- Banned
- #1
Here they are: “Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx”. I am not about to dispute any of them, nor Stephens’ right of choice. Granted, this rather short list of Jewish over-achievers in different fields for a hundred years can be easily augmented. Such world-famous Jews as Sigmund Freud and Leo Trotsky (1879-1940)[1]
are very conspicuous by their absence.
And then that parenthetical “(sigh)” which Stephens emitted before placing it in front of Karl Marx! Does it not cancel the major part of Stephens’ argument about the exclusively beneficial influence of Jews on world affairs?
..........................
Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844, contains the following:
What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
Marx argues that, “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”[9]
Yet, I would not want to be unfair to the young Marx by calling him outright “anti-Semitic”, a term I avoid as a malicious misnomer designed to implicate all non-Jews in irrational hatred of racial or physical features common for the Jews and the Arabs. But Marx’s attitude toward the Jewish preoccupation with money-lending and other financial machinations, negative as it was, deserves attention. (At this point I would expect Stephens to fill the brackets with a word much stronger than “sigh”).
The young Marx’s aversion to a common Jewish preoccupation with money was an important factor of his hostility to Capitalism in general. Nay, it was more than hostility: it was an obsessive desire to get rid of it, once and for all, preferably by violent revolutionary means. Strange as it may seem, it was precisely this psychological need to free oneself from any association with “the Golden Calf” of Capitalism in a single stroke that attracted the young Karl Marx — and then thousands of young, idealistic and impatient Jews– to Communism, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe.
I care not who has the power, give me the money. Right? The Golden Rule: He who has the gold rules.
Sighing at the Secrets of Jewish Genius
are very conspicuous by their absence.
And then that parenthetical “(sigh)” which Stephens emitted before placing it in front of Karl Marx! Does it not cancel the major part of Stephens’ argument about the exclusively beneficial influence of Jews on world affairs?
..........................
Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844, contains the following:
What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
Marx argues that, “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”[9]
Yet, I would not want to be unfair to the young Marx by calling him outright “anti-Semitic”, a term I avoid as a malicious misnomer designed to implicate all non-Jews in irrational hatred of racial or physical features common for the Jews and the Arabs. But Marx’s attitude toward the Jewish preoccupation with money-lending and other financial machinations, negative as it was, deserves attention. (At this point I would expect Stephens to fill the brackets with a word much stronger than “sigh”).
The young Marx’s aversion to a common Jewish preoccupation with money was an important factor of his hostility to Capitalism in general. Nay, it was more than hostility: it was an obsessive desire to get rid of it, once and for all, preferably by violent revolutionary means. Strange as it may seem, it was precisely this psychological need to free oneself from any association with “the Golden Calf” of Capitalism in a single stroke that attracted the young Karl Marx — and then thousands of young, idealistic and impatient Jews– to Communism, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe.
I care not who has the power, give me the money. Right? The Golden Rule: He who has the gold rules.
Sighing at the Secrets of Jewish Genius
