Reading response

6

On the Jewish Question

Marx wrote this review article for the Deutsch—französische Jahrbücher in Kreuznach

before he left for Paris in October 1843. Bruno Bauer had recently published two essays

asserting that, in order to be able to live together, both Jews and Christians had to renounce

what separated them—religion. Thus it was not only Jews but all men who needed emancipa-

tion. Civil rights were inconceivable in an absolute state with an established religion.

Religious prejudice and religious separation would vanish when civil and religious castes and

privileges were abolished and all men made ‘equal’ in the sense of the French Revolution or

the American Constitution. Marx agrees with Bauer but complains that he has not gone far

enough: Bauer subjects to criticism only the ‘Christian state’ and not the state as such, and

thus fails to examine the relationship of political emancipation—that is, the granting of

merely political rights—to human emancipation.

Marx goes on to point out that the mere disestablishment of religion does not abolish

religious beliefs or the social ills that give rise to those beliefs, and cites the United States as

an example. He then examines the relationship of the abstract political state to civil society,

and demonstrates how this divides man into the ‘citizen’ (member of the universal state) and

the ‘bourgeois’ (self-interested member of civil society). Turning from the rights of the

citizen, Marx looks at the rights of man or natural rights, and criticizes their basic assump-

tion that man is an essentially selfish creature. His solution is to abolish the gap between civil

society and the state by making real in civil society the universal, communal, or ‘species’

essence of man inherent in the state.

I

On The Jewish Question

By Bruno Bauer

The German Jews seek emancipation. What sort of emancipation do they

want? Civil, political emancipation. Bruno Bauer answers them: No one in

Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How then

could we liberate you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a special emancipa-

tion for yourselves as Jews. You ought to work as Germans for the political

the early writings 1837–1844 | 47

emancipation of Germany, and as men for the emancipation of mankind, and

consider your particular sort of oppression and ignominy not as an exception

to the rule but rather as a confirmation of it.

Or do the Jews want to be placed on an equal footing with Christian sub-

jects? But in that case they recognize the Christian state as justified, and acqui-

esce in a regime of general enslavement. Why are they not pleased with their

particular yoke when they are pleased with the general yoke? Why should the

German interest himself in the emancipation of the Jews if the Jew does not

interest himself in the liberation of the German?

The Christian state is only acquainted with privileges. In it the Jew possesses

the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights that the Christian does not

have. Why does he wish for rights that Christians enjoy and he does not have?

The wish of the Jew to be emancipated from the Christian state entails a

demand that the Christian state should give up its religious prejudice. But does

the Jew give up his own religious prejudice? Does he then have the right to

demand of another that he forswear his religion? It is the very nature of the

Christian state that prevents it from emancipating the Jew; but, adds Bauer, it is

also the nature of the Jew that prevents his being emancipated. As long as the

state is Christian and the Jew Jewish, the one is as incapable of bestowing

emancipation as the other is incapable of receiving it.

The Christian state can only have its typical, i.e. privileged relationship to the

Jew by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but at the

same time subjecting him to a pressure from the other separated spheres that is

all the heavier since the Jew stands in religious opposition to the dominant

religion. But likewise the Jew can only have a Jewish relationship to the state

and treat it as alien to himself, for he opposes his own imaginary nationality

to actual nationality, and his own imaginary law to actual law, fancies him-

self justified in separating himself from humanity, as a matter of principle

takes no part in the movement of history, and waits on a destiny that has

nothing in common with the destiny of mankind as a whole. He considers

himself a member of the Jewish people and the Jewish people as the chosen

people.

On what grounds then do you Jews seek emancipation? On account of your

religion? But it is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? There are

no citizens in Germany. As human beings? You are no more human beings than

those to whom you appeal.

After a critical review of the way the question of Jewish emancipation was

previously formulated and solved, Bauer frames the question in a new way.

How, he asks, are they constituted, the Jew who is to be emancipated and the

Christian state which is to do the emancipating? His answer consists in a

critique of the Jewish religion; he analyses the religious opposition between

Judaism and Christianity and explains the nature of the Christian state in a way

48 | karl marx: selected writings

that is bold, acute, witty, and thorough, and in a style as precise as it is pithy

and energetic.

What, then, is Bauer’s solution to the Jewish question and what is the result?

To formulate a question is already to solve it. The critique of the Jewish

question is the answer to it. Here is a resumé:

We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.

The most flexible form of the opposition between Christian and Jew is the

religious opposition. How is an opposition to be done away with? By making it

impossible. How does one make a religious opposition impossible? By abolish-

ing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize their opposed religions as

merely different stages in the development of the human spirit, as different

snake skins that history has cast off, and recognize man as the snake that used

the skins for covering, then they will no longer be in religious opposition but

only in a critical, scientific, human opposition. Science is thus their unity, and

contradictions in science are solved by science itself.

The German Jew in particular suffers from the general lack of political

emancipation and the pronounced Christianity of the state. In Bauer’s opinion,

however, the Jewish question has a general significance that is independent of

specifically German circumstances. It is the question of the relationship of

religion to the state, of the opposition between religious prejudice and political

emancipation. Emancipation from religion is laid down as a precondition both

for the Jew who desires to be politically emancipated and for the emancipating

state which itself needs emancipation.

‘Fine, people say (the Jew himself included), the Jew is not to be emancipated

as a Jew, because he is a Jew, because he has universal human moral principles

that are so outstanding; rather his Jewishness will take second place to his

citizenship and he will be a citizen in spite of his being and remaining a Jew. In

other words he is and remains a Jew in spite of his being a citizen and living in

a condition similar to other men. For his narrow Jewish nature always in the

end triumphs over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains

even though it is overcome by universal principles. But if it does remain then it

would be more correct to say that it is the prejudice that overcomes everything

else.

‘The Jew would only be able to remain a Jew in the life of the state in a

sophistical sense, that is, in appearance only; so if he wished to remain a Jew,

the appearance would become what was essential and gain the upper hand.

This means that his life in the state would become only an appearance or a

momentary exception to the rule governing the real nature of things’ (‘The

Capability of Present-day Jews and Christians for Liberation’, Twenty-One

Sheets, p. 57).

Let us listen, on the other hand, to how Bauer formulates the task of the

state: ‘France’, it runs, ‘has recently (Debate of the Chamber of Deputies for the

the early writings 1837–1844 | 49

26th December 1840) given us apropos of the Jewish question a glimpse of a

free life, as she does continually in all other political questions since the July

Revolution. But she has revoked her freedom by law, thus declaring it to be a

sham and on the other hand she has contradicted her free law by her actions’

(The Jewish Question, p. 64).

‘Universal freedom has not yet been established by law in France and the

Jewish question still not solved because legal freedom, which consists in the

equality of all citizens, is limited in practice since life is still dominated and

divided by religious privileges, and this lack of freedom reacts on the law

and forces it to agree to the division of citizens wo are in principle free, into

oppressors and oppressed’ (p. 65).

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

‘The Jew, for example, would have had to cease being a Jew if he were to

refuse to let his law stop him from fulfilling his duties to the state and his fellow

citizens, for example, going to the Chamber of Deputies on the Sabbath and

taking part in public debates. Any religious privilege at all, including, therefore,

the monopoly of a privileged church, must be abolished and if some or many or

even the overwhelming majority still believe themselves bound to fulfil their

religious duties, then this must be allowed them as a purely private affair’

(p. 65). ‘Religion no longer exists when there is no longer a privileged religion.

Take from religion its power of exclusion and it ceases to exist’ (p. 66). ‘Herr

Martin du Nord was of the opinion that the proposal to omit the mention of

Sunday in the law was equivalent to a motion declaring that Christianity had

ceased to exist: a declaration that the abolition of the Sabbath law for the Jews

would be equivalent to a proclamation of the dissolution of Judaism would be

just as perfectly justified’ (p. 71).

So Bauer requires on the one hand that the Jew give up Judaism and man in

general give up religion in order to achieve civil emancipation. On the other

hand it follows that for him the political abolition of religion is the equivalent

of the abolition of all religion. The state that presupposes religion is not yet a

true and real state. ‘Of course religious ideas afford the state guarantees. But

what state? What sort of state?’ (p. 97).

It is here that Bauer’s one-sided approach to the Jewish question appears.

It is in no way sufficient to inquire: Who should emancipate? Who should be

emancipated? A proper critique would have a third question— what sort of

emancipation is under discussion? What preconditions are essential for the

required emancipation? It is only the critique of political emancipation itself

that would be the final critique of the Jewish question and its true resolution

into ‘the general problems of the age’.

Bauer falls into contradictions because he does not formulate the question at

this level. He poses conditions that are not grounded in the nature of political

emancipation itself. He raises questions not contained within the problem and

50 | karl marx: selected writings

solves problems that leave his questions unanswered. Bauer says of the

opponents of Jewish emancipation: ‘Their one fault was that they presupposed

the Christian state as the only true one and did not subject it to the same

critique to which they subjected Judaism’ (p. 3). Here Bauer’s fault lies in the

fact that he subjects only the Christian state to his critique, not ‘the state as

such’. That he does not investigate the relationship of political to human eman-

cipation and thus poses conditions that are only explicable by supposing an

uncritical confusion of political emancipation and universal human emancipa-

tion. Bauer asks the Jews: Does your standpoint give you the right to seek

political emancipation? But we ask the reverse question: Has the standpoint

of political emancipation the right to require from the Jews the abolition of

Judaism and from all men the abolition of religion?

The Jewish question always presents itself differently according to 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 foundation. This state is a professed theologian. Criticism is here criticism

of theology, a two-sided criticism of Christian and of Jewish theology.

But we are still always moving inside theology however critically we may be

moving.

In France, which is a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of

constitutionalism, a question of the incompleteness of political emancipation.

Since here the appearance of a state religion is retained although in an empty

and self-contradictory formula, namely that of the religion of the majority, the

relationship of the Jew to the state contains the appearance of a religious or

theological opposition.

It is in the North American states—or at least a part of them—that the Jewish

question loses its theological importance for the first time and becomes a really

secular question. It is only where the political state exists in its complete perfec-

tion that the relationship of the Jew and of the religious man in general to the

political state, and thus the relationship of religion to the state, can stand out in

all its peculiarities and purity. The criticism of this relationship ceases to be a

theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to have a theological attitude to

religion, as soon as it adopts the attitude of a state towards religion, i.e. a

political attitude. Criticism then becomes a criticism of the political state. At

this point, where criticism ceases to be theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to

be critical. ‘There is in America neither state religion nor a religion declared to

be that of the majority, nor pre-eminence of any one way of worship over

another. The state is stranger to all forms of worship’ (G. de Beaumont, Mary

or Slavery in the U.S.. . . , Paris, 1835, p. 214). There are even some North

American states where ‘the constitution does not impose religious belief and

practice as a condition of political rights’ (loc. cit., p 225). And yet ‘people in

the early writings 1837–1844 | 51

the U.S. do not believe that a man without religion can be an honest man’ (loc.

cit., p. 224). Yet North America is the land of religiosity par excellence as

Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton all aver with one voice.

But the North American states are serving here only as an example. The ques-

tion is: what is the relationship of complete political emancipation to religion?

The fact that even in the land of completed political emancipation we find not

only the existence of religion but a living existence full of freshness and strength

furnishes us with the proof that the existence of religion does not contradict or

impede the perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion is the

existence of a defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature

of the state itself. Religion for us no longer has the force of a basis for secular

deficiencies but only that of a phenomenon. Therefore we explain the religious

prejudice of free citizens by their secular prejudice. We do not insist that they

must abolish their religious limitation in order to abolish secular limitations.

We insist that they abolish their religious limitations as soon as they abolish

their secular limitations. We do not change secular questions into theological

ones. We change theological questions into secular ones. History has for long

enough been resolved into superstition: we now resolve superstition into his-

tory. The question of the relationship of political emancipation to religion

becomes for us a question of the relationship of political emancipation to

human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state

by criticizing the secular construction of the political state without regard to its

religious weaknesses. We humanize the opposition of the state to a particular

religion, Judaism for example, into the opposition of the state to particular

secular elements, and the opposition of the state to religion in general into the

opposition of the state to its own presuppositions in general.

The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and religious man in

general implies the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and

religion in general. The state as state emancipates itself from religion in the

manner peculiar to its own nature by emancipating itself from the state

religion, i.e. by not recognizing, as a state, any religion, by affirming itself

simply as a state. Political emancipation is not the completed and consistent

form of religious emancipation because political emancipation is not the

completed and consistent form of human emancipation.

The limitations of political emancipation are immediately evident in the fact

that a state can liberate itself from a limitation without man himself being truly

free of it and the state can be a free state without man himself being a free man.

Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he poses the following condition for

political emancipation: ‘Every single religious privilege, including the monop-

oly of a privileged church, must be abolished. If several or more or even the

overwhelming majority of people still felt obliged to fulfil their religious duties,

this practice should be left to them as a completely private matter.’ Therefore

52 | karl marx: selected writings

the state can have emancipated itself from religion, even when the overwhelm-

ing majority of people is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does

not cease to be religious simply because its religion is private.

But the attitude of the state, especially the free state, to religion is merely the

attitude of the men who make up the state to religion. It follows from this that

man liberates himself from an impediment through the medium of the state and

politically by entering into opposition with himself and getting round this

impediment in an abstract, limited, and partial manner. It follows also that

when man liberates himself politically, he liberates himself by means of a

detour, through the medium of something else, however necessary that medium

may be. It follows finally that man, even when he proclaims himself an atheist

through the intermediary of the state, i.e. when he proclaims the state to be

atheist, still retains his religious prejudice, just because he recognizes himself

only by a detour and by the medium of something else. Religion is precisely the

recognition of man by detour through an intermediary. The state is the inter-

mediary between man and his freedom. As Christ is the intermediary onto

whom man unburdens all his divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the

mediator onto which he transfers all his Godlessness and all his human liberty.

The political elevation of man above religion shares all the deficiencies and

all the advantages of political elevation in general. The state as state annuls

private property, for example, as soon as man declares in a political manner

that private property is abolished, as soon as he abolishes the requirement of a

property qualification for active and passive participation at elections, as has

happened in many North American states. Hamilton interprets this fact from

the political standpoint quite correctly: ‘the masses have thus gained a victory

over the property owners and monied classes’. Is private property not abolished

ideally speaking when the non-owner has become the lawgiver for the owner?

The census is the last political form of recognizing private property.

And yet the political annulment of private property has not only not abol-

ished private property, it actually presupposes it. The state does away with

difference in birth, class, education, and profession in its own manner when it

declares birth, class, education, and profession to be unpolitical differences,

when it summons every member of the people to an equal participation in

popular sovereignty without taking the differences into consideration, when it

treats all elements of the people’s real life from the point of view of the state.

Nevertheless the state still allows private property, education, and profession

to have an effect in their own manner, that is as private property, as education,

as profession, and make their particular natures felt. Far from abolishing these

factual differences, its existence rests on them as a presupposition, it only feels

itself to be a political state and asserts its universality by opposition to these

elements. Therefore Hegel defines the relationship of the political state to

religion quite rightly when he says: ‘In order for the state to come into existence

the early writings 1837–1844 | 53

as the self-knowing ethical actuality of spirit, it is essential that it should be

distinct from the form of authority and of faith. But this distinction emerges

only in so far as divisions occur within the ecclesiastical sphere itself. It is only

in this way that the state, above the particular churches, has attained to the

universality of thought—its formal principle—and is bringing this universality

into existence.’ [1942, p. 173] Of course! only thus does the state build its

universality over and above its particular elements.

The perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in oppos-

ition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to

exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as proper to civil society.

When the political state has achieved its true completion, man leads a double

life, a heavenly one and an earthly one, not only in thought and consciousness

but in reality, in life. He has a life both in the political community, where he is

valued as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private

individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to a means, and

becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state has just as spiritual

an attitude to civil society as heaven has to earth. It stands in the same oppos-

ition to civil society and overcomes it in the same manner as religion overcomes

the limitations of the profane world, that is, it must likewise recognize it,

reinstate it, and let itself once more be dominated by it. Man in the reality that

is nearest to him, civil society, is a profane being. Here where he counts for

himself and others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the

state, on the other hand, where man counts as a species-being, he is an imagin-

ary participant in an imaginary sovereignty, he is robbed of his real life and

filled with an unreal universality.

The conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the

community in which man as an adherent of a particular religion finds himself

can be reduced to the secular division between political state and civil society.

For man as a bourgeois ‘life in the state is only an apparent and momentary

exception to the essential rule’. [In this passage Marx uses ‘bourgeois’ to mean

a member of civil society, and ‘citizen’ to mean an individual with political

rights.] Of course the bourgeois, like the Jew, only remains in the life of the

state sophistically speaking, just as the citizen only sophistically remains a Jew

or bourgeois; but this sophism is not a personal matter. It is a sophism of the

political state itself. The difference between the religious man and the citizen is

the difference between the trader and the citizen, between the labourer and the

citizen, between the property owner and the citizen, between the living indi-

vidual and the citizen. The opposition to the political man in which the

religious man finds himself is the same opposition in which the bourgeois finds

himself to the citizen and the member of civil society to his political lion’s skin.

This secular strife to which the Jewish question can in the last analysis be

reduced—the relationship of the political state to its presuppositions, whether

54 | karl marx: selected writings

these be material elements like private property or intellectual like education,

religion, the conflict between general and private interests, the rift between the

political state and the civil society—these secular oppositions are left intact by

Bauer while he polemicizes against their religious expressions. ‘It is precisely

the same need which is the basis of civil society, ensures its continued existence,

and guarantees its necessity that also exposes its existence to perpetual dangers,

sustains an unsure element within it, produces the continuing oscillating mix-

ture of wealth and poverty, need and superfluity, and in general creates change’

(p. 8).

Compare the whole section entitled ‘Civil Society’ (pp. 8–9), which is drafted

from the main points of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. 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 great progress. Although it is not the

final form of human emancipation in general, it is nevertheless the final form of

human emancipation inside the present world order. It is to be understood that

I am speaking here of real, practical emancipation.

Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the

field of public law and making it a private right. Religion is no longer the spirit

of the state where man behaves, as a species-being in community with other

men albeit in a limited manner and in a particular form and a particular sphere:

religion has become the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism, the bellum

omnium contra omnes [war of all against all]. Its essence is no longer in com-

munity but in difference. It has become the expression of separation of man

from his common essence, from himself and from other men, as it was origin-

ally. It is still only the abstract recognition of a particular perversion, private

whim, and arbitrariness. For example, the infinite splintering of religion in

North America already gives it the exterior form of a purely individual affair. It

is shoved away into the crowd of private interests and exiled from the common

essence as such. But we should not be deceived about the limitations of political

emancipation. The separation of man into a public and a private man, the

displacement of religion from the state to civil society is not a stage but the

completion of political emancipation, which thus does not abolish or even try

to abolish the actual religiosity of man.

The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, protestant and citizen,

religious man and citizen, this decomposition is no trick played upon political

citizenship, no avoidance of political emancipation. It is political emancipation

itself, the political manner of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in

times when the political state is born violently as such out of civil society, when

man’s self-liberation tries to complete itself in the form of political self-

liberation, the state must go as far as abolishing, destroying religion, but only

in the same way as it goes as far as abolishing private property, at the most, by

the early writings 1837–1844 | 55

declaring a maximum, by confiscation or a progressive tax, or in the same way

as it abolishes life, by the guillotine. In moments of particular self-

consciousness political life tries to suppress its presuppositions, civil society

and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real, harmonious life of man.

However, this is only possible through violent opposition to its own conditions,

by declaring the revolution to be permanent. The political drama therefore

ends necessarily with the restoration of religion, private property, and all the

elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.

Indeed, it is not the so-called Christian state, that one that recognizes Chris-

tianity as its basis, as the state religion, and thus adopts an exclusive attitude to

other religions, that is the perfected Christian state, but rather the atheist state,

the democratic state, the state that downgrades religion to the other elements of

civil society. If the state is still a theologian, makes an official confession of the

Christian faith, and does not yet dare to declare itself a state, then it has not yet

succeeded in expressing its human basis, of which Christianity is the transcen-

dental expression, in a secular, human form, in its reality as a state. The so-

called Christian state is quite simply the non-state because it is only the human

background of Christianity and not Christianity itself that can be translated

into real human achievements.

The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state, but in no

way the state realization of Christianity. The state that still recognizes Christi-

anity in the form of a religion, does not yet recognize it in a political form

because it still has a religious attitude to religion, that is it is not the real

elaboration of the human basis of religion because it still accepts the unreal, the

imaginary form of this human kernel. The so-called Christian state is the

imperfect state and the Christian religion serves as a supplement and a sanctifi-

cation of its imperfection. Religion therefore necessarily becomes a means for

the state, and the state is one of hypocrisy. There is a great difference between

the perfect state counting religion as one of its presuppositions because of the

deficiencies in the general essence of the state, and the imperfect state declar-

ing religion to be its foundation because the deficiencies in its particular exist-

ence make it a deficient state. In the latter case religion becomes imperfect

politics. In the former the imperfection of even a perfect politics shows itself in

religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to

complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the true state, does not need

religion for its political completion. Rather it can abstract from religion,

because it realizes the human foundations of religion in a secular manner. The

so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude towards

religion and a religious attitude towards politics. When it degrades the forms

of the state to an appearance, then it degrades religion just as surely to an

appearance.

In order to explain this opposition, we shall examine Bauer’s model of the

56 | karl marx: selected writings

Christian state, a model that derives from a study of the Christian Germanic

state.

‘In order to prove’, says Bauer, ‘the impossibility or non-existence of a Chris-

tian State, people have often recently pointed to the sayings in the Gospel

which the present state does not only not follow, but cannot even begin to

follow if it does not wish to bring about its complete dissolution as a state.’ ‘But

the matter is not dealt with so easily. What do those sayings in the Gospel

demand? Supernatural self-denial, subjection to the authority of revelation,

disregard of the state, abolition of secular relationships. But the Christian state

demands and performs all this. It has made the spirit of the Gospel its own, and

if it does not repeat it in the same words that the Gospel uses, that is only

because it expresses this spirit in political forms, that is, in forms that are

certainly borrowed from the nature of the state and this world but which, in

the religious rebirth that they must experience, are degraded to an appearance.

Its disregard of the state is realized and completed through the political

institutions’ (p. 55).

Bauer now further develops the theme of how the people in a Christian state

are merely non-people, have no more will of their own, and have their true

existence in their leader to whom they are subject and who is nevertheless alien

to them in origin and nature since he is God-given and arrived at without their

own co-operation; Bauer also explains how the laws of this people are not their

own work but direct revelations; how the supreme leader needs privileged

intermediaries with his own people and the masses; how the masses themselves

disintegrate into a number of particular groups formed and defined by chance

which differentiate themselves through their interests, particular passions and

prejudices, and obtain as a privilege the permission mutually to exclude each

other, etc. (p. 56).

But Bauer himself says: ‘Politics, if it is to be nothing but religion, cannot be

politics; any more than dishwashing, if it has the force of a religious practice,

should be treated as a household matter’ (p. 108). In the Christian Germanic

state, however, religion is a ‘household matter’ just as ‘household matters’ are

religious. In the Christian Germanic state the dominance of religion is the

religion of dominance.

The separation of the ‘spirit of the Gospel’ from the ‘letter of the Gospel’ is

an irreligious act. The state which lets the Gospel speak political words, in

words different from the Holy Spirit, commits sacrilege in its own religious eyes

if not in the eyes of men. The state that recognizes Christianity as its highest

norm and the Bible as its Magna Carta must be met with the words of the Holy

Scripture, for every word of Scripture is holy. Both this state and the dregs of

humanity on which it is based arrive at a painful contradiction that is

insurmountable from the point of view of religious consciousness, if it has

pointed out to it those sayings of the Gospel with which it ‘does not conform

the early writings 1837–1844 | 57

and cannot conform unless it wishes to dissolve itself entirely’. And why does it

not wish to dissolve itself entirely? It can give neither itself nor others an answer

to this question. In its own consciousness the Christian state is an ideal whose

realization is unattainable. It can only convince itself of its own existence by lies

and so remains for ever an object of self-doubt, an insufficient, problematic

object. Thus criticism is fully justified when it forces the state that appeals to

the Bible into a crazed state of mind where it no longer knows whether it is an

imagination or a reality, where the infamy of its worldly ends for which

religion serves as a cloak arrives at an insoluble conflict with the honesty of its

religious consciousness which views the final aim of the world as religion. This

state can only pacify its inner uneasiness by becoming a myrmidon of the

Catholic Church. In the face of the Catholic Church, which declares secular

powers to be its bondsmen, the state is as powerless as is the secular power

which affirms itself to be dominant over the religious spirit.

In the so-called Christian state it is alienation that is important, not man

himself. The man who is important, the king, is a being specifically differenti-

ated from other men (which is itself a religious conception), who is in direct

contact with heaven and God. The relationships that hold sway here are ones

of faith. The religious spirit is thus not yet really secularized.

But the religious spirit can never really be secularized. For what is it but the

unsecular form of a stage in the development of the human spirit? The religious

spirit can only be secularized in so far as the stage in the development of the

human spirit whose religious expression it is emerges and constitutes itself in its

secular form. This happens in the democratic state. The foundation of this state

is not Christianity but the human foundation of Christianity. Religion remains

as the ideal, unsecular consciousness of its members, because it is the ideal form

of the stage of human development that is realized in this state.

What makes the members of the political state religious is the dualism

between their individual life and their species-life, between life in civil society

and political life, their belief that life in the state is the true life even though it

leaves untouched their individuality. Religion is here the spirit of civil society,

the expression of separation and distance of man from man. What makes a

political democracy Christian is the fact that in it man, not only a single man

but every man, counts as a sovereign being; but it is man as he appears

uncultivated and unsocial, man in his accidental existence, man as he comes

and goes, man as he is corrupted by the whole organization of our society, lost

to himself, sold, given over to the domination of inhuman conditions and

elements—in a word, man who is no longer a real species-being. The fantasy,

dream, and postulate of Christianity, the sovereignty of man, but of man as an

alien being separate from actual man, is present in democracy as a tangible

reality and is its secular motto.

The religious and theological consciousness has all the more religious and

58 | karl marx: selected writings

theological force in the complete democracy as it is without political signifi-

cance and earthly aims. It is the affair of minds that are shy of the world, the

expression of a limited understanding, the product of arbitrariness and fantasy,

a really other-worldly life. Christianity achieves here the practical expression of

its significance of a universal religion in that it groups together the most differ-

ent opinions in the form of Christianity and even more because it does not lay

on others the requirements of Christianity, but only a religion in general, any

religion (compare the above mentioned work of Beaumont). The religious

consciousness revels in richness of religious opposition and religious diversity.

Thus we have shown that political emancipation from religion leaves religion

intact even though it is no longer a privileged religion. The contradiction with

his citizenship in which the adherent of a particular religion finds himself is

only a part of the general secular contradiction between the political state and

civil society. The perfect Christian state is the one that recognizes itself as a

state and abstracts from the religion of its members. The emancipation of the

state from religion is not the emancipation of actual man from religion.

So we do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: you cannot be emancipated

politically without emancipating yourselves radically from Judaism. Rather we

say to them: because you can be politically emancipated without completely

and consistently abandoning Judaism, this means that political emancipation

itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews wish to achieve political emanci-

pation without achieving human emancipation, then the incompleteness and

contradiction does not only lie in you, it lies in the nature and category of

political emancipation. If you are imprisoned within this category, then you are

sharing in something common to everyone. Just as the state is evangelizing

when it, although a state, has a Christian attitude to Jews, so the Jew is acting

politically when he, although a Jew, requests civil rights.

But if a man, although a Jew, can be politically emancipated and acquire civil

rights, can he claim and accept human rights? Bauer denies it.

The question is whether the Jew as such, i.e. the Jew who himself admits that his true

nature compels him to live in eternal separation from others, is capable of accepting

universal human rights and bestowing them on others.

The concept of human rights was first discovered by the Christian world in the previous

century. It is not innate in man, but won in a struggle against the historical traditions in

which man has hitherto been educated. Thus human rights are not a gift of nature, no

dowry but the prize of the struggle against the accident of birth and against privileges

that history transmitted from generation to generation up to the present time. They are

the result of culture and only to be possessed by the man who has won and merited

them.

Can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew the limited nature

which makes him a Jew must gain the upper hand over the human nature that should

bind him as a man to other men and must separate him off from non-Jews. He declares

the early writings 1837–1844 | 59

through this separation that the particular nature that makes him a Jew is his true and

highest nature, before which his human nature must give way.

In the same way, the Christian as Christian cannot grant human rights [pp. 19, 20].

According to Bauer man must sacrifice the ‘privilege of belief’ in order to be

able to receive general human rights. Let us discuss for a moment the so-called

human rights, human rights in their authentic form, the form they have in the

writings of their discoverers, the North Americans and French! These human

rights are partly political rights that are only exercised in community with

other men. Their content is formed by participation in the common essence, the

political essence, the essence of the state. They fall under the category of polit-

ical freedom, under the category of civil rights, which, as we have seen, in no

way presuppose the consistent and positive abolition of religion, nor, con-

sequently, of Judaism. It remains to discuss the other part of human rights, the

rights of man, in so far as they differ from the rights of the citizen.

Among them are freedom of conscience, the right to exercise a chosen

religion. The privilege of belief is expressly recognized either as a human right,

or as a consequence of one of the human rights, freedom.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1791, Article 10: ‘No

one should be molested because of his opinions, not even religious ones’. In the

first section of the constitution of 1791 ‘the liberty of every man to practise the

religion to which he adheres’ is guaranteed as human right. The Declaration of

the Rights of Man . . . 1793 counts among human rights, in Article 7, ‘the free

exercise of religious practice’. Indeed, concerning the right to publish one’s

thoughts and opinions, to hold assemblies and practise one’s religion, it goes as

far as to say: ‘the necessity of announcing these rights supposes either the

present or the recent memory of despotism’. Compare the constitution of 1795,

Section 14, Article 354.

Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, Paragraph 3: ‘All men have a natural

and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of

their own consciences: no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect or

support a place of worship, or to maintain any ministry, against his consent; no

human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights

of conscience.’

Constitution of New Hampshire, Article 5 & 6: ‘Among the natural rights,

some are in their very nature unalienable . . . Of this kind are rights of

conscience’ (Beaumont loc. cit., pp. 213, 214).

The incompatibility of religion with the rights of man is so far from being

evident in the concept of the rights of man, that the right to be religious, to be

religious in one’s own chosen way, to practise one’s chosen religion is expressly

counted as one of the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of

man.

60 | karl marx: selected writings

The rights of man are as such differentiated from the right of the citizen.

Who is the ‘man’ who is different from the ‘citizen?’ No one but the member of

civil society. Why is the member of civil society called ‘man’, simply man, and

why are his rights called the rights of man? How do we explain this fact? From

the relationship of the political state to civil society, from the nature of political

emancipation.

Above all we notice the fact that the so-called rights of man, the rights of man

as different from the rights of the citizen are nothing but the rights of the member

of civil society, i.e. egoistic man, man separated from other men and the

community. The most radical constitution, the constitution of 1793, can say:

Declaration of the Rights of Man . . . , Article 2. These rights etc. (natural

and imprescriptable rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.

What does liberty consist of?

Article 6: ‘Liberty is the power that belongs to man to do anything that does

not infringe on the right of someone else’ or according to the declaration of the

rights of man of 1791 ‘liberty consists in the power of doing anything that does

not harm others’.

Thus freedom is the right to do and perform what does not harm others. The

limits within which each person can move without harming others is defined by

the law, just as the boundary between two fields is defined by the fence. The

freedom in question is that of a man treated as an isolated monad and with-

drawn into himself. Why is the Jew, according to Bauer, incapable of receiving

the rights of man? ‘So long as he is a Jew the limited nature that makes him a

Jew will get the upper hand over the human nature that should unite him as a

man to other men and will separate him from the non-Jew.’ But the right of

man to freedom is not based on the union of man with man, but on the separ-

ation of man from man. It is the right to this separation, the rights of the limited

individual who is limited to himself.

The practical application of the rights of man to freedom is the right of man

to private property.

What does the right of man to property consist in?

Article 16 (Constitution of 1793): ‘The right of property is the right which

belongs to all citizens to enjoy and dispose at will of their goods and revenues,

the fruit of their work and industry.’

Thus the right of man to property is the right to enjoy his possessions and

dispose of the same arbitrarily, without regard for other men, independently

from society, the right of selfishness. It is the former individual freedom

together with its latter application that forms the basis of civil society. It leads

man to see in other men not the realization but the limitation of his own

freedom. Above all it proclaims the right of man ‘to enjoy and dispose at will of

his goods, his revenues and fruits of his work and industry’.

There still remain the other rights of man, equality and security.

the early writings 1837–1844 | 61

Equality, here in its non-political sense, is simply the counterpart of the

liberty described above, namely that each man shall without discrimination be

treated as a self-sufficient monad. The constitution of 1795 defines the concept

of this equality, in conformity with this meaning, thus:

Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): ‘Equality consists of the fact that the law is

the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.’

And security?

Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): ‘Security consists in the protection afforded

by society to each of its members for the conservation of his person, rights, and

property.’

Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of the police.

The whole of society is merely there to guarantee to each of its members the

preservation of his person, rights, and property. It is in this sense that Hegel

calls civil society the ‘state of need and of reason’.

The concept of security does not allow civil society to raise itself above its

egoism. Security is more the assurance of egoism.

Thus none of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, man as

he is in civil society, namely an individual withdrawn behind his private inter-

ests and whims and separated from the community. Far from the rights of man

conceiving of man as a species-being, species-life itself, society, appears as a

framework exterior to individuals, a limitation of their original self-sufficiency.

The only bond that holds them together is natural necessity, need and private

interest, the conservation of their property and egoistic person.

It is already paradoxical that a people that is just beginning to free itself, to

tear down all barriers between different sections of the people and form a

political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the jus-

tification of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and the community.

Indeed, this proclamation is repeated at a moment when only the most heroic

devotion can save the nation, and is therefore peremptorily demanded, at a

moment when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is raised to the

order of the day and egoism must be punished as a crime (Declaration of the

Rights of Man . . . 1793). This fact appears to be even more paradoxical when

we see that citizenship, the political community, is degraded by the political

emancipators to a mere means for the preservation of these so-called rights of

man, that the citizen is declared to be the servant of egoistic man, the sphere in

which man behaves as a communal being is degraded below the sphere in

which man behaves as a partial being, finally that it is not man as a citizen but

man as a bourgeois who is called the real and true man.

‘The aim of every political association is the conversation of the natural and

imprescriptible rights of man’ (Declaration of the Rights of Man . . . 1791,

Article 2). ‘Government is instituted to guarantee man the enjoyment of his

natural and imprescriptible rights’ (Declaration of the Rights of Man . . . 1791,

62 | karl marx: selected writings

Article 1). So even in the moments of youthful freshness and enthusiasm raised

to fever pitch by the pressure of circumstances, political life is declared to be a

mere means whose end is the life of civil society. It is true that its revolutionary

practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. While, for example, secur-

ity is declared to be a right of man, the violation of the privacy of correspond-

ence is publicly inserted in the order of the day. While the ‘unlimited freedom of

the press’ (Constitution of 1793, Article 122) is guaranteed as a consequence of

the right of man to individual freedom, the freedom of the press is completely

destroyed, for ‘the liberty of the press must not be permitted when it comprom-

ises public liberty’ (‘The Young Robespierre’ in Buchez and Roux, Parlia-

mentary History of the French Revolution, vol. 28, p. 159). This means then

that the right of man to freedom ceases to be a right as soon as it enters into

conflict with political life, whereas, according to the theory, political life is only

the guarantee of the rights of man, the rights of individual man, and so must be

given up as soon as it contradicts its end, these rights of man. But the practice is

only the exception and the theory is the rule. Even though one were to treat the

revolutionary practice as the correct version of the relationship, the riddle still

remains to be solved of why, in the minds of the political emancipators, the

relationship is turned upside-down and the end appears as the means and the

means as the end. This optical illusion of their minds would always be the same

riddle, although it would then be a psychological and theoretical riddle.

The riddle has a simple solution.

Political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the old society

on which rests the sovereign power, the essence of the state alienated from the

people. Political revolution is the revolution of civil society. What was the

character of the old society? One word characterizes it. Feudalism. The old civil

society had a directly political character. The elements of civil life, like, for

example, property or the family or the type and manner of work, were, in the

form of seigniorial right, estates, and corporations, raised to the level of elem-

ents of state life. They defined in this form the relationship of the single indi-

vidual to the state as a whole, that is, his political relationship, the relationship

of separation and exclusion from the other parts of society. For this sort of

organization of the people’s life did not turn property or work into social

elements but completed their separation from the state as a whole, and made

them into particular societies within society. But the vital functions and condi-

tions of life in civil society was still political even though political in the feudal

sense, that is, they excluded the individual from the states as a whole. They

turned the particular relationship of the corporation to the totality of the state,

into his own general relationship to the life of the people, as it turned his

particular civil occupation into his general occupation and situation. As a

consequence of this organization the unity of the state—the mind, will, and

authority of this state unity, the power of the state in general—equally appears

the early writings 1837–1844 | 63

necessarily as the particular affair of a lord and servants who are cut off from

the people.

The political revolution overthrew this feudal power and turned state affairs

into affairs of the people; it turned the state into a matter of general concern, i.e.

into a true state; it necessarily destroyed all estates, corporations, guilds, privil-

eges which were so many expressions of the separation of the people from the

community. The political revolution thus abolished the political character of

civil society. It shattered civil society with its simple parts, on the one hand into

individuals, on the other hand into the material and spiritual elements that make

up the life experience and civil position of these individuals. It unfettered the

political spirit that had, as it were, been split, cut up, and drained away into the

various cul-de-sacs of feudal society. The political revolution collected this spirit

together after its dispersion, freed it from its confusion with civil life, and set it

up as the sphere that was common to all, the general affair of the people in ideal

independence from the other particular elements of civil life. Particular profes-

sions and ranks sank to a merely individual importance. They were no longer the

relationship of individuals to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such became

the general affair of each individual and politics was a general occupation.

But the perfection of the idealism of the state was at the same time the

perfection of the materialism of civil society. The shaking off of the political

yoke entailed the shaking off of those bonds that had kept the egoistic spirit of

civil society fettered. Political emancipation entailed the emancipation of civil

society from politics, from even the appearance of a general content.

Feudal society was dissolved into its basis, into man. But into the man that

was its true basis, egoistic man. This man, the member of civil society, is the

basis, the presupposition of the political state. He is recognized by it as such in

the rights of man.

But the freedom of egoistic man and the recognition of this freedom is the

recognition of the unimpeded movement of the spiritual and material elements

that go to make up its life.

Man was therefore not freed from religion; he received freedom of religion.

He was not freed from property; he received freedom of property. He was not

freed from the egoism of trade; he received freedom to trade.

The formation of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into

independent individuals, who are related by law just as the estate and corpor-

ation men were related by privilege, is completed in one and the same act. Man

as member of civil society, unpolitical man, appears necessarily as natural man.

The rights of man appear as natural rights, because self-conscious activity is

concentrated upon political action. Egoistic man is the passive, given results of

the dissolved society, an object of immediate certainty and thus a natural

object. Political revolution dissolves civil life into its component parts, without

revolutionizing and submitting to criticism these parts themselves. Its attitude

64 | karl marx: selected writings

to civil society, to the world of need, to work, private interests, private law is

that they are the foundation of its existence, its own presupposition that needs

no further proof, and thus its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil

society counts for true man, for man as distinct from the citizen, because he is

man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, while political man is

only the abstract fictional man, man as an allegorical or moral person. This

man as he actually is, is only recognized in the form of the egoistic individual,

and the true man only in the form of the abstract citizen.

The abstraction of the political man is thus correctly described by Rousseau:

‘He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel

himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each

individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a

greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering

man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a

partial and moral existence of the physical and independent existence nature

has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own

resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being

made use of without the help of other men.’

All emancipation is bringing back man’s world and his relationships to man

himself.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand to a member

of civil society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand to a

citizen, a moral person.

The actual individual man must take the abstract citizen back into himself

and, as an individual man in his empirical life, in his individual work and

individual relationships become a species-being; man must recognize his own

forces as social forces, organize them, and thus no longer separate social forces

from himself in the form of political forces. Only when this has been achieved

will human emancipation be completed.

II

The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free

By Bruno Bauer

This is the form that Bauer gives to the question of the relationship of the

Jewish and Christian religions to each other and to criticism. Their relationship

to criticism is their relationship to ‘the capacity to become free’.

The conclusion is: ‘the Christian has only one barrier to surmount, his

religion, in order to give up religion altogether’, and thus to become free; ‘the

the early writings 1837–1844 | 65

Jew, on the other hand, has not only to break with his Jewish nature but also

with the development and completion of his religion, a development that has

remained alien to him’ (p. 71). So Bauer here turns the question of Jewish

emancipation into a purely religious question. The theological problem of who

has the better prospect of getting to heaven, Jew or Christian, is repeated in the

enlightened form: which of the two is more capable of emancipation? And the

question is no longer: which gives freedom, Judaism or Christianity? It is rather

the reverse: which gives more freedom: the negation of Judaism or the negation

of Christianity.

If they wish to become free, then the Jew should not profess Christianity, but the

dissolution of Christianity, the general dissolution of religion, i.e. the Enlightenment,

criticism and its result, free humanity (p. 70).

It is still a profession that is in question for the Jews, but no longer the

profession of Christianity but of the dissolution of Christianity.

Bauer demands of the Jews that they break with the essence of the Christian

religion, a demand that, as he admits himself, does not proceed from the devel-

opment of the Jewish essence.

It was to be predicted that when Bauer at the end of his The Jewish Question

conceived of Judaism as merely the crude religious criticism of Christianity and

thus only saw in it a religious significance, the emancipation of the Jews would

turn into a philosophico-theological act.

Bauer understands the ideal, abstract essence of the Jew, his religion, to be his

whole essence. He concludes therefore quite rightly: ‘The Jew contributes

nothing to humanity when he neglects his limited law’, when he abolishes the

whole of his Judaism (p. 65).

According to this, the relationship of Jews and Christians is as follows: the

sole interest of Christians in Jewish emancipation is a general human and the-

oretical interest. Judaism is a fact that must offend the religious eye of the

Christian. As soon as his eye ceases to be religious then this fact ceases to

offend. The emancipation of the Jew is in itself no task for the Christian.

The Jew, on the other hand, has not only his own task in order to achieve his

liberation but also the Christian’s task, the ‘Critique of the Synoptics’ and ‘The

Life of Jesus’, etc., to get through.

They must look to it themselves: they will create their own destiny; but history does not

allow itself to be mocked (p. 71).

We attempt to break the theological conception of the problem. The question

of the Jews’ capacity for emancipation is changed for us into the question

what particular social element needs to be overcome in order to abolish Juda-

ism? For the fitness of the present-day Jew for emancipation is bound up with

the relationship of Judaism to the emancipation of the contemporary world.

66 | karl marx: selected writings

And this relationship stems necessarily from the position of Judaism in the

contemporary enslaved world.

Let us discuss the actual secular Jew, not the sabbath Jew as Bauer does, but

the everyday Jew.

Let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion, but let us look for the

secret of religion in the actual Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness.

What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god?

Money.

Well then, an emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real

Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our age.

An organization of society that abolished the presupposition of haggling,

and thus its possibility, would have made the Jew impossible. His religious

consciousness would dissolve like an insipid vapour into the real live air of

society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognizes this practical essence of his as

null and works for its abolition, he is working for human emancipation with

his previous development as a basis and turning himself against the highest

practical expression of human self-alienation.

Thus we recognize in Judaism a general contemporary anti-social element

which has been brought to its present height by a historical development which

the Jews zealously abetted in its harmful aspects and which now must necessar-

ily disintegrate.

In the last analysis the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of

humanity from Judaism.

The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish manner.

The Jew who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, controls through the power of

his money the fate of the whole empire. The Jew who may be without rights in the

smallest of the German states decides the destiny of Europe. While the corporations and

guilds turn a deaf ear to the Jew or do not yet favour him, their bold and selfish industry

laughs at medieval institutions (Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question, p. 114).

This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish

manner, not only annexing the power of money but also because through

him and also apart from him money has become a world power and the

practical spirit of the Jew has become the practical spirit of the Christian

people. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians

have become Jews.

‘The pious and politically free inhabitant of New England’, Captain Hamil-

ton informs us, ‘is a sort of Laocoön, who does not even make the least effort to

free himself from the snakes that enlace him.’

Mammon is their idol, they adore him not with their lips alone but with all of the

strength of their body and soul. In their eyes the world is nothing but a Stock Exchange

the early writings 1837–1844 | 67

and they are convinced that here on earth their only vocation is to become richer than

other men. The market has conquered all their other thoughts, and their one relaxation

consists in bartering objects. When they travel they carry, so to speak, their wares or

their display counter about with them on their backs and talk of nothing but interest

and profit. If they lost sight for a moment of their own business, this is merely so that

they can pry into someone else’s.

Indeed, the practical dominance of Judaism over the Christian world has

reached its unambiguous, normal expression in North America. Here even the

announcing of the gospel, the Christian pulpit, has become an article of trade,

and the bankrupt gospel merchant becomes like the evangelist who has become

rich in business.

A man such as you see at the head of a respectable congregation began by being a

merchant—his trade fell off, so he became a minister; another began as a priest, but as

soon as he had a certain sum of money at his disposal, he left the pulpit for business. In

the eyes of many, the religious ministry is a real industrial career (Beaumont, loc. cit. pp.

185–6).

According to Bauer it is a hypocritical state of affairs when in theory political

rights are denied the Jew, while in practice he possesses a monstrous power and

exercises on a large scale a political influence that is limited on a small scale

(The Jewish Question, p. 114).

The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and his

political rights is the general contradiction between politics and the power of

money. Whereas the first ideally is superior to the second, in fact it is its

bondsman.

Judaism has maintained itself alongside Christianity not only as a religious

critique of Christianity, not only as an incarnate doubt about the religious

provenance of Christianity, but just as much because the practical Jewish spirit,

Judaism or commerce, has maintained itself, and even reached its highest

development, in Christian society. The Jew who is a particular member of civil

society is only the particular appearance of the Judaism of civil society.

Judaism has maintained itself not in spite of, but because of, history.

From its own bowels civil society constantly begets Judaism.

What was the implicit and explicit basis of the Jewish religion? Practical

need, egoism.

The monotheism of the Jew is therefore in reality the polytheism of many

needs, a polytheism that makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Prac-

tical need, or egoism, is the principle of civil society and appears as such in all

its purity as soon as civil society has completely given birth to the political state.

The god of practical need and selfishness is money.

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand.

Money debases all the gods of man and turns them into commodities. Money is

68 | karl marx: selected writings

the universal, self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore robbed the

whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values. Money is the alien-

ated essence of man’s work and being, this alien essence dominates him and he

adores it.

The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world.

Exchange is the actual god of the Jew. His god is only the illusion of exchange.

The view of nature that has obtained under the domination of private prop-

erty and money is the actual despising and degrading of nature. It does really

exist in the Jewish religion, but only in imagination.

In this sense Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable ‘that all creation has

been made into property: the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the off-spring

of the earth—creation, too, must become free’.

What lies abstract in the Jewish religion, a contempt for theory, art, history,

man as an end in himself, is the actual, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the

money man. The species-relationship itself, the relationship of man to woman,

etc., becomes an object of commerce! Woman is bartered.

The imaginary nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of

the money man in general.

The baseless and irrational law of the Jew is only the religious caricature of

morality and law in general, the purely formal rights with which the world of

selfishness surrounds itself.

Here, too, the highest relationship of man is the legal relationship, the rela-

tionship to laws that are not valid for him because they are the laws of his own

will and essence, but because they are the masters and deviations from them are

avenged.

Jewish Jesuitry, the same practical Jesuitry that Bauer points out in the Tal-

mud, is the relationship of the world of selfishness to the dominant laws whose

crafty circumvention forms the chief art of this world.

If the affairs of the world were to be conducted within the limits of its laws,

this would entail the continual supersession of these laws.

Judaism could not develop itself any further theoretically as a religion

because the attitude of practical need is narrow by nature and exhausted in a

few traits.

The religion of practical need could, by its nature, find its completion not in

theory but in practice, for this latter is its true form.

Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new creations

and relationships of the world into the sphere of its own industry, because

practical need, whose spirit is selfishness, is passive and does not really extend

itself, but finds itself extended by the progress of social circumstances.

Judaism reaches its apogee with the completion of civil society; but civil

society first reaches its completion in the Christian world. Only under the

domination of Christianity, which made all national, natural, moral, and

the early writings 1837–1844 | 69

theoretical relationships exterior to man, could civil society separate itself com-

pletely from the life of the state, tear asunder all the species-bonds of man, put

egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-bonds and dissolve man

into a world of atomistic individuals with hostile attitudes towards each other.

Christianity had its origin in Judaism. It has dissolved itself back into

Judaism.

The Christian was from the beginning the theorizing Jew; the Jew is therefore

the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become the Jew again.

Christianity has overcome real Judaism in appearance only. It was too gentle-

manly, too spiritual, to remove the crudeness of practical need other than by

raising it into the blue heavens.

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism; Judaism is the vulgar prac-

tical application of Christianity. But this practical application could only

become universal after Christianity as the perfect religion had completed, in a

theoretical manner, the self-alienation of man from himself and from nature.

Only then could Judaism attain general domination and make externalized

man and externalized nature into alienable, saleable objects, a prey to the

slavery of egoistic need and the market.

Selling is the practice of externalization. As long as man is imprisoned within

religion, he only knows how to objectify his essence by making it into an alien,

imaginary being. Similarly, under the domination of egoistic need he can only

become practical, only create practical objects by putting his products and

his activity under the domination of an alien entity and lending them the

significance of an alien entity—money.

In its perfected practice the Christian egoism concerning the soul necessarily

changes into the Jewish egoism concerning the body; heavenly need becomes

earthly, and the subjectivism becomes selfishness. We explain the tenacity of

the Jew not by his religion, but by the human basis of his religion, practical

need, egoism.

Because the true essence of the Jew has been realized and secularized in civil

society, it could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence

which is merely the ideal perception of practical need. Thus it is not only in the

Pentateuch or the Talmud that we find the essence of the contemporary Jew: we

find it in contemporary society, not as an abstract but as a very empirical

essence, not as the limitation of the Jew but as the Jewish limitations of society.

As soon as society manages to abolish the empirical essence of Judaism, the

market and its presuppositions, the Jew becomes impossible, for his mind no

longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need,

has become humanized, and because the conflict of man’s individual, material

existence with his species-existence has been superseded.

The social emancipation of the Jew implies the emancipation of society from

Judaism.

70 | karl marx: selected writings

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ORIGINAL

MEGA, I (i) 1, pp. 576 ff.

PRESENT TRANSLATION

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K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, New York, 1975, Vol. 3, pp. 146 ff.

K. Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. J. O’Malley, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 28 ff.

K. Marx, Early Writings, ed. L. Colletti, Harmondsworth, 1974, pp. 211 ff.

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