On the Jewish Question
Zur Judenfrage
Marx’s review of two 1843 essays by Bruno Bauer, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Against Bauer’s demand that Jews give up Judaism before they can be emancipated, Marx distinguishes political emancipation, which the modern state can grant while leaving religion a private matter, from human emancipation, and reads the rights of man of the French and American constitutions as the rights of egoistic man in bourgeois society. The second part identifies Judaism with huckstering and money.
- Edition
- H. J. Stenning’s translation, in Karl Marx, Selected Essays (London: Leonard Parsons; New York: International Publishers, 1926), from the Distributed Proofreaders transcription of the 1968 facsimile reprint (Project Gutenberg #21565, 2007), checked against a second scan of that reprint.
- Source
- Project Gutenberg #21565 (2007), via the Internet Archive
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Contents
- I Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage 1 h 1 min 47
Marx answers Bruno Bauer's pamphlet, which held that Jews must give up Judaism, and the state Christianity, before Jews could be emancipated. Marx distinguishes political emancipation, a secular state with equal citizens, from human emancipation. The United States shows that a free state can coexist with intense religiosity, so religion must be explained from secular conditions. The modern state splits each person into an abstract citizen and an egoistic member of bourgeois (civil) society. Examining the French and American declarations, Marx argues that the rights of man are the rights of that separated, property-owning individual, produced when the revolution dissolved feudal society. Human emancipation requires overcoming the split itself.
- II Bruno Bauer, The Capacity of Modern Jews and Christians to Become Free 17 min 17
Marx turns to Bauer's essay ranking Jews and Christians by their capacity for freedom, and recasts the question socially. Identifying “practical” Judaism with huckstering, egoism and money, a stereotype current at the time, he argues that this spirit has become the spirit of Christian bourgeois society, as reports of American money-worship show. Money is the god that turns all things, nature and human relations included, into commodities; Christianity completed the alienation that allowed it to rule. Emancipation of Jews thus becomes the emancipation of society from the money economy, a formulation whose meaning and whose antisemitic overtones remain much debated.