Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

202 // PAOL BUHLE AND ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
George Washington Woodbey, Reverend James T. Holly, and Reverend R.C.
Ransom tried to dispel anti-Semitic myths and looked to the Old Testament and
to Jewish law for a Biblical basis for socialism. In the shadow of the Dreyfus affair
in France and on the eve of Leo Frank's lynching in Atlanta, these incredibly articulate
and well-versed Christian ministers argued that many progressive principles
must be sought in Jewish history and tradition—a tradition in which Reverend
Woodbey, in particular, places Karl Marx. In a popular pamphlet titled The Bible
and Socialism. (1904), Woodbey wrote:
It will be remembered that Marx, the greatest philosopher of modern
times, belonged to that same wonderful Hebrew race that gave to the
world Moses, the Lawgiver, the Kings and prophets, and Christ the Son of
the Highest, with his apostles, who, together, gave us the Bible that, we
claim, teaches Socialism. Doubtless Marx, like other young Hebrews, was
made acquainted with the economic teachings of Moses, and all the rest of
the Old Testament sages and prophets, whatever we find him believing
after life.
If we are able to show that the Bible opposes both rent, interest and
profits, and the exploiting of the poor, then it stands just where the
Socialists do. 13
The Reverend goes on to make a persuasive case that the Book of Genesis in its
original conception forbade the private ownership of land and once that law was
broken it opened the floodgates to other violations—namely the charging of rent
and interest. "This violation of law," he added, "lays at the foundation of the class
struggle over the products which the capitalist is able to take from the worker,
because of his private ownership of the earth." As slaves, Jews learned what it was
like when their labor was exploited to enrich another. Woodbey reminded his
readers that "the Jews had just been relieved from a condition in which others had
been profiting at the expense of their labor in Egypt, so one of the first things in
the law given them at Mount Sinai was a statute forbidding usury or interest."
What is most remarkable about his text is his careful denunciation of the common
tendency to equate (from Matthew 25:14—19) the "money lenders" with
Jews. "It does not necessarily follow.. .that Christ had in view a Jew, when he used
the parable. This money lender, who took his journey into a far country, was like
the same class today who journey at others' expense." 14
Unsteadily, lacking any official party encouragement, the dialogue continued.
A few socialist intellectuals including Anna Strunsky Walling took part in the
founding of the Niagara movement (predecessor of the NAACP) in 1905, indirectly
assisting the rise of future Black leader W.E.B. Du Bois. But a minor
Jewish intellectual figure, best known for his Yiddish writings about the need for
a public system of social security, contributed the first of the important critiques
of the Socialist Party's own position. I.M. Rubinow (using the pseudonym I.M.