On 4 Nov 2003, at 3:29 am, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
--- Jan Coffey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Wasn't Marx a Jew ethnicaly?
His family converted. It's certainly possible to be a self-hating Jew.
But Marx was quite obviously ebulliently full of himself.
Were his statments about the Jewish religion and not the Jewish people?
One of the things that makes Judaism special is that you can't really distinguish the two.
Conflating separable ideas leads to worthlessly muddled thinking.
When he talks about the Jewish God being money he was trafficing in the vilest of anti-semitic stereotypes.
He was a Jew attacking the role of Jews in a Christian society wherein money-lending was still regarded as a sin and Jews were tolerated as they could perform the valuable service of giving loans with interest. The stereotypes he used were the ones of the society he lived in - and he was criticizing them.
Doesn't Marx speak poorly about nearly all religions?
He didn't write _On the Christian Problem_.
"On the Jewish Problem" pretty even-handedly dishes out to Christianity too :)
Do you consider someone who disaproves of a religion to be a racesist? Are the two not distict and seperate?
They can be, but in the case of Judaism, they tend not to be. Jewish is both an ethnicity and a religion - pretending otherwise is sophistry, to be frank.
Pretending that short-circuits debate is sophistry, to be frank :)
I must read the whole thing, but from what I can tell, it seems that you are mixing concepts. While Marx clearly had issues with all religions, he does not seem to have issue with any ethnic group, and therefore classifying him as an anti-semite seems dogmatic in the context of the converstation we were having.
Again, he didn't write _On the Christian Question_. If you want to argue that he didn't have a specific animus against Judaism, you're going to have to find similar statements against other religions in his work _of the same intensity and focus_. And you can't, because they don't exist.
That would be the "this footnote doesn't have a footnote" argument :)
Luckily for me, Dan M. did that for me.
Look, Jan, you don't have to believe Marx was an anti-semite if you don't want to. You can argue with the textual evidence all you want. I think you might want to be a little more restrained in suggesting that someone doesn't know anything about a subject, though. I didn't call you on it - I was pretty confident that everyone on the list knows that I know my way around political philosophy without me waving my resume around. But it didn't exactly strengthen your argument here.
So that would be the appeal to the resume argument then?
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