Printed below is an excerpt from The Jewish Question, A Marxist Interpretation by Abram Leon, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for November. Covering the span from the Roman era to World War II, Leon takes as his point of departure Karl Marx’s observation that "Judaism continues to exist not in spite of history but owing to history."

Leon traces the historical roots of anti-Semitism to the fact that Jews were forced to become a "people-class" of merchants and moneylenders in the centuries preceding industrial capitalism. He explains why in times of social crisis renewed Jew-hatred is incited by the capitalists to mobilize reactionary forces against the labor movement and to disorient the middle classes and layers of working people about the true nature of their impoverishment. Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
 

Petty-bourgeois ideologists are always inclined to raise a historical phenomenon into an eternal category. For them the Jewish question is a function of the Diaspora; only the concentration of the Jews in Palestine can resolve it.

But it is pure childishness to reduce the Jewish question to a question of territory. The territorial solution has meaning only if it signifies the disappearance of traditional Judaism, the penetration of Jews into modern economy, the "productivization" of the Jews. By a detour, Zionism thus returns to the solution proposed by its worst enemies, the consistent "assimilationists." For the Zionists as well as for the assimilationists it is a question of doing away with the "cursed" heritage of the past, of making workers, agriculturists, productive intellectuals, of the Jews. The illusion of Zionism does not consist in its desire to attain this result; that is a historical necessity which will cut its own path sooner or later. Its illusion consists in believing that the insurmountable difficulties which decaying capitalism puts in the way of these tasks will disappear as if by magic in Palestine. But if the Jews were unable to find a place in economic life in the Diaspora, the same causes will prevent them from doing so in Palestine.

The world today is so much a unit that it is sheer folly to try to build within it a haven sheltered from its storms. That is why the failure of "assimilation" must of necessity be followed by the failure of Zionism. In this period when the Jewish problem takes on the aspect of a terrible tragedy, Palestine can be no more than a feeble palliative. Ten million Jews find themselves in a huge concentration camp. What remedy can the creation of a few Zionist colonies bring to this problem?  
 
No solution under capitalism
Well then--neither assimilation nor Zionism? No solution at all? No, there is no solution to the Jewish question under capitalism, just as there is no solution to the other problems posed before humanity--without profound social upheavals. The same causes which make the emancipation of the Jews an illusion also make the realization of Zionism impossible. Unless the profound causes for the Jewish question are eliminated, the effects cannot be eliminated.

The ghetto and the wheel [the badge that Jews sewed on their clothes in the Middle Ages] have reappeared--symbols, moreover, of the tragic destiny toward which humanity is being driven. But the very exacerbation of anti-Semitism prepares the road for its disappearance. The driving out of the Jews provides momentarily a kind of living space for the petty bourgeoisie. "Aryanization" creates jobs for some tens of thousands of unemployed intellectuals and petty bourgeois. But in attacking the apparent causes of their misfortunes, the petty bourgeoisie has merely strengthened the operation of the real causes. Fascism will accelerate the process of proletarianization of the middle classes. After the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers and artisans were expropriated and proletarianized. Capitalist concentration made gigantic progress. "Improvement in the economic situation" took place only at the price of preparation for the second imperialist war, the cause of enormous destruction and slaughter.

Thus the tragic fate of Judaism mirrors with singular sharpness the situation of all humanity. The decline of capitalism means for the Jews the return to the ghetto--although the basis for the ghetto disappeared long ago, along with the foundations of feudal society. Similarly, for all humanity, capitalism bars the road of the past as well as the highway to the future. Only the destruction of capitalism will make it possible for humanity to benefit from the immense achievements of the industrial era.

The very paroxysm, however, that the Jewish problem has reached today, also provides the key to its solution. The plight of the Jews has never been so tragic; but never has it been so close to ceasing to be that. In past centuries, hatred of the Jews had a real basis in the social antagonism which set them against other classes of the population. Today, the interest of the Jewish classes are closely bound up with the interests of the popular masses of the entire world. By persecuting the Jews as "capitalist," capitalism makes them complete pariahs. The ferocious persecutions against Judaism render stark naked the stupid bestiality of anti-Semitism and destroy the remnants of prejudices that the working classes nurse against the Jews. The ghettos and the yellow badges do not prevent the workers from feeling a growing solidarity with those who suffer most from the afflictions all humanity is suffering. And the greatest social explosion the world has ever seen is finally preparing the liberation of the most persecuted pariahs of our planet. When the people of the factories and the fields have finally thrown off the yoke of the capitalists, when a future of unlimited development opens up before liberated humanity, the Jewish masses will be able to make a far from unimportant contribution towards the building of a new world.  
 
 
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