“Marx Was a Jew” [poem by David Lehman]

“Marx Was a Jew “

It’s the turning point of The Stranger (1946),

the moment Edward G. Robinson

wakes up in the middle of the night

knowing Orson Welles gave himself away

by saying “Marx wasn’t a German,

he was a Jew.” Only a Nazi

would make the distinction, he reasons.

On the other hand, in “On the Jewish Question” (1843),

Karl Marx wrote that money is the jealous god

of the Jews, turning men into commodities,

hucksters all, look at them haggle.

“The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew,”

he wrote, and the road to a free world requires

“the emancipation of humanity from Judaism.”

So are you saying that a Jew can be anti-Semitic?

Or that the Left has a love-hate history with the Jews,

the hate reserved for (or projected onto) Israel,

itself a concept in a cloudy world of concepts

rather than a state containing millions of souls?

And along comes a smartass academic pronoun to explain

Marx’s essay is actually a critique of anti-Semitism.

— this poem first appeared on August 20, 2024, in Tablet magazine.