Reply To: Zionism and anti semitism
Post January 16, 2019 at 9:36 am
……….Axelrad also claims that the majority of Jews at the time was petit-bourgeois, which mirrors far right rhetoric around ‘Jewish capitalism’. Other Marxists have attempted to trace Nazi anti-Semitism and 20th Century anti-Semitism more generally to a materialist account of the ways that Jews were restricted to particular professions and forced to migrate in the 19th and 20th Centuries, but Axelrad rather than undertaking this just drops an unsubstantiated claim……….
https://libcom.org/library/auschwitz-big-alibi
I normally avoid this stuff like the plague or jumping into a vat of tripe.
But it is has to be considered that 19th century perspectives on this kind of thing can be a little bit different to modern ones.
It is fairly straightforward on the surface of things; there is another group of people who you hate they could be ‘Jew’s , Slavs, Irish , Catholics, Scouser’s or people from Stalybridge.
[If you come from a middle class background you probably won’t have any understanding of these regional hostilities, and how intense they can be, of people who might live 10miles away- I think they are rarer than they were 30 years ago.]
It is probably best described as xenophobia.
Racism normally involves some believe or concern about ‘traits and characteristics’ that are ‘congenital’.
They can obviously get fused and confused.
I will come to anti-semitism in a bit.
Sometime ago one of scions of my family who originate from Liverpool and were orange lodge protestants had a shot gun wedding with a Irish catholic Mancunian.
There was full blooded fight later on at the reception needless to say.
Thus I think you need to take the congenital racism out of the xenophobia?
And?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people
And eg
Kirk Douglas acting in a role as an “ayran?” viking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vikings_(1958_film)
This kind of thing ran into difficulties with the Nazi’s as regards ayran.
And Blue eyed blond ‘Jews’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan
Without going into the nonsense around that; these people are never the sharpest tools in the box.
“………The Nazis used the word “Aryan” to describe people in a racial sense. The Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg believed that the Nordic race was descended from Proto-Aryans, who he believed had prehistorically dwelt on the North German Plain and who had ultimately originated from the lost continent of Atlantis.[35] According to Nazi racial theory, the term “Aryan” described the Germanic peoples.[36] However, a satisfactory definition of “Aryan” remained problematic during Nazi Germany…”
In the 19th century a lot of anti- Judaism was ‘focused’ around opposition to the culture, religion, economic role and loyalty to the national identity; or questionable patriotism towards they country that the so happened to be living in?
Karl for instance was somewhat critical of the ‘Jews’ and said somewhere about how they had tended enter the ‘pores’, was I think the word he used, of late feudal societies as petty merchants and traders.
Although it goes back further than that to Roman times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
It was the diaspora thing that probably led to that; rather than any congenital conditioning.
‘They’ had an international common culture and language which had to some extent a self regulating network and a kind of shared commercial jurisprudence integrated into a religious system.
Which facilitated international merchantile trade.
Actually they were favoured as they could be trusted to stick to a contract, even if it was perhaps a shit one.
And they could thus also drift into money lending.
Buying cheap and selling dear, hoarding in scarcity and inflating prices etc didn’t help make ‘them’ popular.
A bit like the shop-keeper in Zola’s Germinal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germinal_(novel)
And there was stuff in the Making of English Working Class about riots and dispossession against ‘corn factors’ or speculators in ‘corn’ prices.
They would forcibly take it off them in exchange for a reasonable price.
But there is nothing necessarily ‘congenital’ about a series of material accidents of history driving a group into a an un popular economic role, sometimes.
Most of the ‘real’ third generation working class in Western ‘Pale Settlement’ Russia and the RSDP party circa 1905 were secular ‘Jew’s’ eg the Bundists.
Probably driven out of petty mechantalism and artisan work into wage labour.
It wasn’t just the ‘Jew’s’ that got into the business of international finance and merchantilism.
Eg The Knights Templars?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38499883
there was a ‘pogrom’ against them in 1306.
“……Rumours about the Templars’ secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France – deeply in debt to the order – took advantage of the situation to gain control over them. In 1307, he had many of the order’s members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and burned at the stake.[13] Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312 under pressure from King Philip……”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar
So you start with economic resentment and then develop some kind of ‘identity politics?’ to justify revenge? or economic liberation? or economic oppression.
The problem can be once these kind of concepts or deceit or whatever is drummed into the heads of the masses eg Nothern Ireland in the 17th century.
It is often harder to take them back out again long after the ruling class have any serious interest in it; or even be opposed to it.
There is also the thing about Fred being against the Slavs.
In fact it was more about a stereotyped notion of Slavic culture, as it was perhaps predominantly, as being the last bastion feudal reactionaries.
Thus he had no problem with the Poles; or even Bakunin.
Presuming they were “Slavs” I am often not up to speed on these things.
“Anti-semitism” was the most significant expression of “racism” in England in the 19th century.
So George Elliot who circulated in radical elements of the time wrote an anti anti-Semitism book.
My interpretation of it was that it putting forward a ‘positive’ sympathetic expression of Jewish culture to counter prejudice.
I choose not to agree with the interpretation that she was endorsing Zionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Deronda
I didn’t like it that much really and I think you have to be at least a “soft anti-Semite” to find it intriguing?
Although you could say Dickens got into that kind of thing earlier?
After Fagin in Oliver Twist of circa 1840.
Riah;
….I reflected that I was doing dishonour to my ancient faith and race. I reflected – clearly reflected for the first time – that in bending my neck to the yoke I was willing to wear, I bent the unwilling necks of the whole Jewish people. For it is not in Christian countries with the Jews as with other peoples. Men say ‘This is a bad Greek but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk but there are good Turks.’ Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad among us easily enough – among what peoples are the bad not easily found? – but they take the worst of us as samples of the best, they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest, and they say ‘All Jews are alike…….’
….Mr Riah – is a Jew who manages [English and non Jewish] Mr Fledgeby’s money-lending business. He cares for and assists Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren when they have no one else. Some critics believe that Riah was meant by Dickens to act as an apology for his stereotyping of Fagin in Oliver Twist, and in particular a response to Mrs. Eliza Davis. She had written to Dickens complaining that “the portrayal of Fagin did ‘a great wrong’ to all Jews.” However, some still take issue with Riah, asserting that he is “too gentle to be a believable human….
Mr Fledgeby – called Fascination Fledgeby is a friend of the Lammles. He owns Mr Riah’s moneylending business and is greedy and corrupt and makes his money through speculation. He provides a contrast with Mr Riah’s gentleness, and underlines the point that “a Jew may be kindly and a Christian cruel”.