Marxism is Anti-Semitism is Marxism
Reviewing Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews, one idea at a time
The depth of this history was too much for me to write one review that did it justice, so I decided to discuss several ideas it sparked for me, one at a time.
Take all of the negative stereotypes about Jews, especially those around usury and money, and compare them to the negative stereotypes attributed to greedy capitalists. See any similarities? Well of course you do. That’s because they are the same stereotype. What Karl Marx does is simply turn his hatred of Jews into a theology disguised as economics which pits Jews as the source of all evil in the world. He called it communism.
This is why so many progressives, leftists, and protestors are heavily on the side of anyone opposite Jews. This is why you will hear people shouting things like “decolonization”. This is why university presidents cannot even bring themselves to condemn the calls of their students for Jewish genocide. It is also why I saw all of the suggested book displays at Powell’s City of Books just days after the attacks on October 7th, suggest books on anti-colonialism, but nothing on anti-semitism.
The Marxist assumptions about the nature of the world have become the water in which our university intellectuals swim.
Marx’s Self-Hatred
In Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews, he lays out his case for this idea quite well. And to understand how and why this is the case, it’s important to understand why Karl Marx, a Jew himself, would be so apt to see Jews with such disgust and openly write horrible things about them.
Karl Heinrich Marx was baptized into Christianity at six years old. This may seem unusual for the son of a man who had the very special privilege of deep rabbinical roots. But at the time, during the French enlightenment, secularism was on the rise, and to be a Jew was a yoke that kept you on the outside of many professions. For example, Jews could study law, but were forbidden from practicing it.
Karl’s father, Heinrich Marx, was baptized into Christianity at the age of 35 as a means to assimilate into a secular enlightened European culture and he did the same for his children. Surrounded by Voltaire and Rousseau as opposed to the Torah and Talmud, Karl would grow to have a deep intellectual disdain for what he came to see as superstition and anti-enlightenment doctrines of Judaism.
Even though Karl Marx purposefully distanced himself from his Jewishness, Johnson points out that the spirit with which he approached the world was deeply Jewish. Marx’s theories on history as “a positive and dynamic force in human society, governed by iron laws, and atheist’s Torah, is profoundly Jewish.” Like many secular people today, even though they claim to reject religious ideas, many of their presuppositions are religious in nature. Marx’s flipping of the hierarchies is not much different from Christ’s insistence in Matthew chapter 20 that “the last shall be first, and the first last.”
Marx’s failed predictions of the revolution were little more than a messianic predictions. Johnson lists several of Marx’s predictions that never came true, and explains how much of Marx’s later writings were little more than explanations of why those predictions failed.
Even his insistence that his studies be supported by his community and family are deeply Jewish ideas. It’s an old Jewish tradition that communities support their brightest rabbinical students, allowing them to deeply focus on their studies and create ethical leaders in the community.
And maybe an unconscious understanding of this contradiction was what in part drove him to hate his Jewishness.
Many intellectuals of the time saw their Jewishness and Judaism as a barrier to enlightenment. Jewish intellectuals who were often discriminated against started to see Judaism as an obstacle, and would accept that the next step towards enlightenment was to reject all of its negative characteristics. They accepted this criticism from other intellectuals and directed their anger towards their Jewish kin who didn’t reject Judaism. They started to see them as a yoke that enlightened people would point to and associate them with.
It’s very similar to modern day American minorities who distance themselves from the lower class of their ethnicity. They often see them as a hindrance to their standing in society.
“Enlightenment thinkers, both French and German, argued that the objectionable features of Judaism had to be erased before the Jew could be free. Jews who were discriminated against accepted this, and thus often directed their rage more towards the unregenerate Jew than those who persecuted them both.” — Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews
Conflating Judaism with Capitalism
Writing early during the Industrial Revolution, Francois Fourier identified commerce as “the source of all evil” and the Jews as “the incarnation of commerce.” This idea is very much aligned with common rejections of capitalism as the source of all the ills in our world. Marx picks up on this concept and expands it to explain the nature of mankind as a whole.
This was not some anomaly for only Marx. It was quite common amongst intellectuals of the day. Johnson points out this phenomena occurring with Spinoza, then in 1843 from Bruno Bauer, the “anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian left” who published an essay demanding “Jews abandon Judaism completely and transfer their pleas for equal rights into a general campaign for human liberation both from religion and from state tyranny.” That in itself sounds exactly like achieving communism through the abolition not of property, but of Judaism.
Marx was familiar with Bauer’s views and said of this idea that it was written with “boldness, perception, wit and thoroughness in language that is as precise as it is vigorous and meaningful.” He even quoted Bauer’s assertion, while agreeing with it, that “the Jew determines the fate of the whole [Austrian] empire by his money power.”
By reading Marx’s essays on Jews and Judaism, you can see all of the elements of socialism and communism. Marx simply states that ridding the world of its economic Jewishness will positively transform history towards a just society.
Later on, as Marxism became adopted by Soviet leadership, even Lenin himself acknowledged the ties between anti-Semitism and Marxism. He often said that “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.” By that he meant that the Jews were only a symptom of the problem. To properly be a socialist, one must recognize that Judaism has infected the minds of all men and must not only be destroyed in Jews, but vanquished from the minds of gentiles as well. Marx did much of the same by pushing his anti-Semitism into the background and transforming it into a symptom and root cause that infected all of humanity. But it still showed up throughout his writings.
“The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews.” — Capital, Karl Marx
This is why we keep seeing anti-semitism on college campuses. Paradoxically, the places that need speech codes to keep students safe from micro-aggressions are having trouble seeing that calls for the genocide of Jews is a problem.
You’ll rarely hear anyone on a college campus call themselves an outright Marxist, just like anyone at a protest today would likely not do that either. But the moral confusion around Israel and the propensity of them to see it only in terms of oppressor and oppressed is a symptom of Marxist ideas. These ideas have sewn themselves deep into the minds of our university professors, their students, and are now spilling out into our streets.
Just ordered the paperback version of A History of the Jews. Paul Johnson is a treasure!