"There is a bulky output of literature alleging that Marx’s essay
On the Jewish Question is anti-Semitic because it equates Jewry with the spirit of money-making, the merchant-huckster, preoccupation with self-interest and egoism-that is, with the commercialism of the new bourgeois order. The charge has been furthered in various ways, including forgery: one honest critic renamed the essay
A World Without Jews as if this were Marx’s title.
[1] Few discussions of the essay explain clearly its political purpose and content in connection with the Jewish emancipation question, or even accurately present the views of its target, Bauer. Mainly, the allegation is supported by reading the attitudes of the second half of the twentieth century back into the language of the 1840s. More than that, it is supported only if the whole course of German and European anti-Jewish sentiment is whitewashed, so as to make Marx’s essay stand out as a black spot. This note will take up only the 1843 essay and its background.
"The general method was memorably illustrated in C.B. Kelland’s 1936 novel
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which some may know as a Gary Cooper film. In an attempt to have a hearing declare Mr. Deeds of unsound mind, two little old ladies are brought in from his home town to testify. It’s well known, one explains, that he is pixillated – balmy in the head. The honest woman’s evidence seems damning. But the case blows up later when she is asked one more question: “Who else in your town is pixillated?” She answers: “Why,
everybody!”
"As soon as the question is raised, it is not difficult or even controversial to show that virtually the entire population of Germany (and the rest of Europe, too) was pixillated- that is, habitually used and accepted the words
Jew and
Jewry in the manner of Marx’s essay whether they were favorable to the Jews’ cause or not, whether they were anti-Semitic or not, whether they were Jews or not. In this they were only following the very old, if now discredited, practice of using national and ethnic names as epithets, usually derogatory, for people showing a trait supposedly characteristic of the nation or ethnic group. This practice, which began to be suppressed in self-consciously polite society only a few decades ago, was as common in English as in any other language, and some of it still hangs on. Consider a few:
wild Indian (active child),
apache (Paris criminal),
Hottentot (as in
Hottentot morality),
street arab,
gypsy,
bohemian,
Cossack,
blackamoor,
Turk; or, as an adjective:
Dutch courage,
Mexican general,
French leave. Another of this group, for centuries, has been
Jew..."
Hal Draper: Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype (1977)
www.marxists.org