Are the Jews a Race?

An early attempt by one of the world's leading Jewish Communist theoreticians to counter early twentieth century anti-Semitism-which argued that Jews were an alien non-European race-by attempting to prove that the Jews do not constitute a specific race, but are rather a mixture of many different groups. In this book, Karl Kautsky analyses physical traits and behavioural patterns among Jews and non-Jews alike, sets out what he sees as the definition of pure and mixed races, and then posits Jewish history over these two frameworks to draw his conclusion that the Jews are of mixed racial origins. He also discusses the mental attributes of Jews and their propensity to urbanized commercial life-an attribute which Kautsky ascribes to centuries of selective in-breeding in the mercantile classes. Although parts of this work have now been superseded by modern DNA tests (which have proven that Jews do indeed share a great genetic commonality), Kautsky's discussion of Zionism, antiSemitism, and the future of Palestine and the assimilationist trends of World Jewry are still highly relevant and of importance to the present-day. About the author: Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) was recognized as among the most authoritative promulgators of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels and was called by some the 'Pope of Marxism.' Following the First World War, Kautsky became an outspoken critic of the Bolshevik Revolution and its excesses, engaging in polemics with V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky on the nature of the Soviet state. A principal figure in the history of the Internationalist Socialist movement, he first became famous as editor of the fourth volume of Karl Marx's economic critique of capitalism, Das Kapital.