Religion and Politics 9: Abram Leon. A Marxian Analysis of The Jewish Question

Send us Fan MailAbram Leon, The Jewish Question. Abram Leon was a Jewish intellectual and activist.  He was a Marxist of the Trotskyite tendency.  He was also a Zionist.  He lived in Palestine for a time as a child but his family returned to Europe and he moved from Poland, where he had been born, to Belgium.  The Nazi movement plunged him into reflections on why there had been such tension around and hostility to Jews throughout European history.  He was not convinced that this was simply a matter of religious prejudice.  He saw it as more complex than that.  His analysis, called in English The Jewish Question, was written in 1944. It used Marxian logic, focusing upon "materialist" conditions.  He said the Jews survived, not “in spite of history” but “because of history.” They performed functions that society needed.  As the industrial revolution spread to Eastern Europe, displacing whole classes of people, the Jews became a surplus people (as did others).  We Americans are well aware of the waves of East European immigrants who began to pour into this country in the late 19th century: Jews, Poles, Ukrainians,  Romanians, Lithuanians, and others.    Leon felt that Jews constituted a “people-class.”  The meaning of that concept will be discussed in the podcast, but it refers to a group of people disproportionately concentrated in and associated with certain economic functions.  It is similar to the concept of an “ethno-class,” a term used in contemporary social science.  I suggest that if we turned the analysis to ethnic groups in general (which we Americans have studied for 400 years) it makes real sense.  This is a unique and provocative analysis. The book was published in 1946 in French, in 1950 in English (in a very limited edition in Mexico), and then in America in 1970. An introduction to the book explains how the publishers searched for the source material that Leon used.  He was dodging Nazis at the time and did not have access to libraries. All the footnotes and tables were added later. This was a classroom lecture delivered by Zoom during the Pandemic.