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Home , Jewish eschatology

chapter 1 Marx, Radical Enlightenment and the

Marx and Engels’s approach to the Jewish Question has always been the object of historiographical controversies, which can be summed up in three funda- mental interpretations. The first is theological and deals with Jewish Messian- ism as being one of the pillars, albeit subterranean and hidden, of Marxism; the second considers Marx – or at least the young Marx – as an anti-Semite; the third, on the contrary, sees Zur Judenfrage (1843) as the point of departure for a scientific analysis of the Jewish Question. Highly controversial, these three positions de-historicise or unilaterally stress some contingent assumptions by the founders of historical materialism. The vision of Marx as a thinker deeply shaped by his Jewish origins is widely held, especially among historians of philosophy. The most notable representat- ive of this interpretation is undoubtedly Karl Löwith. In his Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (1949), he claimed to have discovered, beyond the ‘ideological’ conception of history as the history of class struggle, the traces of a ‘transparent ’ that had its ‘unconscious root in Marx’s own being, even in his race’.1 Löwith established a series of formal correspondences between Marxism and monotheist Judeo-Christian : a) between the bourgeoisie/proletariat antagonism and the Christ/ conflict as the foundation of history; b) between the concept of the proletariat and the idea of the chosen people, i.e. between the perspective of a revolution- ary liberation and the expectancy of a -; c) between the conception of communism as the transition from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom and the theological vision of the advent of the king- dom of as the passage from the Civitas terrena to the Civitas Dei.2 These correspondences prove, according to Löwith, that Marxism shares the same teleological conception of history as Hebrew and . Many scholars who are in a number of ways culturally and politically very different from each other – among them Arnold Toynbee, Nikolai Berdiaev, Franz Borkenau and – defend this vision, which sees Marx’s thought as a socialist secularisation of Jewish .3 The most fascin-

1 Löwith 1949, p. 44. 2 Ibid., pp. 44–5. 3 See Toynbee 1974, p. 403; Berdiaeff 1975, p. 38 and 1933, p. 28; Borkenau 1956, pp. 35–6; Berlin 1980, p. 356; finally, Buber 1967, p. 24.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384767_003 12 chapter 1 ating attempt to ‘Judaise’ Marx was that of Bernard Lazare, a revolutionary who for a whole period of his life shared the same point of view as the author of Zur Judenfrage. In his controversial essay Anti-Semitism: Its History and Its Causes (1894), he wrote:

This descendant of a line of and of doctors inherited all the logical strength of his ancestors: he was a clear and lucid Talmudist, who would not be hampered by the foolish minutiae of the practice, a Talmudist who practiced sociology and applied his native qualities as exegete to the critique of political economy. He was animated by this old Hebrew mater- ialism that dreamed perpetually of a realized upon earth and always rejected the distant and problematic hope of an Eden after ; but he was not only a logician, he was also a rebel, an agitator, a biting polemicist and he took his gift for sarcasm and invective, like Heine, from Jewish sources.4

A typical representative of this current is the American critic Murray Wolf- son. In his opinion, Marx’s philosophical trajectory went through three funda- mental stages between 1843 and 1845: a first phase, rationalist and aufklärerisch, in 1843 (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right); a second, materialist human- ist phase, shaped by the influence of Feuerbach (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, On the Jewish Question), in 1844; and finally a dialectical mater- ialist phase opened by the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) and ended by Capital (1867). According to Wolfson, these three philosophical stages find their reli- gious analogies in the scepticism of the Enlightenment thinkers, in Christian humanism as opposed to , and, finally, in Jewish . Essen- tially, historical materialism was only the expression of Marx’s return, in his maturity, ‘to Jewish monist conceptions … that reflect the profound ideological heritage bequeathed by his father despite himself’.5 This theological interpretation is highly controversial: not only does it not find any support in the cultural formation of the author of The Communist Manifesto, but above all it completely ignores his critique of religion as the expression of human alienation (which was not abandoned after 1844 and which can be found in many of the texts of his maturity).6 It is possible to recog-

4 Lazare 1969, p. 170; quoted also in Wilson 1978, p. 97. Later, Bernard Lazare modified his appreciation of the young Marx’s essay, pointing out that his cultural formation had been completely unaffected by Judaism (see Wilson 1978, p. 317). 5 Wolfson 1982, p. xiii. 6 See Parinetto 1980.