By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Karl Marx grew a beard that emphasized his resemblance to Zeus from an ancient statue from the fourth century B.C., a scaled-down copy of which he kept in his office. Marx, an ardent atheist, thought he was God. In spite of his divine ambitions, Marx was a supporter of materialism. In his Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) he is still half-idealist, but later in theory (Capital) and in practice (The Communist Manifesto) he is already a materialist, although he begins “Manifesto” in a romantic, idealist spirit: “A specter haunts Europe, the specter of communism.” But Marx was not a materialist in the sense in which he thought of himself. He felt himself to be the Messiah, whose chosen people were the proletariat. Marx’s Messianic prophecy was the disappearance of classes and the building of a communist paradise. Marx’s Messianic sentiment betrays his idealism, that is, the triumph of spirit over matter.
In the Marxist tradition lies the “original sin” regarding the Jewish problem: Marx himself. He was 6 years old when his lawyer father was baptized. Marx was born into a family with many generations of rabbis. So, he was familiar with anti-Semitism and had Jewish inferiority complexes. Like many educated Jews, he wanted to solve the Jewish problem.
Marx’s Jewish neurosis was sublimated in his economic theory. During Marx’s lifetime there was severe exploitation. At that time, many Jews became rich through traditional Talmudic literacy and the enterprising nature of the tribe, who quickly exploited the atmosphere of emancipation. The number of wealthy Jews as a percentage exceeded that of the Germans, French, Belgians, and English, the peoples among whom Marx lived. Marx began to associate his hatred, shame and contempt for capitalism with another shame: being a Jew whose fellow tribesmen became rich through exploitation. To solve the Jewish problem, Marx reduced the definition of the Jew to an economic one: the Jew became synonymous with the bourgeois. Hence the Marxian solution to the Jewish problem: the end of the bourgeoisie, the revolution, will also be the end of the Jewish problem, because the Jew himself as a bourgeois will disappear. Marx sublimated the deliverance from Jewish origins in the solution of the world problem of the proletariat. He believed that the emancipation of Jewry was an intermediate stage before the disappearance of Jewry and the bourgeoisie. He wrote: “The emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of humanity from the Jews.”
In his article “On the Jewish Question” (1844) Marx wrote: “One should not look for the mystery of the Jew in his religion, one should look for the mystery of religion in the real Jew. […] The Jews have poisoned the Christian world by turning money into a world-wide power.” Here is combined a hatred of religion, which Marx changed, of the Jews, from whom he withdrew and disowned, and of money, the lack of which he had all his life experienced. Marx speaks of the “mystery of the Jew”. The desire of Jews to be different and to remain faithful to their religion was incomprehensible to him and therefore “mysterious”. In saying that one should not look for the mystery of the Jew in religion, Marx believed that the root of evil lies in Jewish religion, which must be eradicated as any religion and as the source of Jewish separateness. Not only was he ashamed that his countrymen were obscenely rich, he accused the Jews of poisoning the “Christian world” with money, as in the Middle Ages they were accused of poisoning wells. Marx conflated hated money with hated Jews tainted by his common descent. Running from the Jewish religion, Marx declared that the Jews had no God in the ordinary sense and that they worshipped a God of money. He reduced Jewish religion to money in an attempt to secularize it.
For all his dislike of the Christian religion, Marx takes Christ as his ally in his attack on the Jews: “It is no accident that the moneychangers whom Jesus expelled from the Temple and the moneychangers who today side with all tyrannies are the same Jews.” In concluding that the Jewish God of money has become a universal God, Marx comes close to concluding that the Jews attempted to conquer the world with their money God: “Money is the jealous God of Israel.”
In this statement he personifies the Jews with capitalism. From the affirmation of the Jews’ devotion to God, Marx moves on to the uselessness of the Jews as a people for humanity: “Even if the Jew denies his faith (so the Jews have a religion after all. – A. G.), he can give nothing to humanity.”
Marx was puzzled by the existence of the Jews, which contradicted his materialist understanding of history. No materialist approach could explain the phenomenon of the Jewish people. Marx’s extreme emphasis on the soullessness of the Jews, their complete predestination by money, contradicted the remarkable historical vitality of the Jewish people. The materialistic understanding of history could not explain why a people with no homeland, no land, no territory survived. Jewish history is dominated by drama, tension with God, continuous reflection, and the prevalence of the strength of the nation’s spirit over the misfortunes that fall upon it. All this is unfathomable anti-materialism. For Marx, the Jews are a mystery he is unable to unravel. He did not understand the Jews’ will to live, their peculiar insoluble, unquenchable thirst for life. He feared to discover in the Jews the dominance of spirit over matter. He feared coming into contact with the embodiment of idealism and the triumph of idea over matter.
When the persecution of the Jews of Syria and the pogroms in Russia became known, Marx remained silent, but at the same time spoke out in defense of the persecuted Moldavians. Ferdinand Lassalle, who supported him financially, was called behind his back “Baron Itzik,” “Negro Jew” and “the biggest barbarian among all Polish Jews.” Only one statement by Marx about his Jewish ancestry is known. In a letter to his aunt’s (mother’s sister’s) husband, Leon Phillips, grandfather of the founder of a famous electronics firm, he wrote of Disraeli that he belonged to “our race together.” More than once Marx heard unpleasant words about his Jewish ancestry. His violent temper made him a host of enemies, among them antisemites who denounced his Jewish origins.
The Young Hegelian Ruge, who quarreled with him, called him a “cheeky Jew. Eduard Tellerling, a participant in the failed revolution of 1848 who repented to the authorities of his revolutionary errors, wrote in 1850 in a pamphlet entitled The Vanguard of the Future Dictatorship of Marx and Engels: “The future German dictator Marx is a Jew. And there are no more ruthless avengers than the Jews.” The dictatorship of Marx and Engels was built 67 years after the publication of Tellerling’s pamphlet. Marx and Engels did not become dictators. They became symbols, idols of this dictatorship in the USSR.
Neither baptism, nor attacks on Jews, nor a “purifying” marriage to the daughter of a Prussian baron helped Marx rid himself of the Jewish stigma. His desire for self-emancipation, for the universalization of his nationality, was deeper than his desire to liberate the proletariat. He could not completely reject the Jewishness that the Jew-haters had incriminated him with. Even more so from his origins suffered generations of Jews after him. Marx’s Jewishness lived a life of its own after his death. The blood that flowed in his veins caused the blood of generations of other Jews to flow.
In addition to the self-loathing described above, the rationale for Marx’s antisemitism can be found in the writings of the philosophers he considered his predecessors, Feuerbach and Hegel.
In “The Essence of Christianity” (1841), Feuerbach writes: “The Jews have survived intact to our day. Their principles, their God is the most practical principle in the world – it is selfishness in the form of religion.” In Marx’s article “On the Jewish Question,” this statement sounds like this: “What is the secular basis of Judaism? – Practical usefulness, selfishness. […] What is the secular God of the Jews? – Money.”
A typical Hegelian thought is expressed by Bruno Bauer, a disciple of the philosopher and former Marx associate, as follows: “The persistence of the national Jewish spirit is due to the lack of capacity for historical development, to the totally non-historical character of this people and is caused by its Oriental essence.” Hegel believed that the Jews had fulfilled their historical mission by giving humanity the Bible. He wrote: “In the face of the absolute right of the ‘dominant people’ [Germans] to be the bearer of the stage of development of the world spirit at the present time, the spirits of other nations are powerless, and they, as well as those whose epoch has passed, no longer count in world history.”
Marx, in the same article, expresses a similar idea: “The Jew can only relate to the state in the Jewish way, that is, treating the state as something alien, […] considering himself entitled to be separate from humanity, taking no part in the historical movement in principle, trusting in a future that has no relation to the future of all humanity, considering himself a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people.” From Hegel’s thought, “The spirit [of the Jewish people] is powerless,” and “[the Jews] no longer count in world history,” it is not far to the exclusion of the Jews from history and from humanity.
By excluding the Jewish people from history, Marx himself went down in history. He was held in high esteem by the Jews he despised, not realizing that Marx’s ideas were one of the engines of their persecution. Jews who are proud of Marx still put his name at the top of lists of famous tribesmen today. This love is one-sided. Marx, who thought he was God, chose the chosen people as one of the main objects of his hatred.
*
Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.