Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution by Shlomo Avineri (Yale University Press, £16.99)

What is the secular cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money — the bill of exchange is the real God of the Jew — The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general”. Part of a Nazi tract? No, an excerpt from Karl Marx’s pamphlet, Zur Judenfrage (“On the Jewish Question”) published in 1844. 

Marx was the grandson of two rabbis, and his mother did not convert to Christianity until after his birth. He was, therefore, halachically Jewish but showed little interest in the Jewish religion or Jewish history. It is difficult, therefore, at first sight, to understand what he is doing in Yale’s series on Jewish lives. 

Shlomo Avineri, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a world authority on Marxism, presents a beautifully clear introduction to Marx’s thought and its Hegelian origins. But the originality of his book lies in Avineri’s belief that Marx’s Jewish background left large fingerprints on his work. 

While he does not exculpate or excuse Marx’s antisemitic rant, he seeks to put it into context, arguing that his attack on Christianity was even stronger than his indictment of Judaism, and that fear of censorship made him use Judaism as a synonym for capitalism, rather as, so he suggests, the verb “to jew”, now excised from the Oxford English Dictionary, was once used as a synonym for “to cheat”. 

This explanation is hardly convincing. But perhaps there is, as Avineri suggests, an alternative explanation in terms of psychology.

Marx, Avineri believed, had mixed feelings of anger and shame at his father’s conversion to Christianity, a conversion determined not by religious conviction but by “purely professional if not pecuniary considerations”, since Heinrich Marx would otherwise have been unable to practise in Prussia as a lawyer.

But perhaps psychologisng a man long dead and hardly prone to introspection amounts to little more than guessing. 

Karl Marx, of course, lives on through his writings. Here again, Avineri seeks to put him into context by declaring that the Russian revolution — and the Chinese, too, for that matter — occurred under quite different conditions from those envisaged by the master. 

I wonder how good an explanation that is. Marx, after all, believed in the union of theory and practice. Socialists were to be judged not by conformity to some pre-existing formula but by whether or not their actions advanced the revolution.

Judged by that criterion, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest were perfectly genuine Marxists rather than deviants from the true faith. But it cannot be denied that regimes calling themselves Marxists in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and elsewhere have been responsible for the deaths of around 100 million people, and that Stalin’s regime was deeply antisemitic. 

In the early 20th century, a biographer of Marx discovered a former librarian of the British Museum who remembered him as “a very fine gentleman indeed” who “used to come to the Reading Room almost every day, but then one day he stopped coming and nobody has ever heard of him again”. 

Perhaps it would have better for the world if Marx, together with his doctrines, had remained hidden in obscurity. 

Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College, London