Essays

Theorising Politics and IR

Week 12

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Works of Karl Marx 1844

On The Jewish Question

Written: Autumn 1843;
First Published: February, 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher;

Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, 2008/9.

See Citizen in the Encyclopedia of Marxism, for an explanation of the various words for
“citizen.”

I

Bruno Bauer,

The Jewish Question,

Braunschweig, 1843

The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they desire? Civic,
political emancipation.

Bruno Bauer replies to them: No one in Germany is politically emancipated. We
ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a
special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans, you ought to work for the
political emancipation of Germany, and as human beings, for the emancipation of
mankind, and you should feel the particular kind of your oppression and your shame not
as an exception to the rule, but on the contrary as a confirmation of the rule.

Or do the Jews demand the same status as Christian subjects of the state? In that
case, they recognize that the Christian state is justified and they recognize, too, the
regime of general oppression. Why should they disapprove of their special yoke if they
approve of the general yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the
Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?

The Christian state knows only privileges. In this state, the Jew has the privilege of
being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which the Christians do not have. Why should he want
rights which he does not have, but which the Christians enjoy?

In wanting to be emancipated from the Christian state, the Jew is demanding that the
Christian state should give up its religious prejudice. Does he, the Jew, give up his
religious prejudice? Has he, then, the right to demand that someone else should renounce
his religion?

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By its very nature, the Christian state is incapable of emancipating the Jew; but, adds
Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated. So long as the state is Christian
and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of
receiving it.

The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way characteristic of the
Christian state – that is, by granting privileges, by permitting the separation of the Jew
from the other subjects, but making him feel the pressure of all the other separate spheres
of society, and feel it all the more intensely because he is in religious opposition to the
dominant religion. But the Jew, too, can behave towards the state only in a Jewish way –
that is, by treating it as something alien to him, by counterposing his imaginary nationality
to the real nationality, by counterposing his illusory law to the real law, by deeming
himself justified in separating himself from mankind, by abstaining on principle from
taking part in the historical movement, by putting his trust in a future which has nothing
in common with the future of mankind in general, and by seeing himself as a member of
the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people.

On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account of your religion?
It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? In Germany, there are no citizens.
As human beings? But you are no more human beings than those to whom you appeal.

Bauer has posed the question of Jewish emancipation in a new form, after giving a
critical analysis of the previous formulations and solutions of the question. What, he asks,
is the nature of the Jew who is to be emancipated and of the Christian state that is to
emancipate him? He replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, he analyzes the religious
opposition between Judaism and Christianity, he elucidates the essence of the Christian
state – and he does all this audaciously, trenchantly, wittily, and with profundity, in a style
of writing that is as precise as it is pithy and vigorous.

How, then, does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? The formulation
of a question is its solution. The critique of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish
question. The summary, therefore, is as follows:

We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.

The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious
opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious
opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian
recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the
development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man
is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious

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but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity.
But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.

The German Jew, in particular, is confronted by the general absence of political
emancipation and the strongly marked Christian character of the state. In Bauer’s
conception, however, the Jewish question has a universal significance, independent of
specifically German conditions. It is the question of the relation of religion to the state, of
the contradiction between religious constraint and political emancipation.
Emancipation from religion is laid down as a condition, both to the Jew who wants to be
emancipated politically, and to the state which is to effect emancipation and is itself to be
emancipated.

“Very well,” it is said, and the Jew himself says it, “the Jew is to become emancipated
not as a Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he possesses such an excellent,
universally human principle of morality; on the contrary, the Jew will retreat behind
the citizen and be a citizen, although he is a Jew and is to remain a Jew. That is to
say, he is and remains a Jew, although he is a citizen and lives in universally human
conditions: his Jewish and restricted nature triumphs always in the end over his
human and political obligations. The prejudice remains in spite of being outstripped
by general principles. But if it remains, then, on the contrary, it outstrips everything
else.”

“Only sophistically, only apparently, would the Jew be able to remain a Jew in the life
of the state. Hence, if he wanted to remain a Jew, the mere appearance would
become the essential and would triumph; that is to say, his life in the state would be
only a semblance or only a temporary exception to the essential and the rule.” (“The
Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free,” Einundzwanzig
Bogen, pp. 57)

Let us hear, on the other hand, how Bauer presents the task of the state.

“France,” he says, “has recently shown us” (Proceedings of the Chamber of Deputies,
December 26, 1840) “in the connection with the Jewish question – just as it has
continually done in all other political questions – the spectacle of a life which is free,
but which revokes its freedom by law, hence declaring it to be an appearance, and on
the other hand contradicting its free laws by its action.” (The Jewish Question, p.
64)

“In France, universal freedom is not yet the law, the Jewish question too has not yet
been solved, because legal freedom – the fact that all citizens are equal – is restricted
in actual life, which is still dominated and divided by religious privileges, and this
lack of freedom in actual life reacts on law and compels the latter to sanction the
division of the citizens, who as such are free, into oppressed and oppressors.” (p. 65)

When, therefore, would the Jewish question be solved for France?

“The Jew, for example, would have ceased to be a Jew if he did not allow himself to
be prevented by his laws from fulfilling his duty to the state and his fellow citizens,
that is, for example, if on the Sabbath he attended the Chamber of Deputies and took

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part in the official proceedings. Every religious privilege, and therefore also the
monopoly of a privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some
or many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed themselves bound
to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be left to them as a purely private
matter.” (p. 65)

“There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Take
from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer exist.” (p. 66)

“Just as M. Martin du Nord saw the proposal to omit mention of Sunday in the law as
a motion to declare that Christianity has ceased to exist, with equal reason (and this
reason is very well founded) the declaration that the law of the Sabbath is no longer
binding on the Jew would be a proclamation abolishing Judaism.” (p. 71)

Bauer, therefore, demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should renounce Judaism, and
that mankind in general should renounce religion, in order to achieve civic emancipation.
On the other hand, he quite consistently regards the political abolition of religion as the
abolition of religion as such. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true, real
state.

“Of course, the religious notion affords security to the state. But to what state? To
what kind of state?” (p. 97)

At this point, the one-sided formulation of the Jewish question becomes evident.

It was by no means sufficient to investigate: Who is to emancipate? Who is to be
emancipated? Criticism had to investigate a third point. It had to inquire: What kind of
emancipation is in question? What conditions follow from the very nature of the
emancipation that is demanded? Only the criticism of political emancipation itself would
have been the conclusive criticism of the Jewish question and its real merging in the
“general question of time.”

Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level, he becomes entangled in
contradictions. He puts forward conditions which are not based on the nature of political
emancipation itself. He raises questions which are not part of his problem, and he solves
problems which leave this question unanswered. When Bauer says of the opponents of
Jewish emancipation: “Their error was only that they assumed the Christian state to be the
only true one and did not subject it to the same criticism that they applied to Judaism”
(op. cit., p. 3), we find that his error lies in the fact that he subjects to criticism only the
“Christian state,” not the “state as such,” that he does not investigate the relation of
political emancipation to human emancipation and, therefore, puts forward conditions
which can be explained only by uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general
human emancipation. If Bauer asks the Jews: Have you, from your standpoint, the right to
want political emancipation? We ask the converse question: Does the standpoint of
political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and
from man the abolition of religion?

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The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the state in which the Jew
lives. In Germany, where there is no political state, no state as such, the Jewish question is
a purely theological one. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which
recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex professo. Criticism here is
criticism of theology, a double-edged criticism – criticism of Christian theology and of
Jewish theology. Hence, we continue to operate in the sphere of theology, however much
we may operate critically within it.

In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of constitutionalism,
the question of the incompleteness of political emancipation. Since the semblance of a
state religion is retained here, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula,
that of a religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to the state retains the
semblance of a religious, theological opposition.

Only in the North American states – at least, in some of them – does the Jewish
question lose its theological significance and become a really secular question. Only where
the political state exists in its completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and
of the religious man in general, to the political state, and therefore the relation of religion
to the state, show itself in its specific character, in its purity. The criticism of this relation
ceases to be theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to adopt a theological attitude
toward religion, as soon as it behaves towards religion as a state – i.e., politically.
Criticism, then, becomes criticism of the political state. At this point, where the question
ceases to be theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to be critical.

“In the United States there is neither a state religion nor a religion declared to be that
of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another. The state stands
aloof from all cults.” (Marie ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis, etc., by G. de Beaumont,
Paris, 1835, p. 214)

Indeed, there are some North American states where “the constitution does not
impose any religious belief or religious practice as a condition of political rights.” (op.
cit., p. 225)

Nevertheless, “in the United States people do not believe that a man without religion
could be an honest man.” (op. cit., p. 224)

Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont,
Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure us. The North American
states, however, serve us only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of
complete political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the country of
complete political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous
vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection
of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source
of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer regard

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religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we
explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not
assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their
secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they
get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones.
History has long enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition in
history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us
the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize
the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular
form, apart from its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction between the state
and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is given by us a human form as the
contradiction between the state and particular secular elements; the contradiction
between the state and religion in general as the contradiction between the state and its
presuppositions in general.

The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in general, of religious man, is
the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In
its own form, in the manner characteristic of its nature, the state as a state emancipates
itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion – that is to say, by the
state as a state not professing any religion, but, on the contrary, asserting itself as a state.
The political emancipation from religion is not a religious emancipation that has been
carried through to completion and is free from contradiction, because political
emancipation is not a form of human emancipation which has been carried through to
completion and is free from contradiction.

The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the state can
free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction, that the
state can be a free state [pun on word Freistaat, which also means republic] without man
being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he lays down the following
condition for political emancipation:

“Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a privileged church,
would have been abolished altogether, and if some or many persons, or even the
overwhelming majority, still believed themselves bound to fulfil religious duties, this
fulfilment ought to be left to them as a purely private matter.” [The Jewish
Question, p. 65]

It is possible, therefore, for the state to have emancipated itself from religion even if the
overwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease
to be religious through being religious in private.

But, the attitude of the state, and of the republic [free state] in particular, to religion is,
after all, only the attitude to religion of the men who compose the state. It follows from

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this that man frees himself through the medium of the state, that he frees himself
politically from a limitation when, in contradiction with himself, he raises himself above
this limitation in an abstract, limited, and partial way. It follows further that, by freeing
himself politically, man frees himself in a roundabout way, through an intermediary,
although an essential intermediary. It follows, finally, that man, even if he proclaims
himself an atheist through the medium of the state – that is, if he proclaims the state to be
atheist – still remains in the grip of religion, precisely because he acknowledges himself
only by a roundabout route, only through an intermediary. Religion is precisely the
recognition of man in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. The state is the
intermediary between man and man’s freedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom
man transfers the burden of all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the
intermediary to whom man transfers all his non-divinity and all his human unconstraint.

The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects and all the
advantages of political elevation in general. The state as a state annuls, for instance,
private property, man declares by political means that private property is abolished as
soon as the property qualification for the right to elect or be elected is abolished, as has
occurred in many states of North America. Hamilton quite correctly interprets this fact
from a political point of view as meaning:

“the masses have won a victory over the property owners and financial wealth.”
[Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2 vols, Edinburgh, 1833, p.
146]

Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has become the
legislator for the property owner? The property qualification for the suffrage is the last
political form of giving recognition to private property.

Nevertheless, the 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. Hegel, therefore, defines the
relation of the political state to religion quite correctly when he says:

“In order […] that the state should come into existence as the self-knowing, moral
reality of the mind, its distinction from the form of authority and faith is essential.

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But this distinction emerges only insofar as the ecclesiastical aspect arrives at a
separation within itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the particular
churches, has achieved and brought into existence universality of thought, which is
the principle of its form” (Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1st edition, p. 346).

Of course! Only in this way, above the particular elements, does the state constitute itself
as universality.

The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as opposed to his material
life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the
sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its
true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life –
leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which
he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a
private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and
becomes the plaything of alien powers. The relation of the political state to civil society is
just as spiritual as the relations of heaven to earth. The political state stands in the same
opposition to civil society, and it prevails over the latter in the same way as religion
prevails over the narrowness of the secular world – i.e., by likewise having always to
acknowledge it, to restore it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. In his most immediate
reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here, where he regards himself as a real
individual, and is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the
other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an
illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal
universality.

Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in conflict with his
citizenship and with other men as members of the community. This conflict reduces itself
to the secular division between the political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois
[i.e., as a member of civil society, “bourgeois society” in German], “life in the state” is “only
a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and the rule.” Of course, the
bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the
citoyen [‘citizen’ in French, i.e., the participant in political life] only sophistically remains
a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political
state itself. The difference between the merchant and the citizen [Staatsbürger], between
the day-laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the
merchant and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction
in which the religious man finds himself with the political man is the same contradiction
in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen, and the member of civil society with
his political lion’s skin.

This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces itself, the relation
between the political state and its preconditions, whether these are material elements,

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such as private property, etc., or spiritual elements, such as culture or religion, the conflict
between the general interest and private interest, the schism between the political state
and civil society – these secular antitheses Bauer allows to persist, whereas he conducts a
polemic against their religious expression.

“It is precisely the basis of civil society, the need that ensures the continuance of this
society and guarantees its necessity, which exposes its existence to continual dangers,
maintains in it an element of uncertainty, and produces that continually changing
mixture of poverty and riches, of distress and prosperity, and brings about change in
general.” (p. 8)

Compare the whole section: “Civil Society” (pp. 8-9), which has been drawn up along the
basic lines of Hegel’s philosophy of law. Civil society, in its opposition to the political state,
is recognized as necessary, because the political state is recognized as necessary.

Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True, it is not the final form of
human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the
hitherto existing world order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real,
practical emancipation.

Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of
public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man
behaves – although in a limited way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere – as a
species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil
society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the
essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of
man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men – as it was
originally. It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and
arbitrariness. The endless fragmentation of religion in North America, for example, gives
it even externally the form of a purely individual affair. It has been thrust among the
multitude of private interests and ejected from the community as such. But one should be
under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the human
being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion from the state
into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this
emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do
so.

The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man
and citizen, is neither a deception directed against citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention
of political emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, the political method of
emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as such
is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men
strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of

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religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds
to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive
taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine. At times of special self-
confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society and the elements
composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man, devoid of
contradictions. But, it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its
own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore,
the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private
property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.

Indeed, the perfect Christian state is not the so-called Christian state – which
acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the state religion, and, therefore, …