The second issue of Engage's on-line journal is just out and has some intriguing articles. Take a look.
Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Anti-Semitism - Robert Fine
Zionism and Apartheid: The Analogy in the Politics of International Law - John Strawson
“The” Jews as products of globalisation - Evelien Gans
Nasty or Nazi? The use of antisemitic topoi in the left-liberal media - Winston Pickett
The case of David Irving: “Revisionism” and freedom of expression - Karl Pfeifer
2 comments:
It's a long, long time since I read Marx's essay "Zur Judenfrage". But at least I can scare off critics by pointing out that I read it in German! (He also quotes in French without translating.) I went back and looked at it (I don't claim to have reread it carefully, or even reread all of it, but I did find the key quotes cited by Fine which I underlined all those years ago).
It seems clear to me that Marx's main concern in this article is neither Judaism nor Christianity, but bourgeois society. It's absurd, as Fine points out, to cite this article to claim Marx was an antisemite. Here's a typical quote (my own translation): "Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation into a purely religious question.... But the question is no longer `does Judaism or Christianity liberate?' but much more the obverse: which makes freer, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity."
You can argue about this forever, and people much more learned than I have done so. But this is clearly not an exercise in anti-Semitism.
Marx wasn't a POLITICAL anti-semite. There was no anti-semitism in his political program(s). But in private correspondence he did call Lasalle as "Jewish nigger" and the like. So, privately, he did indeed express anti-semitic sentiments. Personally, I don't think it matters that much. Marx was a 19th century European. Good luck finding a 19th century European whose views weren't screwed up in one way or another.
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