etails = The Marxists and the Jewish question: History of a debate 1843-1943
By Enzo Traverso
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1996. 288 pp, $37 (pb)
Review by Chris Slee
This book reviews a century of writings by Marxists on the history, social position and future of the Jews.
Marx's article "On the Jewish Question", written in 1843, remains controversial, with some people accusing him of anti-Semitism. Traverso rejects the allegation, which is usually based on "phrases wrenched out of context" rather than a serious consideration of the substance of Marx's views.
Marx supported legal equality and civil rights for the Jews. He rejected the view of Bruno Bauer that Jews could be politically emancipated only if they gave up their religion. Marx argued that religious freedom was a necessary feature of a democratic state.
However, Marx also believed that religion is a product of human alienation. He expected that in a future communist society, where oppression and exploitation had been abolished, people would no longer need religion. Hence Judaism would disappear, along with Christianity.
"On The Jewish Question" is far from being a systematic analysis of the social position of the Jews, but it does contain some ideas which were further developed by later Marxist writers such as Karl Kautsky and Abram Leon.
Marx regarded the Jews as essentially a commercial class within medieval Europe, and the Jewish religion as an ideology reflecting the outlook of this class. With the decline of feudalism, Christians too became active in the money economy. Christianity, which had been the official religion of feudal regimes, became permeated (like Judaism) with commercial values.
In a future communist society, money would disappear, and there would no longer be a commercial class. Hence Judaism, a religion of the commercial class, would also disappear.
Traverso criticises this analysis as schematic. He points out that "On The Jewish Question" was one of Marx's early works, written at a time when his economic concepts were not fully developed. He did not yet distinguish between the commercial capitalism of the middle ages and the capitalist mode of production.
More importantly, Traverso criticises Marx for considering the Jews as essentially an economic category, which would cease to exist as a distinct group once the economic basis had been transformed, characterising this as an "assimilationist" perspective. He comments: "The fundamental limitation of this approach lies in its incapacity to consider the Jews as a community with a specific cultural and ethnic physiognomy, capable of transforming itself, but also of conserving itself beyond and through changes of social and economic structure".
Traverso points out that Marx grew up in Germany at a time when assimilationism was widespread amongst German Jews. Many had abandoned the Yiddish language in favour of German, and did not consider themselves as part of a Jewish nation but as German citizens "of the Mosaic faith".
But assimilation was not possible for most Jews in eastern Europe. There, Jewish communities retained their own Yiddish language and culture. Furthermore, the vicious anti-Semitism of the tsarist state, and the anti-Semitic popular attitudes which the latter promoted, prevented assimilation.
In the following century, most Marxists accepted the essential points of Marx's analysis of the Jewish question, and his "assimilationist" perspective. Kautsky characterised medieval Jews as a "caste", whereas Leon called them a "people-class", but both saw assimilation as a desirable outcome.
An exception was the Bund, an organisation of Yiddish-speaking Jewish socialists in the tsarist empire. Bund leaders such as Vladimir Medem viewed the Yiddish-speaking Jews of eastern Europe as a nation. Medem saw this nation as a linguistic and cultural entity, and did not believe it was necessary for a nation to have its own separate national territory. He rejected both assimilation and Zionism.
The Bund split from Russian Social Democracy when the latter rejected a proposal for a federal party structure. In general, the Bund was much closer to the Mensheviks than the Bolsheviks.
Leaders such as Medem opposed the October Revolution, but many of the rank and file supported it, resulting in a split. The Jewish population, initially suspicious of the Bolsheviks, increasingly viewed the Red Army as their sole protection against the pogroms carried out by the Whites. Most Left Bundists eventually joined the Bolshevik party.
Traverso claims that the Bolsheviks in practice adopted "to a considerable extent" the Bundist program of national autonomy for the Jewish people. Yiddish language and culture were encouraged. However, with the rise of Stalinism, Yiddish cultural institutions were increasingly bureaucratised and then suppressed altogether.
Another issue discussed by Traverso is the nature of anti-Semitism. Early Marxists tended to view it as a legacy of the feudal past, which would disappear as society developed. The falsity of this view became increasingly apparent in the late 19th century and even more so in the 20th. This prompted Marxists such as Trotsky to develop analyses of anti-Semitism as a product of capitalism.