I recall reading about Karl Marx’s anti-Semitism, but I’m not sure where I read it. Anyone have any sources?
Thanks
James B Whisker’s article from the Journal of Historical Review, which this page refutes.
Good grief, how odd I should find myself in the position of defending Karl Marx!
Let’s put it this way- Karl Marx didn’t have any SPECIAL hostility toward Jews. He didn’t single out Jews for special insults or derision. He held ALL religion in contempt, and disdained Jews neither more nor less than he disdained Catholics, Methodists, or moon-worshippers.
He seemed to think that, in a communist utopia, all religion would be abandoned, and anti-semitism itself would cease to have any meaning.
KM was jewish, so no.
However, he did not embrace his heritage and considering the strong anti-semitic social currents of his time, he stayed away from anything jewish and thoroughly portrayed himself as a gentile, bourgoise (sp?), intellectual.
Marx-bashers have used this to portray him as anti-semitic, which is not true.
Search on my username and Marx. I read a very interesting biography about him a year ago and posted about it here. Arguably, no single individual has had a bigger influence on the 20th century on a global scale. To just dismiss him as having crackpot theories about economics is making it too easy. I’m no fan of his teachings. On the contrary. But it’s still interesting to look at the source of so much evil during the past 100 years.
He most certainly was not. Marx’s father was a convert to Christianity, and Marx was baptised and raised a Christian. As an adult he was an athiest.
Though it is true he envisaged a religionless society, Marx essentially rejected the utopian communism of his predecessors. He wasn’t so naïve as to believe that the world would be a utopia just because the problems associated with class and capitalism had been eliminated.
No.
First of, is a person Jewish, if born of a Jewish mother, while that person publicly refer to him(her-)self as an atheist? Hopefullt someone Jewish will wander in here and clearify this subject. I suspect there has been an ongoing debate if ‘Jewish’ is adhering to a religion, or a ‘race’.
However:
On his peternal side, an ancestor, Joshue Heschel Lwow became rabbi of Trier (the town where KM was born) in 1723. The post as rabbi was kind of inherited in the family. KM’s grandfather, Meier Halevi Marx, was succeeded as town rabbi by Karl’s uncle Samuel. KM’s grandfather on his mother’s side was a Rabbi (in Holland).
When Prussia took back Rhineland from Napoleon, KM’s father, Hirschel Marx, petitioned the Prussian government to end the legal discrimination of him and his “fellow believers”. Having tasted freedom under French rule, the Jewish community was not too happy about being back under Prussian rule.
Instead, a new law in 1812, made life for the Jews even harder. They were banned from public offices and from ‘practising in the professions.’ Hirschel, trying to get round all this, re-invented himself as Heinrich Marx and joined the Lutheran church. Following this, the family prospered and he was able to work as an attorney. Considering that he married a Jewish woman, and that there was debate in the family whether KM should become a rabbi, it’s not a big leap to say that Marx’ father was only paying lip-service, and was in fact Jewish. And so was Karl.
I’m not an expert on the Jewish laws. Although I am Jewish, I do not follow the faith, or any faith, but it is my understanding that if your mother was (or is) Jewish, you are Jewish, and nothing you profess can change that. I know an atheist, who was born a Jew (he belongs to some kind of humanitarian society, an atheist society), who considers himself a Jewish atheist. I am an agnostic. Guess that makes me a Jewish agnostic. 
See, that’s what I love with SDMB. There is someone with an answer for everything.
Q.E.D. Whether KM considered himself Jewish or not is beyond the point. He was Jewish. And back to the OP. Even if he sneered at religion, and proclaimed himself an atheist, it seems a bit farfetched to say that he was anti-semitic. This would make him side with the official powers of the time and support sanctions against his own family. So no, he wasn’t anti-semitic.
You mean in the eyes of the Jews. Non-Jews generally don’t believe in indelible spiritual brandings which mark someone as a member of a chosen people and which are inherited through the maternal bloodline. Karl Marx, as a self-professed non-Jew, was not Jewish as far as he and everyone else who doesn’t believe in the covenental inheritance is concerned.
Put it this way: I hereby found the Church of Psychonaut and declare all people, living or dead, whose names end in either X or 8, to be members. Ergo both you and Karl Marx are members of my church. Now we can just as easily claim that Karl Marx was a Psychonautian. Karl Marx isn’t around to refute this claim, but you probably aren’t too happy about your forced membership.
I suppose one could claim that Marx was Jewish by race, provided one makes the highly debatable claim that Jews are a biological race unto themselves. But if you advance the maternal bloodline argument, then you’re not making a biological argument but a religious one, or else you must defend absurd cases where two siblings can belong to different races.
Karl Marx did write about the Jewish religion/community and was critical of the way which the Jewish community (by the Jewish community here I strictly mean the eastern european Orthodox Jewish community rather than the western assimlated ‘Jews’) set itself apart from society at large.
Certainly it was not antisemtism.
Well, now, this is a real logical dilemma. One born of a Jewish mother is always Jewish in the eyes of the Jewish faith. KM was born of a Jewish mother, so he was a Jew in the eyes of the Jewish faith. However, KM said he wasn’t Jewish; therefore, he was not a Jew in his eyes. But since (note above) he was always Jewish in the eyes of Jews (which he was before he purportedly renounced his religion), he can not no longer be non-Jewish.
Are either of those sources even reliable?
And if you say “There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet” three times in a row, you will always be Muslim in the eyes of the Muslim faith, no matter how vigorously you later protest that you were just kidding or subsequently changed your mind.
I don’t see much of a dilemma here. According to most Jews, Karl Marx was Jewish, but according to Karl Marx himself and 99% of the rest of the world, he wasn’t. In objective writing, what do you think it makes more sense to call him? Why assume the opinion of a tiny, vastly outnumbered minority, whose supernatural arguments you probably don’t even agree with, when you can go straight to the horse’s mouth for the answer to this question?
I can’t beleive I’m the first to bring up this argument.
In the Old Testament, it was stated that any child born to a Jewish mother was in fact Jewish. Christianity arose from Judeaism, therefore, all Christians are Jewish?
Seems to me that this rule was written to protect invading forces from “propogating” with Isrealites, or at least giving comfort to the poor women.
As a Catholic, I went through Confirmation, stating at an age of reason that I accepted my faith, not just by being born into it. This is in NO WAY a lure to the Pit. But if a person denounces their religion (of any teaching), does this not break them from any ties? Especially in a historic sense?
I’ve found their standard of journalism to be significantly higher than practically any mass-market news medium. With the ideologies they’re pushing, they have to be in order to avoid outright dismissal and ridicule.
The former publication in particular styles itself a history journal and is careful to cite all its sources so that independent verifications and critiques can be made. And such critiques have indeed been made; you’ll find plenty of rebuttals to their various articles at http://www.nizkor.org/. They’re not just your average foaming-at-the-mouth white-supremacist Holocaust deniers, but rather relatively clever researchers who are attempting to dispell with reason what they consider to be many myths and inaccuracies of the Holocaust story. Some (most?) of the contributors are known Hitler admirers and self-professed Nazi sympathizers, while others do not deny the Holocaust at all but simply want to strike down some popular urban legends about it.
As for the WSWS, it’s a Trotskyist political newspaper. As far as Trotskyist publications go, it’s pretty good (check out the film reviews in particular), but obviously if you don’t believe in Trotskyism you won’t find yourself agreeing with the spin they put on things.
Note: My opinions do not necessarily reflect those found in the above publications. I am neither a Trotskyist nor a Holocaust denier. I am simply answering your question on the quality and reliability of the factual information found therein.
For the sake of argument - if we exchange religion for nationality:
I’m Swedish. I was born here, my parents were born here, and all of my grandparents and great-granparents. I was raised talking Swedish. Part of me, a very big part, is Swedish. It’s the books I read as a child, the TV-shows I watched, the food I ate. It’s the values that comes from growing up in a Lutheran society.
So, if I moved to the US, gave up my Swedish citizenship and got an American, would I not be Swedish?
Most of the Americans I’ve met have a very clear view about where they’re coming from: “I’m German-Irish.” So your parents came from Germany and Ireland? “No, It was my great-grandfather on my father’s side and my grandmother on my mother’s.” Huh?
Karl Marx called himself an atheist. I do too. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m a product of a society with strong Lutheran values, the same way an atheist from Ireland is a product of a country with strong Cathlic values.
No. Christianity is a proselytizing religion, and as such gained most of its converts from the non-Jewish communities. Probably only a small minority of today’s Christians would be considered Jewish according to the matrilineal bloodline argument.
Bravo – good argument! One might well say that Marx was Jewish, or probably more properly Judeo-Christian, by culture, and that this culture necessarily had some influence on his way of thinking. I think that in this case “Judeo-Christian” is a better term than “Jewish” because of the Marxes’ officially professed religion, plus the fact that Jews were a minority where he grew up. Even if the Marxes’ claim to Christianity was merely a façade and young Karl was raised a Jew, one can’t deny that he would have been exposed to Christian culture practically every time he left his house.
As I said before, I have a friend who was born Jewish but is now an atheist. He calls himself a Jewish atheist. A contradiction in terms? Not to him.
But it most certainly is to other people, including former Jews who consider Judaism to be a religion and that atheists are therefore former Jews.
There is no consensus on this issue, obviously, so it is a matter of personal belief. Unless we had Marx here to ask we’re not going to have anything meaningful to say.