The Victims of Birkenau Came From.. 10%4

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Organise 'The Jewish Question' - an introduction by Constance Lever IN 1944 Abram Leon was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But unlike most of the millions who died there too, he understood the force that destroyed him, and he had devoted himself, up to his arrest few months before, to the fight against it.

A leading Belgian Trotskyist, Leon had directed his party's socialist propaganda work amongst the working class conscript soldiers of the occupying German army, helped organise meetings of underground factory committees in the metal plants of Liege and travelled secretly to occupied France to reestablish the international links of the revolutionary workers' movement.

These actions were not only those of a socialist internationalist, but of a Jew who understood that decaying capitalism had no place in it for the Jews whom it had evicted from their traditional class position as feudal middlemen; who understood that it could only use them as a scapegoat for its own crimes. Capitalism was a world system from which there could be no escape -and the only salvation for the Jews as for the working class, lay in destroying it. these conclusions on the basis of a historical analysis, which he had worked out while a leader of the Belgian : Zionist Socialist youth movement (Hashomer Hatsair). He had argued for his explanation within the Zionist movement, and had then left on the basis of it to join the Trotskyists in 1939.

Zionist ideas centred round the Jewish myth -that the root of the tragic history of the Jewish people' lay in the action of the Roman soldiers, 2,000 years ago, who drove the Jews from their land dispersing them over the earth; that their spiritual greatness lay in their holding together despite dispersal and persecution, united by a belief in one god and in their national destiny; and the myth that their problem could be solved and their destiry realised by a return to 'their land, of 2,000 years ago.

Leon argued that the Jews were a "peopleclass": a historically and culturally distinct people, bound together by a common class position. They were mainly involved in trade, beginning in the ancient world in which their land straddled the crosspoints of the trade routes between the centres of the ancient civilisations. It was not the Roman soldiers, but their own jobs as traders which scattered them through the ancient world: the mass dispersal

April 1942 - April 1944

HOLLANI 100,000 MAÁA BELGIUM 50,000 FRANCE 150,000 of Jews outside Palestine had already become fact before the final fall of Jerusalem. It was not despite the dispersal but because of it and of the common class position that accompanied it, that they survived as distinct people. GERMANY 60,000 190a & JUGOSLAVIA 50,000 And now, in the modern world, it was not essentially as a national minority, but as an unpopular, increasingly irrelevant and therefore powerless class that they faced anti-semitism. It was, argued Leon, by the destruction of capitalism, not by the establishment of a client state of imperialism - Israel - that the survival and freedom of 18 million Jews around the world could be assured.

Independent Jewish merchant capital was. in no sense a germ of modern capitalism. The Jewish merchant did not invest money in production, he was merely the link between points of production far apart, over which he had no influence.

The development of early bourgeois merchant capital, growing up organically out of society and gradually achieving, power over raw materials and local processes of production, had first to overcome the obstacle of the commercial monopoly of the Jews - who belonged to feudal society and depended on it, though they were a foreign body within it.

Unlike feudalism, capitalism has no special place for the people-class. Early capitalism finds them an obstacle. Established 900,000 AUSTRIA & CZECHOSLOVAKIA * 60,000 advancing capitalism diversifies their economic tasks and assimilates them. In the countries of the West, before the mass migrations from Eastern Europe, those who remained or had returned earlier were well on the road to assimilation, intermarriage was. high, conversion common.

A new wave of migration to the West was soon followed by the postWorld War I crisis of capitalism, bringing mass unemployment, ruined small middle classes and a decaying society. Having set the Jews in motion capitalism could not now find room for them. Seeking to enter the petty bourgeois and craftsmen jobs to which they were accustomed, they found themselves facing the competition and hatred of similar elements, themselves being ruined.

Fascism directed popular hatred of capitalism and terror in face of social collapse onto the traditional 'money men' , vulnerable precisely because they were, as a people, no longer major money-men or leading capitalists.

The septic stream of anti-semitism which • had always oozed along the sewers of society - the preoccupation of cranks, misfits and those who see visions of the 'who-killedChrist' variety now became a central element

JEWS FROM CAM

IN EASTERN EURC 350,000 GREECE 45,000 malevolent force behind the Workers' Parties and Labour Unions which were rousing the ire and the jealousy of the terrified shopkeepers, and could offer little or nothing to the semi-worker, the lumpenproletarian.

All ills could be traced to their source in the manyheaded, anti-National "Jewish Conspiracy" • All who were aggrieved, sore, bruised by the system or disappointed by the failures and betrayals of the Socialist and Communist parties and who could see no way out of their own misery, found a scapegoat.

In this situation Zionism beginning as a small movement at the end of the last century, gained mass influence amongst Jews.

It wanted to escape from the now-redundant peopleclass position and • from crisis-ridden capitalism by a simple physical removal to Palestine. It remained a minority outlook amongst the jews until the Nazi holocaust. Its predominance amongst Jews today is one of the results of that most tragic defeat in the history of the people-class - a defeat it was powerless to prevent. It could only have been prevented by the revolutionary victory of the international working class -and this was prevented or betrayed by the socialist and Stalinist political organisations land, incidentally, to a minor degree, by the Zionist diversion from the class struggle).

Living in Nazi Europe and fighting for the socialIst revolution, Abram Leon dismissed Zionism as a utopian and reactionary diversion from the real struggle which would liberate humanity, including the Jews.

He did not live to see modern Israel become a major client state of American imperialism and its partner in repressing the attempts of the Arabs to escape from • backwardness and from the imperialist exploitation which keeps them backward.

Leon also could not have foreseen the post-war temporary revival and stability which gave a new lease of life both to Zionism and particularly to the process of s Jewish assimilation. Russia is a peculiar and, in many ways, a special case, but in the two other major Jewish centres, the USA and Israel, the jews are well on their way to losing their old identity.

In Israel most of the traditional culture and way of life of the people-class (including their traditional radicalism and their internationalism) have disappeared The "Jewish Question" here has been transformed into the problem of the Zionist state of Israel, imperialism's ally against the Arab people.

Twisted

The twisted logic of a capitalist world has resulted in some of the remnants of one of imperialism's most tragic victims is becoming its best defender in this area, where imperialism has helped create a Zionist state complete with all the normal features of capitalism, including even racial discrimination against dark-skinned Jews, as well as against the conquered Arabs.

It proves the truth which Abram Leon so clearly understood and which led him to a sharp break with Zionism - that there is no escape from the problems of the capitalist world except its total transformation by the revolutionary socialist struggle, and the victory of the working class.

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