Hitler. Lenin. Stalin. The three biggest destroyers of Jewish life, spiritual and physical, in the 20th century. Arguably, our worst enemies since the Romans. All shared one thing in common: a complete admiration of Karl Marx. A thread on Marx’s virulent antisemitism
“How can you say that Marx was an antisemite? He was, after all, a Jew! His own grand-father an Orthodox Rabbi!” Those are often repeated canards regarding Marx, knowingly or unknowingly meant to obscure his youth, relationships and views, which we’ll explore in that order.
Part 1: His Youth Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany. Trier was, at the time, a deeply Catholic city, with over 90% of its inhabitants professing the faith. Home of the oldest church at the time (more than 1,500 years old).
1818 Germany was a very hard place for religious Jews. It was the center of the maskilim, who were bent to bring Judaism into their vision of “modernity” & the beginning of the Reform movement, who wanted to Germanize Judaism and turn it into a palatable religion for protestants.
Some of the changes they would suggest included bringing organs into synagogues, moving the Sabbath to Sunday, dressing Rabbis in the Lutheran fashion, declaring themselves Germans of the Mosaic persuasion, that Germany was their Fatherland and Berlin their Jerusalem…
In the midst of all this was a third, even more sweeping, movement: conversion through social pressure. Tired of living in margins of society, more & more Germans Jews who had gone through the maskil education system were opting out of Judaism and embracing their host’s religion.
It was an easy ticket out of the restrictions imposed on Jews, allowing for the upward mobility & easier life they desired in German society. We don’t have the precise date, but it’s most likely that Heinrich Marx converted to Lutheranism in 1819, soon after Karl’s 1st birthday.
Marx’s mother was more reluctant. While not observant herself, she only fully acquiesced to her own conversion & the baptism of her children in 1924, when Karl was 6. His parents, though it might have been at first a conversion of convenience, soon became truly devout Lutherans.
And so was Marx, at least at first. We know that by age 17, as one of his last works before high school graduation, was an essay on John’s 15th Chapter. Only after he entered university and discovered Hegel’s views did he embrace the atheism he would become famous for.
I have never read anywhere that Marx had much to do with his extended family, who presumably shunned them for converting out. This is aside from a few visits to an uncle & family members in order to mooch from them after the death of his parents, as he refused to take up any work
In conclusion: Marx never received a Jewish education, never went to cheder, never went to yeshiva, never received any Torah education whatsoever, never had a Jewish presence in his life or many Jewish friends growing up we are aware of. He was Lutheran surrounded by Lutherans.
Part 2: His antisemitism & racism Marx hated Jews. Truly hated Jews. Not far behind were blacks, too. Paul Lafargue was his son-in-law, the husband of his daughter Laura. Originally from Cuba, he moved to Europe to rub shoulders with socialists & get involved in politics.
Marx constantly derided his son-in-law by calling him “the n*grillo” and “the gorilla”. He complained to Engels that “Lafargue has the blemish customarily found in the n*gro tribe - no sense of shame, by which I mean shame about making a fool of oneself”.
It’s unclear whether he fully disowned his daughter for marrying Lafargue, but at the very least he very explicitly and vehemently told her how much he disagreed with her choice for marriage. Their relationship was very much strained as a results
Engels was as much a racist as Marx was, and said he had deducted scientifically that, based on his features, Lafargue was possessed at least “one-eight or one-twelfth of ni**er blood”. When Paul ran for a political office in Paris, he wrote to Laura Marx in a letter that:
“Being in his quality as a ni**er, a degree nearer to the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtably the most appropriate representative of that district.” The reason why he was so appropriate to represent that specific district? It contained a zoo.
Paul and Laura ended up taking their own lives in a suicide pact.
Marx and Engel’s correspondence was also replete with racist vitriol that they would spew at all those they hated, especially Jews. Discussing a Jewish colleague, Marx said he hated his “cynical, oily-obtrusive, phony-Baronial Jew-manners”.
He referred to another, Ferdinand Lasalle, as “greasy Jew”, “the little k*ke”, “water-polack Jew”, “Jew Braun” “Y*d” “Izzy”, “Wily Efraim”, “Baron Itzig” and “the Jewish Ni**er”. He also wrote about him that: “It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and
the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the N*groes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt.” He added that he could be wrong and that his “cranial formation” might be as such because “his mother or his grand-mother on the father’s side was crossed with a ni**er”.
He ended by saying “The union of a Jew & German on a N*gro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid. The fellow’s opportunity is also ni**erlike”. His hatred was not restricted to individuals, as he wrote in another letter that “the Israelite faith is repulsive to me”.
He wrote in The Holy Family (co-authored with Engels) “the Jewishness of bourgeois society, the inhumanity of present existence, which finds its highest embodiment in the system of money.” Bourgeoisie is Jewishness, Jewishness is inhumane & it’s inhumanity is embodied in money.
Marx: “The capitalist knows that all commodities—however shabby they may look or bad they may smell—are in faith & in fact money, internally circumcised Jews, and in addition magical means by which to make more money out of money.” The Jew is a capitalist, the capitalist a Jew.
In fact Marx’s writing is replete with blood libel analogies. After framing Jews as behind capitalism, he accuses capitalism of being a vampire who requires blood to thrive: “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more,
the more labor it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has bought from him.” The extension of the workday into the night “only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor,”
all of this resulting in the fact that “the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited.’” Marx was also an avid fan of conspiracy theories, for example he believed that the British had engineered the Irish potato famine.
Why? In order to thin out the Irish to satisfy landlords. He also believed that the Crimean War was a false-flag to hide the collusion between England and the Russian Empire In fact, his whole philosophy rested on the theory of international (Jewish) bankers controlling society.
