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CHAPTER 10 Karl Kautsky and the Controversy over Zion During the twenty years between the emergence of political Zionism and the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, the European socialist movement for the first time had to confront the existence of a Jewish national problem. The position of German Social Democracy (SPD), the largest and best organized labor movement existing in the world at that time, was of considerable importance in influencing the attitudes of other socialists towards this new phenomenon. Moreover, the polarization of socialist attitudes towards Zionism before the First World War, in so far as it reflected a fundamental split between the traditions of revolutionary Marxism and democratic socialism, remains of some relevance to understanding the confrontations of the present.1 Two distinctly different positions towards Jewish nationalism were adopted by the leading reviews of the SPD, the Neue Zeit, edited by Karl Kautsky, and the Sozialistische Monatshefte, founded and edited by Dr. Joseph Bloch. What we shall henceforth designate as the Kautskyian position contains in embryonic form the seeds of future Communist, Trotskyist, and the New Left critiques of Zionism.2 The revisionist position, on the other hand, as exemplified by the contributors to Joseph Bloch’s Sozialistische Monatshefte was much more sympathetic to the Jewish national idea and the progress of Zionist colonization in Palestine. Orthodox Marxism in the period of the Second International was embodied in the figure of Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of German Social Democracy and the unofficial Pope of the international labor movement. It was Kautsky who came closest to applying the Marxist method of historical materialism in a coherent fashion to the Jewish national problem. For a number of reasons, this led him to argue that the Jews had no future as a separate national group. Though Kautsky was aware of the fact that Marx and Engels had underestimated the dynamic of the national struggles which had unfolded in Europe since 1848, he did not seek a fundamental revision of their views on the national problem. Essentially, Marx and Engels regarded the bourgeois nation-state as a transitory stage in historical development, which would disappear with the victory of the proletariat in each country. Karl Kautsky and the Controversy over Zion 304 This was the internationalist viewpoint adopted in the Communist Manifesto.3 However, disappointment at the failure of the 1848 Revolution led Marx and Engels (especially the latter) to invoke the pseudo-historicist Hegelian notion of “historic” and “ahistorical” peoples to justify the right of certain nations to self-determination and to deny this same right to smaller, more backward nationalities. Thus the founders of Communism took it for granted that Germans and Italians were entitled to their national unification, but in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, they reserved this right solely for the Hungarians and Poles.4 On the other hand, the so-called counterrevolutionary Slav nations of Austria-Hungary, which had frustrated the movement for German national unity in 1848, would be condemned by historical development to disappear.5 Though Kautsky and his Austro-Marxist disciple Otto Bauer recognized that the predictions of Marx and Engels concerning the Slav national movements in Eastern and South-eastern Europe were mistaken, they barely took this into account in their analysis of Jewish nationalism.6 Instead, they depicted the Jewish “nationality” in Russia and Eastern Europe as the fossilized offshoot of an “ahistorical” people. In contrast to the analyses in the Sozialistische Monatshefte, they did not seriously consider the national aspirations of the huge reservoir of non-assimilated Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe. They believed that the process of de-nationalization visible among Jews in Germany and Western Europe was essentially irreversible and would inevitably result in the assimilation of East European Jewry. Kautsky in particular insisted that existing demographic and socio-economic trends among West European Jewry were of decisive importance and proved that the Jews, as a collectivity, were in the process of self-dissolution. In the Kautskyian perspective, the Jews were not a race, a nation, or even a people, but a “caste” with certain quasi-national attributes, which was on the point of disappearing. If one wants to characterize the role played in the Middle Ages and even today by the Jews in Eastern Europe, one can do this much better by describing them as a “caste” than as a nation. It is not among the nations with which we are concerned here, but among the castes of India that we find phenomena which correspond...

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