On the Jewishness of Karl Marx

and contra the opinions of MacDonald and Joyce

This article will assess the Jewish identity of Karl Marx in light of the MacDonald-Cofnas debate. Kevin MacDonald continues to wrongly insist that Marx had a “Jewish identity and concern for Jewish interests” (2022, 7).

Admittedly this is may seem fairly tedious, but I felt this subject in particular needed comment because, as the misconception refuses to die with each additional response paper, it offers yet another example of MacDonald’s intransigence toward even the smallest of details; in fact, throughout the exchange we witness him doubling down. Additionally, Marx’s Jewishness (or lack thereof) has historically been a matter of great importance to antisemites, who naturally find the fact that the most impactful socialist thinker was ethnically Jewish utterly irresistible.

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The original portrayal of Marx given in The Culture of Critique is as follows:

On the surface at least, Jewish involvement in radical political activity may seem surprising. Marxism, at least as envisaged by Marx, is the very antithesis of Judaism. Marxism is an exemplar of a universalist ideology in which ethnic and nationalist barriers within the society and indeed between societies are eventually removed in the interests of social harmony and a sense of communal interest. Moreover, Marx himself, though born of two ethnically Jewish parents, has been viewed by many as an anti-Semite. His critique of Judaism (On the Jewish Question [Marx 1843/1975]) conceptualized Judaism as fundamentally concerned with egoistic money seeking; it had achieved world domination by making both man and nature into salable objects. Marx viewed Judaism as an abstract principle of human greed that would end in the communist society of the future. However, Marx argued against the idea that Jews must give up their Jewishness to be German citizens, and he envisioned that Judaism, freed from the principle of greed, would continue to exist in the transformed society after the revolution (Katz 1986, 113).

These words are clearly intended to paint Marx as a Jew engaging in crypsis (“a self-deceptive disjunction between private and public personas,” p. 93). While Marx may have penned hostile words about Judaism on one occasion, this was an abstract critique that, when it comes down to it, does not challenge the interests of the Jews as an ethnic group. While in a superficial sense Marxism may seem antithetical to Judaism, MacDonald goes on to assert that Marx specifically believed Jews (ostensibly, uniquely) would continue to exist in communism. And in a footnote, he adds that like “many other Jewish intellectuals reviewed here, Marx had an antipathy toward gentile society.”

In his most recent reply, MacDonald goes even further to state that any apparent hostility of Marx toward Judaism was itself a means of deceiving gentiles. He quotes Shlomo Avineri in arguing that this deception was necessary only to not “be accused of supporting Jewish rights because of his own Jewish background.”

More recently, Schlomo Avineri’s (2019: 48) view is consistent with the latter comments and casts further doubt on Cofnas’s claim that Marx was an anti-Semite. Avineri argues that the most likely explanation for Marx’s anti-Jewish remarks is that he strongly backed Jewish emancipation and was opposed to Bruno Bauer’s demand that Jews be forced to convert to Christianity before being granted legal equality. Marx “had to bend over backward and distance himself as much as possible from Jews and Judaism so as not to be accused of supporting Jewish rights because of his own Jewish background.” This at least suggests a Jewish identity and concern for Jewish interests. (MacDonald 2022, 7)

According to this interpretation, Karl Marx was actually a prime example of an influential Jew tricking unsuspecting gentiles into supporting Jewish interests. His ideology was intended perhaps not so much to liberate the working class, rectify historical tensions, critically analyze capitalism, etc., but to protect Jews from adversaries and, in an evolutionary sense, to preserve the Jewish genetic stock indefinitely.

But this is all very wishful thinking at best, simple lies at worst.

As Nathan Cofnas put forth in his original paper back in 2018, the citation (Katz 1986, 113) does not actually comment on this let alone substantiate MacDonald’s claim that Marx envisioned Jews would “continue to exist in the transformed society.”

In Andrew Joyce’s simultaneously polemical and sycophantic “The Cofnas Problem,” he claims the following:

Citing Jacob Katz (and as an owner of several volumes by Katz I’ve checked for accuracy), perhaps the foremost mainstream 20th century scholar of Jewish-Christian relations between the medieval and modern periods, MacDonald astutely qualifies his summary of Marx’s anti-Semitism by stressing that “Marx argued against the idea that Jews must give up their Jewishness to be German citizens, and he envisioned that Judaism, freed from the principle of greed, would continue to exist in the transformed society after the revolution.” Cofnas not only doesn’t have a response to this fact, or the source material, his article merely dissembles that it doesn’t exist, or that MacDonald in any case doesn’t make reference to it. Again, this is in the context of Cofnas’s accusation of “misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts.” Who is really misrepresenting sources in this instance?

But this, too, is a lie, and a rather embarrassing one at that. Cofnas directly addresses the citation of Katz which, once again, provides no support, instead discussing precursors to Zionism. And as he points out, the only reference to Marx in the book is when Katz claims that “with the disappearance of the system, Judaism too would disappear. Jews qua Jews would become liberated from their Judaism to take up their place as human beings in the socialist society of the future, which would have no religious, national or class differences” (122).

MacDonald has since conceded that “the citation to Jacob Katz is screwed up” but refuses to let the claim itself go, noting that he “suspect[s] I cited the wrong book” (2018, footnote 18). The quote from Katz (1986, 122) given above is direct enough to dismiss MacDonald’s characterization as mendacious, but perhaps we can check out his others books as well.

Of all the books written by Katz, the only other relevant passages I could find come from From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933.

Here’s one:

Marx imagined that with this new metamorphosis in the life of humanity the individuals would function spontaneously as complementary parts of a harmonious apparatus. The divisions between different religions and classes would then disappear; the distinctions between Jews and Gentiles would fade away. The solution of the Jewish question was thus relegated to this future Utopia. (Katz 1980, 173)

Fully consistent with his 1986 remarks, Katz offers the common (that is, the obvious) interpretation of Marx’s words when he writes:

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. . . . Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

In other words, Jews as a group will cease to exist in the world Marx both predicted and worked toward.

I would frankly be impressed if MacDonald were able to admit just this one error — and not that he cited the wrong page, or something, but that Katz does not ever say anything of the sort. Andrew Joyce, at least, will have none of it, and commented the following after being confronted by Cofnas:

On the issue of the Katz quote I have no problem at all with Macdonald’s citation. Yes, the page number appears fudged but it’s reflective of Katz’s opinions as expressed in his Antisemitism: From Prejudice to Destruction (p.173) in which it’s made clear that Marx supported Jewish emancipation and wanted to relegate any resolution of the Jewish Question merely to a “future utopia.” Jewish continuity on other words.

What a brilliant mind indeed to interpret “The divisions between different religions and classes would then disappear; the distinctions between Jews and Gentiles would fade away” as “Jewish continuity on other words [sic!],” not to mention the even more explicit ”Judaism too would disappear” from the book MacDonald cites. He appears to be arguing that because Jews existed when Marx was writing, and he thought they would cease to exist only in the future, this somehow entails “Jewish continuity” and confirms MacDonald’s explicit claim about their future existence as well. It seems Joyce lies just for the fun of it.

But Katz (1980, 171–2) provides even more useful information on Marx’s background (emphasis added):

Karl’s father, Heinrich Marx, though the son of a rabbi of Trier, converted to Christianity around the date of Karl's birth, in 1818; Karl, together with his six brothers and sisters, was baptized by him six years later, in 1824. The children's mother, the daughter of the rabbi of Nijmegen in Holland, followed them a year later, after the death of her mother. Whatever Jewish cultural traits Heinrich Marx might have acquired in his youth, he no doubt made an effort to shed before his conversion. . . . Heinrich Marx . . . denied the existence of any Jewish peculiarity that would warrant a special status, his arguments reminiscent of the ideology of the radical assimilationists. . . .

There were sure signs, in the correspondence of Heinrich Marx with his son Karl, as well as in the behavior of the latter during his whole life, that the family adopted an ostrich policy, shutting their eyes to the fact of their Jewish origin, never mentioning it, and overreacting whenever reminded of the unpleasant fact. . . .

Culturally, no doubt, the father and, even more, the sons had been absorbed by their German environment. Christianity had been brought to bear upon the mind of Karl through his education in the humanistic but still religiously oriented Gymnasium. If this did not turn him into an ardent Christian, it integrated him intellectually into the world of Christian ideas. 

Among the elements he absorbed in this way was the negative image of Jews and Judaism—and this ingredient of his intellectual make-up, together with the awareness of his link to the despised race, goes a long way toward explaining his attitude to Jews and their problems. In Marx's rejection of Judaism we encounter a special type of anti-Semitism, burdened by personal involvement and a kind of self-hatred.

Jacob Katz’s actual opinions seem well supported by the facts.

Marx was raised in a patriotic household. According to Silberner (1949):

[His father Heinrich’s] ardent Prussian patriotism is perhaps best shown in his memorial on the “décrêt infâme” — Einige Bemerkungen über das napoleonische Dekret vom 17 März 1808 bei Gelegenheit der glücklichen Vereinigung unseres Landes [the Rhineland] mit der königlich-preussischen Mon­ archie (1815)—a true eulogy of the King of Prussia. It was not pub­lished by the author, because von Sack, Governor-General of the Middle and Lower Rhine, to whom he sent it for approval, does not seem to have replied. His patriotism is also evident in the advice he gave to his son to compose an ode on some glorious episode from Prussian history, such as the battle of Waterloo. The poem was to assign a role to the “genius of monarchy” and, in order to make Karl famous, it should be “patriotic, full of feeling, and worked out in a German spirit.” 

Among Karl’s earliest written works was “The Union of the Faithful with Christ”:

Thus the union with Christ imparts an inner exaltation, comfort in suffering, calm trust, and a heart full of love for humankind, open to everything noble, everything great, not out of ambition but for the sake of Christ. Thus the union with Christ imparts a joyousness which the Epicurean in his frivolous philosophy and the deep thinker in his most arcane science have vainly tried to snatch at, but which the soul can attain only through its unrestrained and childlike union with Christ and God, which alone makes life more beautiful and exalted.

In keeping with MacDonald’s unfailing mention when a Jew is endogamous, it’s relevant to note, and consistent with everything else, that Marx’s childhood sweetheart and life-long wife was Jenny von Westphalen, a gentile woman descending from German nobility. The Marxes had three surviving children, of whom apparently only Eleanor would go on to identify as Jewish after the Dreyfus Trial, though none including Eleanor married other Jews. This was a thoroughly assimilated family whose Jewishness was eventually absorbed into gentile stock, disappearing without a trace in just the manner Marx endorsed. Not only did he consistently apply his ideas to his own ethnic group, he did so to his own family.

And consistent with Katz, his attitudes toward the Jews as a people were generally hostile. Seemingly they were the result of a self-hatred not uncommon to stigmatized minorities who seek acceptance by the broader society, and which naturally tend to be accompanied by a lack of interest in or aversion to group-specific concerns.

None of this is contradicted by Avineri’s admitted blind speculation that Marx’s antisemitism in Zur Judenfrage was strategic. Cofnas (2023) suggests that “MacDonald (2022) has found a couple of commentators with the eccentric theory that Marx only pretended to be an anti-Semite,” but this is not quite what Avineri maintains. Contrary to MacDonald’s insinuation that Cofnas is repeating, he is solely commenting on this one essay and his words are by no means meant to apply to Marx’s antisemitism in general. This kind of deception would not explain, for example, the fixation on Jewish wealth and power of Marx’s anonymous articles written for the New York Tribune and the Neue Oder-Zeitung:

While Marx systematically neglected to study the condition of the Jewish working masses, he showed a predilection for analyzing the wealth and power of the Jewish financiers. In the mid-fifties, during the Crimean War, he published at least three anonymous articles in the New York Tribune (November 9, 22, 1855; January 4, 1856) devoted to this subject. Another one, on the power of the Rothschilds, appeared in the Neue Oder-Zeitung in August 1855. . . .

In another anonymous article, “The Loan-Mongers of Europe,” Marx surveys once more the network of Jewish banks in the Old World. . . . Posted in every point of Europe are Jewish agents who represent this business and work for other leading Jews. In almost every European city there are to be found “a handful of Jews who deem it an honor to take a little of the new stock for specula­tion if the Rothschilds or any other of the great Jewish houses are connected with the negotiation. It is this business Freemasonry among the Jewish bankers which has brought the barter trade in government securities to its present height.” From a knowledge of their financial position, Marx does not hesitate to predict a crash which, as a conse­quence of the present war, is sure to happen to “the representatives of this particular race.” The reader will not fail to notice that the Jewish bankers are depicted here as if they represented a whole people.

Marx calls attention to the fact that almost all Jewish bankers and speculators are connected by family ties. . . .

“The fact,” Marx concludes, “that 1855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish money-chang­ers out of the temple, and that the money-changers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence. The loan-mongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization.”

Silberner’s “Was Marx an Anti-Semite?” dedicates a section (381–5) to reviewing this tendency in his editorials, something very hard to interpret through the lens of Jewish interests. While it could make sense for Marx to embellish a little in Zur Judenfrage — after all it would be wise for anyone, Jew or gentile, to distance themselves from Judaism if they wished to be taken seriously — for obvious reasons this cannot be the case with his anonymous writings which must be taken as genuine expressions of Marx’s personal beliefs.

Likewise, in his private correspondences we find a similar proclivity to Jew-naming as well as gratuitous antisemitism:

In his correspondence with Engels, Marx used a variety of expressions to designate Jews. In some instances the proper names are simply pre­ceded or followed by the word “Jew,” “English Jew,” “French Jew,” etc. In others, “Jüdchen” or “Jüdche” (a little Jew) are added to the names of such different men as Louis Bamberger, a banker, Leo Fränkel, a revolutionary, and Eduard Bernstein, the later revisionist. In still other cases, “der Jud” (Yid), “der verfluchte Jude” (the damned Jew), or “Jud Süss” fulfil the same function. Sometimes, a more subtle way of identifying Jews is used: imitating their peculiar pronunciation.

Cofnas (2023) gives other examples, noting that

He complained that Eastern European Jews were “reproducing like lice” and agreed with Friedrich Engels that Polish Jews were “the dirtiest of all races”

Silberner concurs:

Antipathy to the Jews is discernible even in those writings of Marx which have not the remotest connection with them. Thus, in his “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), he says that the German philosopher did not grasp the significance of revolutionary activity, because practice is con­ceived by him “only in its dirty-Jewish manifestation.” This, by the way, is not the only instance in which he associates Jewishness and dirtiness. Paraphrasing a statement by Schlosser that, in Poland as once in Egypt, the Jews were increasing in great numbers, Marx wrote: “they multiplied like lice (Filzläuse).”

All it takes is a familiarity with the antisemitism of all of Marx’s writings to dismiss the notion that it was all a ruse and establish that he was, in fact, genuinely antisemitic. Notwithstanding MacDonald’s strange aside that “Marx had an antipathy toward gentile society,” it’s abundantly clear that Jews were included in this antipathy as well.

A final point to be addressed is that while Marx did support political emancipation for all, including Jews, this was in all likelihood nothing more than a chance confluence of interests. (Think back to how MacDonald recently attempted to downplay Franz Boas’ passion for German culture by fixating on the moment when his actions happened to coincide with those of other Jews, in his support for Germany in WWI.) Not only did Marx the leftist have zero reason to support the religiously-guided restrictions on Europe’s Jews backed by reactionaries, he once clarified that such a move is in fact tactically useful for the socialist agenda:

Repugnant as the Israelite faith is to me, Bauer’s view [that the Jews can be politi­cally emancipated only after having become atheists] seems too abstract to me. As many holes as possible should be driven into the Christian State in order to smuggle in, as much as we can, the rational [point of view]. At any rate, one must try to do it—and the embitterment grows with every [civil rights] petition that is turned down with protest. (371)

It should be clear that Marx was an assimilated Jew who paid no heed to Jewish interests in crafting his philosophy. Why might it be that MacDonald refuses to relinquish the point?

In the world of Kevin MacDonald, the default assumption is that Jewish assimilation does not occur; it simply appears to exist as a means to deceive gentiles. Rather than slowly associating with and eventually being absorbed by the out-group, assimilationist Jewish movements and communities were actually intended to conceal a steadily intense Jewish ethnocentrism. This is a mindset that blinds MacDonald to far more parsimonious explanations, and causes him to grasp onto every example of assimilating Jews still exhibiting some kind of partiality to Judaism or other Jews — to be expected, by definition, throughout the gradual process of assimilation — as evidence of deception. Thus, Franz Boas, while an assimilated German by every simple and objective analysis, becomes a crypto-Jew molding American anthropology along Jewish lines. The same is true for MacDonald’s interpretation of Karl Marx. He cannot apparently conceive that these two influential Jews may have actually been representative of a genuine trend of assimilation among German Jewry with roots far deeper than he’d like to admit.

Another example of especial relevance is the man to whom Marx was replying in Zur Judenfrage, theologian Bruno Bauer. While MacDonald and Joyce attempt to obfuscate Marx’s calls for Jewish assimilation in this piece, it would be foolish to ignore the context of what he was actually responding to.

Bauer was even more explicit than Marx. In Silberner’s words:

Christianity represents the most perfect type of religion, while Judaism is a lower form of creed. Therefore, true emancipation is more difficult for the Jews than for the Christians. To become a free man, the Christian has only to renounce his Christianity, while the Jew has “to surrender himself completely” and sacrifice not only his religion but also “the chimerical privilege of his nationality.” In other words, the Jews are not to adopt Christianity, but to destroy their own religious and national identity. 

Interestingly, his relative Otto created the Austromarxist idea of “cultural-national autonomy,” an attempt to sympathetically reconcile nationalism with Marxian socialism in what would come to be seen as a rightist deviation. While MacDonald claims that Jews like Marx attempted to stigmatize or erase gentile identities while preserving their own, Otto Bauer does the opposite: all nations have a right to autonomy, except the Jews.

The Jewish nation, according to Bauer, belonged to the pre-modern era, when the Jews were representatives of a money economy in a world whose primary mode of exchange was barter. . . .

In his analysis of the so-called Jewish question Bauer followed his mentor Victor Adler [yet another assimilationist Jew], who saw national assimilation as a precondition of social emancipation, and the disappearance of the Jews’ (historical) identity as a precondition for their liberation as individuals ([5], pp. 295–96). . . . While articulating on the one hand the prospect for inclusion in a new, Austrian, “non-Jewish” identity, more adequate to a revolutionized, modern way of life, Bauer was expressing at the same time a desire for liberation from a collective Jewish identity—an identity seen as backward, pre-modern, and reactionary. . . .

Bauer’s positions were almost paradigmatic of large numbers of middle class second and third generation Viennese Jews who became loyal Social Democrats. The coding of interwar Vienna’s Social Democratic government—Red Vienna—as “Jewish” by anti-Semites renders it difficult to ask whether the fact that so many of its leaders were Jews made a difference in the kinds of policies they pursued.

(Maderthaner 2015, 8)

None of these people can be seen as keeping with MacDonald’s thesis. Again, advocacy of (total) assimilation rules it out:

An important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. (MacDonald 1998, lxxiii)

The best evidence that individuals have really ceased to have a Jewish identity is if they choose a political option that they perceive as clearly not in the interests of Jews as a group. (MacDonald 1998, 55–6)

Perhaps in his upcoming reissue of The Culture of Critique we’ll see this part rectified, too.