Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Whisker James B.
Title : Karl Marx Anti-Semite
Year : 19*

Link download : Whisker_James_B_-_Karl_Marx_Anti-Semite.zip

Karl Marx was not only Jewish, he was descended from an established rabbinical family. His father had abandoned the practice of Judaism in order to function more freely in and with the newly established Prussian state, and in order to attract more clients to his law practice. Biographers do agree that age-old Jewish traditions continued to run deep in Herschel Marx's family long after he had ceased attending the synagogue. Karl Marx probably had no formal ties with Judaism, but he was acutely aware of its theology and its traditions. Lack of formal practice cannot here be equated with ignorance. Indeed, Karl Marx apparently had studied the bases of all Western religions throughout his life. As a "Young Hegelian," commonly known as the Hegelians of the Left, Marx had been exposed to the often bizarre interpretations of organized religion. Among the earliest of his publications was The Holy Family, little more than a plagiarism of the leftist Hegelian leader Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. It was in the juvenile Holy Family that Marx coined the oft-quoted phrase "Religion is the opiate of the people." The idea was hardly original with him. It was a reasonably cogent summation of one of the principal of Feuerbach's ideas, which was that man is alienated from himself by virtue of his dependence on God. By concentrating on God and by assuring himself that God will right all wrongs and reward all sufferings in the next world, man is said to fail to realize that he can correct injustice and prevent the evils of the world in this world by and through his own efforts. Religion has a narcotic effect by soothing us so that we do not mind that we are miserable. All our sufferings, trials and tribulations, sorrows and despair are part of a divine plan wherewith we work out our salvation; thus they are to be accepted and cherished, not defeated or circumvented or prevented. The Holy Family was an attack on all religion, without prejudice against any one specific variety. There was no real attempt in it to separate Christianity from Judaism. Inasmuch as many of the Young Hegelians were apostate Jews, some had shown especial concern for the status of Judaism, but not prejudice against Jews for religious reasons. Hence, in a sense, freedom from religion was really a form of release for Jews. These leftist followers of George William Frederick Hegel assumed that without any religion in the new state there would be no point of separation between Jews and Gentiles, ex-Christians and ex-Jews. The onus of "Christ killer" would no longer be meaningful, any more than accusations leveled against any other group for killing any other individual or group of individuals. Indeed, Christ as a rejected symbol of false hope would be killed for a second time, and at least this second death would be the cause of liberation, rejoicing and new hope for the suffering masses. With most of this Marx could wholeheartedly agree. Christ had to die a second time, and this time there would be no resurrection. Marx agreed that without religion there could and would be no religious persecutions and prejudices. This was a sound example of an analytic logic in which he had great faith. But there were parts of the argument put by the Young Hegelians with which Marx totally disagreed. And this disagreement marks the first clear-cut application of Marx’s anti-Semitism. The Jew would and could not change his character and habits any more than a tiger could shed its stripes. Marx concluded that Judaism was more than possible even without God, the Ten Commandments, the Ark of the Covenant, or the Bible. Judaism had nothing, or at least very little, to actually do with God or religion. It was essentially a cultural phenomenon, based on the acquisition of material wealth. It was a system of cultural and religious deception whose real concern was capital, bullion, currency - in short, whatever the coin of the realm or the currency of the era presented or valued. With this, Marx has a somewhat original idea to present to his fellow Hegelians of the Left. He had not merely copied this insight from Moses Hess, Bruno Bauer, Lorenz von Stein, or Feuerbach. He had added the popular perception of the times and, as an intellectual and a cultural and ethnic, if not religious, Jew, he presented the argument in a form somewhat more articulate than that of the streetcorner pamphleteer. The apostate Jew and direct descendant of a long line of rabbis, Karl Marx, had provided powerful ammunition for the Jew-baiter and the anti-Semite among the apostate Jewish community of intellectuals at the German universities. He had spoken the unspeakable and had challenged the fundamentals of religion. He had in fact created a racist theory second to none among the intellectuals of the nineteenth century on the European continent. There is nothing in Arthur de Gobineau or in Houston Stewart Chamberlain that is more powerful or damning in its content with reference to Jews than Marx's On The Jewish Question (1843), also known as A World Without Jews. This odd little book on the "Jewish Question" was written in response to Dr. Bruno Bauer's The Jewish Question (1843), also known as The Capacity of Today's Jews and Christians to Become Free. Marx's booklet has had a curious publishing history. The first unexpurgated English translation did not appear until made available through the clearly anti-Zionist Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow about 1955. Then the Philosophical Library published an English edition (1959) with a curious and apologetic introduction by the press's editor, Dagobert Runes. German and other editions are scarce, save for those distributed by the communist state press. More intriguing than the scarce-availability of the book is the fact that most scholars have either seemed acutely unaware of its existence, or have simply chosen to ignore it. Certainly, the booklet does not fit in well with the secular humanistic and liberationist theological picture of Karl Marx as the great humanitarian and liberator of the oppressed. Truly, the work presents an obstacle. How can Marx be presented as the champion of all that is good and right in the world when he was in fact so unalterably opposed to Jews and Judaism? A passing remark here or there might be excused; a whole essay on - and of -nothing but anti-Semitism is an entirely different matter and a more complex question. The liberal-left is no more able to cope with A World Without Jews than is the communist world able to deal with Marx's bitter attacks on Russia, in his several essays denouncing Russian communist movements which have been collectively published as Marx Against Russia. Marx made specific charges against the Jews in his polemic. Jews worship Mammon, not God. Jews practice usury. Their true religion is predicated upon the acquisition of money through any and all means. The emancipation of all Europeans means the emancipation from Jewry: "emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time." Jews seek to control the world through the control of money: "What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money. . . . What is the foundation of the Jew in this world? Practical necessity, private advantage. . . . The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange." Marx further alleges: "Money is the one zealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man's life and work which have become alienated from him: this alien monster rules him and he worships it." It is from such statements as these, and from the basic tenets of A World Without Jews, that we discover some of the reasons for the mass appeal of National Socialism among the German working class to which Marxism-Leninism had once appealed. The fundamental and overriding racism of Marx himself helped to create an atmosphere in which Alfred Rosenberg's Zur Protokollen wisen Zionismus could be accepted. The anti-Semitism of the master communist planner and theorist - and Jew - Karl Marx, helped to create the preconditions for the later acceptance of Alfred Rosenberg's many conclusions about Jews in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. ...