566
PARTISAN REVIEW
of Europe has witnessed the holocaust of the Jews. It has been the
misfortune of the Jews that, when the nations of Europe turned
against capitalism they did so only very superficially, at any rate
in
the first half of this century. They attacked not the core of capitalism,
not its productive relationships, not its organization of property and
labor, but its externals and its largely archaic trappings which so
often were indeed Jewish.
Had the peoples of Europe remained attached to capitalism
they would not have spent their frustration and fury on the Jew,
the traditional and, in the main, primitive agent of the money econ–
omy. Had they, on the other hand, risen against capitalism seriously,
they would have overthrown it and would not have found scape–
goats in Jewish shopkeepers and peddlers.
It
was because the peoples
had turned against capitalism only in a half-hearted and half-witted
manner that they turned against the Jews. Babel once said that "anti–
Semitism is the socialism of the fools." The masses of Europe have
been socialist enough to accept the socialism of the fools but not wise
enough to embrace socialism.
This is the crux of the Jewish tragedy. Marx and Rosa Lux–
emburg imagined that mankind would pass from capitalism to so–
cialism before it had degenerated culturally through remaining too
long under the sway and spell of capitalism. They had imagined that
mankind would make its exit from capitalism in good and civilized
form. This has not happened. Decaying capitalism has overstayed its
day and has morally dragged down mankind; and we, the Jews, have
paid for it and mCllY yet have to pay for it.
All this has driven the Jews to see their own State as
the
way
out. Most of the great revolutionaries, whose heritage
r
am discuss–
ing, have seen the ultimate solution to the problems of their and our
times not in nation-states but in international society.
As
Jews they
were the natural pioneers of this idea, for who w,as as well qualified
to preach the international society of equals as were Jews free from
all Jewish and non-Jewish orthodoxy and nationalism? However,
the decay of bourgeois Europe has compelled the Jew to embrace
the nation-state. This is the paradoxical consummClltion of the Jewish
tragedy. It is paradoxical, because we live in an age when the nation–
state is fast becoming an archaism-not only the nation-state of Israel
but the nation-states of Russia, the United States, Great Britain,
