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"On the Jewish Question" (German: "Zur Judenfrage") is an essay by Karl Marx written in autumn 1843. It is one of Marx\'s first attempts to deal with categories that would later be called the materialist conception of history. Some (see below) have argued that it contains manifestations of antisemitism.
The essay criticizes two studies on the attempt by the Jews to achieve political emancipation in Prussia by another Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer. Bauer argued that Jews can achieve political emancipation only if they relinquish their particular religious consciousness, since political emancipation requires a secular state, which he assumes does not leave any "space" for social identities such as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the idea of the "Rights of Man." True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion.
Marx uses Bauer\'s essay as an occasion for his own analysis of liberal rights. Marx argues that Bauer is mistaken in his assumption that in a "secular state" religion will no longer play a prominent role in social life, and, as an example refers to the pervasiveness of religion in the United States, which, unlike Prussia, had no state religion. In Marx\'s analysis, the "secular state" is not opposed to religion, but rather actually presupposes it. The removal of religious or property qualifications for citizens does not mean the abolition of religion or property, but only introduces a way of regarding individuals in abstraction from them.Marx 1844:[T]he political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.
On this note Marx moves beyond the question of religious freedom to his real concern with Bauer\'s analysis of "political emancipation." Marx concludes that while individuals can be \'spiritually\' and \'politically\' free in a secular state, they can still be bound to material constraints on freedom by economic inequality, an assumption that would later form the basis of his critiques of capitalism.
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In Marx\' view, Bauer fails to distinguish between political emancipation and human emancipation: as pointed out above, political emancipation in a modern state does not require the Jews (or, for that matter, the Christians) to renounce religion; only complete human emancipation would involve the disappearance of religion, but that is not yet possible, not "within the hitherto existing world order".
In the second part of the essay (a part which is significantly shorter, yet the one most frequently discussed and quoted today), Marx disputes Bauer\'s "theological" analysis of Judaism and its relation to Christianity. Bauer has stated that the renouncing of religion would be especially difficult for Jews, since Judaism is, in his view, a primitive stage in the development of Christianity; hence, to achieve freedom by renouncing religion, the Christians would have to surmount only one stage, whereas the Jews would need to surmount two. In response to this, Marx argues that the Jewish religion need not be attached the significance it has in Bauer\'s analysis, because it is only a spiritual reflection of Jewish economic life. This is the starting point of a complex and somewhat metaphorical argument which draws on the stereotype of the Jew as a financially apt "huckster" and posits a special connection between Judaism as a religion and the economy of contemporary bourgeois society. Thus, the Jewish religion not only doesn\'t need to disappear in that society, as Bauer argues, but is actually a natural part of it. Having thus figuratively equated "practical Judaism" and "huckstering", Marx concludes that "the Christians have become Jews"; and, ultimately, it is mankind (both Christians and JewsMarx 1844:On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.) that needs to emancipate itself from ("practical") Judaism. Marx 1844:
The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.
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In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
Quotes from this part of the essay are frequently cited as proof of Marx\' antisemitism. For analyses, see the Interpretations section.
Zur Judenfrage was first published by Marx and Arnold Ruge in February 1844 in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. From December 1843 to October 1844, Bruno Bauer published the monthly Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette) in Charlottenburg (now Berlin). In it, he responded to the critique of his own essays on the Jewish question by Marx and others. Then, in 1845, Friedrich Engels and Marx published a polemic critique of the Young Hegelians titled The Holy Family. In partsEngels, Marx: The Holy Family 1845, Chapter VI, The Jewish Question No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 of the book, Marx again presented his views dissenting from Bauer\'s on the Jewish question and on political and human emancipation.
A French translation appeared 1850 in Paris in Hermann Ewerbeck\'s book Qe\'est-ce que la bible d\'apres la nouvelle philosophie allemand.
In 1879, historian Heinrich von Treitschke published an article Unsere Aussichten (Our Prospects), in which he demanded that the Jews should assimilate to German culture, and described Jewish immigrants as a danger for Germany. This article would stir a controversy, to which the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, edited by Eduard Bernstein, reacted by republishing almost the entire second part of Zur Judenfrage in June and July 1881.
The whole essay was republished in October 1890 in the Berliner Volksblatt, then edited by Wilhelm Liebknecht. Marx-Engels Gesammtausgabe (MEGA), Volume II, apparatus, pp. 648 (German) Dietz, Berlin 1982
A translation of Zur Judenfrage was published together with other articles of Marx in 1959 under the title "A World Without Jews". A World Without Jews, review in: The Western Socialist, Vol. 27 - No. 212, No. 1, 1960, pages 5-7 The editor Dagobert D. Runes intended to show Marx\'s alleged anti-Semitism. Marx and Anti-Semitism, discussion in: The Western Socialist, Vol. 27 - No. 214, No. 3, 1960, pages 11, 19-21 This edition has been criticized because the reader is not told that its title is not from Marx, and for distortions in the text.Draper 1977, Note 1
A manuscript of the essay has not been transmitted.
Hyam Maccoby has argued that Marx\'s early anti-Semitism is shown in his 1843 essay "On the Jewish Question." In it Marx argues that the modern commercialized world is the triumph of Judaism, a pseudo-religion whose god is money. Maccoby has suggested that Marx was embarrassed by his Jewish background and used the Jews as a "yardstick of evil." In later years, Marx\' anti-Semitism was mostly limited to private letters and conversations because of strong public identification with anti-Semitism by his political enemies both on the left (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin) and on the right (aristocracy and the Church).Hyam Maccoby. Antisemitism and Modernity: Innovation and Continuity. Routledge. (2006). ISBN 041531173X p. 64-66 Bernard Lewis found many instances of anti-Semitic language in latter Marx\'s work. For example, in one article Marx talks about Polish Jews as "that dirtiest of all races."Bernard Lewis. Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. (1999). W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393318397 p.112
According to several scholars, for Marx Jews were the embodiment of capitalism and the creators of all its evils. Marx\'s equation of Judaism with capitalism, together with his pronouncements on Jews, strongly influenced socialist movements and shaped their attitudes and policies toward the Jews. His essay influenced National Socialist, Soviet and Arab anti-Semites.Edward H. Flannery. The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism. Paulist Press. (2004). ISBN 0809143240 p. 168, Marvin Perry, Frederick M. Schweitzer. Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan. (2005). ISBN 1403968934 p. 154-157
Abram Leon in his book The Jewish Question (published 1946)Leon 1950, Chapter One, Premises examines Jewish history from a materialist outlook. According to Leon, Marx\'s essay states that one “must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary: the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the \'real Jew\', that is to say, by the Jew in his economic and social role”.
Isaac Deutscher (1959)Isaac Deutscher: Message of the Non-Jewish Jew in American Socialist 1958 compares Marx with Elisha ben Abuyah, Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud, all of whom he thinks of as heretics who transcend Jewry, and yet still belong to a Jewish tradition. According to Deutscher, Marx\'s “idea of socialism and of the classless and stateless society” expressed in the essay is as universal as Spinoza\'s ethics and God.
Shlomo Avineri (1964)Avineri, Shlomo (1964). "Marx and Jewish Emancipation". Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (3): 445-50. , while regarding Marx\' antisemitism as a well-known fact, points out that Marx\'s philosophical criticism of Jewish emancipation did not lead him to reject emancipation as an immediate political goal. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, written March 1843, “(...) I have just been visited by the chief of the Jewish community here, who has asked me for a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly, and I am willing to do it. However much I dislike the Jewish faith, Bauer\'s view seems to me too abstract. The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational. At least, it must be attempted--and the embitterment grows with every petition that is rejected with protestations”, postscript of a Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge in Dresden, written: Cologne, March 13 1843 Marx writes that he intended to support a petition of the Jews to the Provincial Assembly. He explains that with the fact that while he dislikes Judaism as a religion, he also remains unconvinced by Bauer\'s view (that the Jews shouldn\'t be emancipated before they abandon Judaism, see above).
In his book For Marx (1965), Louis Althusser claims that “in On the Jewish Question, Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, etc., and even usually in The Holy Family (...) Marx was merely applying the theory of alienation, that is, Feuerbach’s theory of ‘human nature’, to politics and the concrete activity of man, before extending it (in large part) to political economy in the Manuscripts”.Althusser 1965, Part One: Feuerbach’s ‘Philosophical Manifestoes’, first published in La Nouvelle Critique, December 1960. He opposes a tendency according to which “Capital is no longer read as On the Jewish Question, On the Jewish Question is read as Capital”.Althusser 1965, Part Two: On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions, first appeared in La Pensée, March-April 1961 For Althusser, the essay “is a profoundly ‘ideological’ text”, “committed to the struggle for Communism”, but without being Marxist; “so it cannot, theoretically, be identified with the later texts which were to define historical materialism”.Althusser 1965, Part Five: ‘The 1844 Manuscripts’, first appeared in La Pensée, February 1963.
David McLellan, however, has argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be understood in terms of Marx\'s debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany. According to McLellan, Marx used the word "Judentum" in its colloquial sense of "commerce" to argue that that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx\'s essay, McLellan concludes, should be read as "an extended pun at Bauer’s expense."David McLellan: Marx before Marxism (1970), pp.141-142.
Hal Draper (1977)Draper 1977 observed that the language of Part II of On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in Jewish socialist Moses Hess\' essay On the Money System.
Stephen Greenblatt (1978)Stephen J. Greenblatt: Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism, in: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), pp. 291-307; Excerpt compares the essay with Christopher Marlowe\'s play The Jew of Malta. According to Greenblatt, “[b]oth writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against that activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience”. Greenblatt is attributing Marx a “sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background”.
Y. Peled (1992)Y. Peled: From theology to sociology: Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx on the question of Jewish emancipation, in: History of Political Thought, Volume 13, Number 3, 1992, pp. 463-485(23); Abstract sees Marx shifting the debate over Jewish emancipation from the theological to the sociological plane, thereby circumventing one of Bauer\'s main arguments. In Peleds view, this was less than a satisfactory response to Bauer, but it enabled Marx to present a case for emancipation while, at the same time, launching his critique of economic alienation. He concludes that Marx\'s philosophical advances were necessitated by, and integrally related to, his commitment to Jewish emancipation.
Others argue that that On the Jewish Question is primarily a critique of liberal rights, rather than a criticism of Judaism, and that apparently anti-Semitic passages should be read in that context.Brown, Wendy (1995), "Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting the \'Jewish Question\'", in Sarat, Austin & Kearns, Thomas, Identities, Politics, and Rights, University of Michigan Press, pp. 85-130
For sociologist Robert Fine (2006)Robert Fine: Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Anti-Semitism in: Engage Journal 2, May 2006 Bauer\'s essay “echoed the generally prejudicial representation of the Jew as ‘merchant’ and ‘moneyman’”, whereas “Marx’s aim was to defend the right of Jews to full civil and political emancipation (that is, to equal civil and political rights) alongside all other German citizens”. Fine argues that “(t)he line of attack Marx adopts is not to contrast Bauer’s crude stereotype of the Jews to the actual situation of Jews in Germany”, but “to reveal that Bauer has no inkling of the nature of modern democracy”.
While sociologist Larry Ray in his reply (2006)Larry Ray: Marx and the Radical Critique of difference in: Engage Journal 3, September 2006 acknowledges Fine\'s reading of the essay as an ironic defence of Jewish emancipation, he points out the polyvalence of Marx\'s language. Ray translates a sentence of Zur Judenfrage and interprets it as an assimilationist position “in which there is no room within emancipated humanity for Jews as a separate ethnic or cultural identity”, and which advocates “a society where both cultural as well as economic difference is eliminated”. Here Ray sees Marx in a “strand of left thinking that has been unable to address forms of oppression not directly linked to class”.
Outside the context of the essay, various facts have been cited to prove Marx\' antisemitism.
An atheist as an adult, Marx was raised as a Lutheran, his father having converted when Marx was a child in order to escape discrimination by the Prussian state. Marx himself has been accused of being an antisemite. Although most critical scholars today tend to reject this argument, Shamir, Illana and Shlomo Shavit (General Editors), Encyclopedia of Jewish History: Events and Eras of the Jewish People, p. 118, pp. 210-216 there is a wide spectrum of opinion regarding Marx\'s antisemitism. In particular, Shlomo Avineri\'s article on Karl Marx\'s attitudes towards Jews begins with the statement, "That Karl Marx was an inveterate antisemite is today considered a commonplace which is hardly ever questioned".Avineri, Shlomo (1964). "Marx and Jewish Emancipation". Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (3): 445-50. In addition, political psychologist William H. Blanchard notes in his analysis of Marx\'s On the Jewish question that Marx\'s antisemitism was "well known".W. Blanchard, Political Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 365-374
Examples of quotes from part II of On the Jewish Question, which are sometimes cited as proof of Marx\' antisemitism[attribution needed], include:
What is secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, an emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism would be self-emancipation of our age.
The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.(...)
The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.(...)
Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money.(...)
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.(...)
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.Marx 1844
In part II of the essay, Marx refers to Thomas Müntzer:
The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination. It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable“that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.”Marx 1844
In his Apology, in large parts an attack on Martin Luther, Müntzer says:
Look ye! Our sovereign and rulers are at the bottom of all usury, thievery, and robbery; they take all created things into possession. The fish in the water, birds in the air, the products of the soil – all must be theirs (Isaiah v.)Thomas Müntzer: Hoch verursachte Schutzrede, or Apology, 1524, Alstedter, English translation cited from
Karl Kautsky: Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, 1897, Chapter 4, VIII. Münzer’s Preparations for the Insurrection
The appreciation of Müntzer’s position has been interpreted as a sympathetic view of Marx towards (non-human) animals. In Lawrence Wilde: ‘The creatures,too,must become free’: Marx and the Animal/Human Distinctionin: Capital & Class 72, Autumn 2000
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