In the Israeli political philosopher Shlomo Avineri’s recent biography of Karl Marx, he asserts that his subject’s “Jewish origins and background did leave significant fingerprints in his work, some of them obvious and others less so.” Born to Jewish parents, Marx was baptized as a child, shortly after his father converted to Christianity in pursuit of a legal career. His sole piece of writing on Jews per se brims with anti-Jewish invective and crass stereotypes. While Avineri does not attempt to downplay this, he does suggest some possible mitigating factors, e.g., that Marx slandered the Jews for purely tactical reasons. Daniel B. Schwartz writes in his review:
This reading would be more plausible were it not for the fact that Marx repeatedly used anti-Jewish slurs in his [private] letters. Avineri notes perhaps the most egregious example of this—Marx’s suggestion that Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the first working-class mass movement in Germany, represented a “combination of Judaism and Germanism with the basic negro substance” because of “the shape of his head and the growth of his hair.” Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. Marx also commonly referred to Lassalle in his correspondence as “Jüdchen” and “Jüdel” (little Jew) or “Itzig” [the Yiddish equivalent of Isaac] and “Baron Itzig,” [all clearly demeaning turns of phrase]. And Lassalle wasn’t the only object of Marx’s anti-Jewish scorn.
As for Avineri’s contention that Marx might have attempted to backtrack from his anti-Semitism in his and Friedrich Engels’s book The Holy Family, Schwartz is equally skeptical:
It may indeed be that Marx was trying to repair things in The Holy Family. But in light of the considerable evidence of anti-Jewish feeling in his private writings, it is not clear to me that his remorse was more than tactical. The likeliest explanation for Marx’s treatment of Judaism in “On the Jewish Question” is that he shared the derogatory stereotypes of Jews as exploiters and Judaism as an “egoistic” religion that were common even among European liberal and revolutionary thinkers at the time. While it is possible that he was seeking to strategically distance himself from his Jewish origins, it is equally, if not more likely that this was simply Marx, [unfiltered].
Somewhat surprisingly, Avineri has nothing to say about Marx’s Jewishness in his assessment of his afterlife. Jewishness, I would contend, has proved far more influential in Marx’s reception than it ever did in his life and work. . . . [A]ssertions of Marx’s Jewishness were a major trope of the right-wing opposition to socialist parties and trade unions in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, nowhere more evident than in Hitler’s and the Nazis’ broadsides against “the Jew Karl Marx” and “Judeo-Bolshevism.” This survives today on the alt-right. Yet Marx’s Jewishness has also been seized upon by Jewish socialists, who frequently celebrated Marx as a Jewish folk hero who was one of their own.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/7219/marx-and-the-jewish-fingerprint-question/