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nation." It was another to develop a political program that promised to
do much more than exclude Jews or curtail their civil rights - a program
that finally solved the so-called "Jewish question." Karl Marx had such a
program. He thought the Jewish question would be solved by the
working out of the historical process. Once the transition to a classless
society took place, there would be no more Mammon-worshipping
Jews, but there also would be no more Christians - and, of course, no
more capitalism. Like Carlyle and Adams, Marx regarded Jews as the
incarnation of the materialistic spirit. Was Marx anti-Semitic? Perhaps,
but the term does little to clarify the exact nature of Marx's animus
against Jews. Marx had harsh things to say about Jews, but he was not so
much against Jews or Judaism as against capitalists and capitalism.
Marx's attitude toward materialism is complicated. He attacked
ordinary materialism, but he himself was a materialist insofar as he saw the
mode of production - the economic sphere - as the central factor gov–
erning all other aspects of life. As Marx says in the afterword to the Sec–
ond German edition of
Das Kapital,
Volume One: "My dialectical
method is not only different from the Hegelians, but it is its direct op–
posite.... With me , on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the
material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of
thought." The exact nature of Marx's "historical materialism" - a term
coined by Engels - has been the subject of endless controversy. Marx op–
posed the "mechanistic materialism" of Feuerbach - that is, the idea that
consciousness is nothing but a reflection of material conditions - but the
extent to which he disagreed with Feuerbach is not clear, since he never
fully clarified his view of the relation of the material world to the
"superstructure." What we can say is that Marx was a philosophical ma–
terialist who thought the "law" of historical materialism would lead to
the creation in Europe of a classless society of new men who would not
be tainted by ordinary materialism.
What in hindsight was most ominous about Marx's political pro–
gram was not its anti-Semitism but its supposed grounding in scientific
law. As the prestige of science increased and the authority of religion
declined, many late nineteenth-century intellectuals invoked science to
help clarify the contemporary political scene and point the way to the
future . Few pored over the latest scientific literature so thoroughly as
Henry Adams, yet Adams's anti-Semitism was only marginally grounded
in scientific theory. Adams, like most "traditional" anti-Semites, attacked
Jews on cultural - not racial - grounds. Like Adams, George Santayana
often complained about materialistic Jews. In 1936 he wrote to a mem–
ber of the British "Aryan Society," "I don't like the Jewish spirit,
because it is worldly, seeing God in ·thrift and success." But in the same
