The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory's Analysis of Anti-Semitism

Abstract

The posthumous appearance of Max Horkheimer's Notizen of 1950 to 1969 in same volume as a new edition of Dammerung, his aphorisms of 1926 to 1931,1 amply documents many of transformations of theoretical and political positions of Frankfurt School's leading figure. None is perhaps as striking as that of his attitude towards anti-Semitism and what was once known as the Jewish question. In later collection, at least a dozen entries discuss these and related issues, often from very personal vantage point of a survivor of Holocaust. In contrast, Dammerung virtually ignores anti-Semitism as a problem in its own right and has little to say about plight of Jews in Weimar Germany. The one major exception is an aphorism entitled Glaube und Profit (Belief and Profit), which contains a debunking reduction of Jewish identity to class interests: As material base of ghetto life was left behind, willingness to sacrifice life and property to one's religious belief also became a thing of past. Among bourgeois Jews, hierarchy of goods is neither Jewish nor Christian but bourgeois. The Jewish capitalist brings sacrifices to power, just like his Aryan class colleague. He first sacrifices his own superstition, then lives of others, and finally his capital. The Jewish revolutionary in Germany is not different from his 'Aryan' comrade. He commits his life to liberation of man.2