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
1 Marx, Radical Enlightenment and the Jews notes here
2 The Jewish Marxist Intelligentsia
....relationship between the Jews and Marxism can be interpreted through Yuri Slezkine's metaphor of the Jews as a minority of Mercurians (foreign and mobile, producers of concepts) in a world of Apollonians (indigenous, sedent-ary, producers of gods).1 The more radical the opposition between them was, the more the Jews transcended ethnic identities towards cosmopolitanism: this was the path followed by the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe and the assimilated Jews of the Russian Empire, bearers of a post-national, universalist Marxism. In the Pale of Settlement, where the latter appeared as a current of thought carried on by a Mercurian elite organically connected to an Apollonian society – the shtetl – Marxism took a national form, becoming a sort of Judeo-Marxism.
....Many Jewish activists of the Central European left were intellectuals, who were for the most part journalists or writers and often university educated. It could be said without exaggeration that they represented the breeding ground for the social democratic intelligentsia, and among them were – as the list above clearly shows – some of the most important figures of the Marxism of the Second International. In general, they belonged to the high or upper middle classes: they were the sons of merchants or industrialists, the Jewish elite who had become prosperous after Emancipation.
..... Political emancipation had two immediate social effects: a general improvement of economic conditions and widespread urbanisation, which was reflected rapidly by a concentration in the big German and Habsburg cities.
....social layer emerging out of the new Jewish bourgeoisie, the revolt against capitalist society and its system of values took the form of a conflict of generations, of a rupture with the world of their fathers, who had behaved as perfect German or Austrian bourgeois citizens but who, as Joseph Roth put it, 'did not have the courage to convert, preferring to water down the entire Jewish religion'
....At the turn of the twentieth century, Marxism was, in its dominant currents, a variant of positivistic evolutionism. It saw history as a linear process of development of the productive forces and as a society's unending march toward 'progress', which inevitably implied Jewish assimilation.
....For most Jewish revolutionaries, Marxism transcended, in an internationalist perspective, the Jewishness/anti-Semitism antinomy: Jewishness conceived as the heritage of a past made of oppression and obscurantism (according to the traditional aufklärerisch vision), anti-Semitism as the ideology of nationalism and the ruling classes.
....Excluded from university chairs, the state bureaucracy, and the army, the Jewish intellectuals were, to employ a Gramscian typology, neither 'traditional' nor 'organic' intellectuals; they were neither the expression of old, conservative elites, nor the organisers of the ideological hegemony of the new ruling classes. They lived in a neutral space, in a sort of no-man's-land where they perfectly embodied a 'freely floating' or 'socially unattached intelligentsia' (in Karl Mannheim's definition); hence, their predisposition toward avant-garde movements....
....Since a young Jewish intellectual could not join one of the bourgeois nationalist parties – for the most part confessional or anti-Semitic – there remained only two alternatives: Zionism ('our own version of the nationalism of blood and soil') or communism. And until the end of the Second World War, the second option appeared to the majority of such intellectuals to be incomparably more attractive.
....Between 1880 and the 1920s, about three million Jews fled Eastern Europe toward the West, mostly to the United States, Germany and France, without any corresponding diminution in the size of the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, which rather experienced a constant demographic expansion (from about five million in 1897 to more than seven million on the eve of the Second World War). Urbanisation – aided by a series of laws for-bidding Jews from living in certain regions and in small villages – displaced the axis of community life from small- and medium-sized centres – shtetl originally meant village – to towns and cities. Overall, the Jews took on a clearly urban character.
....the pogroms of the 1880s had on the first Jewish socialist circles: The pogroms obliged the socialist intelligentsia to understand that the Jews as a people found themselves in a unique situation in Russia, when they were targets for the hatred of the different sectors of the Christian population; and that they, the socialist Jews, were wrong in neglecting the actual condition of the Jews as a people different from the others. It was then that the revolutionaries understood that they must not abandon the masses in the name of cosmopolitanism.
....birth of a specifically Jewish working class toward the end of the nineteenth century allowed this Jewish intelligentsia to find a social anchorage, a class point of reference, through adopting a Marxist orientation. This was the context in which, in Lithuania and Poland, the Bundists and the socialist Zionists became the 'organic intellectuals'
....The Bund, the principal political force inside the Jewish community of the Pale, was born from the fusion of the first organised workers' circles with this radicalised intellectual elite. In order to speak with the Jewish workers, socialists were compelled to adopt their language, which led gradually them to conceive a political project based on both class and nationality, in which the liberation of the proletariat as an exploited class was intermingled with the liberation of the Jews as an oppressed nation. The tool for this symbiosis was Yiddish, which found in the Bund one of its stronger defenders.
....Parvus moved tirelessly from one German city to another until the outbreak of the First World War. In a series of articles published in 1900 in the Neue Zeit, he analysed imperialism as a system dominated by the historic crisis of the nation-states, henceforth in conflict with the supranational development of the productive forces.59 From this vision of capitalism as a global system stemmed his idea of a transcending of national realities.
...."Today, nationalism no longer makes sense. Even the making of my jacket shows the overcoming of national divisions in the world; the wool comes from the sheep of Angora, spun in England and woven in Lodz, the buttons come from Germany, the yarn is Austrian …" Nachman Syrkin: "And the rip in your sleeve comes from the Kiev pogrom"'.
....necessary to stress the general indifference shown by the Jewish Marxists of Eastern Europe toward religion, which deeply permeated the whole life of the Eastern Jews. Most of the leaders of the Bund – for example Kossovsky, Abramovich, Kremer, Mill, and Gojansky – were educated in the Jewish higher schools, the Yeshivas, where they learned Hebrew and received a religious training. The discovery of socialism and the pursuit of their studies (often unfinished) in Russian or Western universities signified for them a break with traditional religion and culture and an adhesion to a Marxist, atheist, and aufklärerisch worldview. There remained, however, a fundamental link to their community of origin: Yiddish. Unlike the anarchists, who were partisans of an iconoclastic atheism and organised banquets during Yom Kippur, the Bund saw religion as one of the components of Jewish national identity. Messianic references to the struggle for the 'redemption of humanity' were not unusual at its meetings, and its militia defended the entire Jewish community, including synagogues, against the pogroms.
..... In Central Europe, on the other hand, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Marxism became attractive to a nucleus of Jewish intellectuals of romantic background, permeated with a revolutionary messianic spirit. Both Ernst Bloch, the author of Geist der Utopie (1918) and Thomas Münzer (1921), and Walter Benjamin, whose thought was basically a fusion of Judaism – conceived as a religious and not an ethnic category – and historical materialism, were emblematic of this tendency. Benjamin's syncretic Jewish Marxism rehabilitated Jewish theology, which he evoked in his theses
'On the Concept of History' (1940) with the allegory of the 'little hunchback'
who comes to the aid of Marxism in the chess game of history.
....political radicalisation of the Jewish intellectuals was nourished by a common factor in Central and Eastern Europe: anti-Semitism. Obviously enough, Vienna and Berlin did not experience the pogroms of Poland and the Ukraine, but, throughout Central and Eastern Europe, Jewish intellectuals experienced discrimination and marginalisation that favoured their revolutionary engagement. At the turn of the twentieth century, alongside the stereotypes of the Jewish banker and usurer appeared that of the Jewish communist, anarchist, and revolutionary. Often these contradictory figures merged in the arsenal of counterrevolutionary and anti-Semitic propaganda.
....Anti-Semitic agitation started with the financial scandals that broke out in Germany after the crash of the Vienna stock market in 1873, in which some Jewish bankers were involved.2
Anti-Semitism codified in ideological terms the transition from traditional, religious Judeophobia to a new, racist form of hostility against the Jews.
....In 1891, an editorial in Die Neue Zeit significantly entitled Anti und Philosemitismus defended a point of view very similar to his own.
Like most editorials in this journal, it was unsigned, but historians generally attribute it to Franz Mehring (although it was not included in his Werkaus-gabe). According to the article, anti-Semitism expressed a romantic, feudal, and hence reactionary form of anti-capitalism. On the other hand, 'philo-Semitism', of which it gave no concrete example, was only a variant of capitalist ideology, the specular image of anti-Semitism. In other words, the Jews represented a superficial, obvious target for the anti-Semites in their struggle against capitalism, waged in the name of the feudal past; the philo-Semites, on the contrary, defended capitalism by disguising themselves as saviors of the oppressed and persecuted Jews. In such a conflict, nevertheless, anti-Semitism was fundamentally less dangerous than philo-Semitism, because the first was opposed to the Jews 'more in words than in deeds', whereas the second was a defence
'in deeds and not in words' of capitalism.9 Its conclusion joined that of Adler:
'For the conscious worker, the opposition between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism has never had any meaning'.10 What is remarkable in this analysis, not devoid of erudite references to young Marx's theory identification of the Jews with money, is simply its date. Barely one year earlier, the aged Engels had written his letter to the Arbeiterzeitung, widely reprinted by the social democratic press, in which he vigorously condemned anti-Semitism. Die Neue Zeit (Mehring) clearly wished to distinguish itself from Marx's friend, the spiritual leader of the Second International.
....The report made by August Bebel at the Cologne congress of German social democracy in 1893 was undoubtedly the most significant statement against anti-Semitism before the First World War. The anti-Semites had just scored an electoral success assuring them representation in the Reichstag, an event that nobody could ignore. In his report, nevertheless, Bebel went well beyond contingencies and approached the problem in broader terms, establishing
'scientific' criteria for the understanding of Jewish history: 'When a race is persecuted and forced to live in segregation for several generations, when it is separated from its environment, then it is more than natural, on the basis of the hypotheses of Darwin on heredity and the different forms of adaptation, that the original characteristics of this same race will accentuate and develop with time. The persecutions have left an indelible mark on the Jews contributing to the forging of this people that we know today'.16 Bebel compared the Jews to the Gypsies (causing some hilarity among the congress delegates) and showed an authentic respect for these two persecuted peoples (the persecutions they had suffered, he pointed out, being much worse than anything that had happened as a result of Bismarck's anti-socialist laws). Borrowing his arguments from positivistic evolutionism, Bebel defined the Jews as a race, even if this characterisation was not charged with a negative connotation, and their survival was explained in the light of a socioeconomic determinism conceived as a natural – almost biological – law of heredity. Bebel was a talented propagandist, not a theorist, but his analysis reflected perfectly the culture of German social democracy at the end of the nineteenth century.17
Anti-Semitism, Bebel argued, was particularly widespread among the small peasants, the shopkeepers, and civil servants, especially after the financial crash of 1873–4. But in Germany it was also widespread among students who, because of 'intellectual overproduction', came into conflict with the Jewish youth that had 'invaded' the Prussian universities. Bebel defined anti-Semitism as a reactionary anti-capitalist movement, 'seeking to hinder the natural evolution of society', which it was necessary to fight in the name of 'progress'. It was a movement without a future but – that was his astonishing conclusion –
it could favour the rise of social democracy. Once a certain degree of development was reached, anti-Semitism would 'necessarily, and against its own will, transform itself into a revolutionary movement, working thus for our interests, the interests of the Social Democratic party'.18 History was advancing toward progress, and anti-Semitism could not obstruct the rise of social democracy.
....In an article written in 1903, after the Kishinev pogrom, Kautsky distinguished between Russian and Western anti-Semitism: the aim of the former was to preserve Absolutism from modernisation, whereas the latter was a reaction against accomplished modernity. Thus hatred of the Jews took on a much sharper and more violent character in Russia, because it was directly carried out by the regime, which used the Jews 'as a lightning conductor during the storms that gather over the autocracy'.24 Only the workers' movement, by bringing together Jews and non-Jews in a common struggle, could fight this obscurantist reaction.
The argument put forward by Otto Bauer was similar: in the West, where the Jews were often part of the bourgeois class, anti-Semitism was the 'first naïve form of anti-capitalism' ( der erste naïve Ausdruck des Antikapitalismus); in the East, where a Jewish proletariat existed, anti-Semitism was harmful because it took on a nationalist connotation and divided the workers by engender-ing a form of nationalism, including among the Jewish workers. Thus, Russian socialism had to fight against this reactionary ideology while rejecting 'Jewish nationalism', which led to the separation of the Jewish workers from 'their Slavic brothers'.25 The concept of 'Jewish nationalism' is vague here, but, as we will see later, it referred, far beyond Zionism, to any idea of a Jewish cultural autonomy....
....Rosa Luxemburg did not interpret Anti-Semitism as an expression of social backwardness, but rather as one of the aspects of the ripeness of capitalism in a country where 'bourgeois society is declining not too slowly but too rapidly'
....All of them interpreted anti-Semitism as a form of social backwardness that was doomed to disappear with economic development. It extolled a romantic and reactionary ideology, but its roots were economic, brought about by the fear of Jewish competition.
In fact, the positivistic clichés of the Marxism of the Second International excluded the possibility of a modern anti-Semitism. 'The current anti-Semitism', Kautsky wrote in 1890, 'is an ephemeral and narrow [ ephemere und bor-nierte] movement, locally and temporally limited'.31 In his eyes, anti-Semitic ideology was medieval, retrograde, and reactionary, and he neglected or misunderstood the consequences of the transition from religious anti-Judaism to racial anti-Semitism: the first sought the conversion of the Jews; the second was directly opposed to Emancipation. He persisted in considering as an archaic prejudice a movement and an ideology that were the product of modernity.
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....orthodox Marxists criticised Zionism for three main reasons. First of all, it was a chimerical project, insofar as Palestine did not possess the objective conditions for the construction of a modern state and was inhospitable to the point of rendering vain any project of Jewish mass immigration. Second, it represented a historically anachronistic idea because it obstructed the dominant tendency to assimilation and wished to revive a Jewish nation that had disappeared at the end of the Middle Age.
Finally, it was a reactionary form of Jewish nationalism, the reflected image of anti-Semitism. At least up until the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the German and Austrian Marxists considered Zionism as a nationalist current animated by a narrow intellectual elite, supported by some philanthropists from the big Jewish bourgeoisie, but deprived of a mass base and, above all, without a future.
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....To Russian Marxists, the debate between the Bund and socialist Zionism always appeared either useless or incomprehensible. For them, the Jewish Question was not a National Question. Obsessed by the idea that Russia, semi-feudal and semi-Asiatic, had to make up the gap that it had accumulated with the West, they saw both anti-Semitism and Jewish culture as nothing but a legacy of tsarist backwardness. Strangers to both Yiddish language and culture, they identified progress and modernity with assimilation.
....Lenin never paid attention to the existence of a modern and secular Jewish national culture. He identified Jewish culture with either Zionism or religion, and perceived it exclusively as the heritage of a medieval superstition conserved by the rabbis. Isolated and persecuted, the Eastern Jews formed a caste, whereas in Western Europe they had joined the 'civilised world' through Emancipation. Thus, the assimilation of nations was an objective historical tendency brought about by capitalism: could the Jews remain attached to their cultural-ethnic particularism when capitalism, the universal melting pot, ceaselessly broke down national frontiers? Lenin argued in the name of progress, invariably identified with the West, and claimed that only the 'petty bourgeois reactionary Jews' could be opposed to assimilation. 'No one liberated from nationalist prejudices', he continued, 'can fail to perceive that this process of assimilation of nations by capitalism means the greatest historical progress, the breakdown of hidebound national conservatism in the various backwoods, especially in backward countries like Russia'.
....leader always condemned anti-Semitism as one of the most odious aspects of the backwardness and barbarism of Tsarist Russia. It certainly had very deep roots in Russian society, but its nature and its manifestations stemmed above all from Absolutism. In 1906, Lenin stigmatised those responsible for the Bialystok pogrom:
The old familiar picture! The police organize the pogrom beforehand. The police instigate it: leaflets are printed in government printing offices calling for a massacre of the Jews. When the pogrom begins, the police are inactive. The troops quietly look on at the exploits of the Black Hundreds.
But later this very police go through the farce of prosecution and trial of the pogromists.
[Trotsky] did not even accept the thesis of the spontaneous and popular character of Russian anti-Semitism because, in his opinion, unless incited and supported by the regime, the pogroms would never have taken place. Moreover, one could mention that during the 1930s, the exiled Russian revolutionary evoked the Dreyfus and Beilis affairs as historical precedents for the Moscow trials.
....Differently than Kautsky and Stalin, Trotsky defended a fundamentally cultural-historical conception of the nation. He distinguished between nations, made of multiple and variable elements like territory, language, culture, and history of a people, and nation-states, the specific form, historically determined and transitional, that the bourgeoisie and capitalism gave to the national phenomenon.
[Rosa Luxemburg] ....wrote that 'Jewish national autonomy, not in the sense of freedom of school, religion, place of residence, and equal civic rights, but in the sense of the political self-government of the Jewish population with its own legislation and administration, as it was parallel to the autonomy of the Congress Kingdom, is an entirely utopian idea'.55 The Jews were not a territorially homogeneous population, and autonomy could not be realised 'in the air … without any definite territory'.56 At the economic level, the Jews were inserted in the productive structure of the Tsarist Empire and had no particular 'capitalist interests': the development of capitalism would not lead to the
'separation of Jewish bourgeois culture, but acts in an exactly opposed direction, leading to the assimilation of the Jewish bourgeois, urban intelligentsia, to their absorption by the Polish and Russian people'.
...., she rejected the demand for Polish independence because of the integration of the Polish bourgeoisie into the Russian economy, but this did not prevent her from opposing attempts at Russification and defending the development of Polish culture. In the Jewish case, on the other hand, she thought that the assimilation of a bourgeois economic elite was an insuperable obstacle to the flourishing of a national Jewish culture. Her definition of the Yiddishkeit as 'plebeian lack of culture' was an a priori rather than the result of careful argumentation.
"Nations and semi-nations announce themselves everywhere and affirm their right to establish states. Putrefied corpses come out of hundred year old tombs, animated by a new springlike vigor, and peoples 'without history', who have never constituted autonomous state identities feel the violent need to set themselves up as states. Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, the new nations in the Caucasus … The Zionists are already building their Palestinian ghetto, for the moment in Philadelphia … it is currently Walpurgisnacht on the nationalist Brocken."
....Unlike the Austrian, German, or Russian Marxists, who generally interpreted Polish anti-Semitism as a medieval legacy, Rosa Luxemburg saw it also as a bourgeois political manifestation, the product of class antagonisms within a modern capitalist society. She considered anti-Semitism as a phenomenon both modern and archaic, the product of the particular combination of anti-worker bourgeois reaction and an 'age-old' oppression of nationalities by Russian Absolutism. In the Junius Pamphlet, her internationalist manifesto written during the First World War, she saw anti-Semitism as a symbol of the barbarism which capitalism, in the absence of a socialist revolution, was bringing to humanity. She described the wave of nationalism that had swept Europe at the beginning of the conflict through the allegory of a pogrom: The atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air where the crossing guard is the only remaining representative of human dignity … Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form....
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