A World Without Jews by Karl Marx, Edited by Dagobert D. Runes (1959)

Wikipedia article on Dagobart D. Runes.

Introduction

It is with some reluctance that I have agreed to write these introductory lines to Karl Marx's embittered review of the Jewish problem. My reluctance is caused by the awareness that the Marxian type of anti-Semitism is still virulent among those furtive few who find in Jew hatred a compensative way of living out the envies of their drab existences.

On the other hand, our present era has been offered the repeated spectacle of the yellow badge of anti-Semitism attached to banners allegedly flying for Socialism.

Almost a generation ago, the National Socialist Party of Germany adorned its Staffel with that badge, and in our living days the red flag of the Soviet Union carries next to the hammer and sickle the hooked cross.

Was it just an ill wind of history that brought the evil odor of Jew hatred into these humanitarian camps of Socialist movements? Or are we faced here with a situation of direct cause and effect?

I should like to cite a few paragraphs from the booklet that lies before you. These lines which I am quoting are not from the pen of Adolf Hitler or Colonel Nasser, but verbatim translations from the German original of the Father of Socialism, Karl Marx:

"Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man's life and work, which have become alienated from him: this alien monster rules him and he worships it.

"The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.

"What is the foundation of the Jew in our world? Practical necessity, private advantage.

"What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly God? Money.

"Very well then: emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time."

Some readers may raise the question in their minds, what attitude are we to take toward this man who was himself a Jew? To those readers, I reply that in the middle of the nineteenth century anti-Semitism was mainly a religious and social, not a racial, issue, and among converts such as Karl Marx are to be found vitriolic enemies of Judaism. The convert as a tool in the hands of professional Jew baiters is to be found as early as the Middle Ages in the person of the Jew Pfefferkorn who assisted in attempts to put Jewish sacred literature to the torch. And little more than ten years ago in the Soviet Union, the Jew Ilya Ehrenburg led the attack against Jewish writers as being cosmopolitan, non-patriotic and Zionist. This he did at the grave of almost eight hundred Yiddish poets, writers, and novelists who had been executed at the behest of Stalin.

Karl Marx was not only born a Jew; he came from a rabbinical family. His father Heschel Marx accepted Christianity in 1816 in order to practice law in Prussian territory. Like many converts, Marx found it necessary all his life to justify the mass conversion of his family by attacks against his blood brothers.

Anti-Semitic expressions of his are to be found mainly in the present essay, in his Class Struggles in France, In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and in his Letters to Engels, censored by Bebel and Bernstein. Some of the editors of his writings attempted to modify the vindictiveness of Marx's aggression. Others, like Mehring, even intensified them.

I should like to quote at random a few more examples of Marxian Jew baiting:

"It is the circumvention of law that makes the religious Jew a religious Jew." (Die Deutsche Ideologie, MEGA V , 162)

"The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races." (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 29, 1849)

He called Ferdinand Lassalle, "Judel Itzig—Jewish Nigger." (Der Judische Nigger, M E K O R III, 82, July 30, 1862)

"Ramsgate is full of Jews and fleas." (MEKOR IV, 490, August 25, 1879)

The identification of Judaism with usury and exploitation of the masses, combined with an alleged secret master plan of the Jews with headquarters in Jerusalem to dominate the rest of the world, has been, and still is, the fundamental platform of political anti-Semitism. Copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf and Russia's Protocols of Zion have only recently been distributed by Khrushchev's close ally, Colonel Nasser. The late President Zapotocki of Communist Czechoslovakia declared at the time of the mass trials of Jews within the Soviet empire, in reply to protest from the free world, "We will not submit to the Jerusalem-New York axis."

Today in Marxist Russia no Jewish magazine or newspaper may be published, no Jewish cultural center may function, no Jewish rituals may be publicly observed. No Jew may hold major public office or be a member of the Soviet parliament, and even harboring any expression of Zionist character is dealt with as a capital offense.

We also note that in other sectors of the Soviet empire Marxian anti-Semitism is visible. Mao Tse-Tung, the undisputed leader of Red China, declared Israel to be "the Formosa of the Mediterranean" which should be swept into the sea. The Socialist Nehru of India, an ardent admirer of Colonel Nasser, does not permit the liberal and democratic State of Israel to open an embassy, or even a consulate, anywhere in India.

The German as well as the Russian forms of Socialism, be they national or international, have never freed themselves of the taint of a malevolent Jew hatred. And while among the peoples of the free world anti-Semitism has not been completely eradicated, in the West it is only the lunatic fringe that launches propaganda against the Hebrews, while in the Communist domain, the governments themselves spearhead the drive against the ancient people.

The Marxist tendency of identifying Judaism with Mammonism and usury is discernible throughout the Socialist movements of Germany, Austria and Russia.

It is therefore not surprising that Adolf Hitler was able to take over the Marxist unions of Germany almost unchecked. In spite of the brown and red differences, they found themselves to be brothers under the skin in forming a common front against an illusory conquestorial Zionism.

The so-called ideological purges of Stalin were little more than a cover-up for an anti-Semitic onslaught in the Soviet empire, which later engulfed Rumania, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

As Khrushchev himself confessed, Stalin planned to relegate all the Jews of Russia to the marshlands of Biro-Bidjan in Siberia. On the other hand, the very same Khrushchev stated, paraphrasing Hitler, that Jews could not work in a co-operative society, and he publicly admitted having for that very reason reintroduced the Czarist numerus clausus in all schools of higher education in the Soviet Union. This, together with an official anti-Semitic policy combined with a Draconic suppression of all Jewish cultural activities, has succeeded in reducing the Jewish population of Soviet Russia to the status of a colonial people, confined to basically menial and subordinate tasks.

A further threat, through the classification of every act of religious or cultural Judaism as political Zionism, and therefore a capital criminal act, has driven the Jewish population of Russia into a spiritual houseghetto. Persons of the Jewish faith do not today dare to practice or observe even the most ancient religious rites in the face of the wanton terror displayed by the dominant Marxist government.

The cunning distinction made by the Soviet leaders and their fellow travelers between Zionism and Judaism is similar to the old Marxist differentiation between the Capitalist Jew and the Sabbath Jew, the Hitler abstraction of International Jew or Cosmopolitan Jew and Commonplace Jew. The people of Soviet Russia today rarely, if ever, are aware of these fine, ignoble shades, and develop in themselves under the relentless propaganda of the Kremlin an almost physical disdain for their Jewish neighbors, just as the people of Germany and Poland absorbed the malevolent Jew-hatred of the Marx-Hitler brand, in spite of the fine-mesh, allegedly protective screening in the uncanny segregation of International Zionism from Sabbath Judaism.

There is no Sabbath Judaism without Zionism. Every daily prayer of the observing Jew carries the undertone of return to Zion. The four great holidays of the Jewish faith are imbedded in Zionist law and Zionist homecoming. Judaism is as little possible without Zionism as Christianity without Christ. It is in this knowledge that Marxist masters of the Soviet empire attempt to prohibit all religious practice of the Jews, because of their being all of Zionistic character. The distinction between Judaism and Zionism is made by the Marxist elements purely to confound the uninitiated and make a pogrom appear like a political police action.

The official Soviet Socialist attitude toward Israel and the Jewish people in general was unmistakably stated in their State publication of 1958, entitled 'The State of Israel—Its Position and Policies', by K. Ivanoand Z. Sheinis.

From this State document we translate:

". . . The Zionist movement represents a form of the nationalistic ideology of the rich Jewish bourgeoisie, intimately tied to imperialism and to colonial oppression of the people of Asia. Zionism has tied itself to American and other Western capitalism and, with Jewish terrorist tactics, attacked its Arab neighbors. The national liberation movement of the people of the Middle East, spearheaded by its native leaders (such as President Nasser, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and King Iman Ahmad of Yemen) is constantly threatened by naked Jewish aggression..."

"The clear duty of all Marxists and Communists in this situation is to help the Asian and African people crush the reactionary Jewish forces."

Such reads the widely-propagated platform of the Khrushchev-Mao Marxist axis. In fundamentals, it differs little from the Hitler-Stalin resolves of a generation ago, and it forebodes no less terror today than the previous anti-Jewish onslaught. Marxism may have failed in many of its postulates and prognostications, but its anti-Semitism lives on unabated.

It is indeed possible that these terrorist practices may succeed where the Roman soldateska of Titus and the pyres of Torquemada failed, namely, to bring to reality the sanguinary dream of Karl Marx—a world without Jews.

D.D.R.

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