Marx, Judaism and Palestine

During the Trojan War proverbially fought for the beauty of Helen though the monopoly of the commercial routes was the dominant motive, Laocoon, the priest who warned the Trojans not to let the wooden horse of the Greeks in the city was killed by the two sea serpents as a punishment from the Greek gods.

Alluding to Laocoon, “On Jewish Question”, Marx mentions Captain Hamilton who sarcastically simulates “the devout and politically free inhabitant of New England (America)” metaphorically with Laocoon. The Americans, paraphrasing him, are making no effort to escape from Mamon (wealth) and have given up themselves gleefully to be crushed by its serpents. “Mamon (wealth) is their idol which they adore…. for them, world is no more than a Stock Exchange”. Those were supposedly the characteristics of the Jews of every era.

“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest,” Marx says. “What is the worldly religion of the Jews? Huckstering […] Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities[...] The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange[...] The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general”.

The plague of accumulation and realization of wealth is not restricted to Jews alone. The classical pattern of a Shylock attributed to the Jews hasn’t remained restricted to a tribe but has overpowered the entire world like the strangling snakes of Laocoon. “In North America,” Marx adds, “the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade”. If the traders went bankrupt, they used the Gospel as a commodity to earn money exactly like the Gospel preachers who sold the Gospel to earn money only to return to trade.

The entity of Israel has amalgamated the accumulation and realization of capital in such a way that the distinction between religion, race, and nation has melted away. Does a territory without borders, and constitution, committing genocide of its large native population be called a state? An entity that cannot survive without the direct intervention of the entire imperialist world is at best a satellite for its imperialist mentors.

A modern nation-state defies the logic of a bourgeois state if it is merely a state of people with a common faith and not a combination of people of multiple creeds, ethnicities, and identities. Despite being an antithesis of capitalistic parameters of statehood, Israel remains the integral source of realization of international capital by constantly creating upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa.

For Marx, the Jewish control over wealth has converted Christianity into Judaism for both began worshipping the Mamon. Historically, Jews were either a part of the bourgeoisie or the members of the upper middle class. Being latter they looked after the interests of the upper classes acting as their representatives and underlings, standing for the oppressors against the oppressed, a role universally played by the international petty bourgeoisie, which identifies itself with capital and not labour.

By attaining financial supremacy, Jews attained the political power of the world and through their lust for money changed the spirit of every monotheistic religion into a polytheistic one, making all religions identical. “Practical Jewish spirit,” Marx says, “has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations”. The monotheism of the Jews, he adds, “is … the polytheism of many needs… The god of practical need and self-interest is money”. Hence, money became the divine Gospel all over the world and laid the ground for Judo-Christian civilization, a bourgeois construct.

Marx wrote the Jewish Question much before the birth of Theodor Herzl and the concept of Zionism if existed was in the embryonic stages more in the minds of evangelical Christians rather than the Jews. “In Judaism, a general anti-social element of the present time” exists, Marx states “an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate”.

However, Zionism consolidated the general anti-social element in Jews by playing a race card. Wizeman believed “It was not the Jews who had problems, it was the Jews who were the problem” for other nations because they could not live among them. For Herzel, a monarchist, atheist, and strongly anti-democrat, a Jew was neither a race nor a religion but “a historical unit, one nation with anthropological diversities” but his successors were more royalist than their king. To grab a piece of land by refusing to live with other nations they chose to play anti-Semitism as their trump card. “In March 1942 Hayim Greenberg, a staunch Jew and the editor of the Jewish Frontier, admitted that “to be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an anti-Semite”.

Despite anti-Semitism prevailing in the West, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Jewish upper class was immensely wealthy. Herzel offered Sultan Abdul Hamid of the Ottoman Empire; to pay all the foreign debt he owed in exchange for the settlement of Jews in Palestine. The German Jews, only 0.9% of the entire German population, Lenni Brenner writes, were generally prosperous. Nearly 60% or more were businessmen or professionals, many others were artisans, clerks, and students. An insubstantial number were industrial workers. Most supported liberal capitalism, 64% voted for centrist German Democratic Party, while 28% for the Social Democratic Party, only 4% supported the Communist Party, and the remaining voted for other right-wing parties.

Even when Hitler’s Brown Shirts violently assaulted the Jews, their association Centralverain (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) shifted its loyalties to the spent force of Social Democrats, which after giving up socialism became merely a spineless party incapable of defending the workers and minorities from the threat of fascism. The affluent Jewish class continued to oppose the Communist party not because of its atheism but for its opposition to capitalism.

The power of Jewish wealth can be seen in several other incidents. In 1933 when Nazis decided to boycott the Jews’ stores and to oust their professionals from jobs, American Rabi Dr. Wise gave a call for a counter demonstration in New York. Since Jews dominated the retail trade in the US and Europe, fearing a backlash to their interests the German Jews forced Hitler to backtrack. The face-saving of the Nazis was made possible by the German Zionists who compelled Dr. Wise—who wasn’t a radical either and thought that a few demonstrations could bring Roosevelt into the fray for the Jews—to call off the demonstration. The biggest German banker, Oppenheimer, was a Jew who was adopted as Aryan by none other than Hitler.

When Zionists brokered Ha’avaradeal with Nazis, the latter allowed German Jews to ship three million Reich marks from their wealth to Palestine in the shape of German goods. The goods could be sold to the international market to deposit money in Palestine. Nearly $ 40 million went to Palestine. The amount was much smaller than the one shipped to the US ($650 million), the UK ($ 60milion), and various other Western countries. However, the 60% of the Jewish money that went to Palestine between 1933-39 was made possible through the Zio-Nazi agreement. The more affluent Jews who could pay $5000 each had a separate migration quota. Nearly 16,529 capitalist Jews migrated after contributing the huge sums. While the rest of the world was in a deep recession, the capital created an artificial boom in Palestine.

“Walter and other Rothschild family members,” Ilan Pappe states, “were close allies of the ruling class in Britain. The British branch of their bank became a potent political force when it financed some of the British expenses during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1875, the bank financed both the British purchase of the Suez Canal and Cecil Rhodes’ ventures in Africa. Rothschild was the public face of the family in Britain”. Chaim Weizman had special relations with Lloyd George, the former British premier.

This was the story of the affluent East European Jews. It does not mean there was a dearth of the plundered, pulverized, and devastated Jews. The latter the option-less ones were forced to migrate to Palestine, a country they knew nothing about. The Jewish bourgeoisie preferred the US and the UK over Palestine. After the Soviet Revolution in 1917, the wave of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union especially in Russia was completely wiped out. Lenin offered the Jewish Bund an autonomous region in Siberia, but the hierarchy of the Soviet communist party itself had many Jews including Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky, and they preferred to live like any other member of the Soviet society.

The Soviet revolution divided the Jews into two opposing categories, the Bolsheviks and the Churchillian Zionists. The Bolsheviks were the sworn enemies of Zionism. Trotsky exposed the imperialist conspiracy of Sykes-Picot cleaving Arabs into multiple states under Anglo-French influence in Pravda. Rosa Luxemburg rejected the special Jewish pangs, finding herself closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantation in Putumayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans played ball.

For Marx,” An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible…In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024