History Needs Someone To Come Up With A Compendium Of Atheist Anti-Semitism, Racism, etc. Because They've Done One Of Christians

It has got to be one of the stupidest habits of thought that equates trying to understand how people do the bad things they do with excusing what they did.  I didn't post that complex article tracing the motives of Martin Luther and others in their anti-Semitic activities and those Lutherans, especially the Pietists of following centuries to deemphasize his anti-Semitic rants by noting his less unhinged writings about Jews to excuse anything, I posted them to understand that the history between Luther and the Nazis is hardly uniform and hardly able to produce the kind of aphoristic, slogan based substitute for reality that is so popular with the atheists.

If someone hasn't done it yet, someone should list other traditions that have a basis in anti-Semitism. For example, it is entirely possible and probably far more useful to note the many, many atheists whose anti-Semitism is as bad as the worst that Martin Luther produced but without the problematic features of Christian anti-Semitism because atheism doesn't have, at its very definitional foundation, Jesus, a Jew, Paul, a Jew, all of the major characters of the Second Testament, all Jews, the entire Jewish First Testament in which all of the substance is Jewish.  Martin Luther translated and introduced more of the thinking and moral substance of Judaism into German, probably, than any single other German in history.  You can't say the same thing for atheist anti-Semites whose anti-Semitism would wipe away all of that and who deny and ridicule its value and who smear the entire Jewish religious identity in terms at least as bad as any Christians have come up with.  And they also reject the idea that anyone should repent of doing that.

Karl Marx wrote a particularly awful anti-Semitic tract, "On the Jewish Question" early in his career, and, unlike Martin Luther, there doesn't seem to have been much other substance in his career as a writer, a propagandist, a journalist and a scholar for an alternative to it within Marxism to be supported with.  Michael Ezra in an article posted at The Philosophers Magazine said:

In a review of the recently published book, Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology, edited by Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, David Hirsh has argued that it is a “standard misreading” of Marx to say that “Marx was an antisemite.” With this, he concurs with Robert Fine, who attempted to “explode the myth” of Marx’s antisemitism. As far as Professor Fine is concerned, those who believe this “myth” have an “inability” to read Marx or comprehend Marx’s “ironic style” of writing.

What truth is there in this argument? Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844 contains the following:

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

Marx argues that, “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” Larry Ray explains, “Marx’s position is essentially an assimilationist one in which there is no room within emancipated humanity for Jews as a separate ethnic or cultural identity.” Dennis Fischman puts it, “Jews, Marx seems to be saying, can only become free when, as Jews, they no longer exist.”

And as he shows in the article he shows that the writing of Marx could more than match the things Martin Luther, at his worst, wrote:

When considering Marx and his views towards Jews, one must go further than his infamous essay, his correspondence also needs to be considered. Marx used the Bambergers to borrow money but showed contempt for them. In a derogatory fashion he referred to the father and son as “Jew Bamberger” or “little Jew Bamberger.” Similarly, Spielmann, whose name appears frequently in correspondence between Marx and Engels was referred to as “Jew Spielmann.” When on holiday in Ramsgate in 1879, Marx reported to Engels that the resort contained “many Jews and fleas.” In an earlier letter to Engels, Marx referred to Ferdinand Lassalle as a “Jewish nigger.” Professor Fine has not discussed this but I do not see such comments as “witty” or “ironic,” they are simply racist.*

And in an article he wrote about "The Russian Loan" for the New York Herald Tribune:

Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.

… the real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loanmongering mysteries by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade in securities… Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment, there is ever one of these little Jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. The smartest highwayman in the Abruzzi is not better posted up about the locale of the hard cash in a traveler’s valise or pocket than those Jews about any loose capital in the hands of a trader… The language spoken smells strongly of Babel, and the perfume which otherwise pervades the place is by no means of a choice kind.

… Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loan-mongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners… The fortunes amassed by these loan-mongers are immense, but the wrongs and sufferings thus entailed on the people and the encouragement thus afforded to their oppressors still remain to be told.

… The fact that 1855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, and that the moneychangers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence. The loan-mongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization.

Which sounds like quite a bit of the Nazi anti-Semitic literature and I'll bet you could pass off as an introduction to the infamous, spurious, Protocols of the Elders of Zion but which I never, ever came across in my reading of by and for Marxists in my entire life of reading Marxists and lefty apologists for Marxism and those who have an affection for it.

You certainly can't claim that Marx and Engels anti-Semitism is a product of Christianity, though, as can be seen in the last passage, the atheists aren't above using a crude, common misunderstanding of a Gospel passage to promote their anti-Christian anti-Semitism.  You can do such things easily when you don't believe it is a sin to lie and deceive.

And this is just one instance of atheist anti-Semitism, especially if, as some of those quoted in the article include anti-Semitism to mean people who want Jews to disappear by assimilation, something which is happening in secular societies which promote religious hostility and religious indifference.  I do, though, say there is all the difference in the world between those who, out of a misunderstanding of the Gospels, want all Jews to convert to Christianity and to give up their distinct and defining religious traditions and those who out of a clear understanding of Darwinism identify Jews as an inferior biological group who pose a biological danger to their idea of the master race of the future and so, with other groups so defined, must all be murdered.  Marx certainly didn't believe that any more than Martin Luther did, both of them came to have a similar hatred of religious Judaism and both took up the same strain of extreme hatred of Jews who remained unassimilated.

Remember this the next time you read some online rant or comment on a lefty blog against circumcision, which is certainly of a piece with the same strain of anti-Semitism that Marx and Luther shared.**  Though, as I've been telling you, other anti-Semites like William L. Pierce, who take Darwin as their authority, advocate the same things that Hitler did.

*  In other places in his correspondence, Marx and Engels queer bash at least one political opponent on the left, though I don't have time to look up the citation.   American and British and other lefties have been covering up for Marx on such issues as, indeed, they do for Darwin and his viciously expressed scientific racism and his clear hatred and disdain for the poor and the disabled.  I have come to see that, founded in Malthus, the entire theory of natural selection is an introduction of those hatreds into the very heart of science, where its nature is entirely unmentioned and denied.  You can cover up that kind of thing with the language of science, secure in the repute that science is held in to protect you and what you've put there.  The opposite is not true of religion.  One of the greatest things about the Jewish religion is that they admit the many moral indictments there are to be made against their sins.  If they hadn't recorded those falls from grace, exhaustively, anti-Semites would have had to invent them.  Anti-Semites, in science, in atheism, don't have any moral imperative to document their sins or to repent of them.  Natural selection, elevating the violent and deadly "struggle for existence" against the disabled, against those it identifies as inferior into a moral virtue in which murder produces its own rewards is the exact opposite of that.

** I had to point out to several lefties engaged in that fashionable exercise in petty anti-Semitism that the World Health Organization advocated circumcision because circumcised men were less likely to pass on HIV infection (and I'd guess other STDs) than men who weren't circumcised.  Maybe those Jews knew a lot more than the idiots who snark about "bronze age goat herders" today do.  If people took more of their advice a lot of the really bad things going on wouldn't be happening.  Though they were certainly not perfect, they produced one of the most remarkable series of texts in existence.