Reading notes on Chapter 6 of 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

Chapter 6: Gramsci and the Jewish Question

[Gramsci has zero to do with the continuity of revolutionary Marxism.  He, like Benjamin and the Frankfurters, have been embraced by petty bourgeois radicals and academics who traded curiosity or support for independent working class political action for the companionable teat of bourgeois public opinion every time the working class vanguard suffered a reverse or defeat.  The luxury of a Gramsci is that his obscurantism can be molded into any accommodation with academic and political fashion. Need to denigrate technology or historical materialism? Gramsci can mean that, too. The petty bourgeois academic left will never embrace Lenin and Trotsky over someone like Gramsci; their political clarity is too stark for comfort.  JR]

....The Jews barely figure in Gramsci's writings. In prison, he read and even partly translated Marx's Zur Judenfrage,1 but Jewish history never became an object of investigation for the Italian Marxist. He devoted to this topic solely some fragmentary observations in his 1932 correspondence with his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, who had told him of her impressions of a film dealing with Polish anti-Semitism during the First World War. Furthermore, these references were confined to the Jewish Question in Italy, a country where political emancipation and cultural assimilation appeared as irreversible achievements (the fascist regime's 'race laws', which followed the alliance with Nazi Germany, were introduced only in 1938, one year after Gramsci's death).

....Gramsci is an outstanding figure of inter-war Marxism. It is possible to check, through his writings, the extent to which the paradigm of assimilation achieved a kind of normative value in Marxist thought. In spite of his radically anti-positivistic conception of Marxism as a 'philosophy of praxis', which did not fit in easily with Kautsky and Lenin's evolutionism, he did not criticise the dogma of Jewish assimilation as the natural outcome of historical development. 

...., he denied the status of nation to the Jews, repeating the arguments already developed by Kautsky and Stalin: namely, the lack of economic, cultural, linguistic, territorial, and state unity that had characterised the Jewish Diaspora for centuries.

....he did not hesitate to recognise the right of Jewish communities to 'cultural autonomy' (in language, schooling, and so forth) and even 'national autonomy', where they 'in one fashion or another inhabited a definite territory'. 

..... His vision of Jewish assimilation as an ineluctable process, nonetheless, was deduced from an analysis of Italian history rather than from a universal historical schema (like in Kautsky). 

....Different from Russia, Germany, Austria, or even France, anti-Semitism in Italy was neither a political strategy nor a widespread hostility toward the Jews, but rather the vestige of religious prejudices in popular language and mentality. 

....the treaty between the Catholic Church and the fascist regime in 1929 implied no discriminatory measures against the Jewish community. To his friend Piero Sraffa, who did not completely share this point of view, he responded that the situation of unfrocked priests, condemned by the Lateran treaty to become true 'pariahs', was much worse than that of the Jews.

....in a 1932 letter, he reverted to the conception of anti-Semitism as popular hostility toward the Jewish usurer. Here, anti-Semitism was perceived as a socio-economic phenomenon, where the religious element was only superficial and accessory. Hatred for the usurer was a generalised social practice of which anti-Semitism represented only a particular variant.  

....Gramsci did not see the Jews as the bearers of a distinct culture – the Jew in himself – but only as the mirror of an external attitude of hostility, a product of anti-Semitism; second, he identified modernity with Jewish assimilation, inasmuch as its advent implied the progressive elimination of feudality, the secularisation of  

....culture and, consequently, the political emancipation of the Jews. These observations were fundamentally similar to Kautsky's analysis, but were deduced from Italian history. Writing in a country where anti-Semitism always had been a privileged field of Catholic propaganda, Gramsci stressed its the religious dimension.