The Jewish canary in the liberal democratic coal mine
Why does one question impinge upon the other? Why does one evoke the other when there is no obvious connection between them? . . . [A]ll the most important questions of Europe and humankind in our day are forever being raised simultaneously. And it’s this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the riddle!
—Dostoevsky
One of the most powerful insights of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, and the reason we return to it, is that he, almost alone among all the people who set out to answer the Jewish Question in the early 1840s, saw that the question itself was not really about the Jews at all but about the nature of the modern state and the emerging form of society that had not yet been—but soon would come to be—called capitalism. So he set out, as he wrote in a letter in 1842, to write something that would force the debate over the Jewish Question to “take another course.”
We’re at another moment in time when the Jews have come to occupy center stage of political debate, and many people have different explanations for why that’s the case. On the left, the answer is twofold: we’re seeing the resurgence of an antisemitic radical right, on the one hand, and Israel has conducted a genocide, on the other. If Jews are being talked about, it’s because of that. Among centrists and conservatives, the answer is equally straightforward: there’s a rise in antisemitism on the left, which goes by the name of anti-Zionism.
What both explanations, on the right and the left, have in common is that they think this is a debate about the Jews, whether it’s the Jewish people or Zionism or the State of Israel.
Maybe it’s not.
Alana Newhouse, the founder of Tablet, one of the most prominent pro-Israel Jewish magazines in the US, unintentionally gives us a very different kind of answer, one that Marx, in his way, and we, reading in a Marxist vein, might appreciate:
Years from now, it will be obvious why, in this specific moment in human history, as we faced high-powered technologies and political ideologies aimed at paving the way for their dominance over humans, what emerged—what had to emerge—was an intense, global debate about, of all things, Zionism. Israel is no longer an outlier in the pantheon of free societies and people; it’s a blueprint for human defense and flourishing in the coming century….In other words, what Milei is manifesting is Zionism for Argentines….Narendra Modi is practicing Zionism for Indians.
The reason Israel, Zionism, and the Jews have come to occupy center stage is that not that the state is an outlier in a world of secular liberal democracies, nor that it has committed a genocide in recent years. It’s because secular liberal democracy is in crisis everywhere, and Israel, from its very inception, offered a way out of that crisis, by cutting the gordian knot, by choosing ethno-supremacy over liberalism and democracy (while initially straining to suggest otherwise and then abandoning the entire pretense). Now, with a world straining to be rid of the whole problem of liberal democracy, Israel seems to offer everyone a way out. As Newhouse says, the first “survival test” for any state is, “Can you maintain your demographics?”
In the same way that the Jewish Question was the canary in the coal mine for the creation of liberal democracy in the early nineteenth century, so it has become the canary in the coal mine for its destruction in the 21st.
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3 Comments
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sander van schilt
Hi Corey, I am late adapter when it comes to your blog. I really like it and may find some time to read your real work. Could you elaborate on this one a little bit? How was the Jewish question a canary in the coalmine for the creation of liberal democracy in the 19th century? I once – a long time ago – studied central European history and remember that liberal Jews were drivers of the march revolution of 1848 with their call for emancipation and liberal reforms. In that sense you may call them a canary in the coal mine, paving the way for further liberal and democratic reforms further down the line. However, one might just as well argue that the Jewish question from the very start showed the limitations of liberal democracy, something that can be illustrated by rise of anti-semitism after 1848. In that sense, Israel is only following a European example set more than a century ago. Thanks again for your blog, Sander van Schilt (The Netherlands)
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Daniel
So, you are suggesting that “ethno-supriemacy” offers, at once, both a theory of societal development and a theory for its practice. These, like other theories of societal organization and development (change) are inadequate explanations for how human communities evolve as living systems that are complex and interdependent. At best, or worse, it is a regressive “stage” in the developmental trajectory.
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I read Marx’s _On the Jewish Question_ for the first time a few years ago. Read it rather quickly, and all I really remember from it is Marx’s distinction between civic emancipation for the Jews (or, presumably, other persecuted minorities) and “general human emancipation.” The former and the latter shouldn’t be confused. Beyond that, I don’t recall much of anything from it (in terms of the main points) so I guess I need to read it again.
Like a commenter above, I’m not quite sure how the Jewish Question was “the canary in the coal mine for the creation of liberal democracy in the early nineteenth century.” On the one hand, the roots of liberal democracy go back further than that, to (at least some of) the revolutions of the late 18th century. On the other hand, those revolutions did not usher in democracy in the sense of universal suffrage or anything approaching it, which in Britain and the U.S., for example, wasn’t achieved until the 20th cent. (a point made by, among others, Bowles and Gintis in their _Democracy and Capitalism_). How the Jewish Question related to all this is not altogether clear, but I guess one could argue that it helped sparked the movement for civic emancipation and toleration of minorities, which became a feature (whether aspirational or actual) of liberal democracies, and in that sense was one of the canaries in the coal mine.
Have to say, lastly, that the excerpt from the Alana Newhouse piece (haven’t read the whole thing) is pretty shocking, though maybe if I were in the habit of reading Tablet I wouldn’t find it so.
