On the Jewish Question

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"On the Jewish Question" (German: "Zur Judenfrage") is an essay by Karl Marx written in autumn 1843 and published in 1844. It is one of Marx's first attempts to deal with categories that would later be called the materialist conception of history.

Summary

Political and human emancipation

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 fails to distinguish between political emancipation and human emancipation. As an example, Marx refers to the pervasiveness of religion in the United States, which, unlike Prussia, had no state religion. In his 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. 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.

Judaism and Christianity

In the second, significantly shorter part of the essay, 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 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 Jews) that needs to emancipate itself from ("practical") Judaism.

Karl Marx and Judaism

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 anti-Semite. Although most critical scholars today tend to reject this argument, there is a wide spectrum of opinion regarding Marx's antisemitism. In particular, Shlomo Avineri's reappraisal 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”. 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”.

Quotes from part II of On the Jewish Question, which could be interpreted as antisemitic when taken out of their contexts, include:

The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

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.

What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money... The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

The language of Part II of On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in Moses Hess' essay On the Money System. David McLellan writes:

Judentum, the German word for Judaism, had the derivative meaning of “commerce”, and it is this meaning which is uppermost in Marx’s mind throughout the article. “Judaism” has very little religious, and still less racial, content for Marx and it would be little exaggeration to say that this latter part of Marx’s review is an extended pun at Bauer’s expense.

Others argue 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.Further, Shlomo Avinieri 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, Marx writes that he intended to support a petition of the Jews to the Provincial Assembly. He explains that by this step he does not support Bruno Bauer's demand at the Jews to give up their religion.

Reference to Müntzer

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 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.”

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.)

The appreciation of Müntzer’s position has been interpreted as a sympathetic view of Marx towards (non-human) animals.

Publications by Marx related to the essay

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 parts of the book, Marx again presented his views dissenting from Bauer's on the Jewish question and on political and human emancipation.

A translation of Zur Judenfrage was published together with other articles of Marx in 1959 under the title "A World Without Jews". The editor Dagobert D. Runes intended to show Marx's alleged anti-Semitism. This edition has been criticized because the reader is not told that its title is not from Marx, and for distortions in the text.

Interpretations

Abram Leon in his book The Jewish Question (published 1946) 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) 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.

In his book For Marx (1965), Louis Althusser claimes 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”. 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”. 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”.

Stephen Greenblatt (1978) compares the essay with Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta. According to Greenblatt, “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) 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.

For sociologist Robert Fine (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) acknowledges Fine's reading of the eassy 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”.

References

Marx 1844:
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.
Marx 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.
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.

...

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
Shamir, Illana and Shlomo Shavit (General Editors), Encyclopedia of Jewish History: Events and Eras of the Jewish People, p. 118, pp. 210-216
^ Avineri, Shlomo (1964). "Marx and Jewish Emancipation". Journal of the History of Ideas. 25 (3): 445–50.
W. Blanchard,Political Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 365-374
Marx 1844
Draper 1977
David McLellan: Marx before Marxism (1970), pp.141-142; cited from Draper 1977
Brown, Wendy (1995), "Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting the 'Jewish Question'", in Sarat, Austin; Kearns, Thomas (eds.), Identities, Politics, and Rights, University of Michigan Press, pp. 85–130
“(...) 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 1844
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
In Lawrence Wilde: ‘The creatures,too,must become free’: Marx and the Animal/Human Distinctionin: Capital & Class 72, Autumn 2000
Engels, Marx: The Holy Family 1845, Chapter VI, The Jewish Question No. 1, No. 2, No. 3
A World Without Jews, review in: The Western Socialist, Vol. 27 - No. 212, No. 1, 1960, pages 5-7
Marx and Anti-Semitism, discussion in: The Western Socialist, Vol. 27 - No. 214, No. 3, 1960, pages 11, 19-21
Draper 1977, Note 1
Leon 1950, Chapter One, Premises
Isaac Deutscher: Message of the Non-Jewish Jew in American Socialist 1958
Althusser 1965, Part One: Feuerbach’s ‘Philosophical Manifestoes’, first published in La Nouvelle Critique, December 1960.
Althusser 1965, Part Two: On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions, first appeared in La Pensée, March-April 1961
Althusser 1965, Part Five: ‘The 1844 Manuscripts’, first appeared in La Pensée, February 1963.
Stephen J. Greenblatt: Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism, in: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), pp. 291-307; Excerpt
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
Robert Fine: Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Anti-Semitism in: Engage Journal 2, May 2006
Larry Ray: Marx and the Radical Critique of difference in: Engage Journal 3, September 2006