Some vintage far-left anti-Semitism

[Allen773]

""Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money."

- Karl Marx, from "On the Jewish Question"

 

[Magrat]

That makes me very sad.

 

[fuelair]

That makes me very sad.

Remember it is from a nutcase who enough other nutcases followed to cause people to hear it and some to believe it and ruin millions of other's lives. I keep trying to think of a more recent
example To Really Understand My Problem with such!!!!!!

 

[Magrat]

Remember it is from a nutcase who enough other nutcases followed to cause people to hear it and some to believe it and ruin millions of other's lives. I keep trying to think of a more recent
example To Really Understand My Problem with such!!!!!!

There are always more nutcases being nutty, and nutty people following them.

 

[autumn1971]

There are always more nutcases being nutty, and nutty people following them.

Many before and since. Especially with Jewish people. I'm no Zionist, but really,why always the Jewish folks?

 

[malbec]

Many before and since. Especially with Jewish people. I'm no Zionist, but really,why always the Jewish folks?

Because there are around 13 million Jews within a world population that exceeds 7 billion .
Their achievements therefore are a constant source of amazement and it is fitting that this situation should be noted , commented on and researched .
In simple terms , it is equivalent to when one sector wins several hundred gold medals in the All Olympics and only 1000 Golds are available .

 

[Craig B]

Because there are around 13 million Jews within a world population that exceeds 7 billion .

Their achievements therefore are a constant source of amazement and it is fitting that this situation should be noted , commented on and researched .

In simple terms , it is equivalent to when one sector wins several hundred gold medals in the All Olympics and only 1000 Golds are available .

It is worth noting that Marx was himself of Jewish descent. His outlandish comments about Jews therefore require some psychological explanation.

A year before Karl Marx was born, his father formally converted to the Christian religion. He did this because he was a lawyer, and Jews were again forbidden to practice that profession when Prussia resumed control of the Rhineland region after the fall of Napoleon.

It seems probable that this conversion was inspired by professional expediency rather than by genuine belief. However, Karl had immense respect for his father, and it has been suggested by biographers that he could not accept that his father was inspired by mere professional motives, and sought some explanation in the faults of Judaism to justify his father's change of religion. This is the opinion of Francis Kaplan who shows beyond question that Marx was indeed antisemitic, but that his followers, including Engels, on the whole were not.

 

[Craig B]

That makes me very sad.

Cheer up. Here's Frederick Engels. On Anti-Semitism Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 19, May 9, 1890.

Only in places [such as Eastern Prussia and Austria] where there is no strong capitalist class and hence no strong class of wage-labourers ... in other words, where production is still in the hands of the farmers, landowners, craftsmen and suchlike classes surviving from the Middle Ages – there, and there alone, is capital mainly Jewish, and there alone is anti-Semitism rife.

In North America not a single Jew is to be found among the millionaires whose wealth can, in some cases, scarcely be expressed in terms of our paltry marks, gulden or francs and, by comparison with these Americans, the Rothschilds are veritable paupers. And even in England, Rothschild is a man of modest means when set, for example, against the Duke of Westminster. Even in our own Rhineland from which, with the help of the French, we drove the aristocracy 95 years ago and where we have established modern industry, one may look in vain for Jews.

Hence anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that ...​

 

[blutoski]

It is worth noting that Marx was himself of Jewish descent. His outlandish comments about Jews therefore require some psychological explanation.

A year before Karl Marx was born, his father formally converted to the Christian religion. He did this because he was a lawyer, and Jews were again forbidden to practice that profession when Prussia resumed control of the Rhineland region after the fall of Napoleon.

It seems probable that this conversion was inspired by professional expediency rather than by genuine belief. However, Karl had immense respect for his father, and it has been suggested by biographers that he could not accept that his father was inspired by mere professional motives, and sought some explanation in the faults of Judaism to justify his father's change of religion. This is the opinion of Francis Kaplan who shows beyond question that Marx was indeed antisemitic, but that his followers, including Engels, on the whole were not.

There's also some political context. Marx was polishing up Capital in the 1860s, during the same timeframe, the UK was consolidating its economically libertarian Conservative Party under Benjamin Disraeli, who was to also become their first Jewish PM. I am happy to defer to any Marx historians, but this is my understanding from other historians that there might have been an additional proximal political origin for Marx as a secular Jew's hostility toward Judaism.

And don't get me started about Stalin. The perception is that his stroke is the only thing that cancelled a pending antisemitic purge in the USSR in the 1950s.

ETA: and that was post "[Doctor's Plot]"