental problem of human emancipation, but he completely ignored the historical fact of the oppression suffered by the Prussian Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Jewish Question does not contain any reference to the discrimination that affected them: namely, a whole set of restrictions (on movement, on residence, on the exercise of certain professional activities, on access to the civil service, and so on), not to speak of the pogroms that took place in Germany up to 1819. Discrimination – one could add – that had affected Marx's family itself.
b. Identifying Judaism, trade and bourgeois society, Marx had not yet recognised the proletariat as the subject of universal human emancipation and was inclined to see in commerce and circulation, rather than in production, the peculiar features and the fundamental structure of the capitalist system.38 In this sense, his 1843 text appears much closer to Hess's Essence of Money than to Capital, that is, closer to a purely moral denunciation of capitalism than to a historical analysis of it.
c. The image of the Jew sketched by Marx, and summed up in the definition of the chimerical nationality of the Geldmensch, was nothing but the transformation into a philosophical category of certain aspects of the historical situation in which most Jews of Central and Eastern Europe lived in the early nineteenth century. At that time, according to Julius Carlebach, small traders and hawkers constituted 66 percent of the Jewish working population in Prussia,41 whereas in Eastern Europe the overwhelming majority of Jews fell into these categories.42 This was the background for the definition of the Jews as Geldmenschen, which later Marxists transformed into 'caste' (Kautsky) and 'people-class' (Leon).
....Representatives of a monetary economy in feudal society, the Jewish traders seemed to have exhausted their historical function in the period of emerging capitalism and were pushed out by the nascent bourgeois classes. A significant layer of Jewish industrialists would appear only in the second half of the nineteenth century, after emancipation had been achieved.
e. Marx's economic schema led to a mythical vision of Judaism. In spite of his repeated references to history, he posited his Judaism/capitalism equation as an a priori, supra-historical axiom. He perceived the Jew as a figure inseparable from money and identified the suppression of capitalism with the disappearance of Judaism. In his eyes, the Jews were a 'uniform entity'. In his later works, however, Marx abandoned this position. In the Grundrisse, written fifteen years after The Jewish Question, there is a passage in which the contemptible features of the Geldmensch are attributed no longer to Judaism but to Christian Lutheranism: 'The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice – economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, temporal and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English puritanism, or also Dutch Protestantism, and money-making [Gold-machen]'.45 This formulation, which one could call Weberian ante litteram, demonstrates that for Marx – at least in his maturity – the 'cult of money' was not a Jewish specificity and that his argument was not inspired by an anti-Semitic prejudice.
....Marx's article belongs to a precise historical moment, between the first emancipatory laws in Germany, which saw the emergence of a 'pariah' Jewish intelligentsia – Marx and Heinrich Heine were among its most brilliant representatives – and the survival of a layer of 'Court Jews', the bankers who financed the Prussian regime. Zur Judenfrage was the product of this time: it could not be understood, in the words of Hannah Arendt, 'except in the light of this conflict between rich Jews and intellectual Jews'
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Engels: the Jews as a 'People without History'
....Friedrich Engels's assessments of the Jewish Question did not differ from Marx's, but belonged to a later period and were supported by historical arguments mostly related to the national questions put on the agenda by the revolutions of 1848.
....Marx and Engels perceived the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe as anachronistic vestiges of a previous age, communities of small traders lacking any cultural identity but fiercely opposed, because of their small economic activities, to any process of assimilation. Their language, Yiddish, was 'a horribly corrupted German'
....Engels came back to the Jewish Question in 1890, when Arbeiterzeitung, the daily socialist newspaper of Vienna, asked him to analyse the rise of Austrian anti-Semitism. In his article, he vigorously condemned any form of hostility toward Jews, who, for the first time, he no longer identified with capitalism but considered as possible allies in the struggle for socialism. It was a crucial turn, because the struggle against anti-Semitism was finally seen as one of the priority tasks of the international workers' movement. According to Engels, hatred of the Jews represented 'the reaction of the feudal, declining social layers [ mittelalterlicher, untergehender Gesellschafts-schichten] against modern society, composed essentially of capitalists and wage workers'.63 Under a demagogic façade, which did not hesitate to sometimes adopt an apparently socialist language, lurked a reactionary movement that Engels qualified as 'a variant of feudal socialism', with which the Social Democrats should have 'nothing in common'.
....Engels changed his views on the Jewish Question at the end of his life. His legacy, nevertheless, remains ambivalent: on the one hand, he clearly denounced the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria; on the other hand, he nourished the illusion that anti-Semitism was condemned to disappear, to be inevitably erased by modernity and progress.....
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