Marx was not merely a Jewish thinker, he was also an anti-Jewish thinker. Therein lies the paradox, which has a tragically important bearing both on the history of Marxist development and on its consummation in the Soviet Union and its progeny. The roots of Marx’s anti-Semitism went deep. We have already seen the part anti-Jewish polemic played in the works of enlightenment writers like Voltaire. This tradition passed into two streams. One was the German ‘idealist’ stream, going through Goethe, Fichte, Hegel and Bauer, in each of whom the anti-Jewish elements became more pronounced. The other
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