----- Original Message ----- From: "William T Goodall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 10:20 PM Subject: Re: Dogmatism
> > On 4 Nov 2003, at 3:29 am, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > > > --- Jan Coffey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Wasn't Marx a Jew ethnically? > > > > His family converted. It's certainly possible to be a > > self-hating Jew. > > But Marx was quite obviously ebulliently full of himself. That can really be a very complex phenomenon. Gang members seem very full of themselves, but are often plagued with self doubt and self hate at the core. As I mentioned in my thread about my Zambian daughter, racist ideas and stereotypes about blacks seem to have been accepted as true by a number of blacks. > >> > >> Were his statements 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. Right, just like Maxwell muddled things beyond all hope when he combined the separate ideas of electricity and magnetism. :-) The reality is and has been that Jewish identity is complex. (As an aside, I really don't see that utility of pristine theories that do not take the messy realities into account). As far as I see, Jewishness is three fold: Its inherited, if your parents are Jewish you are Jewish. (In particular, if your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish.) Its cultural. One can accept or reject one's Jewish identity. Rejection has typically involved turning one's back on extended family and on one's ancestors. Its a religion. One accepts the Torah as uniquely revealed scripture and follows the God of Abraham. As far as the first question is concerned, there had been times when Jews were offered the opportunity to become full members of European society by renouncing their heritage and becoming Christian. I know that Teri's father's family opted to become Christians in the 19th century. Cultural Jews are very common today. Many Jews are atheists but still Jews. They accept their identity, but don't believe in God. Unlike Teri's family, the still consider themselves Jewish. Religious Jews believe in God and actively practice their faith. Joe Liberman would be a good example of this type of Jew. Its hard to fathom "On the Jewish Question" as a discussion of a theological problem. Rather, Marx seems to accept as fact that the inherent problem in Europe is Jewish in character. I'd argue that his point is that rejecting this Jewishness in order to accept Christianity, as his father did, is not enough. Christianity is too Jewish, one must reject both Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, Marx states a multitude of ethnic slurs as facts. The fact that he is biologically descended from Jew doesn't undo this. I think it is fair to say that he wasn't arguing that its a matter of biology, and that a Jew who renounced his inherently evil heritage could be a perfectly good Communist. However, one cannot deny that the acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes as fact is pervasive in the work. The best explanation that I can give of 19th century European anti-Semitism is that it was so pervasive, that it was accepted as fact even by those who purport to differ with it. So, it is hard to argue that the anti-Semitism of Stalin and Lenin was an unnatural addition to Marxism, because it was accepted in the earliest writings that underlie Marxism. Rather, one could argue that anti-Semitism so permeated Europe, that it was even accepted as fact by people who's ancestors were Jewish. Dan M. > > When he talks > > about the Jewish God being money he was trafficking 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. Could you please show me where in the text that he said those stereotypes were wrong? The plain sense of the text is that he was accepting them as valid. Nowhere did he say that they were erroneous stereotypes. Rather, he stated the stereotypes as one would state facts. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
