On Socialists and "The Jewish Question" After Marx (review)

116 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 The Revolution in 1905 in Odessa is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in the topic. While this study is accessible, the detail with which Weinberg treats his material and his comprehensive notes make the text most appropriate for scholars. It is Weinberg's ability to portray so much about people in his primarily narrative account that is most impressive. In examining details about the lives of those who participated in revolutionary activities in Odessa before and during 1905, Weinberg reveals their perceptions of contemporary events and often their motives to act and their goals. From Weinberg, readers will understand a piece of the intricate puzzle of actors and events that shook the Russian Empire in 1905 and arguably set the stage for repeated episodes of unrest in the ensuing two decades. Ami Samuels California State University, Hayward On Socialists and "The Jewish Question" Mter Marx, by Jack Jacobs. New York: New York University Press, 1992. 300 pp. $50.00. With painstaking care, Professor Jacobs reviews the attitudes toward Jewishness of selected leaders of the Social Democratic Parties in central Europe in the years after Marx's death in 1883. Almost half of the volume is dedicated to notes and references. The main body of the text is itself a storehouse of detailed information. It makes available in summary form materials originally written in several languages. The level of scholarship alone justifies the undertaking. Although it does not clearly emerge until the concluding chapter, Jacobs has a thesis to prove as well as facts to present. His aim is to controvert the "overly wide brush" with which unnamed others have painted "the attitudes of social democratic writers toward the Jewish question." Presumably it is for this reason that the author has restricted himself to relatively few subjects and examined them in great detail. These subjects do not include Marx or Engels, and they are all drawn from the upper echelons of the leadership of the Second International Social Democrats in this part of the world. He insightfully points to individual differences in temperament, family background, and interpretation of Marx. He considers whether the authors in question were Jewish, and what sort of experiences they had with Judaism and antisemitism. There is no single uniform pattern, he concludes. Book Reviews 117 Yet there are some uniformities that do cry out for explanation. They are so obvious that Jacobs does not even consider them. Why did virtually all oftheJewish socialist leaders he studies turn against Judaism in varying degrees? Why were the attitudes of the more antisemitic leaders of the Second International so different from those of the Jewish rank and file? Were the same forces at work that drove Marx to write the antisemitic Zur judenfrage also influential in the attitudes of his followers? Of course, the scope and method of historical inquiry is a matter of taste. Yet one cannot help feeling that by failing to paint with broad enough brush Professor Jacobs has failed to display some of the realities, even as he has highlighted others in cameo portraiture. The individuals thatJacobs describes illustrate in their lives the cross-currents offorces that make Marxism itself a simplistic and misleading doctrine. The most important of these for this book is the dual aggregation of individuals by ethnicity and religion on one hand and economic class on the other. Even were the Marxian class concept to hold water, it frequently is in conflict with national allegiance and identification despite the valiant efforts of socialists to reconcile them. It has frequently been argued that Marxism is a secular religion. But what religion? Some time ago, I argued that the truly antisemitic Marx was a creature of his early humanistic phase (Wolfson, 1982). This was really a Christian Marx, who like Feuerbach before him, considered Man as an undifferentiated species essence. In fact, this good, kind, loving human essence was a projection of the virtues as expounded in Protestant theology. Feuerbach argued that religion alienated Man from his own essential nature, but in the process accepted the Christian virtues as the truly human ones. Marx's gloss on Feuerbach was to identifY alienation...