The Jews in capitalism and socialism

  1. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a “self-hating Jew” in that he was a Jew who thought of the Jews as having used capitalism to take advantage of European civilization. He was a repentant Jew.
  2. Tangentially: The term “self-hating Jew” is confusing because it hides the distinction between the individual and the group. It’s possible for a Jew to “love” themselves as an individual but “hate” their group. Marx may have had as much confidence in how good he was (as an individual) as he had in how evil they were (as a group that he didn’t identify with). In fact, that brings me to another distinction that the term “self-hating Jew” hides: that between identifying as (which is what the individual does) and being identified as (which is what’s done to the individual). Marx didn’t identify as Jewish—his father converted to Christianity before he was born, he was baptized into the Lutheran Church as a child, and he “converted” to atheism as an adult—and thus he probably didn’t think of his criticism of the Jews as being about himself. That’s despite the fact that in history, he’s identified as Jewish. That is: Marx was a Jew who hated the Jews, but he didn’t think of himself as a Jew.
  3. The Jews of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reacted in various ways to increasing anti-Jewish sentiment: socialism, Zionism, etc. Socialism was tempting because much of the anti-Jewish sentiment at the time was ultimately anti-capitalist sentiment. The Gentiles thought of the Jews as greedy and exploitative. Socialism was a way of apologizing for that. It was a way of saying: “Yes, we Jews took advantage of the market. But we’ll get rid of the market, which is a vice, and then we’ll never be able to do that again! Indeed, nobody will ever be able to do that again.”
  4. It’s a sad story because (a) socialism is absurd in theory and catastrophic in practice and (b) capitalism is nothing to apologize for.