History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Marx was not merely a Jewish thinker, he was also an anti-Jewish thinker. Therein lies the paradox, which has a tragically important bearing both on the history of Marxist development and on its consummation in the Soviet Union and its progeny. The roots of Marx’s anti-Semitism went deep. We have already seen the part anti-Jewish polemic played in the works of enlightenment writers like Voltaire. This tradition passed into two streams. One was the German ‘idealist’ stream, going through Goethe, Fichte, Hegel and Bauer, in each of whom the anti-Jewish elements became more pronounced. The other was the French ‘socialist’ stream. This linked the Jews to the Industrial Revolution and the vast increase in commerce and materialism which marked the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a book published in 1808, François Fourier identified commerce as ‘the source of all evil’ and the Jews as ‘the incarnation of commerce’.84 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon went further, accusing the Jews of ‘having rendered the bourgeoisie, high and low, similar to them, all over Europe’. Jews were an ‘unsociable race, obstinate, infernal…the enemy of mankind. We should send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it.’85 Fourier’s follower, Alphonse Toussenel, edited the anti-Semitic journal Phalange and in 1845 produced the first full-scale attack on the Jews as a network of commercial conspirators against humanity, Les Juifs: rois de l’époque: histoire de la féodalité financière. This became a primary source-book for anti-Semitic literature, in many languages, for the next four decades.

  Marx absorbed both streams, adding to the turbid waters the outpourings of his own anguish. In his discussion of revolutionary Jews, the historian Robert Wistrich sees the self-hatred of some of them as reflecting the fury of very clever members of an underprivileged minority denied the position and recognition in society which their talents merited. Enlightenment thinkers, both French and German, argued that the objectionable features of Judaism had to be erased before the Jew could be free: Jews who were discriminated against accepted this, and thus often directed their rage more towards the unregenerated Jew than those who persecuted them both.86 The self-hatred focussed on the ghetto Jew, who was of course the anti-Semitic archetype. Heine, who really knew very little about how most Jews actually lived, used all the standard anti-Semitic clicheés when in self-hating mood. Marx, who knew even less, borrowed his abuse straight from the gentile student café. And both used the ghetto caricature to belabour educated and baptized Jews like themselves, especially fellow progressives. One of Heine’s most vicious and almost incomprehensible attacks was unleashed on Ludwig Börne (1786-1837), born Lob Baruch, a baptized Jewish radical writer whose background and views were similar to his own.87 Marx seems to have picked up this habit from Heine.88 Thus, while himself attempting, whenever possible, to conceal his Jewish origins, he constantly attacked Jewish opponents for this very failing. Why, he asked, did Joseph Moses Levy, owner of the London. Daily Telegraph and a baptized Jew, seek ‘to be numbered among the Anglo-Saxon race…for Mother Nature has written his pedigree in absurd block letters right in the middle of his face’.89

  Marx’s most flagrant exercise in self-hatred, however, was directed at his fellow socialist Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64), a Breslau Jew who changed his name from Lasal in honour of the French revolutionary hero and went on to become the founder of German socialism as a mass movement. His practical achievements in the cause were much more considerable than Marx’s own. Despite or perhaps because of this he was made the object of extraordinary vituperation in Marx’s correspondence with Engels. Marx called him ‘Baron Itzig’, the ‘Jewish Nigger’. He saw him as a Polish Jew and (as he put it), ‘The Jews of Poland are the dirtiest of all races.’90 Engels wrote to Marx, 7 March 1856: ‘[Lassalle] is a real Jew from the Slav frontier and he has always been willing to exploit party affairs for private purposes. It is revolting to see how he is always trying to push his way into the aristocratic world. He is a greasy Jew disguised under brilliantine and flashy jewels.’91 In attacking Lassalle’s Jewishness, and sneering at his syphilis, Marx did not scruple to use the oldest of all anti-Semitic smears. Thus he wrote to Engels, 10 May 1861: ‘A propos Lasalle—Lazarus. Lepsius in his great work on Egypt has proved that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt was nothing but the history which Manetho narrates of the expulsion of the “leprous people” from Egypt. At the head of these lepers was an Egyptian priest, Moses. Lazarus, the leper, is therefore the archetype of the Jew, and Lassalle is the typical leper.’92 Or again, 30 July 1862: ‘It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.’93

  Marx’s personal anti-Semitism, however disagreeable in itself, might have played no greater part in his lifework than it did in Heine’s, had it not been part of a systematic and theoretical anti-Semitism in which Marx, quite unlike Heine, profoundly believed. In fact it is true to say that Marx’s theory of communism was the end-product of his theoretical anti-Semitism. Spinoza had first shown how a critique of Judaism could be used to reach radical conclusions about the world. His example had been followed by the French enlightenment, though their treatment of Judaism was far more hostile, and racial, in tone. Among radical German writers, the idea that solving the ‘Jewish problem’ might provide a key to solving the problems of humanity was much discussed. In the 1820s and 1830s, this was the route the much abused Ludwig Börne had taken towards socialism.94 In 1843 Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian left, published an essay demanding that the Jews abandon Judaism completely and transform their plea for equal rights into a general campaign for human liberation both from religion and from state tyranny.95

  Marx replied to Bauer’s work in two essays published in the Deutsch-Francösische Jahrbucher in 1844, the same year Disraeli published Tancred. They are called ‘On the Jewish Question’.96 Marx accepted completely the savagely anti-Semitic context of Bauer’s argument, which he said was written ‘with boldness, perception, wit and thoroughness in language that is as precise as it is vigorous and meaningful’. He quoted with approval Bauer’s maliciously exaggerated assertion that ‘the Jew determines the fate of the whole [Austrian] empire by his money power…[and] decides the destiny of Europe’. Where he differed was in rejecting Bauer’s belief that the anti-social nature of the Jew was religious in origin and could be remedied by tearing the Jew away from his religion. In Marx’s view, the evil was social and economic. ‘Let us’, he wrote, ‘consider the real Jew. Not the Sabbath Jew…but the everyday Jew.’ What, he asked, was ‘the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.’97 The Jews had gradually conveyed this ‘practical’ religion to all society:

  Money is the jealous God of Israel, besides which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence: this essence dominates him and he worships it. The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world.98

  The Jews, Marx continued, were turning Christians into replicas of themselves, so that the once staunchly Christian New Englanders, for example, were now the slaves of Mammon. Using his money-power, the Jew had emancipated himself and had gone on to enslave Christianity. The Jew-corrupted Christian ‘is convinced he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbours’ and ‘the world is a stock exchange’. Marx argued that the contradiction between the Jew’s theoretical lack of political rights and ‘the effective political power of the Jew’ is the contradiction between politics and ‘the power of money in general’. Political power supposedly overrides money; in fact �
��it has become its bondsman’. Hence: ‘It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders the Jew.’99

  Marx’s solution, therefore, is not like Bauer’s, religious, but economic. The money-Jew had become the ‘universal anti-social element of the present time’. To ‘make the Jew impossible’ it was necessary to abolish the ‘preconditions’ and the ‘very possibility’ of the kind of money activities for which he was notorious. Once the economic framework was changed, Jewish ‘religious consciousness would evaporate like some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society’. Abolish the Jewish attitude to money, and both the Jew and his religion, and the corrupt version of Christianity he had imposed on the world, would simply disappear: ‘In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.’ Or again: ‘In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.’100

  Marx’s two essays on the Jews thus contain, in embryonic from, the essence of his theory of human regeneration: by economic changes, and especially by abolishing private property and the personal pursuit of money, you could transform not merely the relationship between the Jew and society but all human relationships and the human personality itself. His form of anti-Semitism became a dress-rehearsal for Marxism as such. Later in the century August Bebel, the German Social Democrat, would coin the phrase, much used by Lenin: ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.’ Behind this revealing epigram was the crude argument: we all know that Jewish money-men, who never soil their hands with toil, exploit the poor workers and peasants. But only a fool blames the Jews alone. The mature man, the socialist, has grasped the point that the Jews are only symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is the religion of money, and its modern form is capitalism. Workers and peasants are exploited not just by the Jews but by the entire bourgeois-capitalist class—and it is the class as a whole, not just its Jewish element, which must be destroyed.

  Hence the militant socialism Marx adopted in the later 1840s was an extended and transmuted form of his earlier anti-Semitism. His mature theory was a superstition, and the most dangerous kind of superstition, belief in a conspiracy of evil. But whereas originally it was based on the oldest form of conspiracy-theory, anti-Semitism, in the late 1840s and 1850s this was not so much abandoned as extended to embrace a world conspiracy theory of the entire bourgeois class. Marx retained the original superstition that the making of money through trade and finance is essentially a parasitical and anti-social activity, but he now placed it on a basis not of race and religion, but of class. The enlargement does not, of course, improve the validity of the theory. It merely makes it more dangerous, if put into practice, because it expands its scope and multiplies the number of those to be treated as conspirators and so victims. Marx was no longer concerned with specific Jewish witches to be hunted but with generalized human witches. The theory remained irrational but acquired a more sophisticated appearance, making it highly attractive to educated radicals. To reverse Bebel’s saying, if anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, socialism became the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. An intellectual like Lenin, who clearly perceived the irrationality of the Russian anti-Semitic pogrom, and would have been ashamed to conduct one, nevertheless fully accepted its spirit once the target was expanded into the whole capitalist class—and went on to conduct pogroms on an infinitely greater scale, killing hundreds of thousands on the basis not of individual guilt but merely of membership of a condemned group.

  Once Marx had generalized his anti-Semitism into his theory of capital, his interest in the Jews was pushed into the background. Occasionally, as on a palimpsest, it reappears in the pages of Capital. Thus: ‘The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews.’101 More important was the general retention of the aggressive emotional tone so charcteristic of anti-Semitism. The archetype Jew was replaced by the archetype capitalist, but the caricature features were essentially the same. Take, for instance, Marx’s presentation of the capitalist monster himself:

  Only in so far as the capitalist is personified capital has he a historical value…. Fanatically bent upon the exploitation of value, he relentlessly drives human beings to production for production’s sake…he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser assumes the aspect of mania, is in the capitalist the effect of the social mechanism in which he is only a driving wheel…his actions are a mere function of the capital which, through his instrumentality, is endowed with will and consciousness, so that his own private consumption must be regarded by him as a robbery perpetrated upon accumulation.102

  Could such a weird personification of humanity ever have existed? But then, when had the anti-Semitic archetype Jew actually existed in real life? That Marx still, in his emotions, confused Jew and capitalist is suggested by the footnote he appended to the passage just quoted. He referred to the usurer, terming him ‘the old-fashioned but perennially renewed form of the capitalist’. Marx knew that in the minds of most of his readers the usurer was the Jew—as Toussenel put it, the terms usurer and Jew were interchangeable. Most of the footnote consisted of Luther’s violent polemic against the usurer already reproduced on page 242. That Marx should quote this brutal exhortation to kill from an anti-Semitic writer, in a work purporting to be scientific, is suggestive both of Marx’s own violence and of the emotional irrationality which expressed it, first as anti-Semitism and then as economic theory.

  However, Marx’s paradoxical combination of Jewishness and anti-Semitism did not prevent his works from appealing to the growing Jewish intelligentsia. Quite the contrary. For many emancipated Jews, especially in eastern Europe, Capital became a new kind of Torah. Granted the initial leap of faith in both cases, Marxism had the logical strength of the halakhah and its stress upon abstract interpretation of events was highly congenial to clever Jews whose ancestors had spent a lifetime in talmudic studies or who themselves had started in the yeshivah—and then escaped. Throughout the century, the number of Jews of rabbinical type, from scholarly or merchant families, who turned their back on religion, increased steadily. By the end of it, Orthodox Jewry, despite the vast increase in the Jewish population almost everywhere, was becoming conscious of the haemorrhage. Ancient Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia, celebrated for their scholarship and spiritual leaders, found they had to import rabbis from more backward parts.

  Most of the ‘missing rabbis’ seemed to have become radicals, and turned on their Judaism and Jewishness with contempt and anger. They turned on their parents’ class too, for a high proportion came from wealthy homes. Marx’s father had been a lawyer, Lassalle’s a silk merchant; Victor Adler, the pioneer Austrian Social Democrat, was the son of a real-estate speculator, Otto Bauer, the Austrian Socialist leader, of a textile magnate, Adolf Braun, the German Socialist leader, of an industrialist, Paul Singer, another leading German socialist, of a clothing manufacturer, Karl Hochberg of a Frankfurt banker. There were many other examples. Their break with the past, with family and community, often combined with self-hatred, promoted among them a spirit of negation and destruction, of iconoclasm, almost at times of nihilism—an urge to overthrow institutions and values of all kinds—which gentile conservatives were beginning to identify, by the end of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Jewish social and cultural disease.

  There were four principal reasons why Jews, once they began to take part in general politics, moved overwhelmingly first to the liberal and then to the left end of the spectrum. In the first place there was the Biblical tradition of social criticism, what might be termed the Amos Syndrome. From the earliest times there had always been articulate Jews determined to expose the injustices of society, to voice the bitterness and needs of the poor, and to call on authority to make redress. Then too there was the talmudic tradition of communal provision,
which itself had Biblical origins, and which adumbrated modern forms of state collectivism. Jews who became socialists in the nineteenth century and who attacked the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal, laissez-faire capitalism were expressing in contemporary language Jewish principles which were 3,000 years old and which had become part of the instincts of the people.

  But was it not true, as Disraeli claimed, that Jews also had a high regard for authority, hierarchy and traditional order? It was true, but subject to important qualifications. Jews, as we have seen, had never accorded absolute power to any human agency. Rule resided in the Torah and the vicarious authority accorded to man was limited, temporary and recoverable. Judaism could never have evolved, as Latin Christianity did, the theory of the divine right of kings. Jews had the strongest regard for the rule of law, so long as it was ethically based, and they could and did become devoted adherents of constitutionally based systems, as in the United States and Britain. To that extent Disraeli was correct in arguing that Jews were often natural Tories. But they were also natural enemies to authority which was arbitrary and tyrannical, illogical or outmoded. When Marx wrote, ‘Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets,’103 he was wrong. Rothschild loans to absolute monarchies were geared not to reinforce tyranny but to abate it, especially in securing better treatment for Jews (in which, of course, Marx was not interested). Jewish money power in the nineteenth century, in so far as it had any overall political policy, tended to be irenic and constitutionalist. ‘Peace, retrenchment and reform’, Gladstone’s famous Liberal slogan, was also the axiom of the Rothschilds.