On 4/20/07, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Apr 20, 2007, at 2:05 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> On 4/20/07, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Apr 20, 2007, at 12:38 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>>
>> > And what better demagogic stroke
>> > has anyone ever invented than that phrase "Crucify Mankind On A
>> > Cross Of Gold?"
>>
>> Yup - subtle way of invoking anti-Semitism in that phrase, because we
>> all know who crucified Jesus.
>
> Michael Kazin, who should know a thing or two about populism and
> William Jennings Bryan, says that Bryan, whatever his shortcomings,
> was not prejudiced against Jews, let alone invoking anti-Semitism.
I'm just drawing on my lit crit roots: you take figures of speech
seriously. Crucified on a cross of gold is very dramatic image.
> Who crucified whom in the story? Jesus was not a Christian, but a
> Jew, a carpenter by trade, a commoner. Those who crucified him were
> the Roman Empire and its collaborators who were the elite of the
> oppressed Jewish society of which Jesus was a rising reformer. That
> is the way the empire usually gets rid of a populist, a demagogue, a
> reformer who may become a revolutionary.
I'm aware of all this, you know; you don't need to give me a history
lecture. I grew up Catholic and imbibed a lot of Christian myth from
an early age. It was widely believed until recently that The Jews
crucified Christ. I'm guessing a lot of fundamentalists still believe
it, though it's impolite to say so. In fact, here's one <http://
www.biblequestions.org/archives/BQAR067.htm>:
But we can't start with "a lot of fundamentalists" today and attribute
their ideas to William Jennings Bryan and populists of his day, unless
there is evidence that they all believed the same thing about Jesus
and the Jews and understood the Cross of Gold speech in an
anti-Semitic fashion. Even Richard Hofstadter could come up with only
a few examples of anti-Semitic references in populist literature,
which suggests that anti-Semitism among populist commoners was far
less common than among the elite they opposed, as Jon Wiener says
("Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading but Not for the
Reasons the Critics Have in Mind,"
<http://hnn.us/articles/30629.html>). Looking at what Marx wrote, you
can probably find far more negative statements about Judaism in his
early writings than in populist literature of Bryan's times, to say
nothing of prejudiced remarks (such as "the Jewish nigger") Marx made
in his letters.
<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/ferguson150407.html>
Favorite Color: Red
by Dean Ferguson
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wheen draws liberally on Marx's letters to Engels, whose generosity
allowed Marx a scholar's leisure. It is these letters -- so witty, so
entertaining -- that show Marx at his worst. They reveal that, though
he was a rabbi's grandson, Marx was not immune from anti-Semitism: in
several letters to Engels he described his rival, the German socialist
Ferdinand Lassalle, as "wily Ephraim," "Baron Izzy," and "the Jewish
nigger." They show him incensed by the antics of his son-in-law, the
Creole Paul Lafargue, "who has the blemish customarily found in the
Negro tribe --no sense of shame, by which I mean shame about making a
fool of oneself." And they show him gravely worried by his daughters'
social standing: without several cases of claret and Rhenish wine for
their dancing parties, he fears, they may "lose caste."
--
Yoshie
