Abram Leon - The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation

Abram Leon was a brilliant intellectual and socialist activist whose life was cut short when he was murdered in Auschwitz. Born in Warsaw in October 1918 his parents emigrated to Palestine when he was a schoolboy, but then moved to Belgium shortly afterward. From his parents Leon learnt Zionist politics. He quickly becoming an activist in the Zionist socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. He read avidly, as even a cursory glance at the extensive bibliography in this book shows. But he studied Marxism seriously and began to break with Zionism. Leon wrote for a Belgian Troskysist newspaper, and quickly became involved in the group behind it. During World War II Leon wrote a "Theses on the Jewish Question" which became the basis for this book. Through the war years Leon became a leading underground revolutionary, connecting activists in France and Belgium and his group was one of the few socialist organisations maintaining principled positions against imperialism. Tragically when the end of the war was in sight Leon was captured by the Nazis, tortured and eventually deported to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation was his only book. It is a masterpiece of hisorical materialism, limited only by the conditions in which it was written. The editors and translators of the Pathfinder edition I read have done wonders to attempt to find all the source material that Leon used. Naturally he was unable to check all his sources, though this does not undermine the work at all. In the book Leon attempts to understand the position of Jewish people under capitalism and how they have become the victims of fascist and right-wing politics. To do this he explores the history of the Jews from ancient times through to the 20th century. He does because in his words:

We must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary, the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the 'real Jew,' that is to say, by the Jew in his economic and social role.

Thus Leon argues that "the cause of ancient antisemitism is the same as for medieval antisemitism: the antagonism toward the merchant in every society based principally on the production of use values". The Jewish religion means that Jews in ancient and feudal society were forced to occupy particular roles within society, that of the merchant, trader and eventually money lender. These positions meant Jewish people become the victims of antisemitism because they are hated both by the ruling class and lower orders for their economic roles. Leon spends some time exploring the different roles of Jewish people in medieval times - particularly the way that the ruling class dominated their repression - stealing their money, initiating pogroms and expelling them from their lands. Its a fascinating account which sees monarchs and lords dependent on the Jewish people, and empowered to exile and imprison them. But as the economies developed, this was undermined as other people could take on the positions previously restricted to Jews:

The evolution in exchange of medieval economy proved fatal to the position of the Jews in trade. The Jewish merchant importing spices into Europe and exporting slaves, is displaced by respectable Christian traders to whom urban industry supplies the principal products for their trading.

This developement drives a further change which sees Jews become associated with "usury" in particular - though Leon is careful to avoid seeing "lending" as being seperate to "commerical capital". Instead he argues is that "the eviction of the Jews from commerce had as a consequence their entrenchment in one of the professions which they had already practiced previously." Again Leon explores in some fascinating detail historical examples of how Jewish people lived and worked in the period, and their social positions. Crucially Leon argues against common antisemitic lies:

The ideology and capacities of each class formed gradually as a function of its economic position. The same is true of the Jews. It is not their 'innate' predisposition for commerce which explains their economic position but it is their economic position which explains their predisposition to commerce. 

Leon continues by arguing that just as it is "infantile to see the economic position of Judaism as the result of the 'predispositions of the Jews'... it is puerile to consider it as the fruit of persectuions and of legan bans against exercising other profiession than commerce or usury." He documents the various roles, jobs and positions that Jewish people did hold in medieval society outside of trading and usury. It demonstrates that even in highly religious societies like medieval Europe, antisemitism was not a constant. But the association of usury with Jews drove new explosions of antisemitism among the rich as well as the peasants and artisans in cities. As Leon explains:

In the measure that usury became the principal occupation of the Jews, they enetered increasingly into relations with the popular masses and these relations worsened all the time... It was... direst distress which forced the peasant or the artisan to borrow from the Jewish usurer... It is easy to understand the hatred that the man of te people must hav efelt for the Hew in whom he saw the direct cause of his ruin, without perceiving the emperor, the prince, or the rich bourgeois, who had become richer thanks to the Jewish usurer. it is in Germany above all where Jewish usury took on its most "popular" form, pricipally in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries... a hatred which ended in anti-Jewish massacres and in the "burning" of Jews (Judenbrand).

This lays the basis for ongoing antisemitic tropes and racist beliefs about Jewish people, even into the capitalist era when Jews no longer played the social and economic role they had done under feudalism. As Leon writes:

On the one hand, capitalism favoured the economic assimilation of Judaism and consequently its cultural assimilation; on the other hand, by uprooting the Jewish masses, concentrating them in cities, provoking the rise of antisemitism, it stimulated the development of Jewish nationalism. 

The development of Zionism as a reflection of this nationalism however is unable to resolve the contradictions that arise from class society. As Leon says, "an evil cannot be suppressed without destroying its causes. But Zionism wishes to resolve the Jewish question without destroying capitalism, which is the principal source of the suffering of the Jews."

Unsurprisingly it is the horror of the Nazis that shapes the conclusions of Leon's book. Though he remains hopeful. It is worth quoting in full these words, written as they were by a socialist revolutionary in the midst of the Nazi Germany's conquest of most of mainland Europe:

The very paroxysm, however, that the Jewish problem has reached today, also provides the key to its solution. The plight of the Jews has never been so tragic; but never has it been so close to ceasing to be that. In past centuries, hatred of the Jews had a real basis in the social antagonism which set them against other classes of the population. Today, the interest of the Jewish classes are closely bound up with the interests of the popular masses of the entire world. By persecuting the Jews as “capitalist,” capitalism makes them complete pariahs. The ferocious persecutions against Judaism render stark naked the stupid bestiality of anti-Semitism and destroy the remnants of prejudices that the working classes nurse against the Jews. The ghettos and the yellow badges do not prevent the workers from feeling a growing solidarity with those who suffer most from the afflictions all humanity is suffering.

Leon argues that the destruction of capitalism and the building of a socialist society would enable the Jewish people to live in peace and freedom precisely because it would allow "the possibility of assimilation as well as the possibility of having a special national life". Perceptively, several years before the establishment of the State of Israel he notes the potential for a socialist future to unite people, "when national barriers and prejudices begin to disappear in Palestine, who can doubt that a fruitful reconciliation will take place between the Arab and Jewish workers, the result of which will be their partial and total fusion". 

Socialism, by removing national barriers, class antagonism and the need to "divide and rule" will, through the joint struggle of people from different backgrounds, cultures and religions, create a society free of antisemitism forever. It is only socialism, Leon argues, that can offer hope and a safe future to Jewish people everywhere.

The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation is a remarkable book, both for the conditions of its writing and for the clarity of its argument. Inevitably there are some things that are dated, and it would have been interesting if Leon had been able to develop further his analysis of fascism and antisemitism. But in its clarity of historical analysis, Abram Leon's use of Marxism to understand how Jewish people's lives and social roles changed historically, and his utter commitment to the complete liberation of humanity, it remains an inspiring and educational work.

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