The people-class revisited

 

Abram Leon (1918-1944) was a Belgian Jewish Trotskyist killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Posthumously, Leon´s surviving comrades published his book “The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation”. I´m not sure about the works´ present status, but during the 1970´s and 1980´s it was often marketed by Trotskyist groups as some kind of definitive Marxist analysis of the Jewish problematique. I never read the book (although I do have it), but I´ve heard it discussed among un-ironic Trotskyists and related denizens of the far left demimonde. 

One idea addressed by Leon is the weird longevity of the Jewish people – weird, at least, to many Marxists who regard “nations” as a modern phenomenon and “peoples” as ever-changing. His solution was to regard Jews as a “people-class” of merchants and usurers who for these eminently materialist reasons managed to survive for millennia. Apparently, Leon also believed that with the advent of capitalism, the Jewish people-class would be dissolved, presumably making him an assimilationist and anti-Zionist.

In 1998, a small Trotskyist group in Britain, simply called the Trotskyist Group, published extensive excerpts from a criticism of Leon´s book in their magazine Workers Fight. The article is titled “Jews: Never a `People-Class´: The Anti-Marxist Nature of Abram Leon´s Theory”. The pamphlet has a somewhat different title and is 72 pages long, written by Lisa Tailor, presumably a member of the Trotskyist Group. I haven´t been able to locate the pamphlet. The link below goes to the relevant issue of Workers Fight. (For those interested in such things, the Trotskyist Group was the “minority” faction of the Workers International League, one of the less crazy Trotskyist denominations in the UK, but – alas – also one of the smallest!)

Tailor´s argument can be summarized thus. The Jews quite literally never were a “people-class”. The Jewish community has always been class-divided and hence has never been qualitatively different from any other historical or modern “people”. Many Jews have been peasants or artisans, and most of the “merchants and usurers” were really small shopkeepers and peddlers. In all societies where Jews were allowed to take up so-called productive activities, many did so *without being assimilated*. 

Tailor believes that Leon inadvertently gives ammunition to the anti-Semites by picturing Jews as voluntarily parasitical, which in turn would make anti-Semitic hatred against them in some sense rational. Tailor emphasizes the Christian oppression of the Jews, making their choice of occupation far from voluntary. She also points out that anti-Semitism simply continued and in a sense became even worse with the advent of capitalism, falsifying Leon´s prediction that it would become less prevalent and replaced by workers´ unity. 

It´s not clear to me what political conclusions the author (and the Trotskyist Group) drew from this, however. Support for Israel, a two-state solution, or what? I originally assumed that Workers Fight must have been published by the Alliance for Workers´ Liberty! With that, I end this perhaps somewhat esoteric discussion.

Link to Workers Fight back issue:

Workers Fight Winter 1998-99