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].

Reading notes on Chapter 10 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 10: Post-war Marxism and the Holocaust

....lack of a Marxist debate on the causes, forms and consequences of the destruction of the European Jews 

....During the 1940s and 1950s Marxism became an essential component of anti-fascist culture, in which the Jewish tragedy was reduced to a marginal aspect of the gigantic conflict that had ravaged Europe. 

[N.B. For Traverso's 'anti-fascist culture,' read Stalinist/Eurocommunist "culture." . JR]

....Shortly after the war other philosophers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or situated at its periphery, such as Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse and Gunther Anders, made Auschwitz the starting point for their critique of modern civilization. 

....Frankfurt School Marxism (and notably its radical version represented by Gunther Anders, the most interesting of its 'fellow travellers') seemed to take on a more and more antiuto-pian dimension. Ultimately, it based itself on a paradigm that we could call, at the antipodes from Ernst Bloch, the 'principle of despair' ( das Prinzip Verzweiflung). Anders replaced Ernst Bloch's ontology of the not yet (Noch-Nicht-Sein) with an anti-Utopia of waiting for annihilation ( noch-nicht-Nichtsein), which turned him into a kind of Heideggerian Marxist.5 Its radical critique of civilisation went together with an attitude of despair, scepticism and a tragic feeling of impotence (to the point of opposing student protest movements, as Adorno and Horkheimer would do in 1968).

1 The Frankfurt School

....effort to rethink history in the wake of Auschwitz was undertaken by Adorno and Horkheimer towards the end of the war in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. 

..... The Final Solution is presented there as the paradigm of a barbarism towards which the whole trajectory of Western civilisation, characterised as a process of the 'self-destruction of Enlightenment' ( Selbstzerstörung der Aufklärung), has converged.

....to turn upside down the positivist vision of a long, linear, automatic human development towards progress, seeing in National Socialism the terminus of the Western world's course. Auschwitz unveils the destructive dimension of Aufklärung, which has now revealed itself in place of Hegel's Absolute Spirit to be the true content of history.

[N.B. Needless to say, such generalizations are completely anti-Marxist and promote both intellectual obscurantism and surrender/atomization. JR]

2: Ernest Mandel

....Mandel's work undoubtedly contains the most coherent attempt to interpret the Jewish genocide in the light of classical Marxism, and in this way developed further Trotsky's approach. 

....Mandel, by contrast, developed a critical theory of society that was inseparable from a political project that located its subject in the exploited classes. His Marxism was utopian, generous and constantly on the look-out for turning points or 'bifurcations' in history that might be transformed into revolutionary breaks. Mandel reached his zenith as a political thinker in the period after May 1968. The neoliberal outcome of the 1989–91

     crisis of the Soviet bloc failed to break his spirit. His trajectory was thus very much distinct from that of Adorno and Anders. The only element that they shared despite everything was a rejection of Stalinism. 

....In his opinion, the absurdity of the tragedy was only a surface appearance, since it was the product of 'a world in torment'. Although any explanation seemed 'to fall short of the full horror of the reality' in the face of the ghettos, mass executions, gas chambers and ovens, he warned against the temptation of seeing it as 'a sudden, unique catastrophe' in history. True, the Jews had been 'hit harder than any other people', but it must not be forgotten that their destruction took place  at a time when the whole human race had nearly fallen into a bottomless pit. 

...During the decades that separated his first 1946 text from the rest, he devoted several studies to the problem of fascism, but without paying any particular attention to its anti-Semitic dimension.

....scholarly and public discussion on the historical singularity of the Holocaust took place in Western Germany only in the 1980s

..... In his writings in this last period, Mandel did not hesitate to recognise the uniqueness of the Jewish genocide. The 'deliberate and systematic killing of six million men, women and children simply because of their ethnic origin', he wrote, can only be understood as a 'unique' event in history – though this does not mean that we cannot explain it, still less that we cannot compare it with others.

....uniqueness of the Jewish genocide, therefore, did not consist in the Nazis' greater inhumanity when compared with their European forbears, nor in the specific nature of their anti-Semitism.

....One of the basic texts of Nazi anti-Semitic politics, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which vulgarised the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy, was of Russian origin.

[N.B. The Protocols as a "vulgarization" of an anti-Semitic trope is a peculiar - to be generous - formulation.  Is Traverso concerned it is vulgar because he thinks Jew-haters should seek to raise the level of their discourse?  In seriousness, this is a perfect example of the sloppy pretzel of anti-Marxist left rhetoric Traverso employs to explain/obscure his subject. JR]

....Mandel rejected the mystical cult of the Holocaust. The Jewish genocide must be treated historically; its specificity can only be seen clearly on the basis of an analytical approach of a comparative type. In this perspective, this crime seems much less like the outcome of age-old Judeophobia than as a paroxysm resulting from the modern violence deployed by imperialism against peoples judged to be 'inferior', 'subhuman' or inassimilable. In The Meaning of the Second World War Mandel wrote: Traditional semi-feudal and petty-bourgeois anti-Semitism led to pogroms, which were to the Nazi murderers what knives are to the atom bomb. The seeds of the gas chambers resided in the mass enslavement and killing of Blacks via the slave trade, in the wholesale extermination of the Central and South American Indians by the conquistadors. In such cases, the term genocide is fully justified …

    The unique character of the destruction of the Jews was not linked to the nature of the Nazis' anti-Semitic hatred, which was not qualitatively different from other forms of racism that were very widespread at the time inside as well as outside Germany. 

..... He articulated contingencies and long-term tendencies, linked military strategies to their economic bases and to the extraordinary technological changes engendered by the war, and finally connected the ideologies of its actors with the great cleavages of modernity: Enlightenment versus counter-Enlightenment, emancipation against imperialism, socialism or barbarism. In his vision, the Second World War was a plurality of intertwined conflicts: a war between great powers for international hegemony, a defensive war of the USSR against Nazi aggression, a liberation war of the European countries occupied by the Axis forces, a civil war between anti-fascism and collaborationism, and a war of the colonised countries against imperialism that in China turned into a socialist revolution. Analysing the different but correlated dimensions of this war, Mandel analyzed the Nazi violence and the atomic bomb, pointing out both their similarities and their discrepancies, and connecting them with the legacy of Western imperialism and racism. He depicted the historical background of the Holocaust, but his analysis remained as general and abstract as Horkheimer's and Adorno's diagnosis of the 'self-destruction of Enlightenment'. 

....Auschwitz and Hiroshima were not products of technology but of relationships of social forces – in other words, they were the (provisional) terminus of the great historical defeats of the international proletariat after 1917

....During a colloquium held in Salzburg in 1990, Mandel cited Ernst Bloch in order to explain the 'non-synchronism' or 'non-contemporaneity' ( Ungleichzeitigkeit) of ideology and society under the Third Reich, a regime characterised by 'thirteenth-century survivals in the middle of the twentieth century'. This vision was entirely consistent with Trotsky's approach, in which Nazism represented a form (to use Norman Geras's particularly illuminating definition) of 'undigested barbarism'.

3: Capitalism and the Holocaust

....Inscribed into the logic of reactionary modernism – a conservative revolt against modernity that used the destructive means offered by modernity itself as an attempt to incorporate Zivilisation into Kultur – the Holocaust can be analysed through Marx's categories. Moishe Postone has acutely observed that the features generally attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism – abstract-ness, intellectualism, extraterritoriality, mobility, universalism, etc. – perfectly correspond to 'the value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx'.

....Postone explains The Jews were not seen merely as representatives of capital (in which case anti-Semitic attacks would have been much more class-specific). They became the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful, and international domination of capital as a social form. 

....The 'anti capitalist' revolt was, consequently, also the revolt against the Jews. The overcoming of capitalism and its negative social effects became associated with the overcoming of the Jews.49

     This analysis inspired by Capital's theory of commodity fetishism is probably the most interesting and convincing attempt to elaborate a Marxist interpretation of Nazi anti-Semitism, but Mandel was probably too marked by his concrete experience of war and deportation to think of National Socialism as a form of abstract anti-capitalism. 

....Mandel grasped a fatal interconnection at the heart of the Final Solution between racism and industrial modernity, between capitalism's partial rationality and overall irrationality, but he could not admit that this genocide was determined 'in the final analysis' by ideology, despite the material interests (and military priorities) of German imperialism. For him this meant making too big a concession to the idea of the 'primacy of politics' in the history of the Third Reich (an idea for which he had already criticised the historian Tim Mason)56 and stretching the axioms of historical materialism to an excessive degree. In fact the 'counter-rationality' of the extermination of the Jews and of the Gypsies constitutes a challenge for any historical account of Nazism.

[N.B. This is Traverso's collapse into resigned incomprehension of historical events, not Mandel's. JR]

....The vision of the Holocaust as a function of the class interests of big German capital – this is the interpretive criterion 'in the final analysis' of all Marxist theories of fascism – is not defensible.58 Trapped in this dead end, East German historians – not always ideologues; sometimes genuine historians – enclosed a complex reality inside pre-established categories. This approach was bound to end up both making the Jewish genocide banal and discrediting Marxism itself by reducing it to a form of economic determinism.59 Despite his affirmed anti-dogmatism, Mandel did not avoid a certain oversimplification of reality and even arrogance. The survivors, even those as stubbornly rationalistic as Jean Améry and Primo Levi, were suspicious of this kind of reductionist analysis. In Améry's eyes, 'all the attempts at economic explanations, all the one-dimensional interpretations that claim that German industrial capital, fearing for its privileges, financed Hitler, are absolutely meaningless for an eyewitness'. Despite his desire to 'make clear' ( erklären) his experience, Auschwitz remains for him 'a dark riddle' ( ein finisteres Rätsel).

....Mandel pertinently dismissed as obscurantist a view of the Jewish genocide as by definition an incomprehensible, inexplicable and indescribable event (in the style of Elie Wiesel or Claude Lanzmann), but that does not make his own explanation any more satisfactory…. 

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'. 

Reading notes on Chapter 8 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 8: The Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin 

3 Critique of Progress

....his acceptance of Marxism was critical and, so to speak, selective. What interested him about Marxism was its subversive and revolutionary dimension, of which there no longer remained any trace in social democracy. Educated by Bernstein and Kautsky, the latter conceived Marxism as a theory of evolution, in which history was a linear path toward progress and technique, its fundamental tool. This historical evolutionism and technical fetishism took into account only the domination of man over nature, without considering the human and social regression that this implied.

.... in his acceptance of technique, he considered himself closer to Fourier (despite all his naïve limitations) than to German social democracy.

....Technical progress engendered destructive forces and became an instrument of domination that could only lead to war. 

....One of the tasks of the class struggle was then to break this negative dialectic and put technique back at the service of nature and humanity. 'If the abolition of the bourgeoisie', wrote Benjamin in another fragment of the collection, 

     'is not completed in an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a moment signaled by inflation and chemical warfare), all is lost. 

[N.B. Miseducated and self-miseducated, like so many other radicalized young intellectuals trying to find their way to the working class vanguard and scientific socialism, Benjamin was satisfied with a caricature of Marxism bequeathed by the misleaders of the 2nd and 3rd international.  This fraudulent caricature of Marxism he rejected, preferring a subjective variety of idealism which Traverso also prizes above the works of revolutionary socialists of that time and ours. [JR]

....social democracy was not able to distinguish between the emancipatory potential of technique and its destructive application by capitalism. With its complacent optimism, it persisted in seeing each technical innovation as a new contribution to the advent of a liberated society. As he wrote in his essay on Eduard Fuchs (1937), social democracy was prisoner to the illusions of positivism, merely admiring the development of technology; its theorists 'misunderstood the destructive side of this development because they were alienated from the destructive side of dialectics'.

....he wrote that revolutionary action, like that carried out by Blanqui in the nineteenth century, did not 'presuppose any belief in progress' but rather the 'determination to do away with present injustice.'40 Thus, revolution would accomplish both a secular and a messianic function: by crushing fascism and the dominant class – the 'Antichrist' – it would permit the redemption ( Erlösung) of the past

....In his preparatory notes for the theses 'On the Concept of History', Benjamin wrote that Marx had 'secularized the idea of messianic time ( messianische Zeit)'

     in his conception of the 'classless society'.43 Revolution was the 'now-time' ( Jet-ztzeit) in which the oppressed past and the messianic future came together in an explosive encounter.44 On this point, the German sociologist Christoph Hering has pertinently pointed out the striking similarity that exists between this concept of revolution as a messianic interruption of the continuum  of history and Marx's theory – formulated in the introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) – which characterised the revolution as the end of the 'prehistory' 

[N.B. Again the caricature of Marx's work not as the generalization of the line of march of a class, but as a disguised version of "Jewish messianism."  Traverso seems more than a little in love with this formulation, as he is with several idealism rationalizations in this book which he counterposes to class struggle and independent working class political action.  Numerous formerly radicalized intellectuals, in retreating from scientific socialism, passed through, or ended-up, dismissing Marxism by saying it was either messianism or positivism as they registered their disgust at the wares peddled for Marxism by social democracy and Stalinism. JR]

4 Historical Materialism and Theology

In the theses 'On the Concept of History', Benjamin evokes this fusion of Marxism with Jewish theology through the allegorical image, drawn from Edgar Allan Poe and German romantic literature, of the 'hunchback dwarf' ( buckli-ger Zwerg). He described the legend of an 'automaton' that was always capable of defeating his adversaries at chess. In reality, this 'automaton', present in the form of a 'puppet wearing Turkish attire', concealed inside itself a 'hunchback dwarf' who was 'a master at chess', who directed the game and assured the victory....

....Theology – Jewish messianism – appears in this thesis as a weapon to be used in the class struggle, a powerful tool without which Marxism, reduced by social democracy and Stalinism to an empty shell and a sort of soulless machine (an

     'automaton') could not vanquish the historical enemy (fascism). 

...., he did not consider them as opposed or contradictory but as linked by a deep elective affinity. He did not conceive their union as an addition, rather as a dialectical synthesis.48 Without such a fusion, they were doomed to impotence: historical materialism became a fetish (the 'science' of Kautsky or the Stalinist 'diamat') 

....Benjamin's goal was precisely to eliminate any frontier between Marxism and messianism, in order to fuse them together in a new conception, simultaneously religious and secular, of the revolution. Influenced by Scholem and Brecht, most theological and Marxist interpretations of Benjamin share this refusal to see the unity of Marxism and theology. 

....To understand the theses 'On the Concept of History', it is necessary to adopt a new approach – that, for example, of the liberation theology in Latin America – founded on the idea that Marxism and religion are not two irreconcilable entities.

Reading notes on Chapter 7 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 7: From Weimar to Auschwitz: Anti-Semitism and the German Left

....Just as the German left in the nineteenth century had ignored the anti-Semitic propaganda of Richard Wagner, Heinrich von Treitschke and Hous-ton Stewart Chamberlain, under the Weimar Republic it did not pay attention to Mein Kampf.

....Nazi anti-Semitism, on the contrary, was charged with a new apocalyptic strength that took an almost religious dimension, thus becoming a sort of emancipating fight, carried on with the ardour of faith. 

1: The KPD: from the 'Schlageter Line' to the 'Third Period'

....'For us, there are in the world only two peoples, two classes: the workers and the parasites, the owners and those who possess nothing … For us, there are neither Christians nor Jews, neither Germans nor Russians, neither French nor British! For we Communists, there are only the Capitalists and the exploited. The Christian usurer seems to us as odious as the Jew, Stinnes as much so as Rothschild'.

....summed up in Brecht's play 'The Round Heads and The Pointed Heads' ( Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe), where the Nazis and the Jewish bourgeoisie both found themselves allied.

....'National-Bolshevism', born in 1920 out of the attempt to unify the revolutionary left and pan-Germanist reaction in the struggle against the Treaty of Versailles, was not radically rejected by the KPD. Some isolated attempts to integrate racism with Marxist theory were quickly denounced and their authors expelled, but the party leadership showed an ambiguous attitude towards völkisch  nationalism.11 The response of the German communists to the French occupation of the Ruhr was the 'Schlageter line', theorised by Karl Radek in 1923. 

     In a famous speech, he celebrated the memory of Leo Schlageter, a Nazi who had been shot after carrying out a sabotage action in the occupied Ruhr, with the following words: 'The fate of this martyr of German nationalism should not be passed over in silence nor treated with contempt … Schlageter, this courageous soldier of the counter-revolution, deserves to be honored by us, soldiers of the revolution'.12 Radek identified Germany, a great power under military occupation, with a semi-colonial country and came close to equating pan-Germanism with the political movement of an oppressed nation.13 In short, instead of opposing the nationalist wave sweeping the country, the KPD adopted a nationalist rhetoric focused on national liberation. On this basis, it did not reject a 'dialogue' with the Nazis: Radek debated with Möller van der Bruk, one of the most popular representatives of the 'Conservative Revolution', and the communist newspaper, Rote Fahne, published the interventions of Count von Reventlow. The frontier between Marxism and the völkisch  ideology was becoming more and more blurred. 

     In the framework of the 'Schlageter line', the KPD also adopted several very ambiguous positions on anti-Semitism. The most notorious example was a speech by Ruth Fischer, the secretary of the KPD, to the nationalist students of Berlin in 1923, whose anti-Semitic demagogical tone was explicit: 'The German Reich can only be saved if you recognize, gentlemen of the populist side, that you must struggle in collaboration with the masses organized by the KPD. 

     Whoever struggles against Jewish capital … is already a class fighter, even if he does not know it … Shoot down the Jew-capitalists, hang them from the lampposts, crush them!'

....Schlageter line was put aside but not completely abandoned and, in 1930, the KPD took a new nationalist turn. 

....leader, Ernst Thälmann, launched the slogan of the 'popular revolution', which was an obvious appeal to the völkisch  ideology of the Nazis. Nationalist slogans went hand in hand with the theory of 'social fascism', which designated social democracy as the principal enemy of the proletariat. The KPD rejected any political alliance against the Nazis and, on several occasions, allied itself with the Nazis against the social democrats: for example, in 1931, when it supported the referendum proposed by the Nazis against the social democratic government in Prussia, calling it the 'red referendum', and in November 1932, when it organised a transport strike in Berlin with the NSDAP. 

....ambiguities of the Schlageter line were not only repeated but even accentuated. In 1931, the Rote Fahne  denounced Hitler as the saviour of the Jewish bourgeoisie: 'Hitler wishes to be the friend of everyone who owns a cashbox. 

....KPD excluded any real conflict between Nazism and Jewish capital: Hitler must necessarily defend the interests of the big Jewish bourgeoisie

....Nuremburg Laws of 1935 were explained as the inevitable product of the process of concentration of German capital. According to Hans Behrend, 'anti-Semitism leads in a straight line to a new concentration of capital'.28 It was unequivocally proved, in his opinion, by the fact that certain companies whose proprietors were Jewish had been absorbed by trusts such as Siemens and Krupp. The pogroms of the notorious Kristallnacht  in 1938 were explained once again by the Nazi regime's need to find a scapegoat for the economic crisis....

After 1935, the new strategic orientation of the Comintern, the Popular Front....

....1937, the international communist movement organised a World Congress Against Racial Fanaticism and Anti-Semitism in Paris, which concluded with this slogan: 'Men of all nations of the world, unite for peace, justice and fraternity!'30 Communists had become the most ardent defenders of the Enlightenment, which had been betrayed by the bourgeoisie with its complicity with fascism. 

....some heretic Marxists produced more nuanced and sometimes insightful interpretations, but did not abandon this analytical framework. This was true of August Thalheimer, who tended to reduce fascism to a form of Bonapartism,31 but it was also true of the writings of Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse devoted to Nazi ideology. In 1934, Marcuse published an essay in the journal of the Frankfurt School in which he saw the most characteristic traits of totalitarian ideology in the conception of the charismatic leader, irrational naturalism (the romantic idealisation of a mythical prehistoric nature) and the organicism of the Volk.32 Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times (1934), rather than simply an analysis of the Nazi doctrine, was a collection of essays on the mass psychology of fascism.

....For Arthur Rosenberg, anti-Semitism was essentially a sublimated form of anti-capitalism, like other forms of racism and xenopho-bia. 'Demagogic nationalism' needed to focus on a target: in the American South, the 'poor white' hated the black; in the Ottoman Empire, the Turk hated the Armenian; in Central and Eastern Europe, the scapegoat of nationalism had always been the Jews.

....Fascism and Big Business (1936): Anti-Semitism exists in a latent state in the subconscious of the middle classes; throughout the nineteenth century, the petty bourgeoisie, the victim of capitalist evolution, had a tendency to render responsible for its evils the usurer and the banker, indeed the small Jewish trader. 

....How can 650,000 Jews deprive 65 million Germans of work? But when things go badly, a scapegoat is needed and, to preserve from popular anger those who are truly responsible, the capitalists, Israel has been charged with every sin … It is necessary to have understood these men of the people who are not racial theorists, who have not donned the brown shirt, to understand the profound sources of their hatred. Hitler has invented nothing; he has only listened, formulated, guessed what an outlet anti-Semitism offered to the anti-capitalism of the masses.

....Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942).... under the Nazi regime, racism and the anti-Jewish persecutions were only 'substitutes for the class struggle'.39 Otto Bauer compared Nazi anti-Semitism to the social demagogy of Carl Lueger and Georg von Schönerer, which followed from the economic position occupied by the Jews within society. Hatred of the Jews, Bauer thought, was an ephemeral expedient, insofar as the eviction of the Jews from economic life would, sooner or later, lead the impoverished masses to oppose fascism itself.40 Even Max Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt School exiled in New York, repeated the same arguments in a famous article titled 'The Jews and Europe' (1939). In his eyes, the Jews were only a commercial caste who, in the epoch of imperialism, became the victims of state capitalism. 

....According to the historian Martin Jay, the source of such a persistent and widespread incomprehension of the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism should be sought essentially in the Jewish origins of a great number of the German left political leaders and Marxist intellectuals.45 Faced with the Nazis, who accused the left of being a Jewish creation, they were put in a real dilemma: if they acknowledged their Jewishness, this would have been understood as an implicit legitimation of the vision of communism as a Jewish plot; if they denied their origins, they could be accused of cowardice and treason (not only by the Zionists) or even of 'Jewish self-hatred'. How was this contradiction to be resolved? Repression of the problem was an easy way out: both to consider anti-Semitism as a simple demagogic tool, without trying to understand its deeper roots, and to ignore its developments and its consequences. 

3: Trotsky's Warnings

....Trotsky's writings oscillate between the vision of anti-Semitism as a form of obscurantism and irrationalism opposed to modernity and the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the definition of Nazism as totalitarianism, the expression of modern decaying capitalism on the other. 

....To evolution, materialist thought, and rationalism – of the twentieth, nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries – is opposed in his mind national idealism as the source of heroic inspiration. Hitler's nation is the myth-ological shadow of the petty bourgeoisie itself, a pathetic delirium of a thousand-year Reich. In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. 

....Trotsky viewed as a simple juxtaposition what in reality was a fusion of feudalism and totalitarianism into a dialectic of 'reactionary modernism', the core of Nazi ideology: a peculiar amalgamation of the Counter-Enlightenment (authoritarianism, conservatism and the rejection of human rights) with scientism and a cult of technical modernity. Nazism was not a simple coexistence, but rather a dialectical interpenetration between reaction and modernity that resulted in a form of 'steel romanticism'.50 In this article, however, Trotsky still interpreted anti-Semitism exclusively as the product of an economic conflict inside the bourgeoisie....

....end of the 1930s, Trotsky began to consider anti-Semitism from a different perspective. Now, he depicted the Jews as the first victims of a rotting capitalism that the ruling class was trying to preserve by plunging humanity into a bloodbath. Scientific, technical and industrial development, until then considered criteria of progress, was henceforth perceived in its dual nature: both as possible instrument of human liberation and as possible bearer of a modern barbarism. Thus, the fate of the Jews tended to be identified with the alternative socialism or barbarism. This theme was evoked in the Transitional Program (1938), the founding manifesto of the Fourth International, with the following words: 'Before exhausting or drowning mankind in blood, capitalism befouls the world atmosphere with the poisonous vapors of national and race hatred. Anti-Semitism today is one of the more malignant convulsions of capitalism's death agony'.52 In May 1940, just after the outbreak of the Second World War, he reaffirmed the same idea in a more imaginative form: In an era of aviation, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, travel from country to country is paralyzed by passports and visas. The period of the wasting away of foreign trade and the decline of domestic trade is at the same time the period of the monstrous intensification of chauvinism and especially of anti-Semitism. In the epoch of its rise, capitalism took the Jewish people out of the ghetto and utilized them as an instrument in its commercial expansion. Today decaying capitalist society is striving to squeeze the Jewish people from all its pores: seventeen million individuals out of the two billion populating the globe, that is, less than one percent, can no longer find a place on our planet! Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison....

....change of view on anti-Semitism between 1933 and 1938 reveals a dichotomy inherent in Trotsky's thought. It amounts to a contradiction between his 'spontaneous philosophy', formed from a superficial adhesion to classical Marxism (a tradition dominated by the figures of Plekhanov and Kautsky), and his practical, that is to say non-systematised, break with any form of evolutionistic and positivistic Marxism.

[N.B. Like the supposed break between young and old Marx, or between radical Marx and dogmatic Engels, the break between 1933 Trotsky and 1938 Trotsky is an opportunist academic's fantasy to justify their own abstention and quietism.  Traverso has no interest in looking through the thousands of pages Trotsky wrote in the period 1933-1938; he is more comfortable with aesthetic generalization and coffee-house paradoxes. JR]

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. 

Reading notes on Chapter Intermezzo in 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 Intermezzo: The Jews and the Russian Revolution (1917–37)

....One of the first measures adopted by the provisional government was the suppression of the anti-Semitic legislation in force under the old regime: a total of 650 laws limiting the civic rights of the Jewish population, as Trotsky noted in his History of the Russian Revolution.

....People's Commissariat of Nationalities – led by Stalin – established a Jewish section. Its leader was Simon Dimanshtein, an old Bolshevik who spoke Yiddish – he had received the title of rabbi before becoming an atheist Marxist – but had never participated in Jewish political life. To make up for such serious limits, he asked for the collaboration of Samuel Agurskj, a Socialist Jew just returned from the United States.

....During the civil war, between 1918 and 1921, the Russian Jews gradually shifted from an attitude of mistrust, indeed hostility, to substantial support for the Soviet regime.

.... A wave of extremely violent pogroms swept throughout Ukraine, which in 1917 had been an experimental ground for Jewish cultural national autonomy. Initially, most Jewish parties supported the government of Petliura (where the 'territorialist' Socialist Zilberfarb took the ministry of Jewish affairs) but they progressively joined the Soviet regime during the following years.6 Anti-Semitism always had been a pillar of the ideology and culture of the Russian army and quickly became – in an even more radicalised form – the banner of the Whites. The armies of Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel made very extensive use of anti-Semitism as a weapon in their struggle against the Soviet regime. Ukraine was the scene of 2,000 pogroms, affecting around a million Jews and leaving between 75,000 and 150,000 victims.7 According to several scholars, the pogroms of 1918–20 were qualitatively different from the previous waves of tsarist anti-Semitism of the 1880s and 1905–6: not only was the number of their victims incomparably higher, but also their propaganda turned into an open appeal to massacre. They took the form of a modern military campaign carefully planned and ideologically implemented, in which several scholars have seen a precedent of the Holocaust.

....Anti-Semitism was no longer fought as a specifically Jewish problem but as a state problem, intertwined with the very survival of the revolution. On the one hand there was the counter-revolution, which massacred the Jews; on the other hand, the Soviets, who made Emancipation their symbol and adopted legislation against anti-Semitism. Faced with such options, the choice of the Russian Jews was very easy. According to Oleg Budnitskii, 'for the Jews, the choice between the Reds and the Whites gradually evolved into a choice between life and death' .

.... The building of a new state apparatus was sown with obstacles, for the most politicised sector of the working class was engaged in the military effort and the old civil servants boycotted the new authorities. There remained the Jews: a vast reservoir of intellectual energies that Tsarism had always repressed and excluded. The revolution transformed this layer of pariahs, humiliated and persecuted by the former regime, into an elite called upon to play a role of the highest importance in the construction of socialism. 

....During its first ten years, the Soviet regime applied to a considerable extent the projects of national autonomy that the Austro-Marxists and the Bund had elaborated at the beginning of the century.

.... Evsektsiia was the instrument of this empirical Soviet orientation toward Jewish cultural national autonomy. The new regime made a considerable effort to improve the status of Yiddish, which remained the mother tongue of 70.4 percent of Soviet Jews in 1926. Just after the revolution, Yiddish gained the status of an official language in the Ukraine and Byelorussia. Yiddish literature was subsidised and encouraged; libraries, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and Yiddish theatres sprang up.

....Evsektsiia was responsible for closing down Hebrew schools and publications: the repression of religion was the necessary condition for building a modern Jewish (Yiddish) nation, cut off from its tradition and history. Along with Hebrew, both Zionism and Orthodox Judaism were banned. The Evsektsiia shaped Jewish cultural life by establishing a kind of enlightened despotism, applying its emancipatory and revolutionary measures with authoritarian and bureaucratic methods.

....Joseph Roth saw in 1927 the limits of the Russian Revolution in the Jewish world. He speculated on whether the Bolsheviks had really understood the nature of the Jewish Question, given their desire to create a modern Jewish nation completely separated from its past and its historic identity, of which religion was an irreplaceable element. In his opinion, the revolution had never considered the old question, the most important: are the Jews a nation like the others?

....Eradicating Hebrew from Jewish culture meant in the final analysis to 'dehistoricise' it....

....The decision to colonise Birobidzhan was taken in 1928 by the Soviet government (the Commissariat of Defense and the Academy of Agriculture) without any prior consultation with the Jewish population. Behind this decision lay a strategic consideration – the need to establish a forward post capable of containing Japanese expansionism in the Far East – which took no account of national or socio-economic factors. After the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, the process of construction of Jewish Birobidzhan was intensified. 

.... regime was proclaimed in 1934 – a state entity according to the Soviet constitution – less than 20 percent of the population was Jewish.33 In 1937, the regional administration reverted to the use of the Russian language alone and the new president, M. Koteles – brought in to replace Liberberg, who had just been executed as a Trotskyist – did not know Yiddish. The Jewish state of the Soviet Union was no more than a fiction....