Reply To: Zionism and anti semitism

Says Conrad in that article:

‘Put aside Marx’s own Jewishness, a religiously pious mother and rabbinical lineage: a good case can be made for his communism being connected, consciously or otherwise, with messianic Old Testament prophets, such as Amos, Micah and Habakkuk.18 Possibly this came through his personal acquaintance with the proto-Zionist Moses Hess (1812-72), who likewise condemned the “Judeo-Christian huckster world”; a line of thought that surely came via Spinoza, Goethe and Hegel. ‘

I think any anti-semite would be delighted to read that.

The fact of the matter is that Marx got his initial communism from Frenchmen, not from Hess — and certainly not from the OT. And Hess (from whom Engels indeed is said to have ‘learned his communism’) at that time was called Moritz, not Moses; he was not yet a Jewish nationalist (proto-zionist or otherwise) — that happened later on, the 60’s.