Reply To: Zionism and anti semitism
As you say, that statement of Conrad’s is ridiculous for the reasons you give. He cites Erich Fromm. I checked this and Fromm was not talking about Marx in particular but about the idea of socialism in general. What he wrote was:
Marxist and other forms of socialism are the heirs of prophetic Messianism, Christian Chiliastic sectarianism, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance Utopianism, and eighteenth-century enlightenment.
Maybe, but I would have thought that, in Marx’s case, the last was what influenced him.
Marx’s Jewish Question is a criticism of the state and money and, as Conrad points out, does advocate giving full political rights to Jews (as those who practised Judaism). Because it was an early work, dating from the same year (1843/4) that he became a socialist, Marx still identified capitalism with money; which would be why he identified Judaism as the religion of capitalism. But capitalism is not about money-lending and “huckstering”. It’s about production for profit and capital accumulation. In which case it is Protestantism (Calvinism rather than the semi-Protestantism, or semi-Catholicism, of the Church of England), because it preached abstinence and so saving rather than spending money earned from working, that fills better the role of the religion of capitalism. I’m not sure either that Judaism is a religion of money. It’s a tribal religion based on adherence to rituals. To that extent Marx’s criticism of Judaism was unfair.
I think Marx would have been influenced by Moritz Hess (as he then was) who, the following year, published an article advocating communism as a moneyless society