from “In the Interests of Civilization”: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the NineteenthCentury” by Diane Paul (relevent part begin page 14 of the pdf)



What is most striking about the sharply conflicting arguments over Marxist anti-semitism is that they are based on generally different sorts of evidence. The view that Marx and Engels were anti-semitic is based largely on their style, on the contempt they express for Judaism as a religion and for most Jews as individuals, especially (though not exclusively) in their correspondence. The opposed view is based on the argument of Die Judenfrage and, to a lesser extent, on The Holy Family and Marx’s philosophical writings in general.

Both kinds of evidence are relevant, and together they indicate that no simple characterization of Marx’s and Engels’ views is defensible. They did hold a general philosophical position which led them to support full political rights for Jews. It is therefore absurd to imply, as some writers do, that Marx looked forward to “a world without Jews" as though he espoused their physical extermination. On the other hand, it is equally clear that Marx was highly sensitive about his Jewish origins and that he and Engels both disliked most Jews personally and accepted every current anti-Jewish stereotype, including those which from their own personal experience and knowledge of history they should have had reason to doubt. Julius Carlebach has recently shown how little merit there is in the claim of some scholars, such as David McClellan, that Marx’s use of the term “Judentum” in Die Judenfrage is essentially devoid of religious and racial content. Marx himself asserted that “not only in the Pentateuch or Talmud but also in present society we find the nature of the contemporary Jew, not as an abstract nature but as a supremely empirical nature,” and he certainly makes empirical claims about Jewish religion and Jewish history, claims which Carlebach shows to be “even more contemptu-ous and certainly less well-informed than those of his predecessors” (such as Feuerbach and Bauer). Moreover, both Marx and Engels disapprove of what they take to be every characteristic of contemporary Jews. From Marx’s comments in the second essay of Die Judenfrage, other published material by Marx and Engels, and especially their private correspondence, we know that they believed Jews to be selfish, interested only in money-making, capable of determining the fate of Europe through their control of international finance, clannish even greasy.



Taking into account all of the available evidence, I think that the attitude of Marx and Engels toward Jews can be reasonably characterized as follows. As a result of their particular historical situation, Jews have developed a wide range of unpleasant characteristics all directly or indirectly associated with money-making. These historically-conditioned traits will inevitably disappear in a society where money-making is not possible; when Judaism loses its practical basis, the Jew as we know him will cease to exist and the Jewish “problem” will simply dissolve. However, it follows that in the present, as opposed to the socialist future, Jews as a class are the kind of people with whom one would not much want to associate. That it is not their fault and that it will not always be thus does not alter the fact that for Marx and Engels almost all Jews were characterized by highly undesirable traits. Though they rationalized their attitude toward particular Jews, they accepted as true this characterization which if accepted by others, could not help but create a socialist attitude of contempt toward the “actual, worldly” Jew. That is the real basis of socialist anti-semitism, the link connecting Marx with the disgraceful position of almost all socialists in the Dreyfus affair and the anti- semitic views of at least a portion of the modern European left.

