Communisms Jewish Question

In the last two decades a large amount of previously secret documents on Jewish issues emerged from the newly opened Communist archives. The selection of these papers published in the volume and stemming mostly from Hungarian archives will shed light on a period of Jewish history that is largely ignored because much of the current scholarship treats the Shoah as the end of Jewish history in the region. The documents introduced and commented by the editor of the volume, András Kovács, will give insight into the conditions and constraints under which the Jewish communities, first of all, the largest Jewish community of the region, the Hungarian one had to survive in the time of the post-Stalinist Communist dictatorship. They may shed light on the ways how “Jewish policy” of the Soviet bloc countries was coordinated and orchestrated from Moscow and by the single countries. The archival material will prove that the ruling communist parties were restlessly preoccupied with the “Jewish question.” This preoccupation, which kept the whole issue alive in the decades of communist rule, explains to a great extent its open reemergence in the time of transition and in the post-communist period.

This essay, originally published in 1844 as Zur Judenfrage, must be one of Karl Marx's most ignored and suppressed works. Marx, himself of Jewish descent, while answering an essay by fellow Hegelist philosopher Bruno Bauer on the topic of the emancipation of Jews in Prussia, raged polemically against Jewish behavior and culture, asking and answering his own questions this way: "What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money! ... What is contained abstractly in the Jewish religion - contempt for theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself." This new edition has been completely reset and contains an introduction by Arthur Kemp which outlines Bauer's initial works that sparked Marx's writings, and some further evidence of Marx's racist sentiments toward African people. From the introduction: Given that Jewish Communists went on to establish Communism as an openly-declared world ideology which captured Russia and Eastern Europe for nearly eighty years, and, in the West, as an undeclared form of "socialism" which has now permeated America and Western Europe, Marx's pronouncements on Jewish behavior and race seem out of place-until the staggering hypocrisy of contemporary Jewish behavior is considered. In the USA, for example, organized Jewry in the form of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish extremist pressure groups continuously agitate for what they call "civil rights" and open borders for America-but at the same time, fanatically support the Jews-only state of Israel which actively discriminates against Palestinians and has a racially-based immigration policy designed to keep Israel as ethnically pure as possible. This pattern of outright hypocrisy is repeated in all other European nations as well-while taking extensive measures to protect their own identity and actively opposing intermarriage with non-Jews-Jewish organizations and "anti-racist" front organizations lead the way in opposing any European attempts to preserve their identity, even if those Europeans are merely trying to do what the Jews themselves do. It is this hypocrisy and double-standard-of one rule for Jews, another rule for non-Jews-which has been the hallmark of Marxism, dating from the father of Communism himself, Karl Marx. This will become clear as the reader delves into this work.

This title presents a full-length analysis of the identification of Jews with communism. It traces the myth of Jewish communism from the traditional anti-Jewish prejudices on which it is built, to its crucial role in Eastern European Stalinist and post-Stalinist politics.

In The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate, Enzo Traverso analyses an intellectual controversy that runs over more than a century, between Jewish emancipation and the Holocaust, between Marx and the Frankfurt School, stressing both its achievements and its limits.

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.

The first English translation of Karl Marx’s anti-Semitic writings, with critical analysis by the founder of the Philosophical Library. Long available to the readers of Soviet Russia, here are the unexpurgated papers of Karl Marx on the so-called Jewish question, translated into English by philosopher Dagobert D. Runes. While most of Marx’s anti-Semitic diatribes were carefully eliminated by the translators and editors of his books, journalistic writings, and correspondence, their influence was still considerable. Readers unfamiliar with this aspect of Marx’s thought will be startled to discover how well it has served the purposes of the totalitarian regimes of our time. Runes presents this accurate and unflinching translation with the conviction that any student of Marx should be aware of this aspect of his thought. Extensive comments and critical annotations related to the material appear throughout the book.

Tracing the evolving nature of popular and official beliefs about the purported nature of the Jews from the 18th century onwards, Russia and the Jewish Question explores how perceptions of Jews in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union shaped the regimes' policies toward them. In so doing Robert Weinberg provides a fruitful lens through which to investigate the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of modern Russia. Here, Weinberg reveals that the 'Jewish Question' – and, by extension anti-Semitism – emerged at the end of the 18th century when the partitions of Poland made hundreds of thousands of Jews subjects of the Russian crown. He skillfully argues the phrase itself implies the singular nature of Jews as a group of people whose religion, culture, and occupational make-up prevent them from fitting into predominantly Christian societies. The book then expounds how other characteristics were associated with the group over time: in particular, debates about rights of citizenship, the impact of industrialization, the emergence of the nation-state, and the proliferation of new political ideologies and movements contributed to the changing nature of the 'Jewish Question'. Its content may have not remained static, but its purpose consistently questions whether or not Jews pose a threat to the stability and well-being of the societies in which they live and this, in a specifically Russian context, is what Weinberg examines so expertly.