Was Marx Antisemitic?

It is with great annoyance that I must inform you all that once again, prominent intellectual charlatan David Baddiel has spun the mighty Wheel of Bad Takes. 

Now, I'm no self-professed genius like Baddiel and I'm certainly not self-absorbed enough to write a book on Jewishness that subsequently gets dismantled and criticised by rabbis and Jewish groups, but I'm definitely smart enough to a write blog post to illustrate his quackery. 

So what's this all about then? 

Baddiel has resurrected the spectre of  Karl Marx's supposed antisemitism. As unwavering proof of this, he presents a snippet from an article published in the New York Tribune, circa 1856, called The Russian Loan. He also references Marx's work On The Jewish Question, a response to Bruno Bauer's The Jewish Question. He knows this is antisemitism because he used to be something of a Marxist. And a Jew, of course.

To debunk Baddiel fully, I'm going to provide the historical and material context for Marx's work "On The Jewish Question", which is probably the most oft-cited example of his supposed antisemitism. As an actual rebuttal to the argument, a rebuttal that breaks down Marx's work and explains what he means, I'm going to reproduce here someone else's brilliant answer from a Reddit post.

I will also take the liberty of calling this piece On "On The Jewish Question" Question because it sounds silly and keeping me amused is important.

But first, let's address The Russian Loan. 

Baddiel cites The Russian Loan as an example of Marx's antisemitism. The problem with that is that there is no real proof that Marx actually wrote the article in question! 

Let me show you a few reasons why that might be.

1. The article does not appear marxists.org, a huge archive of transcriptions and reproductions of all of Marx's works and Marxist literature. It'd be an oddity for that particular work to have been missed out, especially given that marxists.org has no problem reproducing his more controversial works and letters.
2. There's only a single source I can find that cites Marx as having written it without basis. Said source references The Eastern Question: A Reprint of Letters written 1853-1856 dealing with the events of the Crimean War.
3. The Eastern Question does contain a text called The Russian Loan, but it is not attributed to Marx. Eleanor Marx, the editor of said book, makes the following qualifications about the works contained therein:
   
   "In several cases where his correspondence has been turned into leaders, a few words of addition and interpolation have been written in by the American editors, to keep up journalistic appearances. 
   
   Apparently also, on more than one occasion, ideas or actual passages from letters of Marx were used and written round by the American journalists. This has made the task of selection very difficult, and has certainly, in one case at least, led to the inclusion (see CI.) of an article, the major part of which could not have been written by Marx.
   
   In one or two cases it would appear that part of his letter was used as a leader, and the rest left in the letter form." 
    
4. In The Eastern Question, The Russian Loan (CVIII) is attributed simply as a leader. A leader can either be an article that gives the editor's opinion on something or a leading article in a newspaper. Other works in the book are attributed to Marx when it is known that Marx contributed to the majority of the writing. This article isn't.
5. The writing style in The Russian Loan does not match up to Marx's style in his other works. It comes across as oddly devotional in some places and there's none of his usual snark, irony, sarcasm or wit as in most of his other works.

None of this is to say that Marx did not write The Russian Loan beyond all doubt, but it is more than enough evidence to cast significant doubt upon him being the writer. 

Intellectual and apparent ex-Marxist Baddiel should know better than to chuck such nonsense into the void of despair that is Twitter, without scrutiny.  

The Historical Context For On The Jewish Question

The information here is taken from two sources: David McClellan's biography of Karl Marx, which is very well-sourced, and The Jewish Virtual Library's article on Prussia's history. I've kept it concise for the sake of brevity and most of what is written here are more or less copied directly from the sources with a few grammatical modifications. 

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henrietta Pressburg (1788–1863). He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, an ancient city then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. His family were largely non-religious though ethnically Jewish. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi as was his paternal grandfather, Meier Halevi Marx. 

Meier Halevi Marx numbered many rabbis among his ancestors, who came originally from Bohemia. His wife, Chage, had an even more illustrious ancestry: she was the daughter of Moses Lwow, rabbi in Trier, whose father and grandfather were also rabbis in the same city.

Less is known of the ancestry of Karl's mother, Henrietta, but she seems to have been no less steeped in the rabbinic tradition than her husband. She was Dutch, the daughter of Isaac Pressburg, rabbi of Nijmegen. According to Eleanor (Karl's daughter), in her grandmother's family, 'the sons had for centuries been rabbis'.  It is said that she kept alive in the Marx household certain Jewish traditions, customs and attitudes.

Heinrich Marx originally was counsellor-at-law to the High Court of Appeal in Trier. He also practised in the Trier County Court and was awarded the title of Justizrat (very roughly the equivalent of a British Q.C.). For many years he was President of the city lawyers' association and occupied a respected position in civic society though he confined himself mostly to the company of his colleagues.

Unfortunately, the rich Jewish history and tradition of the Marx family were to prove to be a problem for them in the Kingdom of Prussia, a religiously Protestant state. 

On the 18th of September, 1818, Jews were excluded from all academic positions; the following January Jewish officials in Westphalia and the Rhineland were dismissed, including Heinrich Marx. The Napoleonic "infamous decree," which by then had lapsed in France, was renewed by Prussia in 1818 to cover the Rhineland for an indefinite period. Prussian Jewry's legal position was encumbered by the coexistence of 22 different legislative systems with the various provinces. The king actively encouraged conversion to Christianity and prohibited conversion to Judaism.  

Thus, Heinrich Marx, in order to continue practising and being able to put food on the table, converted to Christianity; Protestantism to be exact. It was at this time that Heinrich changed his name, having previously been known as Heschel.

Between 1812 and 1846, 3,171 Jews in Prussia converted. But this was not the end of Prussia's oppression of Jews.

The accession of Frederick William IV (1840) was accompanied by rising hopes, which were soon dashed when he took steps to implement his medieval conception of a corporationist "Christian state." In this crisis, Prussian Jewry, led by Moritz Veit and Ludwig Philippson, was supported by the liberal majorities in the provincial estates.

Nevertheless, with the aid of the upper house and Friedrich Julius Stahl, the king succeeded in passing the 1847 Jewry constitution which recognized the corporate status of individual Jewish communities. It permitted Jews to occupy "offices not carrying executive, juridical, or law enforcement powers"; at universities, all chairs in the humanities were closed to them, as were the senate and rectorate; Jews owning landed estates could not enjoy the rights accorded the gentry.

It is impossible to estimate with any precision the influence on Marx of this strong, Jewish family tradition. As he wrote later on, "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the living". Jewishness, above all at that time, was not something that it was easy to slough off. Even Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, though only half-Jewish, proclaimed constantly and with a certain defiant pride at workers' meetings in the East End of London: 'I am a Jewess.' 

The position of Jews in the Rhineland, where they were often scapegoats for the farmers' increasing poverty, was calculated to increase their collective self-awareness. Although civil equality had been achieved under the Napoleonic laws, the inauguration of the Holy Alliance and its policy of the 'Christian state' inevitably involved anti-semitism on the double count that the religious Jews professed an alien faith and many claimed to be a separate people. In much of the bitterest polemic - which Marx engaged in with, for example, Ruge, Proudhon, Bakunin and Diihring - his Jewishness was dragged into the debate.  

So, we've established Karl Marx's full-blooded Jewish ancestry, we've established the long-held Jewish traditions of his family, how antisemitic laws in Prussia forced his father to convert to Christianity and how conversations with his peers often dragged his Jewishness into debates. When I say his Jewishness, I don't mean whether he was actually Jewish or not. I mean that his very right to exist, his humanity, was called into question because of his Jewishness. 

Proudhon, for example, said this:

"The Jew is the enemy of the human race. This race must be sent back to Asia, or exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weil, and others are simply secret spies; Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, evil choleric, envious, bitter men who hate us. The Jew must disappear by steel or by fusion or by expulsion."  

Whilst Bakunin said this:

"...the communism of Marx wants a mighty centralization by the state, and where this exists there must nowadays be a central State Bank and where such a bank exists, the parasitical Jewish nation, which speculates on the labour of the peoples, will always find a means to sustain itself.”

Criticism of Marxist communism notwithstanding, this is blatant antisemitism directed at Marx.

What I want to establish here is not simply that Marx was Jewish but that he and his family were also subjected to vicious antisemitism, even from his peers. I want to establish the fact that the Jewish traditions, history and experiences of his entire family, his father's coerced conversion to Christianity, the oppressive laws of Prussia, and the antisemitism he experienced, directly informed his response to Bruno Bauer in the essay On The Jewish Question. 

Marx's history is a material one. All the things we experience in our past inform and fuel our futures. This is no less true for Marx himself.

After all, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

Is 'On The Jewish Question' Antisemitic?

Rather than spend an age trying to write a coherent answer to this, I am no genius after all and definitely not a professional philosopher, I am reproducing someone else's answer here. I have added a few notes here and there to convert academic terms into something more readable and to expand on certain sections.

The original, unedited answer can be found here. Any notes I add will be in bold italics. 
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Marx was not anti-Semitic. Marx was, however, an asshole, and this frequently comes across in his writing. Especially in this case, in which he was essentially trolling Bauer and the Prussian government.

Let's start with some of the offending text, from later in the essay:

"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.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time...

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism."

Oh, man. Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? "Huckstering," a "wordly God" of Money - these are some pretty nasty Jewish stereotypes, and however you read this there's no way that this would fly in today's discourse. But Marx wasn't writing today, he was writing in 1843. This isn't an excuse, as people were antisemitic then, too, but it is the first step in figuring out why Marx was saying these things. First, we need to run through Marx's argument.

The debate being dealt with in the essay is that of Jewish emancipation in the Prussian state, which was Christian. In Prussia at the time, Jews were subject to discriminatory laws which, for example, barred them from certain professions. These laws affected the Marx family, and Marx's father actually converted to Christianity so he could continue practicing as a lawyer.

Marx's object of criticism is Bruno Bauer, a liberal who stood in opposition to the conservative Prussian government at the time. Not coincidentally, this discussion of the "Jewish Question" is similar to discussions of tensions between ethnic recognition and civic obligations today, as with the hijab and Sharia law in Europe. Bauer takes a tack similar to that of the New Atheists, saying that recognition of religious identity is incompatible with the rights and privileges accorded by citizenship:

"In France, universal freedom is not yet the law, the Jewish question too has not yet been solved, because legal freedom – the fact that all citizens are equal – is restricted in actual life, which is still dominated and divided by religious privileges"

Marx finds this answer unsatisfying. His objection hinges on the various senses definitions of "emancipation," which Bauer takes for granted. Marx, perennially critical of bourgeois society, argues that even the emancipation granted within the confines of the state is incomplete. Not only does the state replicate the relation of alienation that religion produces it also doesn't actually absolve people of these forces of alienation, but merely allows them to function outside of the domain of the state:

"Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business."

In this vein, Marx is arguing another point: that the question of emancipation for Jews is not strictly a theological one (i.e. whether or not they engage in the belief of religion) but is also a secular one, insofar as the institutions that confine the Jewish people - and everyone else for that matter - are the real source of their oppression. In fact, many Jews are already quite secular in nature, given the divisions between religious life, "civil" (what we would call "private" or economic) life, and life as a citizen of the state. To be Jewish is to be bound up in all of these categories, not just the religious one:

"Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions."

So what Marx is arguing for here is a material basis for the Jewish identity and therefore the role of Jewish people in the broader Prussian society. Marx is essentially saying that Jews should be free to shape the world as they please, just as everyone else but that can only come from the abolition of secular institutions - i.e the state. 

It's worth remembering here that Marx wrote this response five years before The Communist Manifesto and before he had fully formed the views and works he's known for.

In the latter part of the essay, where Marx really kicks up the rhetoric about Judaism, Marx seems to say some pretty nasty things:

"What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism..."

But then goes on to clarify:

"Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money."

Here, Marx is extending his argument for the material basis of actual Judaism to using "Judaism" - and probably contemporary stereotypes about Jews - as a stand-in for the monied interests that dominate bourgeois society. To clarify, Marx is making a distinction between real Judaism and Jews as they actually are in society, and "Judaism" as a racial epithet that encapsulates all of those stereotypes of Jews.  

Marx's real target here is capitalism, though he doesn't name it as such at this point in his career. You can see what he's trying to do when he calls "practical Christians" - Christians who nonetheless adhere to the "practical need and self-interest" of the prior quote, which would apply to nearly everyone in the political and bourgeois classes of Prussia at the time - Jews:

"Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism... the practical Christian has become a Jew again."

He's turning the Jewish stereotype on its head and accusing the elite of Prussian society of the very extreme greed so commonly attributed to Jews. He's inverting the commonly accepted rhetoric of the entire "Jewish Question" - which Bauer himself employs - as a way to launch an attack on capitalists and landed gentry and how they resist liberatory social conditions for all members of Prussian society. Marx has weaponised the racist stereotypes of Jews and accused the bourgeois class of being more like the stereotypical Jew than real Jews actually are!

So, not really the anti-Semitic argument that it first appears to be, even if Marx's language isn't exactly PC.

Some meta-textual notes:

* It is, as always, important to note that Marx was ethnically Jewish, and his father was raised Jewish and later converted before Marx's birth. His mother did not convert until later in life. Beyond this, much of Marx's extended family did not convert, and many of his uncles were rabbis. Even if Marx himself was born a Christian, he was deeply embedded in the Jewish community of Trier.

* This point is hugely important: Marx wrote this article for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a Prussian opposition paper published in Paris. Marx spent most of his life writing for a Prussian audience and was thus constantly having to slip his work past repressive Prussian censors, who wanted to block anything resembling criticism of the government or government officials. This in part accounts for the convoluted, winking quality of the essay - censors would likely have interpreted it as an attack on Judaism and their "huckstering," when in fact Marx was defending Jews as an oppressed people and accusing Prussian elites of the very vices they laid at the feet of the Jewish community. In fact, the convoluted nature, tongue-in-cheek, winking nature of the essay is what leads many contemporary writers and intellectuals, such as Baddiel, to believe that it is antisemitic.

* If all this isn't enough, it needs to be pointed out that we don't have much evidence of anti-Semitism from the rest of Marx's corpus. Nor do we have it from the huge volumes of correspondence that we have from the Marx family and their associates. If Marx was even a casual anti-Semite, we would see anti-Semitic rhetoric in these materials - but we don't. This fact leads me to put more stock in the reading of On the Jewish Question that I've presented here. As I mentioned earlier, every piece Marx ever wrote is available on marxists.org and "On The Jewish Question" is the only piece that lends a shred of credibility to the idea Marx was antisemitic. 
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Unfortunately for our detractors, we have just demolished that shred. 

Concluding Thoughts

So first up, I have been harsh on Baddiel in this essay, I want to stress that I don't hate Baddiel. Not as a human and certainly not because he's Jewish. I'm sure we have a lot to learn from each other and we might even have a laugh-riot if we met. I just think he's a fucking idiot who, despite his own protests, is obsessed with identity and identity politics. He's also a fucking racist, the hypocrite. The two reviewers of his book that I linked to above also state as much.

It is this obsession over identity politics that is one of the worst aspects of liberalism and it is exactly why Baddiel seemingly does not understand On The Jewish Question. I'm generalising here but there are certain things liberals tend to do when reading that belie the true meaning of certain works to them:

1. Reading superficially or in a perfunctory manner instead of deeply and thoughtfully, asking questions along the way
2. Failing to adhere to the principle of charitable interpretation
3. Obsessing over symbolism and vernacular because it might, in some cases, overlap with the symbolism and vernacular of bigotry - this ties in with the first point because it indicates a superficial reading
4. Failing to consider a material analysis of the author's history as a means to learn more of their intents and experiences. It can also give you a much greater context for their written works and actions. 

These are the ingredients for a tepid and bland literary stew that I like to call Stewpidity. 

I will not apologise for that joke. 

But what exactly does he find antisemitic? Baddiel fails to qualify his accusation so we're left to guess.

It appears to me that Baddiel interpreted Marx's work in an incredibly superficial manner, reacting merely to language that he deems not politically correct and Marx's weaponisation of tropes. His rudimentary analysis of Marx appears to insinuate that Marx never experienced antisemitism or perhaps even wasn't a "real" Jew and hence was writing out of either malice or ignorance. 

I can't define someone else's oppression for them but what I can do is point out that what they think Marx was saying, what they think about Marx himself and what Marx was actually saying do not correlate in the slightest. Baddiel is of course welcome to his views and beliefs and I doubt they'll ever change, but he cannot ignore the fact that he is probably wrong as we've shown above. It's my opinion that Baddiel is reacting to mere language, ignoring Marx's history and experiences and as such what Marx is actually saying flies gloriously over his head.

Marx's true intentions and meaning in On The Jewish Question, along with his own Jewishness, are often mystified and then weaponised as a political cudgel. That cudgel is then used to bash anyone who dares to profess Marxist, socialist or communist ideals by deploying accusations of antisemitism in a guilt-by-association fashion. Those who read Marx are told he is antisemitic and therefore if they read further, they might also become antisemitic. If Marx is antisemitic, then so is communism. It's once again a blatant weaponisation of antisemitism that simultaneously seeks to erase the great tradition of Jewish radicalism. Similar accusations have since been levied at other Jewish radicals - Baruch Spinoza, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and even Albert Einstein.

Anyone who still claims that Marx was antisemitic is further going to have to deal with the fact that his emancipatory philosophies were and are lauded by thousands of Jews since the mid 19th century:

""Marx also gave Jews the idea that to be political doesn’t mean to lobby for greater rights, it means to be aware of yourself as a laborer. And being aware to act on the capacities on this world,” he says.

This last point was extremely pertinent for Jews at the time, Stern points out, because Jews were a stateless people who enjoyed almost no rights or protections.

It’s no wonder, then, that Marx’s writing instantly connected with the vast majority of Jews dwelling in the impoverished conditions of the Pale of Settlement in the mid-to-late-19th century."

It is quite clear from all of the analysis above that Marx was, on the whole, arguing for the emancipation of Jews from the tyranny of organised religion and the secular institutions of the state. Marx's answer, driven by his own experiences as a Jew in Prussia, was that by abolishing the state, Jews, and everyone else, would finally be free to be themselves and leave their mark on society as they choose to. 

There are lessons to be learnt here: Do not read superficially, adhere to the principles of charitable interpretation, do not react to mere language or symbolism because language and symbolism do not always indicate intent or meaning. Dig deeper.

And if you have the time, read up on the material history of authors because there is a lot to be gained from doing so.

In short, don't be like David Baddiel. Be better.