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5 Rereading Marx on the “Jewish Question” Marx as a Critic of Antisemitism? ROBERT FINE Two views prevail concerning Karl Marx’s alleged antisemitism. The disparaging view is that Marx, notwithstanding his Jewish origins, was himself an antisemite avant la lettre or at least made use of antisemitic tropes and reproduced antisemitic stereotypes in his own work. This view is present among some commentators on Marx and firmly entrenched among students of modern antisemitism.1 It is based in particular on a reading of the second of Marx’s two 1843 essays, “On the Jewish Question ,” where he appears to link Judaism to huckstering and global financial power and to equate human emancipation with emancipation of society from Judaism. His representation of Jews is said to inherit a long tradition of radical anti-Jewish hostility and to prefigure the more virulent , political, and sometimes “socialist” antisemitism to come. Marx is portrayed in this literature as a progenitor of what is today labeled the “antisemitism of the Left.” By contrast, the apologetic view adopted by most Marxist commentators tends to ignore the whole issue of antisemitism in Marx’s own writings . If confronted, it either trivializes it as a passing personal prejudice that did not enter into Marx’s scientific writings or it normalizes it as a sign of his times. In some cases it translates Marx’s negative typifications of Jews and Judaism into the more acceptable language of anticapitalism , for example, by translating the word Judentum into the more neutral commerce.2 In other cases it may even endorse the negative typifications of Jews it finds in Marx’s writings, on the grounds that it is necessary to understand what is true in the antisemitic imagination in order to com- 138 Fine bat it and on the assumption that Marx’s negative typifications of Jews derive in part from empirically verifiable Jewish phenomena. If we put these strategies together, we too often find in Marxist scholarship on Marx a propensity to bypass or dissolve the question of antisemitism.3 The problem I have with the first of these interpretations, the disparaging view that Marx was in some significant sense antisemitic, is that beyond the second essay on the Jewish question there is scant evidence of antisemitic thinking in his published works. Marx was known to deploy racist and antisemitic epithets in some of his private correspondence with Engels.4 A frequently cited case is his depiction of fellow socialist Ferdinand Lassalle as Jude Itzig in letters to Engels (July 30, 1862 and May 29, 1863). However, such private correspondence was not intended for public consumption, the name Itzig seems to have been in regular use among Jews as a deflator of grandiose pretensions by a fellow Jew, and the remark should be read as a facetious mockery of Lassalle’s own predilection for the pseudo-science of physiognomy.5 In further private correspondence with Engels Marx made fun of Lassalle’s “smooth, selfimportant , vainglorious, deceitful charlatan’s physiognomy” (June 6, 1853) and expostulated that Lassalle “proved by his cranial formation and hair” that he “descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt” (July 30, 1862). We may wish to accuse Marx of bad taste or chuckle at his acerbic wit, which I am more inclined to do, but there is no evidence that he had any interest in or truck with the pseudo-science of physiognomy. There is plenty of evidence that he became increasingly infuriated by Lassalle’s authoritarian and antiliberal form of socialism. There is occasional use of anti-Jewish epithets in Marx’s political articles . The best known is an article titled “The Russian Loan,” published under Marx’s name on January 4, 1856, in the New York Daily Tribune. One offending passage runs 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 practicality 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. . . . The real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them . . . as they monopolise the machinery of the loan-mongering mysteries .” This article was probably written by Engels, though Marx put his name to it, and attacked the role of Jewish finance alongside that of Jesuit ideology.6 It is noteworthy, however, that a couple of years earlier, on [18.227.114...

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