The New Neo

Commenter “DNW” asked yesterday:

…[C]an anyone…tell me why an even moderately religious or observant Jew, would continue to speak of left-wing atheist progressives, as “Jews”?

Not that you would necessarily know. I just have no one else to ask.

I’ll take a stab at it.

Jewishness is an odd thing. It’s a religion in the usual sense, which means that someone not born Jewish can become a Jew by conversion. Conversion is considered to make someone fully Jewish, by the way, and Jews around the world are of every ethnicity possible.

However, it’s also a “people.” That can mean a number of things (one definition, for example, is “a group of people with a shared history and a sense of a group identity rather than a territorial and political entity”). But one thing it has tended to mean historically—especially to the Jews’ enemies—is a membership conveyed through birth.

So birth mattered—and still matters—to some people as much as belief or religion. To the Nazis, it mattered a lot. But not just to the Nazis; they just were one group that used the definition in exceedingly pernicious and destructive ways.

At any rate, Jews who have no religion at all but who were born to two Jewish (or even one Jewish) parents are still often considered ethnic Jews, or Jews of some sort, both by enemies and by friends. Call them cultural Jews, call them secular Jews, but they often not only are called “Jews” by others but consider themselves Jewish despite that lack of religion.

At what point does Jewish identity end? For example, you often read that Karl Marx, the father of Communism, was a Jew, right? Here are the facts, however:

Marx wasn’t even a lapsed Jew. He was a lapsed Christian. His father converted to Christianity to advance his career. Young Karl disavowed all religions and would later rant against them, especially Judaism. In fact, he is better remembered as one of the world’s most accomplished anti-semites. His famous “On the Jewish Question” called for an end to the emancipation of the Jews because they were enslaved by a harsher taskmaster than the German state: their own religion. He referred to money as the real God of the Old Testament. And, probably not coincidentally, he was frequently in debt to Jewish moneylenders.

Therefore, Karl Marx only counts as a Jew on the slimmest of halachic opinions. And if there was an expulsion process for the Tribe, he would probably be first on the list. His hatred of Jews arose more from his own confusion about his heritage, and his inability to repay his debts, than from a legitimate concern for the human race.

This isn’t meant to be a “Who Is a Jew” exercise, though. Something more important is at stake. Right-wingers throughout the world often equate Marx’ supposed Judaism with a solid link between the religion and communism. There isn’t. Marx borrowed nothing from the Jewish tradition to formulate his ideals.

If you want to delve even deeper into Marx’s twisted history, we have this, which mentions that Marx’s father’s conversion occurred when Karl was a child, and that for some reason although Catholicism was the dominant religion in his part of Germany he converted to Protestantism. No one mentions the mother. Did she remain Jewish? I have no idea.

The plot thickens when you read this, which states that Marx Sr. converted before Karl’s birth and that Lutheranism (the Christian religion to which he converted) was the dominant religion in his part of the world. So you have a singular lack of clarity.

This is typical, I’m afraid. I would not call Marx any sort of Jew, although his heritage was indeed Jewish in the sense of parents who at least at some point in time had been Jewish. It certainly doesn’t sound as though he considered himself a Jew. But the society in which he moved may have considered him one. Perhaps his hatred of Jews was partly an effort to make it clear that he wasn’t one of those awful Jews; how could he be, when he disliked them so?

At any rate, for most people today Marx’s protests, his atheism, and the fact that he was not raised Jewish mean nothing—he is still identified in people’s minds as a Jew.

But to answer DNW’s question specifically regarding how it is that religious Jews can consider a secular Jew to still be a Jew, we have this stricter definition:

According to Jewish law, a child born to a Jewish mother or an adult who has converted to Judaism is considered a Jew; one does not have to reaffirm their Jewishness or practice any of the laws of the Torah to be Jewish. According to Reform Judaism, a person is a Jew if they were born to either a Jewish mother or a Jewish father. Also, Reform Judaism stresses the importance of being raised Jewish; if a child is born to Jewish parents and was not raised Jewish then the child is not considered Jewish. According to the Orthodox movement, the father’s religion and whether the person practices is immaterial. No affirmation or upbringing is needed, as long as the mother was Jewish.

By that strict definition under Jewish law, Marx would have been a Jew, and that it how it is that a “moderately religious or observant Jew, would continue to speak of left-wing atheist progressives, as ‘Jews.'”

[ADDENDUM: By the way, for what it’s worth, Engels was not Jewish in any sense of the word, nor was Lenin or Stalin. It has recently been revealed that Lenin may have had a maternal grandfather who was born Jewish but who converted; this does not a Jew make by any accepted definition, as you can see from the post. Trotsky, on the other hand, was born to a family of secular non-religious Jews. It would be interesting to look back and see how many generations back they had lost their religion; if it was more than one, is it correct to consider them Jewish at all?

Here’s an interesting discussion of Trotsky’s Jewishness:

There is no question that genetically speaking, Trotsky was a Jew. But personally and culturally, he emphatically denied any connection with the Jewish people. Quoting from my book Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime:

“Trotsky””the satanic ‘Bronstein of Russian anti-Semites’””was deeply offended whenever anyone presumed to call him a Jew. When a visiting Jewish delegation appealed to him to help fellow Jews, he flew into a rage: “I am not a Jew but an internationalist.”

As with Marx, a fat lot of good it did him—most people would consider Trotsky a Jew. I repeat, though: at what point, if a person’s ancestors and that person him/herself disavows Jewishness, do we take them at their word?]