To the Editor:
Paul Johnson’s article, “Marxism vs. the Jews” [April], offers an excellent analysis of the fateful ambivalence of Marxism toward the Jewish question or, rather, the question of Jewishness and anti-Semitism. . . .
I would like to emphasize Mr. Johnson’s accurate interpretation of the origins of Marxism precisely in the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. . . . This is an embarrassing topic for many a Marxist zealot. I remember during my student years in Bucharest, Rumania, the clumsy and unconvincing arguments put forward by a professor of dialectical materialism and his desperate attempts to absolve Marx of this intolerable stigma. Paradoxically, the Jewish Marxist militants seemed to be the least interested in illuminating this substratum of their supposedly pristine faith. For Rosa Luxemburg and Georg Lukács . . . there was no trace of anti-Semitism involved in the Marxist design. The message of the prophet was one of universal emancipation and therefore could not entail any reductionist-particularistic approach.
Unfortunately, the historical experiments associated with the name of Karl Marx have not hesitated to capitalize on this persistent, though unavowed, dimension. In this respect, one should not underestimate the role of self-hating Jews—the non-Jewish Jews, as Mr. Johnson calls them—who were more than instrumental first in implementing the Leninist-Stalinist strategy and subsequently in the painful process of cultural-ideological Gleichschaltung. It is therefore a matter of melancholy reflection that this enduring misunderstanding engendered both the massive Jewish commitment to leftist causes and the Jews’ predicament under the Stalinist and neo-Stalinist regimes.
In Stalin’s paranoid imagination, the Jew was the conspirator par excellence; no one, notwithstanding previous revolutionary credentials, could escape the consequences of Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaigns. Trotsky, Kamenev, Radek, Slansky, and Anna Pauker could thus be suspected of trying to carry out the tasks dictated by the omnipotent “Grand Sanhedrin.” The fate of the Revolution, which for Stalin and his epigones always meant the expansion of the Soviet empire, depended on the continuation of such exorcising rituals. . . . Would it be far-fetched to affirm that of all Marxist philosophical-economic texts, the most appealing for the prejudiced mind of the dull Communist apparatchiks remains Marx’s young Hegelian essay, “On the Jewish Question”?
Vladimir Tismaneanu
Voorhees, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
I think Paul Johnson overstates the difference between the anti-Semitism of Marx and that of Hitler. It is true that the Jews did not occupy the same central position in Marx’s demonology that they did in Hitler’s. But Marx shared Hitler’s romantic nationalism and xenophobia. Marx’s newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, was an enthusiastic supporter of Prussian expansionism, and both the paper and Marx in his correspondence with Engels celebrated each new territorial gain with racial attacks on the victims. In 1867, for instance, Marx marked the annexation of Schleswig and Holstein by writing to Engels about the drunken and degenerate character of the Scandinavian people.
More interesting is the violently anti-Russian position of his paper: of all Marx’s racial fixations, this was the most extreme. The Russians, he believed, were a hopelessly reactionary race who needed to be destroyed so that “their very name should be forgotten.” In 1849, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung called for a German race war against Russia, to drive the Russians beyond the Ural mountains and provide the land for German settlement.
Once the pseudo-scientific jargon is stripped away, Marx’s entire theory of ahistorical peoples and Oriental despotisms, and his conviction that only Germany, Britain, and America were prepared for revolution, becomes hard to distinguish from Hitler’s notions of sub-humans and of Aryan superiority. And of course the Nazis also claimed that their theories were scientific.
Arthur Lyons
Richmond, British Columbia
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