Reading notes on Conclusion 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

Conclusion

....Classical Marxism was incapable of comprehending the nature of anti-Semitism, or of recognising the Jewish aspiration to a distinct separate identity. Actually, it shared this misconception with all intellectual and political currents that belonged to the tradition of Enlightenment, from democratic liberalism to Zionism.

....The movement founded by Theodor Herzl succeeded in colonising Palestine and, after the war, in building a state there, thus creating a Palestinian national question.

....The Judeo-Marxists (Medem, Borokhov) saw the national dimension of the Jewish Question in the Tsarist Empire; Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Abram Leon, and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer) came to consider anti-Semitism as an eminently modern phenomenon, no longer a feudal residue but a manifestation of backward capitalism, rooted both 'in objective social relations and in the consciousness and unconsciousness of the masses'.1 This fundamental cleavage separated the partisans of assimilation (Bauer, Kautsky, Lenin, Leon) from those who recognised the national character of the Jews of Eastern Europe (Medem, Borokhov). The latter, in their turn, were divided between the defenders of national autonomy in the Diaspora and the builders of a Jewish state in Palestine. 

....As Isaac Deutscher observed: 'As Marxists, we tried theoretically to deny that the Jewish labor movement had an identity of its own, but it had it all the same. It was quite obvious that in that Jewish labor movement the intellectual found his role and did not have to go to the trouble of defining it. From the Jewish working class in Eastern Europe came the efflorescence of Yiddish literature.'

....The Jewish Question reveals the blindness of Marxism to the significance of both religion and the nation in modern world. 

[N.B.  I think Traverso here confuses "blindness" as an abstract category with class clarity. JR]

..... In the wake of the radical Enlightenment, Marxist thinkers perceived religion as synonymous with obscurantism and as an instrument for the enslavement of the oppressed. The subversive potentialities of faith, the 'hot currents' of religious thought (Ernst Bloch), completely escaped those Marxists who interpreted Jewish history. Almost nobody, in this debate, saw Judaism as the indispensable ally of materialism in the chess game of history (to employ Benjamin's image).

....Marxists were haunted by the search for an 'objective' – sometimes normative – definition of the national phenomenon: they located the constitutive elements of the nation in the economy, language, territory, and so on, often forgetting to take into account its subjective dimension, that is the consciousness a group possesses of forming a community of culture, united by a collective destiny.

[N.B. Every shortxcoming of Marxism Traverso outlines is a failing on the side of class clarity and scientific socialist conclusions.  He objects to unmuddied waters where subjectivism is given its property label and not elevated to the level of a cardinal empirical virtue.JR]

....Jewish Question also reveals a blindness of classical Marxism toward forms of domination not directly related to the class structure of society, such as national, but also racial and gender oppression. 

..... In the pages of the Viennese Arbeiterzeitung, an extremely ambiguous attitude to the Jewish Question (refusal to struggle against anti-Semitism, denunciation of the 'Judaised' finance and press) was often accompanied by an outright condemnation of homosexuality, which led Karl Kraus to conclude that the word 'comrade' ( Genosse) could certainly not derive from the verb 'to enjoy'

..... Russian Marxists offered a rigid choice to national minorities – self-determination (state separation) or assimilation –

     which often transformed the struggle for equality into the attempt to transcend all national difference. Indeed, the entire Jewish culture of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century – from politics (Medem, Zhitlovsky) to history (Dubnov), from sociology (Lestschinsky) to literature (Peretz, Aleichem, Asch) to painting (Chagall) – was the affirmation of a Jewish identity in the Diaspora. 

....There is something profoundly Jewish in the fate of Trotsky (Lev Davidovitch Bronstein), who wrote all his great works in exile and was condemned to a permanent wandering because of his political stance: but, as Hans Meyer has pointed out, he lived his whole life as 'comrade Shylock' without ever being conscious of it.

....Marxist debate on the Jewish Question shows the tragic illusions of a teleological vision of history. Behind the Marxist conception of assimilation and anti-Semitism, there was an idea of progress in which history was envisaged as a linear development, an inevitable improvement of humanity, the evolution of society following natural laws and the development of the productive forces under capitalism growing inevitably closer to the advent of the socialist order....

[N.B.  Again, Traverso's version of Marxism never rises above the level of caricature and academic kitsch.  Neither Marx, Lenin, Engels, or Trotsky ever promoted the idea of linearity or inevitability in history in general or in the contemporary class struggle. They were conscious polemical opponents of such ideas; at their best, so were Kautsky, Labriola, and Plekhanov, not to mention Mandel and George Novack.  Traverso, for a "man of the left," seems to be satisfied with a knowledge of Marxism obtained second-hand, not from the Marxist works of the movement's founders and leaders. To tackle subjects of the scope Traverso undertakes, this is simply not good enough! JR].