The way of dealing with the Jewish Question, today, all of us know, at least in words: you set out from a super-structural definition of Jew, in the same way one would talk of being Christian or Muslim. In fact worse, and we know why, because there is nothing more hateful and false from the point of view of historical and dialectical materialism. After it seemed that everyone has taken on board the idea that a Jewish race doesn’t exist, in the same way that a Christian race doesn’t exist, with the revival of fundamentalist virulency, and not only of the Islamic but also of the Catholic and, why not, Jewish varieties, there came a relapsing, with a disarming facility, back into clichés which we thought had long since been dispersed. Which does not remove the fact that one can and should discuss the question, if only to reiterate our general and particular evaluations of it.

If even a maitre à penser like Sartre takes delight in asking himself in his Reflexions sur Question Juive to what extent the Jew is more intelligent than the Christian, there is little we can expect from the way bourgeois thinking addresses the question. He wrote: “It is at the same time true and not true that the Jew is more intelligent (…) We would say rather that he has the propensity for pure intelligence, to which he has recourse in relation to everything and anything, and that the use he makes of it is not obstructed by the innumerable taboos which still oppress the Christian, or by the aesthetic complications in which the non-Jew willingly indulges himself. And we would add that within the Jew is concealed a sort of impassioned imperialism of reason; he doesn’t just want to convince others that he is right, his aim is to convince others that to rationalism must be attributed an absolute value. He feels himself to be a missionary of the universal, against the universalism of the Catholic Church, from which he is excluded; an instrument capable of attaining truth and establishing a spiritual contact between men”.

Evocative words certainly. But what is Sartre talking about? About the Jew once again according to the petty-bourgeois taboo, of the member of an alleged distinct race. What we want to talk about is not the idealized, tabooed Jew, but about the Jewish Question, of its place in modern and ancient history, and in particular within the history of the class struggle, in the course of which Jews have been considered at times the very personification of capitalism, or on the contrary of Bolshevism, according to the notion of a conspiracy against the gentiles.

Starting with the Jewish Marx, we must say straightaway that the great scandal led by certain critics and haters of communism, apropos of the fact that his conception of history in the final analysis is just an eschatology, typical of Jewish fundamentalism, even if immanentized, constitutes no obstacle at all, quite the contrary! Marx, in his study of the real world which has nothing to do with the world of ideas, takes into consideration actual reality, or as he put it, the empirical and material reality of mankind and of the world in which it finds itself operating. What is more he anticipates and hopes for a time when “natural science will eventually include the science of man, just as the science of man will be included within natural science: there will be one science” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844).

Since today there is an almost unanimous emphasis on how much western culture owes to its Jewish roots, and not just its Greek and Roman ones, we do not see why anyone would want to cast not simply a shadow of discredit, but real hatred over Marx’s Jewishness, to the extent that the “baptized Marx” is emphasized, almost as if to lay on thicker the position that most Jews are in, forced to pretend so they can integrate into gentile society.

Since we are not interested in the superstructure as the base from which to depart, but in the structure, it is not for nothing that it has an effect, in fact it bears us out that among the early elements of Jewish culture one comes across the strict link between Saying and Doing, such that both the verb to say, deber, and the term dabar mean at the same time Saying and Doing, Deed and Word, and that in Hebrew the verb To Be does not exist in the present tense, such that the translation of the unpronounceable Jehovah is “I will be he who I will be”, underlining how history is projected into the future. If the Jewish conception of history views things in these terms, in contrast with the cyclic notion of the Greeks, should we be offended by it? Who can deny that it is within the framework of Greek intellectualism that the justification for the division into classes matures, leading to the Platonic conception of “aristocratic communism”?

If we were to set out from the superstructure to gain an in-depth understanding of the nature of social life, we would have to first clarify which basic elements to start from, having once recognized that culture is a mixture of diverse elements, due to very complicated and fascinating mediations. But once we have decided to set out from the structure, we would trust neither eschatological nor cyclical history, without however ignoring that the use of language, of ‘a tongue’, can condition any kind of research, and even lead us where it wants to go. The method which historical materialism follows is critically conscious of these problems, which doesn’t prevent it from seeking answers within the material conditions, which might bely, or even in certain respects confirm, given co-ordinates of thought.

Marx the Jew then can be neither condemned nor simply exalted if certain underlying tendencies in his thinking seem to align with his culture of origin, or if in others he may be considered a heretic and a subverter of every previous school.

Having clarified these points the consciousness and overall understanding of the Jewish Question also takes on a different significance. In particular once a certain portion of historical Judaism had formed itself into a state, along with all the consequences of this event.

Throughout the whole of the second half of the eighteen hundreds, up to when the state of Israel was formed in 1948, discussions about Judaism focused on the problems of the Jewish diaspora, on the presence of Jewish citizens in the various European countries, and on the plotting, real or presumed, derived from a wish on the part of that ethnic group to conquer and dominate the world. Our interpretation of conspiracies, from wherever they might emerge and whoever hypothesizes them, is well-known: anybody who is serious about the history of society and classes cannot afford to fall for such nonsense. And yet tensions and conflicts between States were resolved in this way: the Jews, frustrated by their exclusion, were only able to engage in conspiracies…

We have said enough and written enough about these themes, which is why it seems necessary to us to see what happened once the new global set up which emerged from the Second imperialist war contributed to bringing about the formation of a “Jewish” State of Israel. It is impossible not to immediately take into consideration that what the bourgeois states wanted to do, after the military and political - but not historical and social - defeat of nazi-fascism, was defuse the question of the residual presence of the Jewish people by creating an independent state, which would attract to the “Promised Land” the Jews who wanted it, in such a way as to free the overpopulated countries of a shattered Europe of their presence.

As one can see things were still proceeding according to the old categories and taboos, as if Jews signified race, with unmistakable ethnic and religious characteristics. Our view is that there have always been rich Jews and poor Jews, like English bourgeois and English proletarians. Then and now we are not prepared to engage in further protracted studies on the question. To get the general idea we need only cite a quip attributed to Ben Gurion, the founder patriarch of the State of Israel: “Our state will not be a normal state until there are thieves and prostitutes like in every other state”. What does that say about the requirement for normality, or rather, normalization!

And so, one must admit that the birth of a “Jewish” state does not dispel ambiguity and equivocation.

The very insistence with which in today’s civil society the Jewish extermination is deemed to be an “absolute Evil” indicates a wish to continue treating the issue as if it were absolutely unique, and therefore, whether demonized or sanctified, we are back where we started! Every time it is claimed that the uniqueness of Judaism has been identified, it is realized that only one important aspect has been touched upon, but not such as to have exhausted the question. Our method emphasizes that by going down the religious or cultural path one can only establish half-truths; but if we are really put on the spot, we won’t refuse to go down it, and will compare the various super-structural interpretations.

What is the form that is best suited to justify modern capitalist society? Which ideology best represents it, or rather, which one would capitalism like to be represented by? Our response today is that the pluralism of ideas excludes no interpretation. And yet, if you only think about the so-called “pensée unique”, you must admit that Capital has never given up the search for a conception which unitarily manages to defend its mode of social life from enemy attacks. So then, if we go back into past history, who would not admit that in the past Judaism was seen as presenting the most striking image of usurer capital, hated by the Feudal world which saw the Jew with no fixed abode as the very incarnation of money given over to usury, which would constitute, in the form of interest, the exception that would eventually become the rule?

Every time that given social forms have sought a supportive ideological expression, visceral tensions have arisen between the presumptive bearers of universalistic visions. Sartre, going off in search of what defines Jewish being, identifies it in his intelligence, that is in an almost missionary quest for the universal,“which puts him in opposition to the Catholic Church, from which he is excluded” (notwithstanding the insistent demands for a “pardon” which the Roman Church has been addressing to the Jewish people in recent times, to get them to forget two thousand years of accusations of “deicide”, of tenaciously cultivated hatred against them).

If the Catholic Church is recognized as the bulwark of the feudal way of life, with the advent of the Protestant Reformation, in the early days of the development of capitalism on a grand scale in Europe, the spirit of capitalism was interpreted ideologically by Protestantism, or reformed Christianity, in tension with the mother church in Rome. What is more Hegel has been recognized as the last Christian philosopher to assume the role of theoretician of the ethical State, “certainly Lutheran, but precisely because of that rooted in the Christian faith and animated by it” (Severino).

So who then best represents imperialistic capitalism in crisis today? What kind of ideological and religious universalism best interprets it? Judaism, defined by Sartre as capable of concealing a passionate imperialism of reason, while its aim is “to convince others that an absolute value must be attributed to rationalism”, where does it stand in relation to Christianity?

What is clear is that any claim to identify the specific aspect of a culture or ethnicity is always partial and one-sided; nor are we of the opinion that we can establish on a theoretical level who should represent the bourgeoisie ideologically, as if this class embodied some kind of category of the spirit. But that doesn’t remove the fact that what Sartre says about the Jews, or Severino maintains about the Hegelian inheritance, does touch on aspects that are worthy of interest, on condition, that is, that we reject the tendency to attribute to the Jewish people a cohesion and organicity which has been belied on more than one historical occasion. We could go on: the attribution at any cost of specific characteristics to a religion or culture is part of the effort to give an unequivocal physiognomy to what is in fact an extremely fragmented and diverse historical experience. Perhaps “European culture” has a complex about not being able ‘to define itself', thousands of times manifested, and expressed with the accusations against the Jews themselves.

It is no accident that Nietzsche, one of Europe’s most controversial philosophers, oscillated in his assessment of the Jews in a sort of confession of his admiration for them, often accompanied by deadly, murderous polemical tirades. He is happy to steal from Jewish culture to the extent that he believes it to be typical of German culture: “We Germans would still have been Hegelians, even if there had never been a Hegel, inasmuch as we (in contradistinction to all Latin peoples) instinctively attribute to becoming and to development a profound sense and a richer value than to that which is”. But, as chance would have it, this cultural peculiarity is typically Jewish, rather than German!

As one can see, going down this road doesn’t get us very far. And yet no-one can deny that the amalgamation of elements from Jewish-Christian culture with those of the Greek and Roman worlds, together with a far from negligible influence from the Islamic world, has shaped Europe, and exercised a widespread influence on the ancient and modern world. It is a futile exercise however to claim to have found that which is specifically Jewish, or Greek, or even Roman, in isolation from the contributions of other forms of cultural life and social organization. If on the other hand we follow the method of dialectical materialism we can reconstruct the bases of the ancient and modern world: for not even the most demanding theological or philosophical category can elude our investigative criteria, so long as it is not considered on its own, in isolation, and apart from the socio-economic issues that gave rise to it.

If we think how the western world claimed to justify, by theological means, the passage from the Old Testament tradition to Christianity, a complex mass of material elements is excluded: including those we need to provide an explanation. It is precisely with the criterion of either absolute reason, or abstract universalism, useful in some circumstances, that the concreteness of history gets lost.

Still today, and inevitably so, the reasons that led to the crucifixion of Christ are rehearsed. Whereas for almost two thousand years the entire “Jewish People” was held to blame, only recently has the arrogance and limitations of such a position come to be understood: thus it was “decided” that the Jewish people were no longer “Deicides”. An explanation was given then? No. It was just decided, and that’s that.

We claim to have a better way of looking into the question, without depleting one of the most delicate nuclei of western thought. Marx, in his Critique of Political Economy, asserts that the “people” understood in a statistical sense is not capable of explaining and accounting for the composition of a given socio-economic reality. The observation is useful and valid not only in order to understand capitalist society today, it is also applicable to the ancient world. Does the notion of the “people” help explain the social composition of Jewish society in the time of Christ, or make sense of the interests and the composite factors that agitated its internal life during the occupation of the Roman Empire? Absolutely not. Even when religious circles started to study that period, making use of disciplines matured in the modern era such as linguistics, structural and cultural anthropology, political economy, and sociology, they went about it in an instrumental way, as for instance in the case of the encyclical Divino afflante spiritu of Pius XII, the Pope much discussed as regards the role he played during the Shoah.

And yet, the interest expressed in these contributions hasn’t modified how the nature of the Old and New Testaments is viewed at all, including the notion that the crucifixion of Christ is explicable only as a religious Mystery, unique and absolute, and not realizable in any way.

But once you try instead to evaluate the interests that animated the Jewish people, to understand its internal social composition, the relations of its ruling classes with the Roman world, you then notice how things take on another dimension.

Increasingly these aspects are being subjected to criticism, and yet, at the level of churches, and The Church, they have still been unable to come up with the reasons why the Jewish people in toto is supposedly to blame along with its ruling body, the Sanhedrin. What lay behind the recognition of the absurdity of this verdict?

We would not be dialectical materialists if we were advocates of a pure logic, above historical phenomena, that existed independently from the concreteness of natural and historical problems. But that does not mean we are indifferent to the value of logic and of mathematics itself, or even of metaphysics. And yet, one of the questions still not free from antinomies and contradictions is that of the relation of part to whole, species to gender and other significant pairings on which both language and ideas are based. When we discuss the Jewish question and deal with the problem of responsibility and collective guilt, or only of determined leading groups such as the Sanhedrin, we come up against this problem.

We have always supported the thesis which holds that before Logic there is Action, although not a type of action/movement that is an end-in-itself. At the same time, we do not sit in judgement and support an ethic which is not incarnated in historical behaviour. This is true to the extent that the presumed “eternal” problems of pure logic, and of mathematics, are put through a fine toothcomb at given turning points, when there is also a pressing theoretical need for it.

An example of this is the dispute between the Set Theory proposed by Frege and the one Russell opposed to it, known as the Theory of Types, which arose when on a historical level problems were maturing which required a language which was clear, or else capable of taking into account its unresolved antinomies. Frege’s postulate that “to any property there always corresponds a set” can, in fact, appear contradictory. Given a people, a party, an organization in general, it can be asked if the single ‘element’ ‘belongs or not to the set’, and if it is, for example, ethically co-responsible for acts carried out by the set. In organic societies, belonging to a collective entity signifies organic co-responsibility; thus does the ethical state reason. In modern atomistic societies, introduced by liberal theory, it is not so: belonging does not signify co-responsibility, insofar as the rights of the individual are theorized as taking precedence, as ‘natural’, and as not constituted by the set that is the State, or organization. Who is right? How do things truly stand? The antinomy is an open one.

In the case of the Jewish people this antinomy, which appears so open-ended, seemed unthinkable throughout most of its history, at least as far as the perception inculcated and diffused in the ‘other’ culture, especially the Western-Christian one. By definition the Jewish people had to be understood as a whole, as responsible and blameworthy, if for no other reason than having claimed for religious reasons to be ‘the Jewish People’.

It seems we have before us a horrible vendetta. But if we remain on the terrain of feelings and emotional perception, we are unlikely we’ll make much headway. If we stay instead on the concrete terrain of socio-political events, which do not of course completely exclude strong emotions, we are of the conviction, as regards the logical formulations of both Frege and Russell, that we have before us a classic case of thinking you can talk first about the Logic of a discourse and of thought, and then about action, about the events. Whose own logico-semantic questions are nevertheless an important aspect.

Within the Jewish people at the time of Christ there were evident social contradictions, which put into question the very notion of an organic people. We are nevertheless aware of the caution necessary when interpreting the history of the remote past, even if necessarily according to the schema of the struggle between classes, and we certainly do not intend to interpret it with inappropriate, or simplistic, categories and dialectical forms. And yet it is relevant to record that the interplay between the Sanhedrin, headed by the all-too familiar Caiaphas, the representative of Rome Pilate, and the other strata who were active in Palestine at the time, consisted fundamentally of conflicting interests, although connected by explicit or implicit alliances.

That the Sanhedrin represented the religious, political and economic interests of the landowners, certainly hostile to Roman rule but inclined to a reciprocal tolerance, while within the people opposed interests, as well as parties, were at work, which were denouncing and were violently opposed to the Roman empire in cahoots with the Sanhedrin, this can be clearly seen in every interpretation, even questionable ones, of the reality of that period.

The Zealots, to whom it seems Judas, ‘the betrayer’, belonged, represented the violent, or nationalist wing as we would call it today, which didn’t agree with the policies and actions of the numerous Soteroi (saviors) who were proliferating in the region, and indicating various conflicting ways of interpreting the messianism typical of that culture. Certainly Christ, who the later interpretation of the Christian church saw not as one of the Soteroi, but as the Soter par excellence, unique and sent by God to his people, but in a version which in its theology was exclusively and peculiarly messianic, wasn’t on the same positions as Judas.

What is more, there is still no resolution to the ongoing disputation about the possible political relevance of Christ’s teachings, which – if we just think of the concreteness that characterises Jewish thinking – cannot be limited only to asserting “the way to heaven”. This certainly doesn’t make us want to distort the Nazerene’s preaching though, but likewise we do not wish to interpret it according to the religious interests of eras closer to our own, which only seem to be concerned about consigning him to an empyrean extraneous to the culture of his time.

Even from this chronicle reduced to its barest essentials one can evince that the responsibility for the death of Christ attributed to the ‘Jewish people’, in its historical-temporal and ethical extensions, constitutes a unicum, a one-off. It is the landowners and priesthood linked to Rome who, fearing the subversiveness of the soteroi for material and religious reasons, who decide that the Messiah is dangerous, and take responsibility for condemning him to death, with the complicity of Pilate the Roman procurator.

But if we return to the logical precondition that we have brought into play, we realize that even today, when we say that a certain event implicates an entire collectivity, we must clarify the meaning of the rhetorical figures to which we have resorted in order to describe it. Has it ever occurred to anyone to say that the Greeks, as a people, or rather, the Athenians as a whole, were responsible for the death of Socrates? Or, in a more up-to-date example, to say that the Italians as a (non-existent) race, or as an ethnic-national unity are collectively to blame for the death of the Duce?

The ‘theory of types’, with which Russell believed he had resolved Frege’s antinomy is in fact the product of a culture and sensibility derived from the modern empiricism of an Anglo-Saxon stamp, which establishes liberalism as a political doctrine and theory of Law. According to the ‘theory of types’ a set is always a different type of object with respect to the elements that compose it. Based on this principle, which they call the “fundamental principle of the theory of types”, Russell erects his ‘theory of logical types’. In the light of this there can be no confusion between the man and the group, people, party or organization to which he belongs. The connection between part and whole which obsessed classical metaphysics is, in this logical approach, broken.

With this can we say the antinomy has been resolved? Certainly it finds a possible solution on the logical plane. But what are the repercussions in neighbouring fields, distinct or different? There exists no culpability for an individual if it can be attributed to a group, people or party. Bourgeois Law, even when derived from Roman Law, does not recognize group culpability: if a gang of criminals is guilty of a crime, the judge doesn’t punish the group, but has to try and assess the levels of culpability specific to each of its individual components. Even for us communists, organicist and anti-liberal by nature, joining the party militia, for example, remains an individual choice and responsibility.

Regarding the Jewish question one can say that history has a logic, but it is not just Logic. Or worse still “logistical”, as understood by the persecutors of the Jews who tried to resolve the question as though it were just a matter of organizing their destruction. And yet analysis of logical preconditions is bound to teach us something: first of all that an interpretation of history that is reduced to deductive and inductive successes is simply not tenable.

The fact that the Jewish question has been supercharged with emotion, to the point that today anyone who denies that the holocaust is an Absolute Evil might be accused of lacking a moral compass, indicates the extent to which emotions continue to run high on this topic, even if with good reason. On the historical and historiographical plane we have reached the absurd situation of having the courts decide whether the Holocaust was real or only imagined: never before has historical research depended on petitions of this kind, at least not since Galileo’s time. Also this is a sign of how much the question has been speculated about, at some distance from any research or sound judgement, a question which lies within the province not so much, or only, of historiography, or of the courts, as it is a product of history, which in its turn is not reducible to historiography! In our view history as it is really experienced is a complex dialectic composed of actions carried out by human beings and of reflections made upon them.

There is no court of either a legal or historico-historiographic type that can give a definitive response to the Jewish Question or to any other open question. It follows that claiming to be able to resolve such a question, as though it was not still open and only explicable within the dynamics that determined it, as also within the superstructures with which it has been overburdened, is a sign of arrogance and an indicator of political designs which need to be repelled. We must denounce the continued use of concepts, categories and inadequate (though convenient) prejudices which the political and cultural forces of the bourgeoisie as a class have no intention of relinquishing as they serve to conceal the true nature and dynamics of the fueldnts that produced the so-called “Jewish question”.

Why then are categories and prejudices, as well as platitudes, so difficult to get rid of? Because they are continuously being bolstered by those who in some measure benefit from them.

The first of the platitudes we need to confront profits from the fact that the hatred of modernity, which emanates from the most diverse settings, is distributed across the various social classes, not excluding the proletariat itself. According to David Meghnagi:

“The hatred of modernity and everything to do with it, has coincided historically with hatred of that part of the population which from the birth of the modern age took advantage of the opportunities it presented to enter society as a full member of it (…) The Jews remained the principal target of every reactionary discourse, insofar as they were the tangible image of the changes that had occurred with the collapse of the old feudal order; they were negative image of modernity itself, and the symbol and quintessence of capitalism, of democracy, of socialism and of communism”.

Here is the first argument. Since our intention is to see what changed after the ‘Jewish’ state was formed, in terms of mental outlook and concrete reality, it is useful to first analyze the aspect that most disquieted the old social forces before the advent of capitalism. Without this backdrop we won’t understand how the State of the Jews returns once again to feature in anti-Jewish prejudice: finally we know where the Jews are, and towards what kind of reality the energy of the Jews who do not live there is directed.

Our dialectical reading of historical events, and in particular of the modernity inaugurated by capitalism, which overthrew the feudal system, puts us in a position of making an assessment not according to abstract or rigid metrics, but with a capacity to understand, and not execute, to paraphrase Benedetto Croce’s admonition. The enemies of modernity, in the name of the old society divided into ‘orders’ but not yet osmotic classes, could not tolerate anyone not rooted in a given territory: what does ‘servo della gleba’ mean in fact if not peasant tied to the feud, in such a way as not to be transformed into a “wandering Jew”, according to the term of abuse which has been liberally bestowed by Catholic Christian ideology throughout the past millennium; pointing the finger at the rootless, those who are different, the uncontrollable?

The peasants who on the eve of the industrial revolution amassed around great cities like London, were they not branded with red hot irons so they could be recognized and controlled; as though they were automatically delinquents rather than being expropriated people forced to take their chances in an urban environment? But who are the very emblem of the transhumant life, rather than being tied “to the blood and soil” (as the national socialists would say in their relentless propaganda) if not, historically, the Jews of the diaspora? So then it is from this moment that proletarians, who are not rooted in the soil, are assimilated with them, because they by their nature they have no country, being “a permanent army of emigrants”, then and now!

If we are dealing with the Jewish Question, we do so within that optic, not as a defense of an official reality which we admit is distorted, adulterated and manipulated to nurture hatreds and prejudices, but in order to group together a diverse range of problems which have assumed a tragic and increasingly grave significance, up to and including the current planetwide migrations in the imperialist phase of capital. Certainly we place no trust in the correctives that are passed off as so worthy today, when “pardons” are begged and from every quarter the vacuous litany arises: “Never again!”.

If then, for the society of the feudal orders, Judaism is the same as liberalism-democracy-socialism-communism in a unique conjoined sequence, we ask ourselves how come certain liberals today, certain democrats, certain “socialists” and certain “communists”, are unable to see that the theory of a conspiracy is simply an aberration, and how come they have they not realized that the antidote to a theory of this kind is not trusting that after the Holocaust we have all finally understood, and that never again will we witness such wickedness!

Our take on the question has nothing to do with rhetorical hypocrisies and simplifications of this kind. If the nascent proletariat found itself assimilated, not due to ethnicity or religion, but due to its condition of having been deprived of any rootedness in the land or in a country, that does not mean that its history and historical role should be confused with an alleged “Jewish conspiracy”. We know that Judaism, in the Nazis’ ideological simplification, signifies not only capitalism, but communism as well! For truth’s sake we should make clear that it was the Jesuits who, from the perspective of the feudal classes’ and in an ecclesiastical version of it, theorized the inevitable sequence liberalism-socialism-communism!

Capitalism, which had the merit of freeing the serfs, in a certain phase of its development becomes the enemy of the society of the species: progressive no more it becomes in it turn reactionary. We do not therefore play along with the notion that everybody is equal, faced with the harsh reality of the historical dialectic, Nor are we disposed, in the name of a pointless anti-Semitism, or of a generic, remedial pro-Semitism, to renounce the differences that justify the struggle for a society without classes.

(Continues in the next issue)