Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (74 page)

Luther is commonly regarded as being preoccupied with sin, damnation, and salvation, but Marius makes a compelling case that what really drove Luther was this dread of death, and the Jews were those who stood between him and hope. Jews were at the center of Luther's perception because they contradicted the one thing that kept him from going mad. And this was true not only because of what they denied (negatively) about Christian faith or what they affirmed (positively) about the Law of Moses. The mere existence of Jews sparked the panic Luther felt. Even the way they had resisted every assault, survived the cruel horrors of anti-Jewish violence, fed his hatred. Living Jews had refused Christendom's every effort to convert them, which meant that neither they nor their forebears could possibly have regarded death with the terror it held for Luther. "I suspect," Marius comments, "that [Jews'] patient endurance of suffering and death in their adhesion to their own faith, necessarily rejecting his, made him afraid, and so created in his mind a fantasy called 'Jew' that was in part constructed of hated elements in his own soul."
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That fantasy Jew would thrive in Lutheran Germany as nowhere else, even if the twentieth century, combining it with pseudoscientific racism to make what we call modern antisemitism, would reinvent the fantasy with unprecedented ferocity. "But the fact that Luther's hostility to Jews was not the same as modern antisemitism does not excuse it. It was as bad as Luther could make it, and that was bad enough to leave a legacy that had hateful consequences for centuries."
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The personal venom of Luther's hatred of Jews, and his perhaps psychotic experience of the Jew as standing between him and salvation—the Jew makes death absolute—are what separate Catholic antisemitism from that inspired by Luther. This is an enormously complex question; the point to emphasize here is that the shadow cast by Luther fell in a particular way over Germany, over Hitler, obviously, and perhaps over Marx.

When at last Luther was dying, in bed during the night, after having complained of chest pains, he declared that Jews had done this to him. He had condemned Jews in his last sermon. The date of his death was February 18, 1546.
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The date of his birth was November 10, 1483. Four hundred and fifty-five years later, the Lutheran bishop of Thuringia, Martin Sasse, exulted, "On November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." The bishop was referring, of course, to Kristallnacht. His joy was expressed in the foreword to his collection of Luther's anti-Jewish writings, which the bishop was publishing in the hope that the German people would take to heart the words, as he put it, "of the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews."
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Such was the broad, if still evolving, cultural milieu into which Karl Marx was born. It is impossible to sort out Catholic and Lutheran influences on Marx, because it was more a matter of cultural spirit than of creed, and who is to say what the German Christian ethos, particularly in the Rhineland, was by that time? We know that, even as a child, he would never have had more than a formalized and shallow relationship to the Christian religion into which he had been sacramentally initiated, but contempt for Jews was by then in the German air. Marx would have learned other lessons about the values of Judaism by witnessing his own parents' capacity to shrug it off like an old cloak. "No one is proud to derive from an inferior people, and it is understandable that Marx—always conscious of his Jewish origin—tried to alleviate his burden by endeavoring to become non-Jewish." This is the scholar Edmund Silberner. "This endeavor—typical of his Jewish self-hatred—led him repeatedly to attacks on the Jews. His aggressiveness towards them was a means of convincing himself and the outside world how little Jewish he was, in spite of his rabbinical ancestors."
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Such attacks had special meaning coming from Marx, and special consequences. As a young man, he went to Bonn, and then to Berlin, for his university education. In Berlin, he was particularly influenced by G.W.F Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. But by 1842, at age twenty-four, he was back in Trier, submitting articles to a Cologne newspaper,
Rheinische Zeitung.
By the end of the year, he would be the editor of that paper, but in these months in Trier, the shape of his future work showed itself in a startlingly ugly form. It was then that Marx wrote his first essay of note, which was published in 1843 with the title "On the Jewish Question." The article is a screed that takes off from his mentor Feuerbach's blasphemous description of Jehovah as "nothing but the personified selfishness of the Israelitish people."
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Or, as Marx put it, "Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist."
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It is important to note at the outset of any consideration of Marx's attitudes toward Jews that he was a steady supporter of Jewish emancipation. But he saw that cause in firmly secular terms. Like Voltaire, Marx was by now looking for ways to dismiss the cultural and historical significance of religion, and so he focused on what he called "the everyday Jew" instead of "the Sabbath Jew." Marx wanted to emphasize, as if against Christianity, that there was more to be detested in Jews than just their religion. The impetus for "On the Jewish Question" was the general question of Jewish emancipation, much debated in Europe as ghetto walls fell, and again as they were rebuilt. It was as a liberal that Marx naturally supported emancipation. So did
Rheinische Zeitung,
one of whose owners was Dagobert Oppenheim, of the up-and-coming Cologne Oppenheims, one of the Jewish families that would rise to prominence in the new world of finance.

But something in the subject of the Jew touched a raw nerve in Marx, short-circuiting his liberalism. Whether he could identify the source of his irrationality or not, we can. The rope of history, knotted in Trier, was choking him. Marx took off from the medieval complaint against the Jew as usurer, carrying it to the level of character assassination. He indulged the same old medieval manipulation: Let's force Jews into moneylending and then hate them for it. Hating Jews for moneylending, let's define them by it. Marx's great work, of course, would be a critique of heartless capitalism, and the kernel of his insight shows in this early essay. But where later he will become famous for demonizing the capitalist, here, occupying the same ground in an economics of exploitation, the devil figure is "the real Jew."

Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew. What is the profane basis of Judaism?
Practical
need,
self-interest.
What is the worldly cult of the Jew?
Huckstering.
What is his worldly god?
Money.

Very well: then in emancipating itself from
huckstering
and
money,
and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions and thus the very possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would evaporate like some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society...

We discern in Judaism, therefore, a universal
antisocial
element of the
present time,
whose historical development, zealously aided in its harmful aspects by the Jews, has now attained its culminating point, a point at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

In the final analysis, the
emancipation
of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from
Judaism.
"
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In less than five years from the publication of "On the Jewish Question," after having begun his collaboration with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Marx would publish
The Communist Manifesto
(1848). In that work, his call for "the abolition of the preconditions" of antisocial Judaism was replaced by a demand for an end to the class society. With
Das Kapital
(1867, 1885, 1895), his vile intuition about Jewish "huckstering"—a word drawn, presumably, from the hawking of sellers in a market—was transformed into a substantial critique of the market economy. Instead of writing of the necessary disintegration of Judaism through a natural "historical development," he writes of the "contradictions" in all social systems that, through history, lead to their destruction. His assertions about the inevitable dispersal of the "insipid vapour" of Judaism prepared him for insights into the fate of a bourgeoisie that "produced its own grave diggers."
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One senses that Marx's visceral reaction to the Jew prepared him for his considered rejection of the capitalist. Before turning to the impact of Marx's reduction of the Jew to a shameless market man, it might be useful to note that such a polemic has characterized not only anti-Semites, but also Jews treading the blurry line between self-criticism and self-hatred. Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), for example, was a passionate Zionist in part because he believed that Jews had been deformed by their long status as an oppressed minority in Christian Europe, condemned to lives of hawking and haggling. That oppression had resulted in what he derided as "the crookedness of Jewish morality."
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To say that Marx's lasting ideas were grounded in the hatred of his own people can float above this story like yet another abstraction—but not when one recalls that his people included, say, that "comely" girl of Trier who, in 1096, broke away from her captors to fling herself into the swirling Moselle. Who was Karl Marx to condescend to her? He flattered himself to think his conclusions were drawn from the rational study of history and economics, but his condemnation of Jews, its high moral tone notwithstanding, was barely more than a glib rehash of the twisted charges of Christian preachers, made even as he sought to distance himself from their religion. Marx prided himself on a consideration of "the real Jew," yet his diatribe betrays, in Padover's words, "nearly total ignorance, possibly willful, of the lives and ideas of the people he had descended from."
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He knew nothing real about the true character of Jews, in the past or in his own day.

Of overriding significance is the fact that, in "On the Jewish Question," Marx epitomized his charges in a figure that would become a durable nineteenth- and twentieth-century stereotype. He is not the originator of this particular strain of modern antisemitism—the Jew as the embodiment of materialism—but his is nevertheless an archetypal instance of it. The vitriol of his language thus becomes a symptom of society's disease. The words he used, whether original with him or not, were inflammatory: "The
chimerical
nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the trader, and, above all of the financier."
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In his mature analysis, he would unforgettably label that hated figure not as the Jew but as the capitalist. In the European imagination, however, and in the socialist imagination, thanks in no small part to Marx, the figure of the Jew and the figure of the capitalist would be identical. The Jewish "financier," as a target of revolutionary hatred, would dominate the age. Once again, an imagined "jew" is made to seem pivotal for the salvation or damnation of the rest of society.

The association of Jews and banking, as is well known, grew out of medieval restrictions—Jews could not join guilds or own land—that had forced them into moneylending. The Church condemned usury, but that did not keep many Christians, including prelates, from engaging in the practice, often to the exclusion of Jews. Because of the stigma attached to moneylending, and the readiness of debtors to resent their creditors, it served the purpose of Christian usurers to encourage the myth of the Jewish dominance of the currency exchange and loan businesses. The myth was based not on the real origins of the association of Jews with money, but in a twisted slander—yet another—of Judaism's core beliefs. With its emphasis on what, to Christians, seemed the minutiae of the legislation of Leviticus—those 613 commandments—wasn't Jewish religion all about adding and subtracting? Wasn't the toting up of such observances a kind of spiritual avarice? And wasn't the emphasis on good works a kind of commercial exchange with God? Jews would bargain with God. Or rather, because they did, they bargain with everybody. In other words, observable characteristics of Jews, like their relative prominence in the realm of money, were attributed not to the contingent factors that produced them, including oppression, but to something innate in Judaism.
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In this regard, Marx gave expression to the dominant anti-Jewish prejudice of his time. It seems not to have fazed him that one of his targets, implicitly, was the "financier" Abraham Oppenheim, a backer of the Cologne paper that gave him his first serious job.
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Marx took over as editor of
Rheinische Zeitung
shortly after he wrote "On the Jewish Question" but before he published it. Before the essay appeared, as it turned out,
Rheinische Zeitung
failed because it was too liberal for Prussia.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a group of Jewish investment bankers who had ties to each other and to family branches in various cities and nations. In addition to the Oppenheims, there were the Rothschilds, the Seligmans, the Warburgs, the Sassoons.
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These commercial figures had been able to turn to their economic advantage the long-term disadvantages of enforced ghettoization, which served for these few as an incubator of success. They were quickly taken to be "typical Jews" by the mass of bigoted and resentful Europeans, including some clients, despite the fact that the vast majority of Jews were still burdened by the effects of ghetto dispossession. In 1800, for example, there were six hundred Jewish families in Frankfurt, most in the
Judengasse,
its ghetto. Almost half of their net worth was held by sixty families, several of whom would go on to dominate the finances of the city, and one, the Rothschilds, of the continent.
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Instead of being typical Jews, such figures were successors to the court Jews of the Middle Ages, those physicians, advisors, and, yes, lenders on whom kings, bishops, and popes had relied from the feudal era through the Renaissance. In the myth of the financier, the tradition of "the exception Jew" was kept alive, but it was turned against the rest of Jews when the exception was defined as typical. Religion had become politics and economics, but once again, the Jew was held responsible for the fate of the general population—fate defined as doom. Thus Marx's early, Trier-composed essay "On the Jewish Question," when matched with the incendiary notions in his later writings, "made its small contribution," in the words of Lawrence Stepelevich, "to the formulation of that fatal equation between Judaism and exploitative Capitalism which bore its fruit in the doctrines of National Socialism."
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