Page:Minority of One January 1961.pdf/6

Going with the Wind

The cold war has given rise to a great variety of new professions, not only among the newly emerged military elite but also in certain semi-scholarly fields. There are, for instance, people who have traded their vocational training and skills for the opportunity of becoming "professional" assassins of other people's reputations, and they are making a living at it. There are others whose change was less radical. Consider a man who wrote a book over twenty years ago (the title: "The Soviet Impact on Society") but could never find a publisher to take it on. Some years later, however, and thanks to the cold war that developed in the meantime, everything anti-Soviet finds a thirsty market, the author turns publisher, prints the stuff in perfect safety that now no one will dare challenge the merits of a book that is anti-Soviet. That man calls himself Dagobert (any Hollywoodization of name?) D. Runes.

THE "EMINENT PHILOSOPHER"

The reader had better not ask who Mr. Runes, a self-professed "eminent philosopher", is since a book reviewer who "dared" to refer to him as "a certain Dagobert D. Runes" was reprimanded by him for having done so "with a straight face" and with the sermon: "Now look. I have written and edited more than twenty books in my time, and I doubt if any student of philosophy or social history has gone through college without the use of some of my books." So, as you can see, the "Eminent Philosopher" Runes' authority must be taken for granted, or else! -even if he just "forgets" to cite a single instance of a college using any of his books. Furthermore, unless you are willing to pay homage to the "Eminent Philosopher Runes, he may "honor" you with a personal letter (don't forget to keep the signature for the eventual enrichment of some discriminating museum!) as this writer was "honored", calling you a man of "pitiful ignorance". "amazing indolence" and "laziness" who does "not know your way around about (sic!) books".

But it is not the "Eminent Philosopher" Runes we wish to talk about but one of his truly amazing success stories. Even if you have never come within a block's distance of a printing plant, you will appreciate the "quick-buckedness" of that success story. Just imagine taking some text that is within public domain (no authorship fee or royal- ties to be paid for it), printing it on 51 small, 4"x 7", pages and peddling the stuff at $2.75 a copy! Of course, if you too were an "Eminent Philosopher" you would know what kind of stuff to choose and how to title it in order, after a while, to be able to re- port that "the sales of this small book have gone into tens of thousands."

THE "SMALL BOOK"

It seems that the only honest thing about that "small book" is that its publisher did not claim to have written it himself. This credit is given to Karl Marx and six times acknowledged in bold letters on the cover and title pages. The title of the "small book" by Karl Marx is "A World Without Jews". The only acknowledgement that that "small book" was edited by (a) Dagobert D. Runes appears on its dust jacket.

As one who believes himself rather thoroughly acquainted with all of Karl Marx's published writings, to the degree that a command of almost a dozen of languages including German sufficed, I also believe I am in a position to state that Karl Marx has never written nor published a "small" or any other book called "A World Without Jews", and all proof to the contrary would have to come from the "Eminent Philosopher".

Mr. Runes' self-professed intention in publishing the "small book" is to "prove" that Karl Marx was, like Adolf Hitler, a vicious anti-Semite. I do not come to the defense of Karl Marx's memory out of any political loyalty to him, which political loyalty I do not possess. But I do come to denounce with all the vehemence of my pen an attempt to capitalize on cold war hysteria by resorting to literary frauds. In doing this I should state that in certain respects I share more with Mr. Runes than with Karl Marx: while a student of Marxism, I am not a Marxist; I am a Jew like Mr. Runes. This, however, does not mean that I would grant Mr. Runes the right to lie or to commit a literary fraud. Had the subject of his perversion not been Karl Marx but anyone else, my position would be the same.

THE "INTRODUCTION"

While only the dust jacket of the "small book" acknowledges any editing by Runes, there are several pages of Runes' "Introduction". It begins with a pretense of shyness and conscientiousness that contains a built-in denial of genuineness. He starts out: "It is with some reluctance that I have agreed to write these introductory lines to Karl Marx's embittered review of the Jewish problem." The unavoidable impression is that someone has asked Mr. Runes to write the "introduction", and after overcoming his initial reluctance, he finally "agreed" to do so. It also seems that the someone who urged Mr. Runes to write his "Introduction" must have been the publisher, the Philosophical Library. Now, the Philosophical Library is Mr. Runes and Mr. Runes is the Philosophical Library. So Mr. Runes asked Mr. Runes to write an "Introduction", and Mr. Runes, after some hesitation, informed Mr. Runes that he (Mr. Runes) would write the piece for Mr. Runes.

But let us not be stopped by megalomaniacal symptoms. One of the climactic frauds in that booklet is achieved through a perversive system of equations. In reviewing socialist movements Runes lists among them Hitler's National Socialist Party, which amounts to an obvious intellectual fraud. Since it is indisputable that the National Socialists of Germany were vicious anti-Semites, Runes accepts "Mein Kampf" as a window into Socialism. The Nazis called themselves some kind of Socialists and others call themselves some kind of Socialists. The Nazi "Socialists" were vicious anti-Semites; proof that all Socialists are vicious anti-Semites. In Runes' own words: "Almost a generation ago. the National Socialist Party of Germany adorned its Staffel with that badge (the yellow badge of anti-Semitism), and in our living days the red flag of the Soviet Union carries next to the hammer and sickle the hooked cross." And later he proceeds to answer in the affirmative the second of his two questions: "Was it just an ill wind of history that brought the evil odor of Jew hatred into these humanitarian camps of Socialist movements? Or are we faced here with a situation of direct cause and effect?"

BETWEEN MARX AND HERZL

Prophylactically, Runes proceeds to deal with someone's hypothetical argument, how could Marx, himself a Jew, have been an anti-Semite. He replies that "in the middle of the nineteenth century anti-Semitism was mainly a religious and social, not a racial issue, and among converts such as Karl Marx are to be found vitriolic enemies of Judaism." The truth of the matter is that in that century not only anti-Semitism but also Judaism itself was a religious and social, not a racial, issue. Consequently, anyone who challenged the prevailing religious and social relations of which Jewish religious and social relations were a part or a consequence, was in a way challenging Judaism. Such challenge was by no means anti-Semitic. On the contrary: all the progressive minds of the time, all the philo-Semites and anti-bigots were opposing Jewish reality as it then existed-they negated it and wished to introduce reforms in its stead. These challengers included such "anti-Semites" as the Founding Fathers of Zionism Theodor Herzl, Leo Pinsker, Ahad-Haam, Baron Rotschild, to mention just a few. Of course, there was a great political and philosophical difference between Marx and Herzl, but both conceived of Judaism, as it was at the time, as "abnormal"; both opposed it, both wished to alter its content as well as external relations.

The difference between Herzl and Marx was that the latter not only saw the Jewish situation as abnormal and the resulting Jewish traits as undesirable; in fact in a million and one places Marx made quite clear that whenever he talked about "Judaism" he had in mind what we presently call especially in America, "Judeo-Christianity". To re-quote Marx from Runes' own publication: "The Christian was from the start the theorizing Jew; the Jew therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has once more become a Jew." Was then Marx anti-Jewish or was he anti-Christian? Marx was more than both: he was anti-religious and against the total state of the capitalist society. One could easily prove that Marx was against one group or another, and when such evidence is taken out of Marx's overall critical philosophy, it may easily make him appear a bigot against one group or another rather than the radical total reformer he was. Marx went very far in depicting the negative sides of Jewishness, but he left no doubt whatsoever that he considered it symptomatic of the universal state of society. He protested against Bruno Bauer, accusing him of taking the "Jewish Question" out of the broader social context.

There may well be places in which Marx's references to Jews and Judaism sound derogatory. Runes takes no notice of the unrepresentative nature of Marx's early articles, written before the crystalization of his overall philosophy; or of Marx's view of Judaism as an epitome of commercialism that was not of his own design but rather something adopted from the generally accepted literary and sociological symbolism of his day. Runes is intellectually dishonest in withholding the historical background against which Marx wrote his early articles; he is also actively fraudulent in misconstruing Marx's opposition to the "Jewish spirit" as a genocidal opposition to Jews. This he does in spite of Marx's consistent, active, literary as well as political fight for the political emancipation of the Jews.

Considering the relationship Marx ascribed to Jews and Christians and to Judaism and Christianity, it becomes obvious that his at- tacks were not singling out Jews but aimed at society at large. The matter is largely one of semantics. This writer is not a Christian nor did he ever entertain any thoughts about converting to Christianity. Yet, in a particular context in which the word "Christian" is used as a synonym for "ethical", he has no qualms about being considered Christian. There is no longer a Samaritan people around, yet how often do