Early German Socialism and Jewish EmancipationAuthor(s): Gustav MayerReviewed work(s):Source: Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Oct., 1939), pp. 409-422Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4464304 .Accessed: 22/02/2012 17:01

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EARLY GERMAN SOCIALISM AND JEWISH EMANCIPATION

BY GUSTAV MAYER

The arguments for and against Jewish emancipation as advanced in Prussia in the first decades of the nineteenth century may be divided into two groups, liberal and conservative. One was motivated by certain more fundamental attitudes towards Jews and Judaism, the other merely by passing and circumstantial considerations. In addition to these two main approaches to the problem there was a third attitude which, although accepted by only a small group, demands attention because of its influence on the attitude of the pioneers of the new German socialism regarding the Jewish question. This attitude, which might be designated as "dialectic," had its roots in the philosophy of Hegel and can be understood only in relation to the development of Hegelianism after Hegel's death. First, however, it is best to consider the general situation of the Jews in Prussia and the attitude of liberal and conservative circles toward Jewish emancipation.

I

As is well known, the victorious armies of the French Revolution brought liberation to the Jews in those German lands which they conquered. It was also to the victorious French that the Prussian Jews owed the edict of 1812, which allowed them to become citizens of the state although not officials. These gains were endangered after the defeat of Napoleon by the coalition of reactionary powers and the collapse of French supremacy. The liberated Germans turned their backs upon the ideology of the French revolution; they exulted in proud self-glorification of their history and tried to destroy as much as possible of the work of the revolution. Foremost among these achieve- ments had been the emancipation of the Jews.

409

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In redrawing the map of Europe the Congress of Vienna added territories to Prussia, both in the east and in the west, which had never or only temporarily belonged to Prussia. For the Jews this meant a different status in the different provinces. Sooner or later the question was bound to arise as to a unified regulation of this problem and as to the fundamental bases for such regulation. Prussia had as yet no parlia- ment to which legislative bills could be submitted and the provincial diets were only consultative bodies. The strong antisemitic spirit pre- vailing in Germany after the Wars of Liberation was evidenced in the answer given to a government inquiry by the diets of all the Prussian provinces between 1824 and 1827. "In the best interests of the Christian population," they recommended new restrictions instead of emancipa- tion for the Jews. Only with the advance of liberalism after the revolu- tion of 1830 did this reactionary spirit begin to lose its hold upon the noble and bourgeois classes. When, twenty years after the first inquiry, the government again approached the provincial diets, five out of eight declared for a marked extension of Jewish rights.

A true picture of the attitude of the educated and propertied Prussian classes on the eve of the revolution of 1848 towards the Jews living in their midst may be gathered from the deliberations of the first united diet in 1847 concerning a government proposal to make uniform and improve the status of the Jews in Prussia. The representatives of the two principal tendencies, the more liberal and the more conservative, both approached the problem from the standpoint of a fixed Welt- anschauung. Both, however, were willing to recognize the actual conditions existing in Prussia and to bring the Jewish problem to a satisfactory solution by parliamentary means.

The liberals, with their espousal of the idea of a constitutional state, demanded equal rights for their Jewish fellow-citizens, many of whom had fought for their fatherland in the battles against Napoleon. Only through full and equal rights, they believed, would it be possible to wean away the Prussian Jews from their un-German customs and from their one-sided preference for petty trade. Only with the possession of full political rights could the Jews be expected to accept the Prussian state as their own. Among the deputies who advanced these arguments were not only the leaders of the rising upper bourgeoisie, such as Camp- hausen, Mevissen and Beckerath, but many noblemen as well, such as

EARLY GERMAN SOCIALISM AND JEWISH EMANCIPATION 411

Baron von Vincke, Prince zu Lynar, Prince Biron von Kurland, Prince Reuss and Count Yorck. The latter expressed his gratitude to the Prussian Jews because members of their race in the Orient had saved Aristotle for posterity.

The conservative deputies opposed full emancipation. They argued that Prussia was a Christian state and that it should remain such. They also pointed to the hostile attitude of the masses as well as to the greater criminality of the Jews. The dogma of the "Christian state," that show-piece of romantic-reactionary politics, had been accepted by the government since the accession of Frederick William IV in 1840. Among those in the diet who also accepted the dogma were the ministers von Thile and Eichhorn and the conservative deputies von Thadden Trieglaff, von Landsberg-Steinfurt, and von Bismarck-Schoenhausen. The Catholic Baron von Landsberg categorically declared that full emancipation would mean complete abandonment of Christianity. The Pietist Pomeranian Junker, von Thadden, sarcastically declared that he would give full emancipation to the Jews if they would all be baptized; and the future illustrious statesman said: "It would mortify me most deeply to think of giving obedience to a Jew representing the sacred majesty of the king. I share this feeling with the lower masses of the people and I am not ashamed of the association."

The ministers expressed themselves more dogmatically than the deputies. Their bill was based mainly on the law of 1812. Thile also declared it incompatible with the nature of the Christian state to appoint Jews as officials. Because their religion is inseperable from their nation- ality, the Jews could have no other fatherland than the one to which their faith directed them. "Zion is the fatherland of the Jews. Every Jew who believes in his religion has there his fatherland from which he can never turn away his gaze." He can become an obedient citizen but never a Prussian "from the bottom of his heart." Eichhorn supple- mented the statements of his colleague. The liberal idea of the consti- tutional state, he declared, is made up of abstract concepts which cannot be applied to real life. "Our state is inseparable from a real people; we know of no other state life except in most intimate associ- ation with the life of the people." Whoever is unable to merge himself fully in the national community cannot be accepted in the community of the state. A baptized Jew would immediately become a member of

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the national community. This proves that neither nationality in itself nor religion, with its isolating ritualistic customs, were the barriers erected against the Jews. It was the combination of racial descent and religion which created the isolating element which made a national community impossible.

There was no difference of opinion between liberals and conservatives on the need for improving the legal position of the Prussian Jews. The dispute was whether emancipation should be put into effect immediately and completely, or whether certain restrictions should remain until the Jews, through their increased freedom, had been more thoroughly assimilated into the rest of the population. Even the liberals were of the opinion that the Prussian state should not "educate Jews but citizens." The Silesian deputy, Count Renard, declared: "They must so far yield to the enormous majority surrounding them as to become one in conformity with us." His compatriot, von Raven, added, cog- nizant of the experiences in France: "If such recognizable progress has been made only in fifty years, what will be the result of hundreds of years of experience of this principle of equal rights?" Vincke was no friend of the Jews but as a fanatical exponent of legal rights he fought for full emancipation. In reply to Eichhorn he said: "Only in their poetry and religion do the Jews consider Zion their fatherland. They have no longer any passion for Jerusalem. Never have I heard of any wealthy Jews wishing to settle in Jerusalem."

II

This discussion of Jewish emancipation by practical politicians had been preceded a few years earlier by a theoretical discussion which concerned itself not so much with the Jews as with the principles of emancipation. The Germans until shortly had been a nation of philoso- phers. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were not long dead. It was still cus- tomary to first approach political problems in their philosophical setting. The government permitted open discussion of these fundamentals; political activity, however, was hindered by strict censorship. The Hegelian school, in particular, sought to solve dialectically the most burning problems of the age. This was likewise true of the radical Young Hegelians. In the beginning the Young Hegelians fought only

EARLY GERMAN SOCIALISM AND JEWISH EMANCIPATION 413

against orthodoxy, but soon they were pushed by their dialectic method into opposition not only to Christianity in general but also to religion in any form. The landmarks in this process of radicalization were: Leben Yesu, by Friedrich Strauss (1835), Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des 7ohannes, by Bruno Bauer (1840), and Wesen des Chris- tentums, by Ludwig Feuerbach (1841). It is well known how Hegel transformed the idea of the state into a cult and how he did not sharply distinguish between the institution of the state, on which he bestowed the mission of realizing reason on earth, and the Prussian state of his time. After the death of Frederick William III (1840) Hegel's philosophy was no longer the state philosophy. The new king, Frederick William IV, the "romanticist on the throne," did not strive for a "rational state" but for a "Christian state." Under the old regime the Young Hegelians had considered themselves the "thunder legion of the state." Now they thought of themselves as an "ecclesia pressa." Soon the most radical among them began to express doubts not only concerning religion but also concerning the idea of the state. They wondered whether it would be sufficient merely to secularize the state or whether the onward pulsing pressure of the spirit of the age would not dispose of the state altogether. It was out of such doubts that Max Stirner, Edgar Bauer and Ludwig Buhl turned to anarchism, while Friedrich Engels followed by Karl Marx, turned to communism.'

Before the French revolution the philosophical radicals in France and in Germany demanded only tolerance from their absolute rulers, enlightened or not. This limited demand was replaced after the revolu- tion by the more far-reaching demand for emancipation. In backward Germany, however, emancipation became the slogan of the radicals only after 1830. The German radicals now demanded the abolition of all privileges; traditional chains had to be cast off and equality realized. They refused to give priority to Jewish emancipation and they objected to arguments made solely for emancipation of the Jews. Even Fichte had jeered at the fact that tolerance was demanded for the Jews in states where independent thinkers were not tolerated. As hostile as Fichte was against the Jews and as often as he acknowledged the fact,

1 Cf. the author's writings: "Der politische Radikalismus in vormirzlichen Preussen," in Zeit- schrift fur Politik, vol. vi (1913); "Die Junghegelianer und der Staat," in Historische Zeitschrift (1919); Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie, 2 vols. (The Hague 1934, Eng. trans. New York 1937)

414 JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES

yet he added that he did not mean to say that Jews should be persecuted because of their beliefs but rather that no one in general ought to be persecuted for the beliefs he holds.2

Bruno Bauer followed in Fichte's footsteps when he too would not allow that the battle cry of his generation should result in special benefits to the Jews. "Emancipation," he declared in Die fudenfrage (Brunswick 1843), "is the problem of our age in general; it is not only the Jews but all of us who want to be emancipated." Bauer, a former orthodox theologian who had discarded religion, considered it to be the greatest problem of his age to free the Prussian state from the Christian chains forged by the new king. His concern with the Jewish question served primarily to combat the idea of the Christian state. For Bruno Bauer dialectic was the dynamic factor of all happenings.3 Whatever stood in the way of its never-ceasing work of change, whatever persisted in remaining static belonged, in Bauer's opinion, to the refuse heap of history. A truth, he maintains in Die fudenfrage, can be true only once; it is a truth when it first arises in the consciousness, and it remains such only so long as it is in combat with the historical spirit. When the historical spirit has fully absorbed it, it becomes only the fruitful soil for the beginning of a new form of truth. There was no room in such a view of history for understanding of and respect for an historically developed and established phenomenon such as Judaism. History, declared Bauer, means development, new forms, progress, change. But the Jews? They wish to remain the same always. The tenacity of their national spirit is proof of an incapacity for historical development. The very nature of their existence is exclusiveness. The exclusiveness of Christianity is a Jewish heritage. The Jews still consider themselves the chosen people for whose sake the world exists. Their life in the diaspora means to them a trial period which will end with the coming of the messiah, who will guarantee them world supremacy. Faith in their people is the only faith of which the Jews are capable, the only

2 Fichte, J. G., PReitrige zur Berichtigung des Urteils des Publikums iiber die franzihische Revrlution,

2d ed. (1795) p. 191. 3 In a review of this work by Moses Hess in Der Israelit des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, which I

have not been able to consult myself, Hess reproached Bauer with having made the Jews victims of his fanatical dialectics. Bauer in his "Verteidigung," which appeared in his own dllgemeine Literaturzeitung (1844), compared himself to an artist "who follows the urge of his sense of form and works on the block of marble while the ends fall in pieces to the floor."

EARLY GERMAN SOCIALISM AND JEWISH EMANCIAPTION 415

one to which they are bound. That is why for them the nature of man in general is neither higher nor more than their own particular nature.

Bauer's aim was to prove that civic freedom, which he made syn- onymous with the "emancipation of man," was possible only in a de- christianized state. Therefore he reasoned thus: The present-day Jews are not free because they are slaves to arbitrary laws, the reasons for which they do not dare question. They consider it a privilege to be a Jew. It is the nature of the Christian state to respect privilege. But should the Jews have privileges "now that privileges are falling under the blows of criticism and when, later, they shall have fallen?" The defenders of Jewish emancipation have placed themselves in a peculiar position, for they, who fight against privileges, simultaneously grant Judaism the privileges of immutability, invulnerability, and irresponsi- bility.

The conservative Pietist, von Thadden-Trieglaff, as we have seen, conceded the emancipation of the Jews only on condition that they became baptized. Bruno Bauer, however, could not accept a solution of the Jewish problem through baptism, by which merely "one privilege would be exchanged for another."' As long as the Christians are Chris- tians, they are not free and so cannot help to free anyone else. "The slave cannot emancipate others." "Since all things were not free and arbitrary power and privilege have ruled up to the present, the Jews too could not be free." Thus Bauer came to the following conclusion: "If the Jews wish to become a genuine part of the people,- they can do so only in the historical nations of our age and not in their own chimerical nationality,- they must give up their chimerical preroga- tives which, as long as they are maintained, will always separate the Jews from the nations and alienate them from history. They must offer up their lack of faith in the nations and their exclusive faith in their own baseless nationality before they can be in any possible position to participate sincerely and without secret reservations in real state and national affairs."5

If there was anything at all original in Bauer's ideas on the Jewish question it was his strong emphasis on the dialectic movement of history. The Jews had always been reproached for their exclusiveness since the

4 Die Judenfrage, p. 60. 5 Ibid., p. 61.

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Babylonian exile. During the 17th and 18th centuries there prevailed the closely linked view that the Jews were not to be regarded as a religious community but as a "state within a state." Kant looked upon Judaism as a political community ("staatlich-politische Gemeinschaft"), and not a religion; the antisemitic Fichte warned his fellow-citizens against this "separatist and strongly chained state," which would trample all the other citizens under its feet once the Jews gained equal rights. Hegel had shown a deep understanding of the world-historical significance of the Jewish religion but Bruno Bauer, however, was no longer influenced by Hegel in his judgment of the Jewish question, but by Feuerbach whose Wesen des Christentums (1841) had so deeply impressed all the Young Hegelians. Feuerbach too, in turning against Judaism, struck at the roots of Christianity. In the figure of Jehovah he saw the reflection of "the personified egotism of the people of Israel." The idea of utility was for him the "basic concept of Judaism." Thus for the majority of the Young Hegelians and for Feuerbach, the Jewish religion was only a preparatory stage to Christianity which had already been transcended by the Zeitgeist.6

Bruno Bauer's work was much discussed in pamphlets as well as in book reviews. We shall not concern ourselves here with his Jewish critics. Bauer mentions some of these in his answer to his critics in the A.l/gemeine Literaturzeitung, which he edited: Gabriel Riesser, Wilhelm Freund, Gustav Philippson, Samuel Hirsch, Gotthold Salomon, and Moses Hess. Of the non-Jewish writers who deserve special attention there is Karl Grin,7 the most important representative, next to Hess, of the so-called "true socialism," which aspired to see Feuerbach's

6 Among Jewish thinkers influenced, temporarily or permanently, by the Young Hegelians, faith in their religion and in their people was washed away by the rising tide of unrestrained dialectic. MVoses Hiess, for example, in his Europdische 7riarchie (1841) bemoaned the "stability" Of the Jews and denied them any future. The spirit of Judaism moved into the shadow of history for the young Lassalle as soon as he came under the Young lIegelian influence, and he saw only "a world of misery" in the Jewish world from which he made his way into German intellectual life. But where Lassalle referred to Hegel for support, he misinterpreted the ideas of the philosopher. Cf. "Lassalle und das Judentum," by Gustav Mayer, in Der Jude (1924), and Lassalle, Nach- gelassene Briefe und Schriften, ed. by Gustav Nlayer (Berlin-Stuttgart, 1921-25) v. 1. The entire six volume edition of these posthumous writings, which were found by the editor in 1919 in the castle of Count Hatzfeldt, was destroyed in Berlin by the publisher, Julius Springer, in 1936.

7Grin, Karl, Die Judenfrage (Darmstadt 1844). Ernst Jungnitz, who was closely associated with Bruno Bauer, launched a polemic against Grin's book in the Aligemeine Literaturzeitung, vol. ii (Aug. 1844).

EARLY GERMAN SOCIALISM AND JEWISH EMANCIPATION 417

desire for the "true and whole man" realized in the social world. Grin scoffs at Bauer's statement that the Jews still consider themselves the only chosen people, and after Gabriel Riesser's reproof of Kirchenrat Paulus, Grin considered it useless to bring up again the "old rigmarole of Jewish nationality." In answer to the reproach that the Jews have excluded themselves from the ways of their host nations, Grin argues that in France, North America, Holland, and Belgium the Jews fulfill their duty as citizens in spite of their Mosaic faith. In answer to the question as to who is the "true man," Griun replied as a liberal: "Only the citizen is the true man." This was also what Bruno Bauer meant at the conclusion of his book on the Jewish question when he demanded of his contemporaries "to be and remain genuine nations and within the national life, true men."8 Bauer too still believed that man's emanci- pation will find its complete realization in political emancipation.

III

These ideas of Bauer were no longer shared in by his former comrade, Karl Marx. Marx had become convinced that political emancipation was only "the latest form of human emancipation within the hitherto- existing world order," but that the "real emancipation of man" pre- supposed a radical social transformation. In his first polemic with Bauer, which was related to Bauer's treatment of the Jewish question, Marx tried mainly to prove the limitations of the political sphere and its dependence upon social conditions.' It was only by chance that the Jewish question became the subject whereby he advanced the proof of his theory. This also explains why Marx in his Zur Judenfrage does not deal with the actual position of the Jews in Prussia.

Marx had been baptized as a young boy. His playmates were not Jewish children and since early childhood he had looked down upon the Jews through the eyes of his German environment. "The Jews" to him meant mainly the Jewish cattle dealers in the Rhineland, those who bought from, and sold to the small peasants, taking advantage of their own superior business abilities. Karl Marx never experienced Jewish

8 Op. cit., p. 61. 9 Zur Judenfrage appeared at the end of February, 1844, in the Deutsch-Franziisische Jahrbiicker.

418 JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES

religion; he found it "repugnant."'0 Moreover, the religion of Judaism was not a power to be reckoned with. Christianity, on the contrary, was a power which Marx, along with Bauer, fought against directly until Feuerbach, in his Wesen des Christentums revealed to him that "the supernatural mysteries of religion were based upon quite simple natural truths" and that all religions are only reflections of social con- ditions. After Feuerbach thus laid bare these ideologies, not only religion but also politics lost for Marx its unique position. Here too Marx now saw a reflection of social relationships.

In his treatise, Zur 7udenfrage, Marx does not concern himself with the "Sabbath Jew," whom he later, in his Heilige Familie calls "hypo- critical." He is interested only in the "actual worldly Jew," the "every- day Jew" whose functions in German economic life seemed to confirm, for Marx, Feuerbach's explanation of Judaism.

Like Feuerbach, Marx looked for "the secret of the Jew not in his religion," but "the secret of his religion in the real Jew." Like Feuer- bach, he also designated "practical necessity and self-interest" as the "world foundation of Judaism." Indeed, Marx went beyond Feuerbach's spiteful contempt when he said: "The secular cult of the Jew is petty trade; his secular God is money." If humanity could be freed from commerce and from money, "that is to say, from practical and real Judaism," that would constitute the "self-emancipation of our age." The religious conscience of the Jew would then evaporate like a vague mist in the real life-atmosphere of society.

Thus Marx, with a stroke of sophistry, made Judaism the symbol of the existing world based on egotism, of the world which outraged his inborn Jewish ethos. Because he saw "the real nature of the Jew realized" in bourgeois society, he could not agree with Bruno Bauer and with the earlier Hess that the historical function of Judaism had disappeared with the rise of Christianity. Marx, who made no distinc- tion between Jews and Judaism, for whom a particular group of Jewish men was synonymous with Judaism, thus came to the conclusion,

10 On March 13, 1843 Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge from Cologne: "The leader of the Jewish community here just came to ask my support for a petition by the Jews to the diet. I will give it to him. As repugnant as the Israelite faith is to me, yet Bauer's view is too abstract. It is necessary to shoot as many holes as possible into the state and smuggle in as much as possible of the rational, of which we have so much." Quoted in Zlocisti, T., Moses Hess, 2d ed. (Berlin 1921) p. 84 ff.

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contrary to Bauer and Hess, that Judaism reached its highest influence in the Christian world and in the full development of bourgeois society. The world of his day he declared to be "Jewish to the depth of its heart," and the emancipation of the Jews was to come only with "the emancipation of society from Judaism." Marx thus envisioned a radical transformation of the existing social order in which, as happened later in Russia, the Jewish petty tradesmen would disappear and Jews would become absorbed into their non-Jewish environment. In the words of Heine, Marx saw in the Jews only "the dog with dog's thoughts" and not "the man with human feelings." The poet of the "Princess Sabath" understood the Jews and Judaism better than the author of Das Kapital.

During the 1840's in Prussia, 431 out of every 1,000 Jews were engaged in trade. In the Rhineland, Marx's homeland, 974 out of the 3,137 peddlers were Jews. When the average German of that time spoke of Jews, he immediately thought of the Jewish petty-trader. Fichte had spoken bitterly of the "petty trade of the Jews which de- stroys every noble feeling." The malpractices often found among the Jewish peddlers violated the ethical feelings while their behavior violated the esthetic feelings of their German neighbors. The widespread belief in the world power of Jewish big capital strengthened even more the aversion for the Jews which was so deeply rooted in the German people. The liberal deputy, von Saucken, declared in the united diet: "I believe we all know that nowadays practically no state can begin a war and carry it on for any length of time without first securing the support of the house of Rothschild for its cause." To the average German the Rothschilds were the factual rulers of all the great European states. They became so proverbial that the socialist, Friedrich Engels, in speaking of Tsar Nicolas I (who had supported Prussia and Austria against the impending revolution of 1848), described him as "the Roth- schild of all the declining absolute monarchies.""1 Engels was familiar with England and France and he knew that, in addition to the Roths- childs, there also were "Fulchiron and Decazes in Paris and Samuel Jones Lloyd, Baring, and Lord Westminster in London."'2 Engels like Marx, it is true, fought not against the capitalists but against

"Die neue Konstitution," in Marx-Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. vi, p. 584. 12 "Die wahren Sozialisten," ibid., p. 78.

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capitalism. But to the average German, Judaism and capitalism came pretty close to being synonymous. And for this they could cite Marx who, in his Zur 7udenfrage, because of his dialectical reasoning, had set up Judaism and money power as one.

IV

How did the writings of the youthful Marx influence the position of the German Social Democrats on the Jewish question? They could not influence the masses directly because they had disappeared completely from the book stores. The small group of intellectuals who, after the death of Marx, tried to adapt his theories to the changing conditions, followed Marx mainly in the emphasis they laid on the economic and social aspect of any political or cultural subject. This they also did in their handling of the Jewish question. It was at this time too that a political antisemitic movement arose out of the growing economic threat to petty tradesmen by department stores, to craftsmen by large- scale industry, and to farmers by the increasing imports of wheat from North and South America. The real bearers of this new antisemitism were, it appears, those social classes which saw their existence threatened by the rapid expansion of capitalism. In view of the strong participa- tion of the Jewish business world in this capitalist expansion they vented their rage on Jews and Judaism in the same way as a child attacks a post upon which he tripped. Eduard Bernstein, who then lived in exile in London, wrote in 1893 in the Neue Zeit: "The Jews often achieved relatively strong economic supremacy over the broad masses. This supremacy, because it is in crass contradiction to the social and legal status of the Jews, must appear so much more one- sided and oppressive than the rule of the moneybag."'13 Heinrich Cunow also wrote: "The antisemitic movement is not a racial movement but an economic one and is only sharpened by ethnic and religious differ- ences. It is a reaction of certain petty-bourgeois classes who feel their existence threatened by the big business and money economy of today, at the head of which they see many Jews and therefore consider the Jews as the real bearers of the conditions threatening them. ""4

13 "Das Schlagwort und der Antisemitismus," in Neue Zeit, vol. xi (1893) 228. 14Review of Otto Freiherr von Boenigk's Grundziwge zur Judenfrage (Leipzig 1894), in Neuc

Zeit, vol. xiii (1895) 823.

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The Social-Democratic writer who most zealously tried to implement the position of his party on the increasingly acute Jewish question, was Franz Mehring. He ridicules the "proletarianized petty-bourgeois who, in naive ignorance of his class position, comes to profess antisemitism," and "whose leaders so strongly attack Jewish capital in order the less to disturb the exploiting activity of Christian capital." Influenced by his personal experiences and encouraged by the writings of the youthful Marx, which he was the first to republish, Mehring was just as hostile to Jewish capital as he was toward antisemitism. The Pomeranian minister's son had only slowly become converted from a bourgeois democrat and opponent of social democracy into an orthodox Marxist. He wielded the sharpest pen in the journalistic struggles of the Bismarck era. After his conversion to social democracy, the former Berlin cor- respondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung and editor of the Volkszeitung was considered a renegade by the powerful liberal press, which was owned largely by Jewish publishers and written by Jewish editors. The antisemitic party and the German Freisinnige Partei, the successor of the Progressive Party, looked for voters mainly among such classes which the labor party had difficulty in reaching, and whom they hoped to win over with the further growth of capitalist concentration. Mehring's thesis was: "If antisemitism claims to fight capitalism by persecuting the Jews, philosemitism claims to protect the Jews by defending capitalism through thick and thin."'" Antisemites and philo- semites bestirred themselves about the poor souls of the small property owners whose decline became more evident with each year of capitalist expansion. "The former offer them quack medicines, while the latter can only console them by letting the wind of the unchangeable principles of St. Manchester blow around their nose."16

Mehring made direct reference to Marx's Zur 7udenfrage in his article, "Kapitalistische Agonie," which he published in the year follow- ing the acquital of the Jewish defendant in the ritual murder case in Cleve."7 He was actuated by the desire to strike blows at both sides. He declared that "the capitalist notables such as the Messrs Mosse, Davidsohn, Levysohn, Mommsen, Virchow, Barth," demand Jewish

15 "Anti-und Philosemitisches," in Neue Zeit, vol. ix (1891). 16 Ibid. 17 "Kapitalistische Agonie," in Neue Zeit, vol. x (1892).

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emancipation only because in that way they will hinder the emancipa- tion of the proletariat." In defending Judaism, Mosse and his colleagues defend the presuppositions of the haggler on which the glory of the capitalist world rests. The youthful Marx had already proven - and here Mehring cites vigorous passages from Marx - that the solution of the Jewish question is impossible within capitalist society. A glance at the anti-and-pro-semitic dispute is sufficient to prove the correctness of the Marxist thesis in all its fundamental truth.

There never was any danger that the German Social Democratic party might fall into the stream of antisemitism. How could that happen to the party, with its democratic tradition, the liberal tendency which never disappeared from its ideology, and its large number of Jewish voters and leaders? In addition, the Social Democrats took such pains seriously to understand the real economic connections that it was impossible to satisfy them with the superficial explanations of antisemites.18 When Sombart's Die 7uden und das Wirtschaftsleben appeared, it was dismissed by the Marxist, Van Ravenstyn, with the claim that all that was useful in Sombart's work one could find "more strikingly and profoundly" expressed in the works of Marx and in Mehring's introduction to the new edition of those works. Ravenstyn concluded that it is natural and in a measure a common-place that the Jews should participate and play a definite role in capitalist develop- ment wherever the conditions were ripe for that development, as, for example, in the Netherlands of the 16th century. "But one can con- ceive of such capitalist development, old or new, without any Jewish influence, and actually this influence in the Netherlands was demon- strably insignificant, while on the contrary, the modern capitalist Jews are inconceivable without capitalist development."'19

18 The Social-Christian conservative, Rudolf Meyer, author of Der Emanzipationskampf des vierten Standes, who associated with Marx and Engels in London in 1879-1880, writes in the epi- logue to his edition of the letters and papers of Rodbertus (vol. ii, p. 726): "That the genuine Social Democrats, i. e. practically all the Protestant German workers today, do not join in Jew-baiting, is explained by the fact that money Judaism has declassed the middle class and thus transformed a conservative class into a revolutionary one."

19 "Kapitalismus und Judentum," in Neue Zeit, vol. xxx (1912) 708.