PART I SA N REVI EW
560
ounted the
problem
Marx about twenty years younger, sunn
.
.
h
't
'n
,
d'd h
to
gnps
WIt 1, 1
hich tormented Heine. Only once
1
e come
;: youthful and famous
,(ur Judenfrage.
This was his
unr:served
rejection of Jewry. Apologists of Jewish orthodoxy and JewISh na–
tionalism have because of it severely attacked Marx as an "anti–
Semite." Yet, I think that Marx went to the very heart of the
matter when he said that Jewry had survived "not in spite of history
but in history and through history," that it owed its survival to the
distinctive role that the Jews had played as agents of a money
economy in environments which lived in a natural economy, that
Judaism was essentially a theological epitome of market-relationships
and the faith of the merchant; and that Christian Europe, as it de–
veloped from feudalism to capitalism, became Jewish in a sense. Marx
saw Christ as the "theorizing Jew," the Jew as a "practical Christian"
and, therefore, the "practical" bourgeois Christian as a "Jew." Since
he treated Judaism as the religious reflection of the bourgeois way
of thought, he saw bourgeois Europe as becoming assimilated to
Jewry. His ideal was not the equality of Jew and Gentile in a
"Judaized" capitalist society, but the emancipation of Jew and non–
Jew alike from the bourgeois way of life, or, as he put it provoca–
tively in
his
somewhat over-paradoxical Young-Hegelian idiom, in
the "emancipation of society from Jewry." His idea was as uni–
versal as Spinoza's yet advanced in time by two hundred years-it
was the idea of socialism and of the classless and stateless society.
:Among Marx's many disciples and followers hardly any were,
in spirit and temperament, as close to him as Rosa Luxemburg and
Leon Trotsky. Their affinity with him shows itself in their dialectically
dramatic vision of the world and of its class struggles and in that
exceptional concord of thought, passion and imagination which
gives
to their language and style a peculiar clarity, density and richness.
(Bernard Shaw had probably these qualities in mind when he spoke
of Marx's "peculiarly Jewish literary gifts.") Like Marx, ROSa! Lux–
emburg and Trotsky strove, together with their non-Jewish com–
rades, for the universal, .as against the particularist, and for the inter–
nationalist, as against the nationalist solutions of the problems of
their time. Rosa Luxemburg sought to transcend the contradiction
between the German reformist socialism and the Russian revolution–
ary
Marxism. She sought to inject into German socialism something
