-ALSO ON THE SUBJECT OF JUDAISM, CONSIDER WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE.
One-third of the world now lives in countries that operate according to political systems inspired by a Jew--Karl Marx. Yet the Jews themselves have suffered much from the spread of communism and the atheism it mandates. Red China, after all, refuses to recognize the existence of Israel in United Nations debates, and the Soviet Union represses Judaism within its borders and supports the Arabs in the Mid- east conflict. Lewis Mumford, in The Condition of Man, has even suggested that "the Jew-baiting of the Nazis was a sinister game that Marx himself actually began."
Still, a case can be made that the communism of today--filtered through the influences of his disciple Lenin--is hardly the stuff of which Karl Marx dreamed. He viewed socialism as a noble campaign to free the working man from the abuses of capitalism, which in his day sought profits by any means. Jacques Barzun in Darwin, Marx, Wagner put Marx's ideas in perspective when he wrote: "It was surely out of a passionate hatred of injustice that Marx spoke of exploitation." His ultimate aim was probably a world similar to the Jewish messianic view in which "lion would lie down with the lamb," for in Marx's vision, as Louis Untermeyer said, "the world would no longer be divided between the exploiters and the exploited, and class antagonisms would therefore vanish."
Heinrich Karl Marx, born on May 5, 1818, in Trier in the German Rhineland, came from a family whose ancestors had been deeply religious Jews. Almost all of the rabbis of Trier from the sixteenth century to his birth were ancestors of Marx. His father's father had been a rabbi; his mother's father had been a rabbi, and her family for centuries had been rabbis. In Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, David McLellan notes that "it would be difficult to find anyone who had a more Jewish ancestry than Karl Marx."
But Marx's father, an able, ambitious lawyer, converted to Christianity since Jews could not practice in the higher courts. Who can doubt that his father's opportunism soured Marx on all religion? Karl Marx was baptised as a Protestant at the age of six. In 1843, he would write that he found "the Israelite beliefs" to be "obnoxious."
When Marx died in 1883, after years of poverty, he left behind writings that filled forty volumes. In an ironic link to Jewish tradition, he came to be hailed as "the workers' Messiah," and 'Das Kapital', his major work, has been called a "modern testament" and the "Bible of the working classes." He, however, has sometimes been called "the Father of Lies" and "the Antichrist."
Although Marx repudiated all religion as a weapon used against the worker to keep him in his place--"the opiate of the masses"--the spiritual approach to life influenced his ideas and, ironically, helped him capture a following. Today Marx's writings are studied in Communist countries with the fervor of scholars poring over the Bible. His theories are espoused by even more people than the Holy Scriptures, and with comparable intensity. If Communists believed in saints, Marx would be canonized as their patriarch.
Karl Marx is really the black sheep of the Jewish Connection. But could his indignation at social injustice have been fueled by his deep blood-line links with the morality of ancient Judaism?
"The characteristic genius of the Jew," wrote Edmund Wilson in To Finland Station, "has been especially a moral genius....It was here that Karl Marx as a Jew had his great value for the thought of his age....Nobody but a Jew could have fought so uncompromisingly and obstinately for the victory of the dispossessed classes."
Marx simply didn't realize how difficult it is to sever one's Jewish Connection.
Whereas Karl Marx is universally termed the father of communism, other economic theories seem to have
(excerpt from 'The Jewish Connection' by M. Hirsh Goldberg, copyright 1976 by M. Hirsh Goldberg.)
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-ALSO ON THE SUBJECT OF JUDAISM, CONSIDER WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE.