The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

Where the Jews were concerned, he argued, it was not the Sabbath service which mattered but how they lived and what they lived for, which was, always, money. In this deep sense, being Jewish was to worship at the golden calf of capitalism: the two habits were one and the same. There were two extraordinary and baleful aspects to Marx’s analysis of what it meant to be Jewish. First it was astonishing, especially at a time when the first modern histories – social and religious – of the Jews were being written by the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Heinrich Graetz and Leopold Zunz, that Marx saw what he judged to be reprehensible economic practices, not as the results of persecution and the enforced restriction of Jews to odious occupations, but rather to ingrained and incorrigible habits, so that the usury of the Middle Ages became the vicious banking of the modern age. It was Marx who gave a modern gloss to the ancient libel that Judaism was, in effect, interchangeable with, and nothing more than, the worship of Mammon. Worse still – and ominous for the future – was Marx’s echoing of the contemporary commonplace, owned by Judaeophobes of both right and left, that the Jews were hardly in need of emancipation since they were the masters of the modern age. ‘The Jews have [already] become emancipated in so far as Christians have become Jews.’