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CHAPTER 3 Austro-Marxist Interpretations of the “Jewish Question” Austrian Social Democracy adopted a highly ambivalent attitude towards the “Jewish Question” before and after the First World War. Though much less openly antisemitic than rival mass movements such as the Christian-Social Party or the Pan-Germans led by Georg von Schoenerer, the Social Democrats were far from being “philosemitic”—a charge which they vigorously repudiated whenever possible. The dominant figure and founding father of the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic Party in Austria, Victor Adler, had set the tone by rejecting all appeals to defend the Jewish community as being a diversion from the primacy of the class-struggle. Himself a Jewish convert to Protestantism (he had taken this step at the age of 26, at least in part to escape antisemitic attacks), Adler consistently regarded his Jewish background as a burden to the Party.1 In 1891, he had opposed the efforts of the American Jewish Labor leader, Abraham Cahan, to convince delegates at the Brussels Congress of the Socialist International, that antisemitism should be explicitly condemned. This, he felt, would help the antisemites by identifying the cause of international socialism with that of the Jews.2 Worse still, Adler—who equated “philosemitism” with the defense of liberal capitalism—regarded it as a more dangerous enemy of the labor movement than the populist antisemitic agitation which, he believed, at least opposed the prevailing status quo. Unlike most leading German Marxists at the time, Adler did not advocate socialist intervention during the Dreyfus Affair, or even at the time of the Beilis blood libel in Tsarist Russia in 1912. His response to the Beilis case was particularly revealing: “Jews and more Jews. As if the entire world revolved around the Jewish question!”3 Similarly, when asked by the leading Belgian Socialist, Camille Huysmans, what he thought about antisemitism, he apparently responded: “My dear comrade! One must have Jews, but not too many!”4 This was a stance echoed by his heir and successor as leader of the interwar Austrian Social Democrats, Otto Bauer, who wrote in 1910, that Austro-Marxist Interpretations of the “Jewish Question” 83 ever since the days of Karl Marx, the labor movement had opposed “philosemitism.” Not only Bauer but most of the other Austro-Marxists never tired of repeating that: “Social Democracy has never been a Jewish protective guard.”5 Socialism, from the beginning of its history, had an attitude to Jewish economic activity that was different from its liberal predecessors. Since the first half of the 19th century, Jews were identified on the Left with petty huckstering and allegedly “parasitic” occupations. The young Marx had made it clear in his Zur Judenfrage (1844) that “Emancipation from haggling and money from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our time.6 Marx’s anti-Jewish stereotypes had a powerful influence on the Jewish (and non-Jewish) leaders of Austrian Social Democracy, reinforced by the large-scale settlements of Ostjuden in the border regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. The middleman role of Galician Jews seemed to many Austrian socialists a microcosm of everything that was backward in a decomposing feudal society still in transition towards capitalism. Galicia, the home of twothirds of Austrian Jewry in the 19th century, was perceived by socialists (as it was by Josephinian bureaucrats and many Jewish maskilim) as “half-asiatic” (Halb-Asien). The social structure of the Austro-Polish province was considered antithetical to the progress, culture, and humanity symbolized by Western Europe. Halb-Asien was a realm of darkness, sordid barbarism, clerical fanaticism, and violent hatreds.7 The Jewish ghettos were depicted as centers of obscurantist superstition, clinging to obsolete customs, an outmoded Yiddish language (denigrated as a corrupt and vulgar jargon), and an incorrigible ethnic particularism. Galicia with its myriad Luftmenschen was the living incarnation to many socialists of Marx’s haggling, usurious, and non-productive Jew. Thus their reactions to Austrian antisemitism, like those of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of Vienna, were from the outset prejudiced by this background. To a remarkable degree, the Jews in the Austrian socialist leadership internalized the commonplace anti-Jewish stereotypes of their Gentile environment concerning ghetto Jews and traditional Judaism. Precisely because they considered themselves to be in the vanguard of “progress,” leaders like Victor and Friedrich Adler, Otto Bauer, Friedrich Austerlitz, and Wilhelm Ellenbogen, who were thoroughly Germanized in culture, shared the revulsion of most Gentile Austrians against the shabby appearance, stubborn orthodoxy, “exotic” customs, and national separatism of East...

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