"On the Jewish Question" (German: "Zur Judenfrage") is an essay by Karl Marx written in autumn 1843 and first published in February 1844 in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. The essay is one of Marx's first attempts to deal with categories that would later be called the materialist conception of history.
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 only achieve political emancipation 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. For Marx, it is not a question of who is to be emancipated or who is to bring it about; it is a question of the appropriate form of emancipation to be pursued. 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, given that the Rights of Man are rights individuals possess insofar as they are viewed in abstraction from their particular identities. The removal of religious or property qualifications for citizens, according to Marx, does not mean the abolition of religion or property, but only introduces a way of regarding individuals in abstraction from concrete particular identities that he assumes are just as illusory as religion:
- [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 distinction, 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. [1]
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.
Karl Marx and Judaism
Because Karl Marx had some Jewish ancestry, many anti-Semites promote the idea that communism is part of a Jewish conspiracy. An atheist as an adult, Marx was raised as a Lutheran, his father converting when Marx was a child in order to escape anti-Semitism.
Marx himself has been accused of being an anti-Semite, though most critical scholars today tend to reject this argument.Template:Fn In On the Jewish Question, he wrote: "What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money."; and continues, "[t]he social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism." [2] Those who accuse Marx of anti-Semitism often cite these passages, but others feel this distorts Marx's work, lifting quotes out of context. In particular, the second passage cannot be understood if one doesn't take into account that Judaism here stands, in fact, for capitalism. As Marx put it, "... 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".
Marx stresses, then, that he is speaking of "the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew." Meaning, not the [Sabbath] Jews who may devote their lives to studying the Kabalah and the Talmud, but those [worldly] Jews who in their daily economic activities are engaged in banking, trade, and finance. Thus, while he did consider the Jews to be a people with a special tradition in capitalist activites, and while he did regard capitalism as an "anti-social element of the present time [author's italics]", he did not believe that the Jews themselves constituted an evil.
Marx linked the overrepresentative role played by Jews in finance and banking not to any inherent Jewish trait, but rather to an acculturation brought about by hundreds of years of medieval laws, which placed restrictions on the type of labor Jews were permitted to engage in. He expresses a tone of near-sarcastic admiration for Jews who succeeded under capitalism, despite (and arguably, because of) the hindrances they endured from anti-Semitic laws and attitudes.
With a measure of irony, Marx goes on to link the emancipation of Jews to a general emancipation from capitalism. Still, his focus was not on the Jewish religion, but rather on the worldly Jews' economic legacy and its material manifestations as directly related to a division of labor imposed on Jews since medieval times; that is, as a direct product of capitalist and precapitalist development. He did claim that the actual religion was a particularly clear expression of the spirit of capitalism, but he didn't regard it as significantly inferior to the "Christian egoism of heavenly bliss". The latter was, in his opinion, only a kind of "spiritualistic" projection of Judaism and precisely the religion that had made the final triumph of that same capitalist spirit possible.
Many Zionist socialist Jews agreed with Marx, and expanding on his ideas, viewed the emancipation and retention of the identity of Jews as inexorably tied to a reversal of their economic history. These Zionist socialists, particularly associated with, but not confined to, the Kibbutz movement, went on to define and practise physical (and especially agrarian) labor, which for centuries had been denied to Jews, as a necessary form of 'purification' from their past economic legacy, which, like Marx, they viewed negatively. While most of these Zionist socialist Jews were pronouncedly secular (even anti-clerical), unlike Marx they retained a strong sense of Jewish identity.
Specific criticism of On the Jewish Question
Some scholars have presented an alternative reading of Marx, primarily based on his essay On the Jewish Question. Economist Tyler Cowen, historian Marvin Perry, and political scientist Joshua Muravchik have suggested that what they see as an intense hatred for the "Jewish Class" was part of Marx's belief that if he could convince his contemporaries and the public to hate Jewish capitalists, the public would eventually come to dislike non-Jewish capitalists as well.
Most scholars reject this claim for two reasons: first, it is based on two short essays written in the 1840s, and ignores the bulk of Marx's analysis of capitalism written in the following years. Second, it distorts the argument of On the Jewish Question, in which Marx deconstructs liberal notions of emancipation. During the Enlightenment, philosophers and political theorists argued that religious authority had been oppressing human beings, and that religion must be separated from the functions of the state for people to be truly free. Following the French Revolution, many people were thus calling for the emancipation of the Jews.
At the same time, many argued that Christianity is a more enlightened and advanced religion than Judaism. For example, Marx's former mentor, Bruno Bauer, allegedly argued that Christians need to be emancipated only once (from Christianity), and Jews need to be emancipated twice — first from Judaism (presumably, by converting to Christianity), then from religion altogether.
Marx rejects Bauer's argument as a form of Christian ethnocentrism, if not anti-Semitic. Marx proceeds to turn Bauer's language, and the rhetoric of anti-Semites, upside down to make a more progressive argument. First, he points out that Bruno Bauer's argument is too parochial because it considers Christianity to be more evolved than Judaism, and because it narrowly defines the problem that requires emancipation to be religion. Marx instead argues that the issue is not religion, but capitalism. Pointing out that anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews are fundamentally anti-capitalist, Marx provides a theory of anti-Semitism by suggesting that anti-Semites scapegoat Jews for capitalism because too many non-Jews benefit from, or are invested in capitalism, to attack capitalism directly.
Marx also uses this rhetoric ironically to develop his critique of bourgeois notions of emancipation. Marx points out that the bourgeois notion of freedom is predicated on choice (in politics, through elections; in the economy, through the market), but that this form of freedom is anti-social and alienating. Although Bauer and other liberals believe that emancipation means freedom to choose, Marx argues that this is at best a very narrow notion of freedom. Thus, what Bauer believes would be the emancipation of the Jews is for Marx actually alienation, not emancipation. After explaining that he is not referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion, Marx appropriates this anti-Semitic rhetoric against itself (in a way that parallels his Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction) by using "Judaism" ironically as a metaphor for capitalism. In this sense, Marx states, all Europeans are "Jewish". This is a pun on two levels. First, if the Jews must be emancipated, Marx is saying that all Europeans must be emancipated. Second, if by "Judaism" one really means "capitalism," then far from Jews needing to be emancipated from Christianity (as Bauer called for), Christians need to be emancipated from Judaism (meaning, bourgeois society). See: works by historian Hal Draper and David McLellan.
See also
- Karl Marx
- Marxism
- Marxist theory
- Marxist philosophy
- Bruno Bauer
- Young Hegelians
- German idealism
- Materialism
Further reading
- Andrew Vincent, "Marx and Law" Journal of Law and SocietyVol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 371-397.
Footnotes
Template:Fnb Shamir, Illana and Shlomo Shavit (General Editors), Encyclopedia of Jewish History: Events and Eras of the Jewish People, p. 118, pp. 210-216