[Xmca-l] Marx and Der Judenfrage

[David Kellogg]

I am ploughing through an enormous tome by Yuri Slezkine, called "The House
of Government". Slezkine sets out to give us a kind of historical
ethnography of Soviet times in the form of an autobiography of "the
Swamp"--an area of Moscow across the river from the Kremlin. To his credit,
he soon realizes that when you do this, you cannot have a "bricks and
mortar" model of context (what Ruqaiya Hasan called 'material situational
settings'); you need to understand context as the relevant settings for
text. So then he decides that the context is really Marxism (already a very
debatable proposition) and that the context of Marxism is really--religion.

In Russia, it's an idea whose time--or at least whose sell-by date--has
come: all of Soviet history is now being re-evaluated by Russians in highly
religious terms. But how to repackage this idea in America? It turns out
that Slezkine's model of Marxism is based on Marx's work on the "Jewish
Question", probably the most vociferously decontextualized thing poor Marx
ever wrote (it is invariably cited in discussions which 'prove' that Marx
was anti-semitic). It also turns out that Slezkine's model of Judaism has
an uncanny resemblance to the work of Amy Chua on "model minorities" like
Chinese-Americans and Mormons; Slezkine thinks that Jews are
a "Mercurial" people, who thrive on going to places in the economy where
angels and "Apollonian" gentiles dare not tread.

Slezkine is not an idiot; he's just a very repetitious, redundant, and
wordy writer (caveat emptor until the paperback comes out!). But my reading
of "Marx and Der Judenfrage" is very different. First of all, I took it for
granted that Marx is writing as a Jew himself--as someone who would, like
Mendelsohn, have been recognized as part of the "self-emancipated" Jewry
(the Jews who had sought franchise by renouncing religion). Secondly, I
thought that Marx is really making the same argument that Andy made. It is
one of the cardinal and most overlooked  points of the Quranic revelation:
in religion, and matters of philosophy quite generally, compulsion (and
French style state atheism) is quite beside the point. But maybe I am an
idiot. (If so, the least I can do is to try to avoid repetition,
redundancy, and ...)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
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