“Jewish Antisemitism” of Karl Marx

Abstract

The concept of “Jewish antisemitism” adduced a strong feelings  of an abnegationof Jewish national characteristics, arising from aprotracted nature of an identitycrisis on condition of Jews’assimilation.

After the French Revolution the problem of national identity each of the European Jews solvedon an individual basis and chose the relevant for this strategy.Marxism was gaining popularity especially on “Jewish street”oftraditional Eastern European town with its’religious ideals concerning social justice and the constant expectation of Jewish pogroms.

It was not easy for K. Marx to get rid of his deep Jewish roots, because he came from the rabbinicallineage. The crisis of identity of the young Marx was in his ridicule of those who at least once reminded him of his ancestry.Obviously, Marx was selecting “Jewish antisemitism” asthe individual strategy for overcoming the crisis of identity anditwas the most convenient means of self-defense, especially under pressure of the newborn German nationalism, the first victims of which were G. Heine and L. Boerne. Instead, a prognosticof classical Marxism M. Hess, who in the early 1840's converted the young F. Engels to communism, has never denied his Jewish roots and emphasized the impossibility of assimilation changes for the Jews on national basis. Marx reacted with suspicion to the prophecy of “late”Hess on the possibility of Jewish nationalism (Zionism). However, Marx was conscious of the danger of Jews’ failed assimilation that would threatened to the victims of the national tragedy. This forced him to react by own strategy to overcome “Judaea”in his rationalistic doctrine. Talented compilation of disparate contemporary ideas of socialist and communist movements in the new revelation “The Communist Manifesto”appeared. The author has allowed it to curb its concern on the national identity in the field of social myth therapy. An important aspect is the affective component of Marxism: the pathos of hatred and revenge to “bourgeois”, which included those Jews who were well-known to Marx, as he was completely a bourgeois thinker. Perhaps because he not only transformed the “bourgeois”on the object of impassioned hatred, but also gave him a proportion of world historical figure.

Responding to B. Bauer’saccusations concerning “the  Jewish emancipation which  does not apply Germans”, Marx, exposed the Jewish character of bourgeois society in his article “On the Jewish Question”in 1843, which has led some researchers to suspect its’author of the most influential social and political doctrine in the Jewish anti-Semitism.In contrast his anti-capitalism was aimed at critics of “Jewish self-interest of civil society”, primarily which, in the opinion of Marx were guilty Christians which “Jewish nationality to nationality merchant.” So his ostensive “anti-Semitism”was an attempt to neutralize accusations by real anti-Semitism. In his controversial model the Jewish Question solving Marx opposed the ethnoconfessional factor of estates-hierarchical caste society the principle of civil society in which the emancipation of the Jews became necessary precondition of total emancipation. Thus, the Marx’s “Jewish antisemitism”became a demonstration of assimilated Jew’sgelidrationality which was opposed to German’s empirical ethnicity. It was a testing of revolutionary metaphysics in class struggle, an attempt to avert the threat of ethnic nationalism that matured in the womb of bourgeois society, which Marx had planned to destroy by the forces of cosmopolitan proletariat and, therefore, to deprive the favorite image of “Jewish mercantilism”among all anti-Semites. He renewed the educational traditions of secularization the political life and encouraged to deep the processes of the Jews’ emancipation that were started in the late eighteenth century. But now the mission of the Jews’ liberation from feudal prejudices attributed not to the bourgeoisie, which discredited itself by exceptious emphasis to Jews’ anthropology but to the “proletariat”which like the Jews, according to Marx, deprived own ethnicity for the sake of social revolutionary.                                    

Kewwords: Jewish anti-Semitism, Jewish identity crisis, K. Marx, emancipation, Jews