Marx Was a Jew
August 21, 2024

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It’s the turning point of The Stranger (1946),
the moment Edward G. Robinson
wakes up in the middle of the night
knowing Orson Welles gave himself away
by saying “Marx wasn’t a German,
he was a Jew.” Only a Nazi
would make the distinction, he reasons.
On the other hand, in “On the Jewish Question” (1843),
Karl Marx wrote that money is the jealous god
of the Jews, turning men into commodities,
hucksters all, look at them haggle.
“The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew,”
he wrote, and the road to a free world requires
“the emancipation of humanity from Judaism.”
So are you saying that a Jew can be anti-Semitic?
Or that the Left has a love-hate history with the Jews,
the hate reserved for (or projected onto) Israel,
itself a concept in a cloudy world of concepts
rather than a state containing millions of souls?
And along comes a smartass academic pronoun to explain
Marx’s essay is actually a critique of anti-Semitism.
David Lehman is a poet and writer whose books include New and Selected Poems and A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and series editor of The Best American Poetry.