"On the Jewish Question" is a response by Karl Marx to then-current debates over the Jewish question. Marx's father had converted to Lutheran Christianity, and his wife and children were baptized in 1825 and 1824, respectively. Marx wrote the piece in 1843, and it was first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title "Zur Judenfrage" in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.
The essay criticizes two studiesBruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question), Braunschweig 1843Bruno Bauer: "Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden" ("The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free"), in: Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, edited by Georg Herwegh, Zürich and Winterthur, 1843, pp. 56–71. by Marx's fellow Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, on the attempt by Jews to achieve political emancipation in Prussia. Bauer argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only by relinquishing their particular religious consciousness since political emancipation requires a secular state; Bauer assumes that there is not any "space" remaining 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 opportunity for presenting his own analysis of liberal rights, arguing that Bauer is mistaken in his assumption that in a "secular state", religion will no longer play a prominent role in social life. Marx gives the pervasiveness of religion in the United States as an example, 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."
Marx then 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.
The essay and Marx's alleged history of antisemitic behavior has led to criticism of Marx as well as Marxism. However, many Marxists, and scholars otherwise interested in Marxism, disagree that the essay or his letters are antisemitic.
Synopsis of content In Marx's view, Bauer fails to distinguish between political emancipation and human emancipation. As noted above, political emancipation in a modern state does not require Jews (or Christians) to renounce religion; only complete human emancipation would involve the disappearance of religion, but that is not yet possible "within the hitherto existing world order".
In the second part of the essay, Marx disputes Bauer's "theological" analysis of Judaism and its relation to Christianity. Bauer states that the renouncing of religion would be especially difficult for Jews. In Bauer's view, Judaism was a primitive stage in the development of Christianity. Hence, to achieve freedom by renouncing religion, Christians would have to surmount only one stage, whereas Jews would need to surmount two.
In response to this, Marx argues that the Jewish religion does not have the significance Bauer's analysis attributes, because it is merely a spiritual reflection of Jewish economic life. This is the starting point of a complex and somewhat metaphorical argument that 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 does not need to disappear in society, as Bauer argues, because it is actually a natural part of it. Having thus figuratively equated "practical Judaism" with "huckstering and money", 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.Marx 1844: "On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that his practical nature 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."
History of publication "Zur Judenfrage" was first published by Marx and Arnold Ruge in February 1844 in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, a journal which ran only one issue. From December 1843 to October 1844, Bruno Bauer published the monthly Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette) in Charlottenburg (now part of 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.Engels, Marx: The Holy Family 1845, Chapter VI, The Jewish Question No. 1, No. 2, No. 3
A French translation appeared 1850 in Paris in Hermann Ewerbeck's book Qu'est-ce que la bible d'après la nouvelle philosophie allemande? (What is the Bible according to the new German philosophy?).
In 1879, historian Heinrich von Treitschke published an article "Unsere Aussichten" ("Our Prospects"), in which he demanded that the Jews should assimilate into German culture, and described Jewish immigrants as a danger for Germany. This article stirred up 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 entire essay was re-published yet again in October 1890 in the Berliner Volksblatt, then edited by Wilhelm Liebknecht.Marx-Engels Gesammtausgabe (MEGA), Volume II, apparatus, p. 648 (German) Dietz, Berlin 1982
In 1926, an English translation by H. J. Stenning, with the title "On the Jewish Question", appeared in a collection of essays by Marx.Karl Marx Selected Essays, translated by H. J. Stenning (Leonard Parsons, London and New York 1926), pp. 40–97
Another English translation of "Zur Judenfrage" was published (along with other articles written by Marx) in 1959, and titled, A World Without Jews. The editor, Dagobert D. Runes, intended to demonstrate Marx's alleged antisemitism. Runes' text was extensively criticized by Louis Harap for grossly misrepresenting Marx's views.
Interpretations In Abraham Leon's 1946 book The Jewish Question, Leon examines Jewish history from a materialist perspective. According to Leon, Marx's essay uses the framing 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".Leon 1950, Chapter One, Premises
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 repudiate Jewry, 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), while acknowledging Marx's antisemitism as fact, also argues that Marx's philosophical criticism of Judaism overshadows his support for Jewish emancipation as an immediate political goal. Avineri notes that in Bauer's debates with a number of Jewish contemporary polemicists, Marx entirely endorsed the views of the Jewish writers against Bauer. 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 while he dislikes Judaism as a religion, he also remains unconvinced by Bauer's view (that Jews should not be emancipated unless they abandon Judaism). However, he also clarifies in the letter that his support of the petition is merely tactical, to further his efforts at weakening the Christian state."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
In his 1965 book For Marx, Louis Althusser say that "in On the Jewish Question, Hegel's Philosophy of the State, etc., and even usually in The Holy Family that "... 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 published in La Pensée, February 1963.
David Nirenberg sees Marx as having used anti-Judaism as a theoretical framework for making sense of the world and critically engaging with it. He argues that by framing his revolutionary economic and political project as a liberation of the world from Judaism, Marx expressed a "messianic desire" that was itself "quite Christian." In 2022, he specified in a K. interview that, in doing so, Marx perpetuated a more radicalized externally conceived Judaism than that of "slavery to the law, to forms, to rites", when "he affirm[ed] that the West, insofar as it utilized money and private property, produces Judaism 'from its own entrails'".