Tuesday, July 10, 2018

How Anti-Semitism Brought About Zionism with Such people as Marx, Bonaparte, and Dryfus

Nadene Goldfoot                            
1818-1883

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a middle-class family, Marx studied law and Hegelian philosophy.  He was born on May 5, 1818 in Tier, Germany/, Prussia in a former Jewish family but abandoned Judaism before he was born.  His parents had him baptized at the age of 6.   He died March 14, 1883.  
                                                 
The Jewish migration known as the First Aliyah of 5 running from 1882-1903 and consisted of individuals and small groups inspired by the Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) and the BILU movements. Upon arrival to the barren land of Israel, these pioneers established the early rural settlements called “moshavot.”  My grandfather
chose to leave Lithuania and immigrate to England where he found Ireland might be better only to decide to get to Canada where he ended in Idaho, USA.  Finding an accepting home was not easy.  
        
It was in 1882 when my Zaydah  was only 12 that 25,000 Jews from Russia immigrated to Palestine in a movement called the First Aliyah. Maybe that's because of the anti-Semitic May Laws of 1882 that started.    They lived together to start a community in a dangerous territory where the Ottoman Empire ruled.  Jews never had emancipation in the Muslim countries and lived as dhimmis, or 2nd class citizens.  It was bad, but not as bad as life was for Jews in certain sections of Europe. We were scapegoats everywhere, accused of even causing bad weather.   Of course, the Nazis picked up the hatred against Jews and in 1933 were against their RACE.  Jews had never known themselves to be of a different race.  They looked upon themselves as a different religion.  And what does the UN use as a reason for picking on Israel all the time?  No other country can be found fault with except Israel.  It's downright obvious.  They don't like Jews, either.  You don't have to read the Talmud to know that other states commit horrible injustices but are never called on it.  

Marx was expelled from France as a result of his attacks on the Prussian government so went to Brussels and renounced his Prussian citizenship and became "stateless."  Then he fell in with the Communists, calling themselves the League of the Just."  That's when he wrote his famous "Communist Manifesto" which became the classic work of Marxian socialism.  He believed that history was essentially the account of class struggles between the oppressing and the oppressed.  

David ben Gurion had mentioned in his letter to Charles de Gaulle, that Karl Marx no doubt was a genius and a Jew himself, but had written slanderous things about Jews and had turned out to be anti-Semitic towards his own people!  He was what we call a self-hating Jew-he hated his parents and they in turn must have hated theirs-and all because everyone else hated them.   

"The British journalist and historian Paul Johnson has argued that “The second part of Marx’s essay is almost a classic anti-Semitic tract, based upon a fantasied Jewish archetype and a conspiracy to corrupt the world.” The American historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb argued that it cannot be denied that in his essay On the Jewish Question, Marx expressed views that “were part of the classic repertoire of anti-Semitism.”  Noted expert on antisemitism, Robert Wistrich, declared, (Soviet Jewish Affairs, 4:1, 1974) “the net result of Marx’s essay [On The Jewish Question] is to reinforce a traditional anti-Jewish stereotype – the identification of the Jews with money-making – in the sharpest possible manner.” In his book, Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx and the Jewish Question , Dennis Fischman comments that in the second section of his essay, “Marx seems fairly to bristle with anti-Jewish sentiments.” 
By anti-Semitism I mean the denial of the right of the Jew to autonomous existence, i.e., to freely determine his/her own being as Jew. Anti-Semitism therefore entails an attitude of hostility to the Jew as Jew. This is an act of violence, addressed to an essential property of humanity: the assertion of an identity, which may be understood as a socially shared structuring of subjectivity. To attack the free assumption of identity is to undermine the social foundation of the self. Judged by these criteria, OJQ [On the Jewish Question] is without any question an anti-Semitic tract – significantly, only in its second part, “Die Fähigkeit.” No attempt to read these pages as a play on words can conceal the hostility which infuses them, and is precisely directed against the identity of the Jew.

In fact, so commonly held is the view that Marx was an anti-Semite that in 1964, Shlomo Avineri, a leading commentator on Marx, stated (“Marx and Jewish Emancipation,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1964) “That Karl Marx was an inveterate antisemite is today considered a commonplace which is hardly ever questioned.”  Marx’s essay also contains accusations against the Jewish religion which Marx says has “Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself.
There's so much that Marx would not admit to himself, and does not delve into in making his statements, like the fact that Jews were kept from so many occupations so as not to give competition with Christians in a Christian-ruled society.  The only thing they would allow Jews to do was to deal with money as in loans, being it was an occupation they didn't want Christians to debase themselves with.   It wasn't the Christian thing to do.  
                                                       
Born February 12, 1814, Jenny von Westphalen
She died December 2, 1881
Married Karl Marx in 1843, mother of 7, 3 lived.  

What had caused him to become self-hating?  We'll leave that up to the psychologists.  Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier, Marx became more serious about his studies and his life. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, an educated baroness of the Prussian ruling class who had known Marx since childhood. As she had broken off her engagement with a young aristocrat to be with Marx, their relationship was socially controversial owing to the differences between their religious and class origins, but Marx befriended her father Ludwig von Westphalen (a liberal aristocrat) and later dedicated his doctoral thesis to him.  Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June 1843 they got married in a Protestant church in Kreuznach.  Marx and von Westphalen had seven children together, but partly owing to the poor conditions in which they lived whilst in London, only three survived to adulthood.  They had had 4 daughters and named them all Jenny.  

The man never did study his own Jewish history.  He felt only antipathy and contempt for the Jewish people because of this and his parent's attitudes.  When he described Judaism, and the Jews, it was in terms similar to those used by many ati-Semites.  From 1848 on, Marx envisaged the Jews chiefly as a financial reactionary group.  

It is men like Karl Marx who feeds anti-Semitism to the world.  David ben Gurion mentioned this to Charles de Gaulle, since these ideas seep into so many Europeans, and France was a center of it as well as having been once been helpful towards the Jewish people.  
                                                   
1769-1821

For it was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French emperor when during his Middle Eastern campaign of 1799, he issued an appeal to the Jews sort of promising the resuscitation of a Jewish state, but somehow this met with little response from his own people.  "Then he convoked an Assembly of Jewish Notables in Paris and ordered a temporary moratorium on debts owed to Jews in the Rhineland. "That wasn't helpful for these Jews at all!  However, what so often happened was that large debts were not honored, not paid off and oftentimes the Jewish loaner was murdered  to end the debt.   The 111 Notables met on July 15, 1806 to April 6, 1807 and talked about various aspects; Jewish matrimonial status, internal administration, occupations, duty to the state.  Napoleon convoked  the Sanhedrin which met February 9 to March 9, in 1807.  What he was doing was starting the ball rolling for Jewish Emancipation.  This meant that Jews would finally receive civil rights not only in France but in other areas subject to his political domination such as Italy and Germany.  

When Napoleon fell, all the concessions were rescinded or diluted in different degrees.  In some German cities, Jews were expelled and the ghetto system was restored in Rome and other parts of Italy.  
                                                      
1859-1935

We would think this was wonderful and would hold water in France.  The Dreyfus case woke up the Jews.  Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish captain in the army on the general staff and was accused by anti-Semites of selling secret documents to Germany, so in 1894 he was condemned to prison for life.  He was adamant that he was innocent but was forced  to a public degradation in Paris and sentenced to serve  out his life in a Devil's Island's prison.  Finally, the end of this terrible fate ended in 1906 when he was found innocent.  This anti-Semitism divided all of France into camps for or against Jews;  the Catholic clergy, the military, and the right-wing refused to recognize a miscarriage of justice which would lower the prestige of the army.  It contributed to the separation of the Church and the State of France in 1905, and to the rise of the Socialist Party, and through Herzl-to the development of Zionism.  As for Dreyfus, he was reinstated in the army, retiring with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.  

Jews did not get emancipation in Russia till the end of World War I in 1917.  
                                                         
Jerusalem showing respect for other religions
Here are Christian churches and Mosques with minarets 
Zion by definition means Jerusalem.  It was the stronghold in Jerusalem held by the Jebusites that David captured and is identified with this city.  The prophets called Jerusalem "ZION."  It is our spiritual symbol.  In the Maccabean times Mt Zion was identified with the Temple Mount and the City of David together.  Josephus, the Jewish general captured by the Romans, identified Zion with the Upper City of David, an its identification with the eastern hill or Lower City was forgotten.  Since the Crusader period, the Tomb of David on Mt Zion became an established Jewish tradition which has continued into modern days, especially in 1948 to 1967 when this hill was the only part in ancient Jerusalem in the possession of Israel.  To be a Zionist is to think it's all right to return to Israel to live because that's where we came from.  It was our home, our first one and the place that G-d said we should live.  We were full citizens there with rights, unlike all the other places we've had to live in throughout the ages.  
                                                         
1860-1904

Theodor Herzl made it a political movement at the First Zionist Congress in 1897.  They hope for a national home in Palestine guaranteed by public law.  Zionists realized we were still a people or nation and could not assimilate themselves to other peoples without losing their identity and their religion.  Born in Budapest, Hungary, he studied in Vienna, Austria from 1878-1884.  As a newspaper journalist, he became interested in the Jewish problems, advocating assimilation at first.  He even suggested a place somewhere in Africa, but that didn't go over at all.  No, what every man prayed for 3 times a day was to return to Israel;  to Jerusalem.  It was a prayer that lasted since 70 CE, almost 1800 years.  Letting go of that dream was almost like losing our Judaism completely.  It was enough already to have adapted to such a cruel world as to having synagogues for our prayers and our rabbis.  The  Dreyfus case woke him up, too.  Then he wrote this book, about the state we needed.  This was one non-religious Jew who felt empathy for Jews who were religious, unlike Karl Marx completely.  He saw that this was how we as a people kept our morals given to us by Moses.  We had promised to do so.  We were the stiff-necked people who kept our promises.  
                                                         

Can you find Israel quickly?  
It's these world events that have caused us Jews to realize that there's only one safe place to live in this world, in our own country where we are wanted and appreciated, not hate and despised.  It's where we learned in the first place to be kind to strangers for we were strangers in Egypt.  It's where we learned not to rejoice at our enemy's deaths when the Egyptian soldiers were drowning in the sea that had parted for us only.  It's where we learned that there was only one true G-d, and to obey his laws, not our befuddled ones.  I wonder if Charles de Gaulle ever learned all David ben Gurion tried to remind or make him aware of that was our history.  


Resource:  http://www.philosophersmag.com/opinion/30-karl-marx-s-radical-antisemitism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_von_Westphalen
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://israelforever.org/history/aliyah_bet/the_backdrop_of_jewish_settlement_the_early_aliyot/

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