Arab Nationalist Christians and Jewish Communists

Changing framings to be grandly included.

One of the more striking patterns of political and intellectual history has been the prominence of Jewish Communists and Marxists, starting with Karl Marx himself. But there have been plenty of others: Leon Trotsky, Yakov Sverdlov, Moisei Uritsky, Lazar Kaganovich, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Adolf Joffe, Karl Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov, Pavel Axelrod, Genrikh Yagoda, Maxim Litvinov, Yakov Yurovsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Bela Kun, Gyorgy Lukacs, Georgy Arbatov, Raya Dunayevskaya, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcuse …

White Russian propaganda poster, 1919. Wikimedia commons.

The overwhelming majority of Jews were neither Communists nor Marxists. Nor were a majority of active Marxists thinkers and revolutionaries Jewish. Nevertheless, the number of first and second rank Jewish Communist and Marxist thinkers and revolutionaries is striking. Jewish intellectuals are particularly dominant in the origins of Western Marxism, with Antonio Gramsci being one of the few key figures in the development of the tradition in the interwar period who was not Jewish.

The dominance of German Jews in the interwar development of Western Marxism undermines one of the reasons sometimes given for the number of Jewish Bolsheviks: that it was an understandable reaction to the Tsarist regime being explicitly (indeed violently) anti-Semitic. Neither Second Reich Germany nor Weimar Germany was anti-Semitic in law or official rhetoric. While there was explicitly anti-Semitic politics in Germany, these were politically fringe until the rise of the Nazi Party. So all those German Jews turning to Marxism were not reacting to an anti-Semitic regime as one might claim of the Jewish Marxists of the Russian Empire.

The anti-Semitism of Tsarism had rather more do with the strength of Zionism among Jews from within the Russian Empire. Zionism was not very significant among German Jews, because they were mostly assimilated within the normal patterns of German society. So, clearly, something else is going on in generating those prominent Jewish Marxists.

Sometimes, the best way to get a handle on the patterns in one civilisation is to compare it to patterns in one or more other civilisations. Do we see a pattern like this in any other civilisation? Yes, in the prominence of Arab Christians in Arab nationalism.

Youssef Bey Karam, Constanin Zureiq, Michel Aflaq, Juryi Zaydan, Khalil Sakanini, George Antonius, Gregoire Haddad, Antoun Saadeh, Butrus al-Bustani, George Habash, Wadie Haddad, Nayef Hawatmeh, Kamal Nasser, Hanan Ashrawi, Edward Said: Christian Arab nationalists have been, if anything, more prominent in the founding and development of Arab nationalism than Jews were in the development of Marxism in general. Christians were as comparably significant in Arab Nationalism as Jews were in the development of Western Marxism. Christians have been particularly prominent in the development of Palestinian nationalism.

There is even a point of overlap, in that various Palestinian Christians were prominent in the Israel-Palestine Communist Party: Tawfik Toubi, Daud Turki, Emile Touma, and Emile Habibi.

So, what is going on here? It has always been tempting to suggest that intellectual Jews are particularly easily seduced by intellectual systems. On this view, Kabbalah is a precursor to the fascination with Marxism. While there might be something to this, the example of Arab Christians being so prominent in various strands of Arab nationalism suggest something else might be going on.

Arabs live within Islamic civilisation. Within Islam, Christians have very much a second-class status as dhimmis. Shifting the political and cultural framing to an identity that includes Christians as equals has obvious appeal to Christians. Even better, Arab nationalism is a framing where they can have an intellectual — even political — prominence that Islam would never give them.

What we call Western civilisation has deep Christian roots. The concept of Judaeo-Christian is a way of being inclusive to Jews against, for instance, atheist political movements. Nevertheless, it has always been something of a fig leaf, a convenient fiction.

What grew out of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West was very much a Christian civilisation. Indeed, there are arguably three, Christian-in-origin civilisations currently on the planet: Western civilisation, Orthodox civilisation and Latin American civilisation.

For almost a thousand years, Latin Christendom was a much better moniker for what became Western civilisation. The Protestant Reformation made the Latin more problematic, but Western Christendom still worked. It was the Enlightenment and after that made the Christendom label seem troublesome. Indeed, the label of Western civilisation became a way of “moving on” from a Christian identity.

Nevertheless, Western civilisation was still deeply Christian in its roots and outlooks until the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s brought an end to the civilisational cycle that started with the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the C4th and C5th. Even now, Hitler is the secular Satan — and Nazism generates a more visceral antipathy than Communism — because Nazism is such a comprehensive denial of the Christian roots of Western civilisation. The strongest historical parallel to the contemporary advance of “wokery” through our institutions is the Christianisation of a highly bureaucratised Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries.

An interwoven historical parallel is from David Hume’s scepticism about our knowledge of causation mirroring al Ghazali’s scepticism about the same. Via Kant, Hegel, Marx, Critical Theory and French Theorists, you can see such scepticism having the same corrosive effect on contemporary Western science as al Ghazali’s scepticism had on Islamic science. With our universities increasingly becoming “woke” madrassas, they are coming to mirror the role that actual madrassas had in displacing Islamic science.

Source: Chaney 2023.

Marxism — despite being founded by a secularised Jew — is, like other Western political philosophies, a Christian heresy. Something that is, if anything, even more true of Critical Social Justice (“wokery”) with its ostentatious empathy for victims. Precisely because it not such a complete denial of the ideas that have animated Western civilisation — and despite having a much higher death toll than Nazism — Communism does not seem as viscerally evil as Nazism, for Nazism is a much greater insult to the lingering, ultimately Christian, animating sense of the sacred within Western civilisation.

So, just as Arab nationalism appeals to Arab Christians, because it is a framing that does not exclude them — rather, it enables them to not only be equals with other Arabs, but also be intellectual and political leaders — Marxism offers the same to Jews.

The anti-Christian element in Marxism is quite explicit. (Hitler was much more publicly circumspect in his reversal of Christian ideas.) Antonio Gramsci famously wrote that:

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.

One can reasonably argue that the only significant intellectual and political tradition across the last two centuries that is as explicitly anti-Christian as Marxism is Feminism. There have been a lot of prominent Jewish feminists.

Karl Marx himself was, of course, famously an opponent of a continuing Jewish identity. But that represents the final escape from the restrictions of a Jewish identity in a civilisation with Christian roots: to replace a Jewish identity with a universalising, transformative revolutionary identity. Hence the development of networks of Jewish Marxist intellectuals, as Marxism provided them a common escape path and a common identity. Indeed, a common grandiose intellectual and revolutionary identity.

There have been plenty of prominent Jewish intellectuals who have been defenders of Western civilisation and its legacies. Much of the point of the Judaeo-Christian moniker is to make such identification and defence easier.

Nevertheless, just as Arab Christians have pushed Arab nationalism so as to move away from the religious nature of Islamic civilisation, so Marxism has provided Jewish intellectuals with a path to reject the Christian roots of Western civilisation, and escape from the restrictions of a Jewish identity. With the added bonus of being able to use, develop and master a complex system of intellectual thought, the mastery of which gives them a morally and intellectually grandiose cognitive identity, and sense of authority.

References

Eric Chaney, ‘Religion and the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science,’ March 2, 2023.

Edward J Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, University of California Press, 2015.

Rachel Wilson, Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women's Liberation, 2021