'On the Jewish Question': the Karl Marx's antisemitic essay that any nazi could sign

@ElentirENG ES 5·04·2021 · 7:00 0

The existence of a significant antisemitic current on the left is something that shocks many people, because they ignore the antisemitic origin of marxism.

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The paradox: a man of Jewish origin writing an antisemitic essay

Four years before the publication of the "Communist Manifesto", in 1844, Karl Marx published an essay entitled "Zur Judenfrage" (On the Jewish question). It was clearly antisemitic writing. A paradox, everything be said, because Marx was born into a Jewish family, although his parents had converted to Lutheranism, a religion that he professed before embracing materialism. In this essay, and denying his own roots, Marx wrote antisemitic clichés that would later be copied by national-socialism. An attempt, perhaps, to feel integrated at the cost of betraying his own?

Marx's judeophobia was comparable to Hitler's

Whatever the intention of Marx, the judeophobia that he distilled in that work is comparable, in some points, to the antisemitic paranoia that Adolf Hitler exhibited in his book "Mein kampf" (My struggle). Let's look at some examples from Marx's essay:

"Let us not look for the mystery of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the mystery of religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular foundation of Judaism? The practical necessity, the selfish interest. What is the secular cult practiced by the Jew? Usury. What is your secular god? The money. Well, the emancipation of usury and money, that is, of practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.
An organization of society that ends with the premises of usury and, therefore, with the possibility of it, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would clear like a murky vapor floating in the real atmosphere of society."

It is inevitable and chilling to observe in this effort to make "the Jew impossible" an ideological antecedent of the perverse "final solution", the cynical label created by the nazi hierarchs to unleash a colossal genocide against the Jewish people. One wonders what plans Marx would have if, once his communist utopia was created, that "murky vapor" persisted, as he disparagedly referred to the Jews. No need to resort to imagination.

Engels' warning about peoples "destined to perish"

In January 1849, Marx's great companion, Friedrich Engels, wrote an article entitled "The Magyar Struggle" in the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in which he stated the following:

"Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality — the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary.
All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary."

The part that you read in bold was all a warning of the genocides that the communists perpetrated in the following century. Like nazism, communism has genocidal ideological roots, however much some deny them.

Some statements that explain the large influx of communists to the Nazi Party

Returning to Marx's antisemitic essay, following the quotes we have seen above, the ideologue of communism stated the following:

"We recognize, therefore, in Judaism a general antisocial element present, which the historical development in which the Jews jealously collaborate in this evil aspect has been in charge of exalting until its present apogee, when it must necessarily dissolve.
The emancipation of the Jews is ultimately the emancipation of humanity from Judaism."

Later, Marx links Judaism with the great class enemy of communism, the bourgeoisie:

"Bourgeois society constantly engenders the Jew in its own womb.
What, in itself, was the foundation of the Jewish religion? The practical necessity, the selfishness. (…)
Money is the jealous God of Israel, before whom no other God can legitimately prevail. (…) The God of the Jews has become secularized, he has become a universal God. The bill of exchange is the real God of the Jew. His God is just the illusory bill of exchange."

The influences of these anti-Semitic claims by Marx on nazism are obvious. In the tenth chapter of "Mein kampf", Hitler spoke of the "yoke of slavery of international capitalism and its managers, the Jews", in terms very similar to those of Marx. It is not difficult to understand, reading that 1843 essay, the great number of communists who joined the Nazi Party. According to calculations by the Nazi militias themselves, the SA, 55% of its militants came from the communist ranks. It was enough for them to change an internationalist socialism for a nationalist socialism that seemed inspired by Marx's antisemitism.

From Judeophobia to Christianophobia

The most striking thing about Marx's essay is that he directed his anti-Semitism also against Christianity, due to its Jewish origins:

"Christianism has sprouted from Judaism. And it has dissolved in him again. The Christian was from the first moment the theorizing Jew; the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has again become a Jew.
Christianism only in appearance had come to surpass real Judaism. He was too noble, too spiritualistic, to remove the harshness of practical necessities rather than elevate them to the cloud realm.
Christianism is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism the vulgar practical application of Christianism, but this application could only become general once Christianism, like the finished religion, theoretically brought man's self-alienation from himself to terms and of nature.

The influence of Marx's antisemitism on present-day communism

Some might think that those antisemitic slogans written by Karl Marx in 1843 have no influence on current communism. It is enough to see the hatred of the communists to Israel to verify that this anti-Semitism is still very present in this totalitarian movement. The irrational hatred against Israel of the communists, who use as an excuse alleged abuses against the Palestinians, is unmatched by the opinion that communists have about other peoples and nations, even with regimes - many of them communists - that have committed horrendous genocides. Communism now disguises its antisemitism as "antizionism" - that is, the denial of the right of the Jewish people to have their own nation - but as the Spanish saying goes, even if monkey dresses in silk, monkey stays.

The Communist Youth offer this antisemitic essay on their website

In fact, to this day that antisemitic essay by Marx is accessible on the website of the Communist Youth, the youth branch of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), a party to which - at the time of writing these lines - two ministers of the government of Spain belong. What would happen if any political organization linked to a European Union government published a pamphlet as rabidly antisemitic as that on its website? Communist antisemitism is as detestable and intolerable as nazi antisemitism. Why are exceptions made with the first one?