The Ordeal of Civility

The Marxian Urszene: Property and Propriety

Marx’s “primal scene” was thus very much a Jewish Urszene, rooted in his Jewish experience. Just as the core of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the “Oedipus complex,” is a universalization of his father’s social humili-ation, so, I contend, the core of Marx’s “scientific socialism”’—the in-sight that the determining realities of the socioeconomic “substructure” are masked by the cultural ideology of the “superstructure’—was”dis-covered" as a Jewish experience. When he attacks Bauer’s theological interpretation of the “Jewish question,” Marx does so as a debunker: “Let us consider the actual, secular Jew—not the sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew”¹ (Marx’s emphasis). Here we have the earliest version of the substructure/superstructure dichotomy. It is not a spatial, higher/lower dichotomy, but a temporal, longitudinal dichot-omy: the workaday weekday Jew versus the Jew of the hieratic seventh day or Sabbath. Gentiles like Bruno Bauer who defined “the Jewish question” in terms of religion were ideologists, they were “idealizing” the problem, just as Hegel had done in his reconciliation of state and civil society. Even Left Hegelians like Bauer had fallen for the ro-mantic solution embodied in Hegel’s system.

Hegel’s system was an elaborate theodicy, a secularized Christian theodicy, papering over the contradictions of the liberal civic era it was designed to legitimate. Chief among the “accursed contradictions” veiled by the Hegelian “speculative identity’—as first Feuerbach, then Marx, was to note—was the supposed synthesis of civil society and the mod-ern state. Instead of the state assimilating private interests to its”com-mon good," private interests—individual and group interests—were using the state to further their own ends. Feuerbach and later Marx saw Hegel’s idealization as an attempt to “remove this contradiction from sight”² through the techniques of sublimation, obnubilation, and ideal-ization. Marx decided to reverse this process: taking the “group interest” most familiar to him—that of emancipating Jewry—he brought to light the contradiction between its bourgeois commitment to its own ag-grandizement and its citizen’s commitment to the ’ ’common good" and the “public interest.” What to liberalism (especially as it became pluralis-tic liberalism) might have passed for an ardent ethnic narcissism, to

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Marx was an unsightly discrepancy between official ideology and the self-serving fact. He refused to allow Hegel’s romantic liberal idealism to remove this contradiction merely from sight: he was to propose radical revolutionary praxis as a way of removing it from reality. The “Jewish question” was thus to serve Marx as a model in his demonstration of the failure of the bourgeois state to transform its bourgeois members into universalistic citizens. The contradictions in Hegel’s system reflect the contradictions in the Prussia of his time. In 1843 Marx was engaged in unmasking Hegel’s Philosophy of Right—writing his Critique—con-currently with his exposing the realities of the “Jewish Question.” There was an inner connection between Hegel’s political pseudosynthesis and Bauer’s theological idealization of the “Jewish question”: both studiously avoided the reality of vested collective interests—at the level of ethnic and class interests—running counter to and exploiting the public in-terest. This was to be the enduring “problem of bourgeois society” (das Problem der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft). It is thus that historian Gertrude Himmelfarb can maintain that Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” is neither a youthful aberration nor an eccentricity but that if one reads “the whole of the essay rather than snippets and quotations, it becomes a formidable argument … integrally related to the rest of his thought. … It is a horrendous and odious essay,” she adds, “but it is also an intellectually impressive statement of his vision.”³ The empirical in-gredient in this vision was the stubborn staying power of Jewish par-ticularism; it was this that first revealed Hegel’s “beloved community” to be eine illusorische Gemeinschaft, an illusory halfway covenant.

Jewry, then, rebutted Hegel’s dream of the state assimilating and sublating into itself all egoistic interests (individual, family, guild), transforming civil society into a new community. It wasn’t just the enduring golus-Jew⁴ with his haggling and “sharp ’practices” nor “the phenomenon of social dissociation even when Jews enjoyed political equality”⁵ that troubled Marx. What enraged him was ideology—that is, the fact that particularistic interests could be masked by abstract and universalistic legitimations, whether political, religious, or economic— and that academic theorists such as Hegel and Bauer could be taken in by these ideologies. Marx’s first debunking job was to debunk the “Jewish question,” to divulge the everyday Jew beneath the Sabbath Jew of the liberal-academic discussions of the “Jewish question.” This, I believe, is the ethnic provenance of Marx’s concept of “ideology.” As Helmut D. Schmidt writes:

Jewish interests were firmly entrenched on the side of the Manchester school of laissez-faire. As a group the Jews had nothing to gain from state interference in private enterprise and they stood to lose a good deal by the fall of liberals from political power. So they fought back mainly through the press [1848-1874]. Their

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power was not exactly measurable but recognizable. What made their power appear sinister to their enemies was the fact that the Jews were anxious to hide it for fear of arousing yet greater hostility. Thereby they increased the impression of all sharing in a conspiracy particularly as they defended their interests in the name of lofty principles not as Jews but as Germans.⁶ [My emphasis]

The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Emancipation had presumably liquidated all group and corporate interest, in principle anyway. The Jewish kehillah was over. Collective existence was at an end. All men were only individuals. Schmidt writes:

By the terms of the Jewish emancipation it was impossible for Jews to defend their political or economic interests as Jews. The reality of their collective existence was never adequately taken into account by the political philosophy of nineteenth century Europe in whose political categories there was no real place for them.⁷ [My emphasis]

Liberalism could never handle the de facto existence of Jewry as a collective problem. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries secularized Jewish intellectuals arrived at an identical choice-point: either to legitimate this observed de facto ethnic “segregation” of emancipated Jewry via nationalism—the Zionist ideology—or to delegitimate it by subsuming and universalizing it under a class variable—the communist and socialist ideologies. (Bundist socialism would try to do both.) Even slight shifts in the factors involved could convert a Communist into a Zionist, as happened in the case of Moses Hess. But in almost every case, whether the road taken was communism or Zionism, the initial quarrel of the secular Jewish intellectual was not with the larger society, but with the behavior—or misbehavior—of his fellow Jews. “The anti-Jewish denunciations of Marx and Bérne,” Hannah Arendt writes, “can-not be properly understood except in the light of this conflict between rich Jews and Jewish intellectuals.”⁸

Oftentimes the “rich Jews” were relatives, and then the “conflict between rich Jews and Jewish intellectuals” was a family quarrel. Two examples of this are Helene Deutsch and Hayim Zhitlowsky. In the case of the pioneer psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, who moved from the ideology of socialism to Freudian ideology, the quarrel began as a family quarrel. “First let me confirm what the reader must already suspect,” she writes, opening the chapter on her mother in Confrontations with Myself: “For most of my childhood and youth I hated my mother.”⁹ Many pages later we learn why: “I hated my mother’s bourgeois ma-terialism.”¹⁰ Helene Deutsch’s ability publicly to confess hatred for her Jewish mother was, it seems evident, a factor in her not having to

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transfer that hatred to Western bourgeois society (that is, in her not becoming a Communist). This is suggested by Dr. Deutsch herself when later she tells of meeting Rosa Luxemburg at the International Socialist Congress in Stockholm in 1910:

I found out that Rosa Luxémburg was born into a Polish-Jewish bourgeois family, as I was, and that throughout her life she had maintained a close, typically Jewish attachment to her relatives. But when she was only fifteen, burning with indignation against the evils of society, she had joined the Socialist Party. It is interest-ing to note how she transferred her adolescent rebellion from her family to the whole of bourgeois society….

…Rosa’s rebellion was transferred outside the family circle.¹¹¹²

Hayim Zhitlowsky left his little Jewish village of Ushach, in Russia, when he was sixteen. Why? He was a young socialist revolutionary and he wished to be a Russian among Russians, one of “the people,” in Tula. Also, he wanted to extricate himself from “the bourgeois atmosphere which caused conflicts between my parents and me” and where “each year the desire for worldly pleasures grew” and Orthodox observance receded: “My mother uncovered her hair and my father began to wear his coat shorter. In place of the old spiritual ideals came the thirst for luscious living and luscious earnings. Material wealth became their idol. … From this bourgeois atmosphere I had to escape.” But in the summer of 1883, the year Marx was buried in Highgate, he returned to his natal village of Ushach, where the “Jewish question” confronted his universalistic socialism in a form Marx never encountered: in .the form of his own family, loved ones, and relatives. “In the foreground emerged the Jewish question,” he writes, “confronting me like a Sphinx: Solve my riddle or I will devour you.”¹³ The riddle was, as Zhitlowsky realized, that while the philo-Semitic liberal solution to the “Jewish problem” only led to Jewry’s further embourgeoisment, the socialistic solution was “objectively anti-Semitic” and would destroy his people. We quote him at length:

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The philosemitic solution of the Russian-Jewish press, demand-ing equal rights and justifying Jewish merchantry and its achieve-ments for Russia, could not impress me. In fact, it revolted me. T sensed it as an absolute contradiction to my socialist ideas and ideals, which had a pronounced Russian populist, agrarian-socialist character.

Samuel Solomonovich Poliakov built railroads for Russia. Those railroads were, according to Nekrasows famous poem, built on the skeletons of the Russian peasantry. My uncle Michael in Ushach distilled vodka for the Russian people and made a fortune on the liquor tax. My cousin sold the vodka to the peasants. The whole town hired them to cut down Russian woods which he bought from the greatest exploiter of the Russian peasant, the Russian landowner. … Wherever I turned my eyes to ordinary, day-to-day Jewish life, I saw only one thing, that which the antisemites were agitating about: the injurious effect of Jewish merchantry on Rus-sian peasantry. No matter how I felt, from a socialist point of | view, I had to pass a death sentence not only on individual Jews but on the entire Jewish existence of individual Jews.¹⁴ [Zhitlow-sky’s emphasis]

Zhitlowsky, like Marx, turned his eyes to “ordinary, day-to-day Jewish life”—to the alltag Jew, not the Sabbath Jew—-and saw there much that Marx had seen a generation earlier. And he realized that universalistic socialism was a version of assimilation, and that it meant the complete disappearance of the Jewish people, and that Marx’s was the most logical and consistent solution to the “Jewish problem”—“the most logical, yet for me,” he adds, “psychologically impossible. I was happy and com-fortable in my Jewish world. Jews were closer to me, more my own kind, than many Russians with whom I was good friends and closely associated because of our common views. Why fool myself? After all,” he concludes, “I was a Jew.”¹⁵ Zhitlowsky had answered the riddle of the Sphinx. Liberalism was a poor ideological solution to the “Jewish problem” because of its elision of the “open secret” of its de facto © collective dimension. Socialism and communism, recognizing the col-lective problem, omitted its particularist Jewish dimension. Combining his two loves, Zhitlowsky opted for Yiddishist socialism.

“Unlike the observant Jew, the secular Jewish intellectual—Moses Hess, Rahel Varnhagen, Lassalle, Marx, Freud, Herzl—knew how the emancipating Jews—especially the pariah Ostjuden, the golus-Jews— ’looked” to the average bourgeois Gentile. And he cared. And he was embarrassed and ashamed. How did they look? Let us follow the Fabian Mrs. Sidney Webb (née Beatrice Potter) as she makes her way into London’s East End in 1889, there to observe the “look” of newly ar-rived Polish Jewry. It is six years after Zhitlowsky returned to his Russian village. It is Shabbes:

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You enter; the heat and odor convince you that the skylight is not used for ventilation…. [You see] the swaying to and fro of the bodies…. Your eye wanders from the men, who form the con-gregation, to the small body of women behind the trellis. Here li.e., in the women], certainly, you have the Western world, in bright-colored ostrich feathers, large bustles, and tight-fitting coats of cotton velvet or brocaded satinette. At last you step out, stifled by the heat and dazed by the strange contrast of the old-world memories of a majestic religion and the squalid vulgarity of an East End slum.¹⁶

As her study concludes, Beatrice Potter turns to East End business practices, of which she lists many, and finds them shocking. The Eastern European Jew keeps the laws and keeps the peace and performs his contracts, but nevertheless something is missing. “The reader will have already perceived,” she writes, “that the immigrant Jew, though possessed of many first-class virtues, is deficient in that highest and latest develop-ment of human sentiment—social morality….¹⁷ He totally ignores all social obligations other than keeping the law of the land, the ’main-tenance of his own family, and the charitable relief of coreligionists.”¹⁸

What Beatrice Potter here sees as a Jewish social “deficiency,” an ethnic delict, Marx—only six years dead—transformed into a “symptom” of a general deficiency: bourgeois capitalism. This is Marxism’s “primal scene,” the Jewish economic Urszene which Marx had incorporated into his essay on the “Jewish question” forty-six years earlier (1843). Marx had universalized it; Beatrice Potter reparticularized it. Both turn their thoughts to the Anglo-Jewish economist David Ricardo. For the English Fabian, Ricardo is suddenly seen, in a startlingly new perspective, not as the supposed economist of her own decorous bourgeois English business people, but as an economic anthropologist of the “pariah capitalism” of the Eastern European Jewry of Whitechapel:

Thus the immigrant Jew seems to justify by his existence those strange assumptions which figured for man in the political econ-omy of Ricardo—an Always Enlightened Selfishness, seeking em-ployment or profit with an absolute mobility of body and mind, without pride, without preference, without interests outside the struggle for the existence and welfare of the individual and the family. We see these [strange] assumptions verified [not in the be-havior of Englishmen, much less mankind, but]¹⁹ in the Jewish

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inhabitants of Whitechapel; and in the Jewish East End trades we may watch the prophetic deduction of the Hebrew economist actually fulfilled.²⁰

Marx, on the other hand, reveres Ricardo for building his economics on precisely this type of market “scene,” namely, a purely contractual purely utilitarian “cash nexus” disembedded from every social ethic and moral sentiment. Ricardo is the scientific economist of bourgeois capital-ism: “Ricardo’s theory of value is the scientific interpretation of actual economic life,” he declares against the French utopian socialists, who try to prove their superiority over the English economists—as the English Fabian has just done?—by “seeking to observe the etiquette of a ‘hu-manitarian’ phraseology,” reproaching Ricardo and his school for their “cynical language” because “it annoys them to see economic relations exposed in all their crudity [read”Jewishness“], to see the mysteries of the bourgeoisie unmasked”²¹ (my emphasis).

It is most significant that the great historian of the shtetl and of East-ern European Jewry, the late Maurice Samuel, a Roumanian non-Marxist Jew settled in Scotland, should converge with Marx in an identical analysis of Gentile economic behavior. “Apart from the necessities of the law, you [Gentiles],” he writes, in a book called You Gentiles, “attempt to bring into the field of business the curious punctilio of the fencing master —courtesies and pretenses, slogans and passwords, which mitigate only im appearance the primal savagery of the [business] struggle.”²² Here again, the elements of the Diaspora critique make their appearance: the observation of punctilios, courtesies, and mitigations, the relegation of these to the moralist category of “pretense” or hypocrisy, and, finally, the by-now-conventional contrast of the “primal savagery” with the mis-leading “appearances” (think of Freud’s “primary process” underlying the superego; think of Marx’s ideology concept).

For Maurice Samuel, it is clear, the goyim embed their economic ex-change of goods and services in a social exchange of civilities²³ because, good hypocrites that they are, they refuse to admit the “primal savagery” of what is actually occurring between them. As with Marx, the civil nexus is an ideology, a figleaf for the cash nexus. Goyim have this hang-up. The Civilities are a kind of games goyim play. Leave them to their goyim naches.

Marx’s ideology, scientific socialism, is (as we shall see) an odd kind of “apology” for the emancipating Jewry of nineteenth-century Europe. It looks like anti-Semitism, but it isn’t. It is anti—philo-Semitic. It annoyed both liberal Gentile and assimilating Jew that the Ostjude should provide the occasion, create the actual social scene, in which they were forced

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“to see economic relations exposed in all their crudity, to see the mysteries of the bourgeoisie unmasked.” Bourgeois-Christian democracy, the whole edifice of refined bourgeois Gentile civility and “social ethics,” was but a superstructure, a cunning obnubilation designed to conceal the rank materialism of bourgeois capitalism underneath. Both Marx and’ Freud viewed bourgeois modernization as a vast ecclesia super cloacam.²⁴ The scandal of the Ostjude was that he exposed to full view, openly, the dark underside of European society.

At the very time Beatrice Potter visited London’s East End, the Danish-American Jacob A. Riis visited New York’s Lower East Side to see “how the other half lives.” He writes of the Eastern European Jewry he sees there: “Money is their God. Life is of so little value compared with even the leanest bank account. In no other spot does life wear so intensely bald and materialistic an aspect as in Ludlow Street…. Proprieties do not count on the East Side; nothing counts that cannot be converted into hard cash”²⁵ (my emphasis). Throughout the nineteenth century the con-trast keeps cropping up: “bald,” “bare,” “naked,” “materialistic,” “cash-nexus” on the one hand; “propriety,” “social sentiment,” “civility” on the other. The social behavior of emancipating Jewry becomes an experi-mentum crucis for the nascent social sciences. In these Jews, the pariah was not yet hidden in the parvenu. The Ostjude becomes for Marx his Unterbau, his substructure. All the rest is “propriety” (i.e., bourgeois social and legal “formalism”).

Scarcely a generation after Riis, the “socialist phase” of Walter Lippmann, as a German Jew, typically began with his intense preoccupa-tion with the problem of the “behavior in public places” of newly rich American Jewry. Lippmann’s socialism was not driven by any passion for redistribution. His was not a socialism that would give with one hand to Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money what it took with the other from Our Crowd. No; Lippmann’s was a sumptuary socialism designed to curb the ostentation of bourgeois Jewry.²⁶ The ideologies of intellectual Jews are their ways of settling their accounts with the “Jewish question” (as they see it) and only derivatively universalist manifestoes addressed to “Mankind.” We quote at length from Lippmann’s analysis of a half-century ago. He writes that while there are not among Jews

more blatantly vulgar rich than among other stocks, sharp trading and blatant vulgarity are more conspicuous in the Jew because he himself is more conspicuous…. He needs more than anyone else

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to learn the classic Greek virtue of moderation; for he cannot, even if he wishes to, get away unscathed with what less distinguishable men can, For that reason the rich and vulgar and pretentious Jews of our big cities are perhaps the greatest misfortune that has ever befallen the Jewish people. They are the real fountain of anti-Semitism. They are everywhere in sight, and though their vices may be no greater than those of other jazzy elements in the population, they are a thousand times more conspicuous.

Moreover, they dissipate awkwardly. It happens that the Jews, for good or evil, have no court or country-house tradition of high living, and little of the physical grace that just barely makes that mode of life tolerable. When they rush about in super-automobiles, bejeweled and be-furred and painted and overbarbered, when they build themselves French chateaus and Italian palazzi, they stir up the latent hatred against crude wealth in the hands of shallow people: and that hatred diffuses itself. They undermine the natural liberalism of the American people….

I waste no time myself worrying about the injustices of anti-Semitism. There is too much injustice in the world for any particular concern about summer hotels and college fraternities…. I worry about the Jewish smart-set in New York…. They can in one minute unmake more respect and decent human kindliness than Einstein and Brandeis and Mack and Paul Warburg can build up in a year. I worry about upper Broadway²⁷ on a Sunday afternoon where everything is feverish and unventilated…. And as a Jew writing in a Jewish weekly to Jews I say that there is a very serious danger of failure…. The Jew is conspicuous, and unless in his own conduct. of life he manages to demonstrate the art of moderate, clean and generous, living, every failure will magnify itself in woe upon the heads of the helpless and unfortunate. The Jew will have to display far better taste than the average if he is to discount for the purpose of sympathetic understanding with the rest of the American people the fundamental fact that he is conspicuous."²⁸

Lippmann’s socialism betrays its roots. Closer in inspiration to Marx’s communism than he would be pleased to admit, this apostle of puritan “plain living and high thinking” clearly constructs his socialist ideology as a prophylaxis for what he takes to be Jewish ostentation. When Eastern European socialism is urged by Eastern European Jews, it is urged for the sake of the Jews; Eastern European Zionism also. They are auto-emanci-pations. But the provenance of German-Jewish socialism, as of German-Jewish Zionism, is different. Lippmann’s was a sumptuary socialism as Brandeis’s was a sumptuary Zionism. “For it was clear to those who did not seek the way of individual escape by means of conversion,” Jacob Katz writes of post-Emancipation Jewry, “that, as Jews, they would always be judged by the collective and it was to their advantage to see that the lowest type of Jew, who seemed to provide a model for the stereotype, should disappear altogether.”²⁹