[Marxism] Re What to make of Marx's antisemitism

[Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx]

Israeli historian Amos Elon's book, "The Pity of it All: A History of Jews in
Germany, 1743-1933," takes for its starting point the yearning of Central
European Jews, typified by Moses Mendelssohn, for connection with the
Enlightenment. This desire, lead in turn to Prussian Jews becoming the most 
ardent
supporters of the French Revolution of 1789. The converse of this identification
with the progressive ideals of the bourgeois-democratic revolution was a
desperate flight from the backwardness and overall physical and cultural
impoverishment of the shtetl Jews of the East-- those whom a previous post has 
correctly
identified as itinerant hawkers and peddlars. This rejection often assumed
extreme forms which strike today's reader as "anti-semitic," and indeed,
led Herzl and the early Zionists to be the 1st to define them as
"assimilationists." Elon claims that modern Reform Judaism came directly out of 
the
attempt of Prussian Jews to negotiate the demands of their religion with their
desire for full participation in the highest economic, political and cultural
movements of the day. A mania for conversions, both real and pseudo, and for
Germanizing last names swept the community, especially after the defeat of 
Napoleon.
It's not at all surprising that the very young Marx, fighting his final
battles with the Young Hegelians in the person of Bruno Bauer would mix support 
for
full civic emancipation for Jews with the call to transcend the existing
"world order" of civil society (Hegel's term for bourgeois society). The 
weakness
and immaturity of Marx's perspective at this point is revealed most explicitly
in his unfortunate use of the "spirit of Jewry," as a signifier for bourgeois
society. However, as others have so aptly demonstrated, Marx was by no means
an "anti-semite" as we understand the term today.
Ilyenkova
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