Review by Choice Review
Avineri's brief biography of Karl Marx offers judicious interpretations of many of Marx's main writings but less information about Marx as a person. Avineri (political science, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) shows how the later image of Marx as a radical revolutionary is contradicted by the historical Marx, who was often much more cautious in his arguments. For example, Marx was very skeptical about Russia as the site for communism, a judgment borne out by the catastrophic results of the Bolshevik Revolution. The book appears in the "Jewish Lives" series, and Avineri is especially good at treating Marx's Jewish identity (Marx was converted to Christianity at age six). Avineri finds that Marx's scandalous essay "On the Jewish Question," though clearly anti-Semitic, reveals Marx's complex attitude to Jews and Judaism. Avineri concludes with an ironic anecdote from when he served as director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. At a UNESCO meeting, he quoted, in opposition to Soviet opponents of Israel, a sympathetic passage from Marx's essay on the Jews of 19th-century Jerusalem. When the Soviets claimed that it was a forgery, Avineri showed that the essay was published in the Soviet Union. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --David Biale, University of California, Davis
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
