Karl Marx’s Jewish blind spot

How the thinker missed the dangers of nationalism.

The Karl Marx monument in Chemnitz, Germany. | Photo Credit: MAREK SLUSARCZYK/iStock

Karl Marx’s famous essay “On the Jewish Question”, written in 1843 and published a year later, needs to be reread in the light of Zionist and other cultural forms of nationalism in vogue today. The concerns in Marx’s essay can be divided into two parts: one, the question vis-à-vis the specific Christian-Jew conflict in Germany via the historian and theologian Bruno Bauer’s prescription for Jews; two, the critique of Jewishness (and of all collective identities or communities of faith) in relation to the general theory of modernity.

Bauer reminded Jews to learn to be German first and an everyman next, and forget being a Jew. His argument was that to ask for recognition from the Christian state of Germany was to legitimise it, hence Jews must bypass that question and demand everyone’s liberation from a religious state. There was no point, Bauer argued, to demand the end of Christian prejudice without ending Jewish prejudice. But he did not realise that he was dismissing the minoritarian significance of the Jewish question in favour of the nationalist—as if a community’s subjective views regarding others are significant enough to determine its political status. Even though the Christian state is critiqued in favour of the secular, by dismissing the concerns of the minority, Bauer’s was a majoritarian understanding of the problem. In his universalist logic, Jews must give up their minority status if they want to be emancipated.

Marx explores Bauer’s critique of the Jewish desire for political emancipation. He is in agreement with Bauer on the larger framework of a secularised national identity but differs on the question of citizenship. For Marx, citizenship is a liberal-bourgeois concept which individuates people by merely privatising belief, ego, self-interest, and the desire and accumulation of property and capital. To treat emancipation at the level of civil society alone is thus not enough; it restricts its revolutionary potential. All rights of citizens from labour to law are constricted by the emphasis on civil society alone, and produce what Marx calls the “abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person”.

Marx is unhappy that religion remains the “secret” of the individual citizen, as Judaism exists alongside the citizen in a secularised form. The argument for the destruction of any community of faith is based on a rational and universal idea of human emancipation. It forgets the majoritarian potential of nationalism where the minorities are under threat. Fascist thinking is not the opposite of Marxism in this regard, but its double.

Marx’s anti-culturalism

National Socialism condemned Jews in the name of those essentialised attributes that Bauer and Marx, too, laid down as a sickness that had to be overcome. Marx’s anti-culturalism identifies negative attributes of character (such as ego and self-interest) to traditional identities alone. A national community as a form of collective self-interest that can pose a majoritarian danger for “others” was not considered. Even though the ideological motivations are different, fascists use and exploit the language of cultural essentialism against minorities. In his blindness, Marx blessed the majoritarian project and put the minority community in danger. His radical prescription to make being Jew impossible is dangerously close to Nazi logic that the Jew must be eliminated because he cannot be integrated. The fascist and communist idea of the nation has one fundamental connection: no one can exist as other within it, without being an enemy.

The duality in the citizen-cum-person-of-faith that Marx decried as the privatising of religion in bourgeois civil society is the best option for people to grapple with the terrors of the new beast called the modern nation-state, and the alienation of individuated life. This allegorical existence allows a desirable middle ground to civil society, caught between the oppressive state and the community. It acts as a safety valve in spiritual and psychological terms for people faced with the demands of a modern Moloch.

What Marx calls a “secret” is the Jewish soul that faced Hitler’s concentration camps and the dissident soul that faced Josef Stalin’s Gulags. Stalin believed in “the engineers of the human soul” who treated society like a factory that produced subservient bodies. In contrast, Gandhi said, explaining Satyagraha in Young India in 1931, that “the tyrant, whom the satyagrahi seeks to resist, has power over his body and material possessions, but he can have no power over his soul.” The ungraspable, hence bottomless soul preserves the innermost spirit of resistance.

In modernity, the community has been paradoxically broken and widened to embrace the nation. Hegel’s misplaced enthusiasm for the nation beast ruined the edifice of modern thought. There was a scientific bravura to produce a new society. The figure called “man” was born out of a rationalist fantasy that turned against itself. As if people under the liberal state are half-angels, awaiting transformation into full-fledged angels under a communist regime.

Milan Kundera wrote about such angels in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978). Kundera described them as sincere citizens of a totalitarian regime who indulged in “circle dancing”: a giant dance of forgetting (“absolute injustice and absolute solace at the same time” as Kundera explained in The Art of the Novel) where political crimes were collectively ignored and endorsed at the same time. No one wanted to fall out of this ring, for “once a circle closes, there is no return”.

The nihilist characters of Dostoevsky’s Demons (1873) are considered precursory analogues to people who appeared later in the stage of history. Stavrogin is a man who lost the distinction between good and evil, and for Shigalyev, the possibility of freedom can only come from limitless dictatorship. Such thinking has produced far-left and far-right ideologues in the twentieth century. They define and limit the nature of Marx’s optimism.

The Rabbis and orthodox Jews who have decried Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians are those who have not sold their brains and soul to the Zionist project. They know the difference between an ethical community and the unscrupulous ways of a settler-community. Surely, the Jews must decide if their being the chosen people must include violence in the name of Israel, people chosen for endless violence to establish a dystopian promise of Israel.

‘Struggle between two memories’

The evil of German nationalism forced the Jews to leave their homeland in Europe and seek refuge in Israel. The nature of confrontation with Muslims who inhabited that place was overridden by the lens of a brutalised and desperate people. In 1973, when he was living in Beirut, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Arab generosity put the Israeli-Palestinian encounter as “a struggle between two memories.” The community of memories evoked by Darwish falls outside the discourse of the state. That is why the Palestine-Israel encounter was bound to be catastrophic.

Gandhi wrote in the Harijan in 1938: “This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews. But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history.” Despite acknowledging its exceptional status, Gandhi hesitated to justify a nation based on the tragic irony of history where persecution moved hands. His reasons were historical and political, rather than showing a lack of empathy: “The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun.” Gandhi dared to give his understanding of Judeo-Christian ethics back to the Jews: You cannot claim a nation by committing foundational violence against people who lived there.

The Enlightenment provided the world with a new ethic of the secular self, but it experienced severe strain under modern regimes of power. The secular self is cushioned by the idea of a national community founded on a ruthless idea of sovereignty. It transforms the idea of neighbourhood into territorial paranoia.

In 1918, Tagore described modern power as the “scientific product made in the political laboratory of the Nation, through the dissolution of personal humanity.” Unparalleled in his time, Tagore’s indictment of the nation negates the optimism of Enlightenment thought. In Tagore’s visionary understanding, the humanist project that replaced the community with the utopian idea of the “new man” was nothing more than a soulless laboratory product of history. It is time the misplaced arrogance of modern political thought dialogues with older forms of being human.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India.