Reading notes on Chapter 9 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

[N.B.  There is no better place to understand Abram Leon's book The Jewish Question than the book itself, available in many places on the web, and for purchase here. Traverso in his chapter on Leon tries to have his cake and eat it, too on nearly every page:  Leon is too dogmatic in his Marxism/he breaks from previous Kautsky dogmatism; Leon counterposes assimilation to Zionism; Leon supersedes the contradiction of assimilation versus Zionism.  Below are a series of passages suggesting how big a lacuna [favorite Traverso word] exists in Traverso's understanding and exposition of Leon.  [As with his discussion of fascism, literary and historical obscurantism is prized over plain scientific socialism, as when he promotes Neumann's Behemoth over Guerin's superior Fascism and Big Business. JR].

Chapter 9: The Theory of the People-Class: Abram Leon

4 Solutions

....In line with a classical Marxist conception, Leon considered Zionism as a 'petty bourgeois' nationalist movement, born at the end of the last century under the impact of the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus affair.

....it should be repeated that Leon's opposition to Zionism went well beyond a simple condemnation of its practical impotence in the face of Nazism. He rejected Zionism as an illusory response, in historical terms, to the Jewish Question. Capitalist society was shaken by a profound overall crisis which challenged a whole form of civilisation: in this context, the Zionist idea of a Promised Land where the Jewish people, the foremost victims of this crisis, would be able to remain sheltered from the general catastrophe, was a dangerous illusion: the solution of the Jewish Question implied the abolition of capitalism. 

....'but socialism must give the Jews, as it will to all peoples, the possibility of assimilation as well as the possibility of having a special national life'

....Leon himself recognised the incompatibility between the concept of the people-class and the perspective of a Jewish national renaissance under socialism, when he suggested that a 'national solution' to the Jewish Question would probably only be a 'preface' to assimilation. It was a strange conclusion, in which Leon recognised implicitly that the Jews had the possibility of remaining a

     'people' even after having ceased to be a 'class'.