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In his article in the Spring 1998 issue of Science & Society on "Engels' Position on Anti-Semitism in the Light of Contemporary Socialist Discussion" (Kessler, 1998), Mario Kessler follows the common practice of relying on the 1986 work of Roman Rosdolsky (Rosdolsky,1986) as a guide to the politics of the Neue Rheinische Zeitungon the national question. It is always a bad idea to rely on secondary sources when the original is available. But, in this case, it is worse than useless since Rosdolsky simply ignores most of what Engels actually wrote.
In the first place, as a guide to the position of Marx and Engels on "the Jewish Question," Rosdolsky is particularly poor because his discussion of this matter is tacked on to a discussion of a different subject: the Neue Rhenische Zeitung's treatment of the small nations, in particular the Croats, who allied themselves with the Hapsburgs to crush the national revolution of the Italians, Hungarians and Germans. What is worse, Rosdolsky uses as a guide to Marx's and Engels' thinking on the Jews, and the line of the NRZ in 1848, an 1844 article series that hardly reflected Marx's and Engels' views four years later.
But Rosdolsky, unlike Kessler, at least knows what Marx's and Engels' views in general were. Kessler sums up his attack on Marx and Engels with the statement that "instead of equal rights for Jews - an important heritage of German enlightenment - the paper called for their segregation" (Kessler,1998,128). Kessler provides no evidence for this assertion, nor can he. Rosdolsky knew better. While his main argument, based not on the NRZ but on Marx's 1844 article "On the Jewish Question," written when Marx was still a Hegelian, makes many of the same points that Kessler does, Rosdolsky does slip in the following fact in an obscure footnote: "I am going to leave aside the tremendous practical distinction: that Marx and Engels, as well as all later socialists, championed the complete emancipation of the Jews" (Rosdolsky, 1986, 205, n. 42).
There are two problems with this quote. The first, and least important for our purposes, is that the statement that "all later socialists championed the complete emancipation of the Jews" is much too sweeping and is contradicted elsewhere by...