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Hey, I found this on reddit "The concept of a "secular Jew" really didn't exist at Marx's time- by their standards, he wasn't a Jew because he didn't practice Judaism. And if you read his essay On the Jewish Question, you'll find he was actually very anti-Semitic himself." I know he's considered to be antisemtic, but is is true that back then you where only considered Jewish if you praticed it?

Thanks for asking.

No, it's not true- that Redditor couldn't be more wrong, and by the end of this post, you'll understand why.

Not only did the concept of the secular Jew exist in Marx's time- the status of the secular Jew was the very topic with which Marx was engaging in On the Jewish Question.

Marx's time, based on the years of his birth and death, was from 1818 to 1883.

Several major movements were reshaping secular Jewish identity well before Marx's time:

The Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) began in the 1770s, encouraging Jews to engage with secular European culture, science, and languages. This led directly to assimilation and non-observance which was in full swing during Marx's lifetime.

Jewish Emancipation unfolded from the 1790s through the mid-1800s (starting in France in 1791, Prussia in 1812). As Jews gained civil rights, they left ghettos, entered universities, and pursued professional careers. This political and social integration meant breaking from purely religious communal life, essentially creating "secular Jews" by default.

Reform Judaism emerged in the early 1800s to modernize Jewish practice and align it with contemporary European culture. The very existence of this movement shows how widespread the challenges of assimilation and secularization had become.

The Marx family was part of a growing population of non-practicing, assimilated, or secularized Jews.

Marx's father converted to Lutheranism in 1816, two years before Karl was born, partly to advance his legal career in Prussia, but also because there was real pressure to convert if one wanted to assimilate safely.

So by 1844, when Marx wrote On the Jewish Question, the figure of the acculturated, non-practicing Jew, someone defined by society based on ancestry rather than belief, was highly visible and often contentious across Europe.

So what's the essay actually about?

On the Jewish Question was a response to a very specific contemporary debate about Jewish Emancipation, particularly with Bruno Bauer.

By Marx's time, there was a large population of educated, professional Jews who were no longer religiously observant (like his own father), but still universally regarded as Jews.

But if these Jews had abandoned their religious practice, why did they still face legal and social discrimination? What was this lingering "Jewish problem"? Why did people still discriminate against them if they'd given up their religion?

Marx's answer involves a rhetorical move I continue to find repellent. He performs an analogy in which he takes this debate about Jews and redefines it as the economic problem (capitalism) affecting all of society.

He starts with the contemporary stereotype of the non-religious, emancipated Jew as a bourgeois merchant or financier (professions Jews were in because they were allowed to work in these professions). Then he defines the essence of "Jewishness" as the pursuit of money, huckstering (aggressive commerce), and self-interest.

In his own words:

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money…

Then comes the pivot: Marx argues this "Jewish spirit" isn't unique to Jews, it's actually the defining spirit of modern capitalism itself. The "Jewish principle" of profit and self-interest, he claims, has become universal in Western society. The Christian world has become "judaized."

He concludes that the "Jewish problem" is really just capitalism in disguise, then the solution isn't merely political emancipation for Jews but overthrowing capitalism entirely, thereby "emancipating" society from this "Jewish spirit."

Some scholars defend Marx by arguing he was being ironic, critiquing liberal politics rather than Jews themselves, or simply using the common language of his time. But the text's reliance on ugly stereotypes (Jews as money-obsessed hucksters) has led most historians to conclude the essay contains antisemitic elements, regardless of Marx's intent or his support for Jewish civil rights.

So yes, the essay is widely considered antisemitic. Marx relies on ugly stereotypes about Jews and money, even as he tries to universalize them into a critique of capitalism. The fact that he was from an ethnically Jewish family doesn't excuse the rhetoric, it just makes the rhetoric more complex and troubling. He's participating in the very prejudices that made life difficult for the secular, assimilated Jews he's ostensibly discussing, like his own family.

The concept of the "secular Jew" wasn't just present in Marx's time, it was the entire foundation of the debate he was engaging with.

Please take social media commentators (including me) with a whole shaker of salt. Online, confident ignorance often has a way of sounding like actual knowledge.

THE PITY OF IT ALL: A PORTRAIT OF THE GERMAN-JEWISH EPOCH 1743-1933, by Amos Elon, Henry Holt and Co., 446 Pages, $30.00.<br /> <br /> The r

Jews in the North German Confederation are given civil freedoms in 1869. The unification of Germany extends jewish emancipation to Bavaria.

Are there hints about Marx’s thoughts on Judaism in his writing, and if so, what do they say?

#jumblr #ask #asks #anon ask #anon asks #Marx #antisemitism #On the Jewish Question #marxism #haskalah #jewish emancipation #Jewish history #karl marx #On The Jewish Question

okay since some of yall continue to display a TRULY awe inspiring lack of knowledge of jewish history lmao, let’s go on a lil journeyyyy:

as i stated, before this, aka before HASKALAH, “orthodox judaism” aka TRADITIONAL JUDAISM was just judaism.

the name orthodox judaism is the reaction to reform btw. THE NAME ALONE LMAO LIKE. nothing else changed! that is the entire point!

#like fives a ten is speaking omg #jumblr #jewblr #judaism #reform judaism #orthodox judaism #haskalah #jewish

Register today to join Rabbi Josh Gischner explore an overview of Jewish History & Mythology from Abraham to the present.

Monday, May 24 at 7PM ET.

Suggested Contribution: $15, with other options including free options.

Join Rabbi Josh as we explore the evolution of the Jewish project from ancient days to the present.

In this overview class, we will explore the following topics:

* The three major periods of Jewish History: The Biblical Period, the Rabbinic Period, The Post-Enlightenment Era (today)

* Critical mythologies/histories of the Hebrew Bible (Abraham and the Covenant, Moses & Miriam, King David, Lamentations)

* The ancient sacrificial system of the Kohanim (ritual priests in the Temple)

* The evolution between Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism in the First Century (and the moment early Christians officially *split* from Judaism)

* Overview of the development of the Talmud and Halacha (Jewish Law),

* Antisemitism's early routes in the 3rd century and later in the Medieval Period

* The Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and how it led to the development of the American Jewish Project, the Modern State of Israel, and the denominations: Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Modern Orthodox Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism.

This class will include one ten minute break. This interactive class will not include any breakout room chevruta groups.

When the Russian government opened the doors of medical schools to Jews in the 1850s, Ashkenazim took advantage of this opportunity in significant numbers. It wasn’t long before they were very much overrepresented (proportionally) in all branches of certified medicine: clinical medicine, pharmacology, nursing, midwifery, dentistry, and feldsher practice. While Jews, both men and women, were drawn to medicine for a variety of reasons, the groundwork for this entry into the professions was clearly laid by the assimilationist efforts of the maskilim [proponents of the Haskalah, Jewish Enlightenment].

Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel, Ashkenazi Herbalism; Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews

#haskalah #deatra cohen and adam siegel #ashkenazi herbalism; rediscovering the herbal traditions of eastern european jews #assimilation #the pale of settlement #feldshers #ashkenazim

It must again be premised that the subject [of dogma], which occupied the thoughts of the greatest and noblest Jewish minds for so many centuries, has been neglected for a comparatively long time. And this for varying reasons. First, there is Mendelssohn's assertion, or supposed assertion, in his "Jerusalem", that Judaism has no dogmas - an assertion which has been accepted by the majority of modern Jewish theologians as the only dogma Judaism possesses. You can hear it pronounced in scores of Jewish pulpits; you can read it written in scores of Jewish books. To admit the possibility that Mendelssohn was in error is hardly permissible, especially for those with whom he enjoys a certain infallibility. Nay, even the fact that he himself was not consistent in his theory, and on another occasion declared that Judaism has dogmas, only that they are purer and more in harmony with reason than those of other religions; or even the more important fact that he published a school-book for children, in which the so-called Thirteen Articles were embodied, only that instead of the formula "I believe" he substituted "I am convinced" - even such patent facts did not produce much effect upon many of our modern theologians. They were either overlooked or explained away so as to make them harmonize with the great dogma of dogmalessness.

“The Dogmas of Judaism”, by Rabbi Solomon Schechter, found in Studies in Judaism: Essays on Persons, Concepts, and Movements of Thought in Jewish Tradition (pages 73-74)

#Judaism #dogma #Solomon Schechter #Moses Mendelssohn #Haskalah

He was a man with a cause: Yiddish. There were risks posed to those who remained in the Pale of Settlement, he felt; but only when he left. He had been evicted, after all. He had been taken and shown the door. Still, he felt them while he looked at the Seine, while he charted his way through London, while he drafted Socialist tracts for the revolution to come: we were dying, and we needed to be saved. People were dying at the hands of pogroms—scores of dirty Russians atop steel horses, and it was just beginning. There would be more horses, horses driven by fire and gas that would eviscerate the Jewish body; but what of the soul, Ansky wondered: what of the soul?

Ansky was, by all accounts, an alchemist, interested in the extension of life beyond death. With good reason, he felt: the steel horses come! They come, and they take the bodies of the Jews too early. Too early for what, some felt? And he was a worldly man, not a pious one—this, at least, they knew. Wasn't he playing God with the Jews? What business does a freethinker have over the soul of a pious man? Judgment was better left to the Baal, and obedience to the man. We'd learned this lesson before.

So the Jews of the Pale went, day after day, husbands to their schools to teach the young men, and women to work in the homes or away. They were like little bedouin tents that had been allowed to think their canvas had become wood, that there was permanence in their situation. Ansky knew that the forces that had blown the Jews from Jerusalem were winds now, and that the winds were always blowing—and would come again. If it should be, it will be, they thought, and until then, they prayed, and their lives seemed built for the very act of traveling (being pushed around, Ansky thought; wandering, said they): the Jews were much like a turtle, and they could, if needed, carry their homes upon their back, for what was their home besides their ark, the torah within? Each community needed only that, and that alone would do. Sure, they could bring along some candles and clothes, but to keep going they needed nothing more than the Israelites who cleaved from Egypt had needed; and perhaps they could need nothing less. Wandering. Would they wander again? Wander, like breadcrumbs thrown on the Day of Atonement—sins cast away into moving waters by believers in the hope of being inscribed in the Book of Life in the coming year? Wander, like Moses had when he was placed in the tide of that Egyptian river—wandering, to be taken into the hands of some unwitting gentile, some benevolent gentile, some brittle gentile—were any hands the hands of God? Wander like the Baal himself had said: “You shall be as numerous as the stars;” perhaps we should have known what the Holy Diasporist meant... When was the last time you touched a star? Yet they are always there; you know them but you leave them, and you hope they'll leave you alone—and they are numerous, but they are rare, and they are infinite, omnipresent but visible only sometimes. And I have heard that all stars are falling, and what we see is simply each star's tail as it makes its way towards The World to Come. Stars like sand—stars so many you see them for what they aren't—stars so many, so small, so fragile, so—Jewish. Such stars, were there one whisper, they would all be blown away.

S. Ansky stood atop the Tower of Paris and he knew what must be done. He would do it as he had been taught as a child, taking the crayon and rubbing it against the paper that rests on the bark. He wanted more than anything to simply reach out his hand with a vial large enough to scoop up all the sand, but stars burn too bright, even in exile. Even in diaspora; and you mustn't look a star straight in its face; rather, like crayon against paper against a coin, you etch what it gives off, standing lightyears away but letting the light make marks, letting the light take time, letting the mark be made, letting the making make.

How to save the sands from the wind was another question entirely: how to save the pious from their God? For if their God was a wind, and he seemed to be, seeming to never let his dust rest for one moment upon some writer's desk—then it would be S. Ansky the writer, S. Ansky the socialist, S. Ansky the freethinker—the Atheist—who would wrestle them from their God, imbuing them with the life he had hitherto denied them. Yiddish had lived on in his little life, despite his renunciation of it. Once, he had thought that freethinker must leave behind any remnant extant from his piety. Off with the tassels, off with the skullcaps, off with the locks of hair and the beard. These were, he remembered, the first to go when he left the Old Country. But when did he leave the Old Country? Was it when he was exiled—oh, no, perhaps he had left it when he first encountered Marx: a man of no religion; in that moment, perhaps, did he most severely sever his bonds to the caravan of the wandering men.

Physicians with Western academic training, together with health care reformers emerging from the nascent Jewish middle classes of Eastern Europe, attempting to reshape popular attitudes toward health care (along with reforms to education, culture, political and social engagement, etc.) as part of the new movement. By the end of the eighteenth century, as formal training and education became more accessible to Eastern European Jews, traditional healers—who lacked certifications and relied on the natural world for their remedies—attracted the scrutiny of the new Jewish scientific elites. The maskilim, proponents of the Haskalah, launched an offensive to reform the daily, intimate habits and customs of Jews throughout the Pale. Now traditional healers found themselves targeted by the new reformers.