Was Karl Marx an anti-Semite? I have twice before written setting out the reasons why my own answer to this question would be an unqualified yes (see here and section 1 here): Marx’s essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ uncritically deploys certain standard anti-Jewish themes; and from time to time (for example, in his correspondence) he displayed disparaging attitudes towards Jews.
But when the question is posed in an interview with Jonathan Sperber, the author of a new biography of Marx, Sperber proffers ‘an ambivalent response‘, saying that historians are ‘notoriously reluctant to give yes-or-no answers to any question’. Yet the material he cites in favour of his ambivalent response is not, in my view, apropos. Thus he says (as is true) that Marx favoured the political emancipation of the Jews, so that they should enjoy the same democratic rights as everybody else; and he cites evidence of Marx admiring certain individual Jews and occasionally writing of his own Jewish origins in a more friendly way. And that’s basically it – aside from a remark that when viewed through the genocidal project of the Nazis in the 20th century Marx’s attitudes to Jews look more sinister than they are
I have no quarrel at all with that last point. It won’t do to project back on to Marx anything like the exterminationist thinking of Adolph Hitler. There is not a scrap of evidence for doing so. But, for the rest, none of what Sperber adduces is to the point. One could not persuasively say of a person who supported the enjoyment of all the usual democratic rights by black people but also wrote and spoke of them in an abusive way, mobilizing standard anti-black stereotypes, that he or she wasn’t a racist. In some matters you can’t ‘balance out’ material of one kind by saying there is also material of another kind. It is relevant to know that there is this other material and it can make an important difference to the overall moral picture, but the other side of the story doesn’t neutralize the side to which it is other.
For an analogy, you only have to consider whether the question ‘Is Hilda a vegetarian?’ should give anyone pause when Hilda is known to tuck in regularly to sumptuous beef steaks and plates of fried chicken – give them pause because Hilda also likes vegetables and eats them in quantity. Hector, likewise, is not a libertarian if he favours savage laws of every kind but hesitates over a ban on the sale of hard drugs.
Marx wasn’t a Nazi or a precursor of Nazi racial anti-Semitism. But the fact that he sometimes displayed friendlier attitudes to Jews and Jewishness does not dispel the anti-Semitism that is manifestly there both in his work and in his unpleasant remarks about certain Jews, remarks relating precisely to their Jewishness.