In late January 1989, almost exactly 30 years ago, the economic historian Robert Heilbroner wrote this epitaph:
Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won. . . . Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.
That verdict, pronounced by a leading economist who also happened to be a career-long socialist, expressed what seemed to be a global consensus on an issue that had torn the world apart for generations. For a moment, relief and joy at the end of the cold war and of the larger debate behind it soothed the pain of the many nations that had been blighted, some quite horribly, by the lethal fantasy of socialism.
Yet, ominously, socialism, so recently considered over and done with, is now back, including in the United States and the United Kingdom, with apostles at high levels of government and with polls showing its rising popularity. Among those with special reason to be wary of this return from the grave are Jews, for no other people has had so fraught and tumultuous a relationship with the socialist idea and the socialist reality. Indeed, Jews have played an unmatched role among both socialism's genitors and socialism's victims.
Before we return to the present, some history is in order.
Socialism germinatedin the French Revolution at the same moment that the revolution “liberated” the French Jews, who would henceforth, in the famous words of Comte de Claremont-Tonnerre, be “denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.” This duality—nation versus individuals—has not ceased ramifying over the centuries. A generation or two after the French Revolution, it was personified by two Jews, Moses Hess and Karl Marx, who gave socialism its modern meaning.
Of the two, Marx was by far the more influential theorist. But Hess, six years Marx's senior, had been something of a mentor to him as, in the words of Friedrich Engels, “the first Communist in the party.” Known for his “purity of character” and “saintly” ways, Hess conceived of socialism in ethical terms. “We shall experience . . . heaven on earth,” he wrote, “when we no longer live in self-seeking and hate, but in love, in a unified human species, in the communist society.”
These words were written in the 1840s, in the voice of an atheist speaking as a presumptive Christian. But in 1862, following an interlude of political withdrawal, Hess announced that “after twenty years of estrangement I have returned to my people.” In Rome and Jerusalem, he set forth the case for Jewish statehood, thus becoming a principal forerunner to Theodor Herzl and modern Zionism.
If Hess's relationship to his Judaism makes for an inspiring saga, that of Marx is a nightmare. His father, born Heschel Levy but calling himself Heinrich Marx, rose high in the legal profession in the German Rhineland during a brief period when longstanding restrictions on Jews were briefly rescinded under the Napoleonic conquest. After the French emperor's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the old constraints were restored, but Levy/Marx succeeded in retaining his position by being formally converted and baptized. At the time young Karl entered elementary school, he, too, was baptized.
If this background seems sufficient to explain the younger Marx's later cynicism toward religion, it doesn't account for the special scorn he nurtured for Judaism. Acknowledging that Jews were in some sense victims, he laid out this sweeping solution to “the Jewish question”:
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object. . . . The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism. [emphasis added]
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