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CHAPTER 9 The Austro-Marxist Critique of Jewish Nationalism Left-wing opposition to Zionism and other variations of Jewish nationalism is not a novel phenomenon. Indeed, there have been some remarkably constant features in the Marxist critique of Jewish nationalism, and in particular its rejection of any special pleading or moral obligation to further a distinctively Jewish existence as a collectivity.1 Marxists have frequently argued that the survival of the Jewish people—whether in a purely religious, a national, or state form—is politically reactionary. They have often followed the formula of the young Marx who dismissed Judaism as a wholly negative phenomenon—a reflection of the money-lending era of capitalism, doomed to disappear with its demise. The Marxist analysis of the “Jewish Question” (like that of many liberals) assumed that antisemitism was merely a temporary phenomenon. With its dissipation the last remaining factor encouraging the “illusory” national cohesion of the Jews would also fade away. The new Left of the 1960s continued to echo, often in a bizarrely dogmatic form, arguments about Zionism and Jewish peoplehood long since taken over by events.2 These polemics have in more recent decades become ever more partisan and disconnected from reality. Nevertheless the original Marxist interpretation of the Jewish condition was not altogether devoid of plausibility , especially in central Europe. It should be remembered that around 1900, the revolutionary socialist movement found itself confronted by rival nationalist and antisemitic movements throughout Europe, as well as the emergence of political Zionism. This was an era of decisive importance for the development of European Jewry itself, torn between contradictory movements, having to choose (especially in Russia) for or against the revolutionary movement, between a class and a national orientation in politics. It was the beginning of Jewish national emergence in the Diaspora, of mass migrations from the lands of oppression to America and western Europe, an era of full emancipation, but also of dramatically rising political antisemitism. The Austro-Marxist Critique of Jewish Nationalism 273 Those Jews who joined the Marxist camp in eastern Europe and Russia fought for a socialist revolution modeled in part on liberal emancipation in western Europe. They fought not under a Jewish banner, but with Russian slogans for a Russian Revolution which would end class, ethnic, and religious discrimination. They were assimilationists on principle, who rejected as inadmissible any notion of national rights for Jews. If there was one factor that united such well-known Marxist Jews as Paul Axelrod, Julius Martov, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Jogiches, and Otto Bauer, it was their complete rejection of the idea of Jewish national self-determination.3 There can be little doubt that this hostility of Marxist Jews to Zionism and the Jewish national movement greatly influenced the attitude of other revolutionaries to the problem. Faced with this antagonism, a Diaspora nationalist like the great Russian-Jewish historian, Simon Dubnow, could remark, “How much a Jew must hate himself who recognizes the right of every nationality and language to self-determination but doubts it or restricts it for his own people whose ‘self-determination’ began 3,000 years ago.”4 Anyone who has closely studied the personality and background of Socialist leaders of Jewish descent cannot deny the element of truth in this judgment.5 But the theoretical source lay in the historical-materialist outlook formulated by Marx and Engels with regard to the “national question” in 19th-century Europe. In his early essay, Zur Judenfrage (1844), Marx had reduced nationality to the factor of economic interest, and misleadingly identified the “illusory” nationality of the Jew with that of the merchant and money-man.6 In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, national antagonisms were regarded by Marx and Engels as purely secondary, as a factor which would disappear with the expanding freedom of trade, the growing world market, and the resolution of class contradictions within individual nation-states. This was similar to the view of Cobdenite liberalism in Great Britain, which held that free trade was the road to international cooperation and the termination of national rivalries. The 1848 revolutions in Europe, which witnessed the resurrection of the German, Polish, Italian, and Slavic national movements, already cast doubt on that optimistic theory. Marx and Engels noted the development without fully understanding it. They accepted the right of “revolutionary” nations like the Germans, Hungarians, Poles, and Italians to their national independence, but denied this same right to what they termed the “historyless peoples” in southern and Eastern Europe. It was...

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