The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of emancipa- 
tion 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 emancipa- 
tion 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 recognise that the Christian state is justified 
and they recognise 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? 

On the Jewish Question 147 

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 analyses 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 re- 
solved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made 
impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian 

recognise 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 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 Chris- 
tian 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.” (“Die Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu 
werden”. Einundzwanzig Bogen, p. 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 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.” (Die Judenfrage, 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? 

On the Jewish Question 149 

“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 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 Jonger 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 emanci- 
pate? 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 the 
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 his 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? 

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 recognises 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 towards 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. 

“Il nexiste aux Etats-Unis ni religion de l’Etat, ni religion déclarée celle de la majorité 
ni prééminence d’un culte sur un autre. L’Etat est étranger a tous les cultes."* (Marie ou 
Vesclavage aux Etats-Unis, etc., par G. de Beaumont, [t. II,] Paris, 1835, p. 214.) 
Indeed, there are some North American states where “la constitution n’impose pas les 
croyances religieuses et la pratique d’un culte comme condition des priviléges politiques”.> 

* “In the United States there is neither a state religion nor a religion declared to be that 
af the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another. The state stands aloof from 
all cults,"—Ed. 

> “The constitution does not impose any religious belief or religious practice as a 
condition of political rights.” — Ed. 

On the Jewish Question 15] 

(op. cit., p. 225.) Nevertheless, “on ne crott pas aux Etats-Unis qu’un homme sans 
religion puisse étre un honnéte homme’. * Cop. cit., p. 224.) 

Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of 
religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamil- 
ton 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 a 
defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of 
the state itself. We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only 
as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore we explain 
the religious limitations of the free citizens by their secular 
limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their 
religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restric- 
tions, 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 questions. We turn theological 
questions into secular ones. History has long enough been merged 
in superstition, we now merge superstition in history. The ques- 
tion of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for 
us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human 
emancipation. We criticise the religious weakness of the political 
state by criticising 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 

2 “In the United States people do not believe that a man without religion could be an honest 
man.” — Ed. 

> A. de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, Thomas Hamilton, Men and 
Manners in North America, Edinburgh, 1833, 2 vols. Marx quotes from the German 
translation Die Menschen und die Sitten in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika.— Ed. 

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 comple- 
tion 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? 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.” [Bruno Bauer, 
Die Judenfrage, 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* in particular, to 
religion is after all only the attitude to religion of the men who 
compose the state. It follows from 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. 

? A pun on the word Freistaat, i. e., republic, for if it is taken literally, it means 
“free state”. 

On the Jewish Question 153 

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”? 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 distinctions, that every member of the nation is an 
equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements 
of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. 
Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupa- 
tion, 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 
éssential. 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 Rechtsphilosophie, 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 

* Thomas Hamilton, Die Menschen und die Sitten in den Vereinigten Staaten von 
Nordamerica, Bd. 1, S. 146.—Ed. 

> Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. In this quotation words empha- 
sised by Marx are set in bold italics, words emphasised by both Marx and Hegel 
in italics.— Ed. 

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 relation 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., 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,’ 
“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 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 religious man and the citizen is the 
difference between the merchant and the citizen, between the 
day-labourer and the citizen, between the landowner and the 
citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradic- 
tion 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, such as private 
property, etc., or spiritual elements, such as culture or religion, 

* Here meaning a member of civil society — Ed. 

> Bruno Bauer, “Die Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu 
werden”, p. 57 (see also this volume, p. 148).— Ed. 

On the Jewish Question 155 

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 recognised as 
necessary, because the political state is recognised 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 fragmen- 
tation 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 
abolishes 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 emancipa- 
tion, 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 
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 adopts an exclusive attitude towards other 
religions. On the contrary, the perfect Christian state is the 
atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion 
to a place among the other elements of civil society. The state 
which is still theological, which still officially professes Christianity 
as its creed, which still does not dare to proclaim itself as a state, 
has, in its reality as a state, not yet succeeded in expressing the 
human basis—of which Christianity is the high-flown expres- 
sion—in a secular, human form. The so-called Christian state is 
simply nothing more than a non-state, since it is not Christianity as 
a religion, but only the human background of the Christian religion, 
which can find its expression in actual human creations. 

The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the 
state, but by no means the political realisation of Christianity. The 
state which still professes Christianity in the form of religion, does 
not yet profess it in the form appropriate to the state, for it still 
has a religious attitude towards religion, that is to say, it is not the 
true implementation of the human basis of religion, because it still 
relies on the unreal, imaginary form of this human core. The 
so-called Christian state is the imperfect state, and the Christian 
religion is regarded by it as the supplementation and sanctification of 
its imperfection. For the Christian state, therefore, religion 
necessarily becomes a means; hence it is a hypocritical state. It 
makes a great difference whether the complete state, because of the 
defect inherent in the general nature of the state, counts religion 
among its presuppositions, or whether the incomplete state, because 

On the Jewish Question 157 

of the defect inherent in its particular existence as a defective state, 
declares that religion is its basis. In the latter case, religion 
becomes imperfect politics. In the former case, the imperfection 
even of consummate politics becomes evident in religion. The 
so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to 
complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does 
not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it 
can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is 
realised in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the 
other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious 
attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere 
semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance. 

In order to make this contradiction clearer, let us consider 
Bauer’s projection of the Christian state, a projection based on his 
observation of the Christian-German state. 

“Recently,” says Bauer, “in order to prove the impossibility or non-existence of a 
Christian state, reference has frequently been made to those sayings in the Gospel 
with which the [present-day] state not only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, 
if it does not want to dissolve itself completely [as a state].” “But the matter cannot be 
disposed of so easily. What do these Gospel sayings demand? Supernatural 
renunciation of self, submission to the authority of revelation, a turning-away from 
the state, the abolition of secular conditions. Well, the Christian state demands and 
accomplishes all that. It has assimilated the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not 
reproduce this spirit in the same terms as the Gospel, that occurs only because it 
expresses this spirit in political forms, i.e., in forms which, it is true, are taken from 
the political system in this world, but which in the religious rebirth that they have 
to undergo become degraded to a mere semblance. This is a turning-away from the 
state while making use of political forms for its realisation.” (P. 55.) 

Bauer then explains that the people of a Christian state is only a 
non-people, no longer having a will of its own, but whose true 
existence lies in the leader to whom it is subjected, although this 
leader by his origin and nature is alien to it, i.e., given by God and 
imposed on the people without any co-operation on its part. 
Bauer declares that the laws of such a people are not its own 
creation, but are actual revelations, that its supreme chief needs 
privileged intermediaries with the people in the strict sense, with 
the masses, and that the masses themselves are divided into a 
multitude of particular groupings which are formed and deter- 
mined by chance, which are differentiated by their interests, their 
particular passions and prejudices, and obtain permission, as a 
privilege, to isolate themselves from one another, etc. (P. 56.) 

However, Bauer himself says: 

“Politics, if it is to be nothing but religion, ought not to be politics, just as the 
cleaning of saucepans, if it is to be accepted as a religious matter, ought not to be 
regarded as a matter of domestic economy.” (P. 108.) 

In the Christian-German state, however, religion is an 
“economic matter” just as “economic matters” belong to the 
sphere of religion. The domination of religion in the Christian- 
German state is the religion of domination. 

The separation of the “spirit of the Gospel” from the “letter of 
the Gospel” is an irreligious act. A state which makes the Gospel 
speak in the language of politics, that is, in another language than 
that of the Holy Ghost, commits sacrilege, if not in human eyes, 
then in the eyes of its own religion. The state which acknowledges 
Christianity as its supreme criterion and the Bible as its Charter, 
must be confronted with the words of Holy Scripture, for every 
word of Scripture is holy. This state, as well as the human rubbish 
on which it is based, is caught in a painful contradiction that is 
insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness when it is 
referred to those sayings of the Gospel with which it “not only 
does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it does not want to 
dissolve itself completely as a state’. And why does it not want to 
dissolve itself completely? The state itself cannot give an answer 
either to itself or to others. In its own consciousness the official 
Christian state is an imperative, the realisation of which is unattain- 
able, the state can assert the reality of its existence only by lying to 
itself, and therefore always remains in its own eyes an object of 
doubt, an unreliable, problematic object. Criticism is therefore 
fully justified in forcing the state that relies on the Bible into a 
mental derangement in which it no longer knows whether it is an 
illusion or a reality, and in which the infamy of its secular aims, for 
which religion serves as a cloak, comes into insoluble conflict with 
the sincerity of its religious consciousness, for which religion 
appears as the aim of the world. This state can only save itself 
from its inner torment if it becomes the police agent of the Catholic 
Church. In relation to the church, which declares the secular 
power to be its servant, the state is powerless, the secular power 
which claims to be the rule of the religious spirit is powerless. 

It is indeed estrangement which matters in the so-called Christian 
state, but not man. The only man who counts, the king, is a being 
specifically different from other men, and is moreover a religious 
being, directly linked with heaven, with God. The relationships 
which prevail here are still relationships dependent on faith. The 
religious spirit, therefore, is still not really secularised. 

But, furthermore, the religious spirit cannot be really secular- 
ised, for what is it in itself but the non-secular form of a stage in 
the development of the human mind? The religious spirit can only 
be secularised insofar as the stage of development of the human 

On the Jewish Question 159 

mind of which it is the religious expression makes its appearance 
and becomes constituted in its secular form. This takes place in the 
democratic state. Not Christianity, but the human basis of Christiani- 
ty is the basis of this state. Religion remains the ideal, non-secular 
consciousness of its members, because religion is the ideal form of 
the stage of human development achieved in this. state. 

The members of the political state are religious owing to the 
dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of 
civil society and political life. They are religious because men treat 
the political life of the state, an area beyond their real individuali- 
ty, as if it were their true life. They are religious insofar as 
religion here is the spirit of civil society, expressing the separation 
and remoteness of man from man. Political democracy is Christian 
since in it man, not merely one man but every man, ranks as 
sovereign, as the highest being, but it is man in his uncivilised, 
unsocial form, man in his fortuitous existence, man just as he is, 
man as he has been corrupted by the whole organisation of our 
society, who has lost himself, been alienated, and handed over to 
the rule of inhuman conditions and elements—in short, man who 
is not yet a real species-being. That which is a creation of fantasy, a 
dream, a postulate of Christianity, i.e., the sovereignty of 
man—but man as an alien being different from the real 
man—becomes in democracy tangible reality, present existence, 
and secular principle. 

In the perfect democracy, the religious and theological con- 
sciousness itself is in its own eyes the more religious and the more 
theological because it is apparently without, political significance, 
without worldly aims, the concern of a disposition that shuns the 
world, the expression of intellectual narrow-mindedness, the pro- 
duct of arbitrariness and fantasy, and because it is a life that is 
really of the other world. Christianity attains here the practical 
expression of its universal-religious significance in that the most 
diverse world outlooks are grouped alongside one another in the 
form of Christianity and still more because it does not require 
other people to profess Christianity, but only religion in general, 
any kind of religion (cf. Beaumont’s work quoted above). The 
religious consciousness revels in the wealth of religious contra- 
dictions and religious diversity. 

We have thus shown that political emancipation from religion 
leaves religion in existence, although not a privileged religion. The 
contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion finds 
himself involved in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of 
the universal secular contradiction between the political state and civil 

society. The consummation of the Christian state is the state which 
acknowledges itself as a state and disregards the religion of its 
members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the 
emancipation of the real man from religion. 

Therefore we do not say to the Jews as Bauer does: You cannot 
be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radical- 
ly from Judaism. On the contrary, we tell them: Because you can 
be emancipated politically without renouncing Judaism completely 
and incontrovertibly, political emancipation itself is not human 
emancipation. If you Jews want to be emancipated politically 
without emancipating yourselves humanly, the half-hearted ap- 
proach and contradiction is not in you alone, it is inherent in the 
nature and category of political emancipation. If you find yourself 
within the confines of this category, you share in a general 
confinement. Just as the state evangelises when, although it is a 
state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew 
acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights. 

But if a man, although a Jew, can be emancipated politically and 
receive civic rights, can he lay claim to the so-called rights of man 
and receive them? Bauer denies it. 

“The question is whether the Jew as such, that is, the Jew who himself admits 
that he is compelled by his true nature to live permanently in separation from 
other men, is capable of receiving the universal rights of man and of conceding them 

to others.” 

“For the Christian world, the idea of the rights of man was only discovered in 
the last century. It is not innate in men; on the contrary, it is gained only in a 
struggle against the historical traditions in which hitherto man was brought up. 
Thus the rights of man are not a gift of nature, not a legacy from past history, but 
the reward of the struggle against the accident of birth and against the privileges 
which up to now have been handed down by history from generation to 
generation. These rights are the result of culture, and only one who has earned 
and deserved them can possess them.” 

“Can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew, the 
restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human 
nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from 
non-Jews. He declares by this separation that the particular nature which makes 
him a Jew is his true, highest nature, before which human nature has to give way.” 

“Similarly, the Christian as a Christian cannot grant the rights of man.” (P. 19, 
20.) 

According to Bauer, man has to sacrifice the “privilege of faith” 
to be able to receive the universal rights of man. Let us examine 
for a moment the so-called rights of man, to be precise, the rights 
of man in their authentic form, in the form which they have 
among those who discovered them, the North Americans and the 
French. These rights of man are in part political rights, rights 
which can only be exercised in a community with others. Their 

On the Jewish Question 161 

content is participation in the community, and specifically in the 
political community, in the life of the state. They come within the 
category of political freedom, the category of civic rights, which, as 
we have seen, in no way presuppose the incontrovertible and 
positive abolition of religion, nor therefore of Judaism. There 
remains to be examined the other part of the rights of man, the 
droits de l'homme,’ insofar as these differ from the droits du citoyen.> 

Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to 
practise any religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly 
recognised either as a right of man or as the consequence of a right 
of man, that of wet 

Déclaration des droits de Uhomme et du citoyen, 1791, article 10: “Nul ne doit étre 
inquiété pour ses opinions méme réligieuses.”“ “La liberté a tout homme d’exercer 
le culte religieux auquel il est attaché”? is guaranteed as a right of man in Section I 
of the Constitution of 1791. 

Déclaration des droits de Uhomme, etc., 1793, includes among the rights of man, 
Article 7: “Le libre exercice des cultes.”© Indeed, in regard to man’s right to 
express his thoughts and opinions, to hold meetings, and to exercise his religion, it 
is even stated: “La nécessité d’énoncer ces droits suppose ou la présence ou le 
souvenir récent du despotisme.”’ Compare the Constitution of 1795, Section XIV, 
Article 354.7° 

Constitution de Pensyluanie, article 9, § 3: “Tous les hommes ont recu de la 
nature le droit imprescriptible d’adorer le Tout-Puissant selon les inspirations de leur 
conscience, et nul ne peut légalement étre contraint de suivre, instituer ou soutenir 
contre son gré aucun culte ou ministére religieux. Nulle autorité humaine ne peut, 
dans aucun cas, intervenir dans les questions de conscience et contrdler les pouvoirs 
de l’éme.” 8 

Constitution de New-Hambpshire, article 5 et 6: “Au nombre des droits naturels, 
quelques-uns sont inaliénables de leur nature, parce que rien n’en peut étre 
Yéquivalent. De ce nombre sont les droits de conscience.” " (Beaumont, op. cit., [t. 
IL] pp. 213, 214.) 

* Rights of man.—Ed. 

> Rights of the citizen.— Ed. 

© Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1791, Article 10: “No one is to 
be subjected to annoyance because of his opinions, even religious opinions.” —Ed. 

4 “The freedom of every man to practise the religion of which he is an 
adherent.” — Ed. 

© The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, “The free exercise of 
religion.” — Ed. 

“The necessity of proclaiming these rights presupposes either the existence or 

the recent memory of despotism.”—Ed. ee 

8 Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, § 3: “All men have received from nature 
the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their 
conscience, and no one can be legally compelled to follow, establish or support 
against his will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in any 
circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control the forces of the 
soul.” —-Ed. 

» Constitution of New Hampshire, Articles 5 and 6: “Among these natural rights 
some are by nature inalienable since nothing can replace them. The rights of 
conscience are among them.”— Ed. 

Incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is to such 
a degree absent from the concept of the rights of man that, on the 
contrary, a man’s right to be religious in any way he chooses, to 
practise his own particular religion, is expressly included among 
the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man. 

The droits de ’vhomme, the rights of man, are as such distinct from 
the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is homme as 
distinct from citoyen? None other than the member of civil society. 
Why is the member of civil society called “man”, simply man; why 
are his rights called the rights of man? How is this fact to be 
explained? From the relationship between the political state and 
civil society, from the nature of political emancipation. 

Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the 
droits de l'homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing 
but the rights of a member of civil society, i. e., the rights of egoistic 
man, of man separated from other men and from the community. 
Let us hear what the most radical Constitution, the Constitution of 
1793, has to say: 

Déclaration des droits de Vhomme et du citoyen. 
Article 2. “Ces droits, etc. (les droits naturels et imprescriptibles) sont: l’égalité, la 
liberté, la stireté, la propriété.” * 

What constitutes liberty? 

Article 6. “La liberté est le pouvoir qui appartient 4 homme de faire tout ce qui 
ne nuit pas aux droits d’autrui”, or, according to the Declaration of the Rights of 
Man of 1791: “La liberté consiste 4 pouvoir faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas 4 autrui.” 

Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no 
one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming 
someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between 
two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the 
liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why 
is the Jew, according to Bauer, incapable of acquiring the rights of 
man? 

“As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound 

to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other 
men, and will separate him from non-Jews.” 

But the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of 
man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the 

* Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Article 2. “These rights, etc., 
(the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.” —Ed. 

> Article 6. “Liberty is the power which man has to do everything that does not 
harm the rights of others”, or... “Liberty consists in being able to do everything 
which does not harm others.”—Ed. 

On the Jewish Question 163 

right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, 
withdrawn into himself. 

The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right 
to private property. 

What constitutes man’s right to private property? 

Article 16 (Constitution de 1793): “Le droit de propriété est celui qui appartient a 
tout citoyen de jouir et de disposer a son gré de ses biens, de ses revenus, du fruit 
de son travail et de son industrie.”* 

The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to 
enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (4 son 
gré), without regard to other men, independently of society, the 
right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application 
form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other 
men not the realisation of his own freedom, but the barrier to it. 
But, above all, it proclaims the right of man 

“de jouir et de disposer 4@ son gré de ses biens, de ses revenus, du fruit de son 
travail et de son industrie”. 

There remain the other rights of man: égalité and stireté. 

Egalité, used here in its non-political sense, is nothing but the 
equality of the liberté described above, namely: each man is to the 
same extent regarded as such a self-sufficient monad. The 
Constitution of 1795 defines the concept of this equality, in 
accordance with its significance, as follows: 

Article 3 (Constitution de 1795): “L’égalité consiste en ce que la loi est la méme 
pour tous, soit qu’elle protége, soit qu’elle punisse.” 

And stireté? 

Article 8 (Constitution de 1793): “La sdreté consiste dans la protection accordée 
par la société 4 chacun de ses membres pour la conservation de sa personne, de ses 
droits et de ses propriétés.” 

Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept 
of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in 
order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his 
person, his rights, and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel 
calls civil society “the state of need and reason” ‘ 

 Article 16 (Constitution of 1793): “The right of property is that which every 
citizen has of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of 
the fruits of his labour and industry.”—Ed. 

“of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of the 
fruits of his labour and industry” — Ed. 

© Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the law being the same 
for all, whether it protects or punishes.” —Ed. 

4 Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection afforded 
by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and 
his Property.”—Ed. 

Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Werke. Bd. VIII, S. 242.— Ed. 

The concept of security does not raise civil society above its 
egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of its egoism. 

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond 
egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an 
individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private 
interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. 
In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a 
species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as 
a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their 
original independence. The sole bond holding them together is 
natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of 
their property and their egoistic selves. 

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to 
liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various 
sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people 
solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man 
separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that 
indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the 
most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore 
imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the 
interests of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism 
must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, 
etc., of 1793.) This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see 
that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, 
and the political community, to a mere means for maintaining these 
so-called rights of man, that therefore the citoyen is declared to be 
the servant of egoistic homme, that the sphere in which man acts as 
a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which 
he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen, but 
man as bourgeois who is considered to be the essential and true 
man. 

“Le but de toute association politique est la conservation des droits naturels et 
imprescriptibles de homme.” (Déclaration des droits, etc., de 1791, article 2.) “Le 
gouvernement est institué pour garantir 4 homme la jouissance de ses droits 
naturels et imprescriptibles.” (Déclaration, etc., de 1793, article 1)? 

Hence even in moments when its enthusiasm still has the 
freshness of youth and is intensified to an extreme degree by the 
force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be a mere 
means, whose purpose is the life of civil society. It is true that its 

_ * “The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and 
imprescriptible rights of man.” (Declaration of the Rights, etc., of 1791, Article 2.) 
“Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment of his natural 
and imprescriptible rights.” (Declaration, etc., of 1793, Article 1.)—Ed. 

On the Jewish Question 165 

revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. 
Whereas, for example, security is declared one of the rights of 
man, violation of the privacy of correspondence is openly declared 
to be the order of the day. Whereas the “liberté indéfinie de la 
presse”* (Constitution of 1793, Article 122) is guaranteed as a 
consequence of the right of man to individual liberty, freedom of 
the press is totally destroyed, because “la liberté de la presse ne 
doit pas étre permise lorsqu’elle compromet la liberté publique”> 
(Robespierre jeune, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution frangaise 
par Buchez et Roux, T. 28, p. 159.) That is to say, therefore: The 
right of man to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into 
conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the 
guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and 
therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradic- 
tion with its aim, with these rights of man. But practice is merely 
the exception, theory is the rule. But even if one were to regard 
revolutionary practice as the correct presentation of the relation- 
ship, there would still remain the puzzle of why the relationship is 
turned upside-down in the minds of the political emancipators and 
the aim appears as the means, while the means appears as the aim. 
This optical illusion of their consciousness would still remain a 
puzzle, although now a psychological, a theoretical puzzle. 

The puzzle is easily solved. 

Political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the 
old society on which the state alienated from the people, the 
sovereign power, is based. Political revolution is a revolution of 
civil society. What was the character of the old society? It can be 
described in one word—feudalism. The character of the old civil 
society was directly political, that is to say, the elements of civil life, 
for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labour, were 
raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of 
seigniory, estates, and corporations. In this form they determined 
the relation of the individual to the state as a whole, i.e., his political 
relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the 
other components of society. For that organisation of national life 
did not raise property or labour to the level of social elements; on 
the contrary, it completed their separation from the state as a whole 
and constituted them as discrete societies within society. Thus, the 
vital functions and conditions of life of civil society remained 
nevertheless political, although political in the feudal sense, that is 

* “Unlimited freedom of the press” — Ed. 

> “Freedom of the press should not be permitted when it endangers public 
liberty.”— Ed. 

to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and 
they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state 
as a whole into his genera] relation to the life of the nation, just as 
they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his 
general activity and situation. As a result of this organisation, the 
unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will and activity of 
this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to 
appear as the particular affair of a ruler isolated from the people, 
and of his servants. 

The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power 
and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which 
constituted the political state as a matter of general.concern, that is, 
as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, 
and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation 
of the people from the community. The political revolution 
thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up 
civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the 
individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements 
constituting the content of the life and social position of these 
individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it 
were, split up, partitioned and dispersed in the various blind alleys 
of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political 
spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established 
it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the 
nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. 
A person’s distinct activity and distinct situation in life were 
reduced to a merely individual significance. They no longer 
constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a 
whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the 
general affair of each individual, and the political function became 
the individual’s general function. 

But the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same 
time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing 
off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the 
bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political 
emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civil 
society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal 
content. 

Feudal society was resolved into its basic element—man, but 
man as he really formed its basis—egoistic man. 

This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis, the 
precondition, of the political state. He is recognised as such by this 
state in the rights of man. 

On the Jewish Question 167 

The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty, 
however, is rather the recognition of the unrestrained movement of 
the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his 
life. 

Hence man was not freed from religion, he received religious 
freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to 
own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he 
received freedom to engage in business. 

The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil 
society into independent individuals—whose relations with one 
another depend on law, just as the relations of men in the system 
of estates and guilds depended on privilege—is accomplished by 
one and the same act. Man as a member of civil society, unpolitical 
man, inevitably appears, however, as the natural man. The droits de 
Vhomme appear as droits naturels, because conscious activity is 
concentrated on the political act. Egoistic man is the passive result of 
the dissolved society, a result that is simply found in existence, an 
object of immediate certainty, therefore a natural object. The political 
revolution resolves civil life into its component parts, without 
revolutionising these components themselves or subjecting them to 
criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labour, 
private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as a 
precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its 
natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil society is held to 
be man in the proper sense, homme as distinct from the citoyen, because 
he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas 
political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, 
juridical person. The real man is recognised only in the shape of the 
egoistic individual, the true man is recognised only in the shape of the 
abstract citoyen. 

Therefore Rousseau correctly describes the abstract idea of 
political man as follows: 

“Celui qui ose entreprendre d’instituer un peuple doit se sentir en état de 
changer pour ainsi dire la nature humaine, de transformer chaque individu, qui par 
lui-méme est un tout parfait et solitaire, en partie d’un plus grand tout dont cet 
individu regoive en quelque sorte sa vie et son étre, de substituer une existence 
partielle et morale 4 l’existence physique et indépendante. I] faut qu'il éte 4 Vhomme 
ses forces propres pour lui en donner qui lui soient étrangéres et dont il ne puisse 
faire usage sans le secours d’autrui.”* (Contrat Social, livre II, Londres, 1782, 
p- 67.) 

* “Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel him- 
self capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, 
who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from 
which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a 

All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and 
relationships to man himself. 

Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, 
to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, 
and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person. 

Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the 
abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a ° 
Species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his 
particular situation, only when man has recognised and organised 
his “forces propres”* as social forces, and consequently no longer 
separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, 
only then will human emancipation have been accomplished. 

Il 

“Die Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, 
frei zu werden”. 
Von Bruno Bauer (Einundzwanzig Bogen, pp. 56-71). 

It is in this form that Bauer deals with the relation between the 
Jewish and the Christian religions, and also with their relation to 
criticism. Their relation to criticism. is their relation “to the 
capacity to become free”. 

The result arrived at is: 

“The Christian has to surmount only one stage, namely, that of his religion, in 
order to give up religion altogether”, and therefore to become free. “The Jew, on 
the other hand, has to break not only with his Jewish nature, but also with the 
development towards perfecting his religion, a development which has remained 
alien to him.” (P. 71.) 

Thus Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipa- 
tion into a purely religious question. The theological problem as to 
whether the Jew or the Christian has the better prospect of 
salvation is repeated here in the enlightened form: which of them 
is more capable of emancipation. No longer is the question asked: Is 
it Judaism or Christianity that makes a man free? On the contrary, 
the question is now: Which makes man freer, the negation of 
Judaism or the negation of Christianity? 

“If the Jews want to become free, they should profess belief not in Christianity, 
but in the dissolution of Christianity, in the dissolution of religion in general, that 
is to say, in enlightenment, criticism and its consequence, free humanity.” (P. 70.) 

limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. He has to 
take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he 
cannot employ without the help of other men.”—Ed. 

* Own powers.— Ed. 

On the Jewish Question 169 

For the Jew, it is still a matter of a profession of faith, but no 
longer a profession of belief in Christianity, but of belief in 
Christianity in dissolution. 

Bauer demands of the Jews that they should break with the 
essence of the Christian religion, a demand which, as he says 
himself, does not arise out of the development of Judaism. 

Since Bauer, at the end of his work on the Jewish question, had 
conceived Judaism only as crude religious criticism of Christianity, 
and therefore saw in it “merely” a religious significance, it could 
be foreseen that the emancipation of the Jews, too, would be 
transformed into a philosophical-theological act. 

Bauer considers that the ideal, abstract nature of the Jew, his 
religion, is his entire nature. Hence he rightly concludes: 

“The Jew contributes nothing to mankind if he himself disregards his narrow 
law”, if he invalidates his entire Judaism. (P. 65.) 

Accordingly the relation between Jews and Christians becomes 
the following: the sole interest of the Christian in the emancipa- 
tion of the Jew is a general human interest, a theoretical interest. 
Judaism is a fact that offends the religious eye of the Christian. As 
soon as his eye ceases to be religious, this fact ceases to be 
offensive. The emancipation of the Jew is in itself not a task for 
the Christian. 

The Jew, on the other hand, in order to emancipate himself, has 
to carry out not only his own work, but also that of the Christian, 
ie., the Krittk der Synoptiker and Das Leben Jesu,* etc. 

“It is up to them to deal with it: they themselves will decide their fate; but 
history is not to be trifled with.” (P. 71.) 

We are trying to break with the theological formulation of the 
question. For us, the question of the Jew’s capacity for emancipa- 
tion becomes the question: What particular social element has to be 
overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the present-day Jew’s 
capacity for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the 
emancipation of the modern world. This relation necessarily 
results from the special position of Judaism in the contemporary 
enslaved world. 

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew, not the Sabbath Jew, as 
Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. 

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

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. 

* A reference to Bruno Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, 
and David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu.—Ed. 

F—AB2 

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huchstering. What is his 
worldly God? Money. 

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, 
consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self- 
emancipation of our time. 

An organisation of society which would abolish the precondi- 
tions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, 
would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would 
be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the 
other hand, if the Jew recognises that this practical nature of his is 
futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his 
previous development and works for human emancipation as such 
and turns against the supreme practical expression of human 
self-estrangement. 

We recognise in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element 
of the present time, an element which through historical develop- 
ment—to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously 
contributed—has been brought to its present high level, at which 
it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. 

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipa- 
tion of mankind from Judaism? 

The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way. 

“The Jew, who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines the fate of 
the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who may have no rights in the 
smallest German state, decides the fate of Europe. While corporations and guilds 
refuse to admit Jews, or have not yet adopted a favourable attitude towards them, 
the audacity of industry mocks at the obstinacy of the medieval institutions.” 
(Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 114.) 

This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a 
Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, 
but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has 
become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become 
the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emanci- 
pated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. 

Captain Hamilton, tor example, reports: 

“The devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoén 
who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. 
Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force 
of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, 
and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer 

* Here and elsewhere in this article Marx evidently uses the words Jude and 
Judentum also in the figurative sense, i.e., denoting usury, huckstering, trading, 
etc.— Ed. 

On the Jewish Question 171 

than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other 
recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels he carries, so to speak, his 
goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit. If he loses 
sight of his own business for an instant it is only in order to pry into the business 
of his competitors.” * 

Indeed, in North America the practical domination of Judaism 
over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and 
normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the 
Christian ministry have become articles of trade, and the bankrupt 
trader deals in the Gospel just as the Gospel preacher who has 
become rich goes in for business deals. 

“Tel que vous le voyez G la téte d’une congrégation respectable a commencé par étre 
marchand; son commerce étant tombé, il s'est fait ministre; cet autre a débuté par le 
Sacerdoce, mais dés qu'il a eu quelque somme d'argent a la disposition, il a laissé la chaire 
pour le négoce. Aux yeux d’un grand nombre, le ministére religieux est une véritable carriére 
industrielle.” (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 185, 186.) 

According to Bauer, it is 

“a fictitious state of affairs when in theory the Jew is deprived of political rights, 
whereas in practice he has immense power and exerts his political influence en gros, 
although it is curtailed en détail.” (Die Judenfrage, p. 114.) 

The contradiction that exists between the practical political 
power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction 
between politics and the power of money in general. Although 
theoretically the former is superior to the latter, in actual fact 
politics has become the serf of financial power. 

Judaism has held its own alongside Christianity, not only as 
religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of 
doubt in the religious derivation of Christianity, but equally be- 
cause the practical-Jewish spirit, Judaism, has maintained itself and 
even attained its highest development in Christian society. The 
Jew, who exists as a distinct member of civil society, is only a 
particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society, 

Judaism continues to exist not in spite of history, but owing to 
history. 

The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own 
entrails. 

What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical 
need, egoism. 

* Hamilton, op. cit., Bd. I, S. 109-10 —Ed. 

> «The man who you see at che head of a respectable congregation began as a trader; his 
business having failed, he became a minister. The other began as a priest but as soon as he 
had some money at his disposal he left the pulpit to become a trader. In the eyes of very many 
people, the religious ministry is a veritable business career.” — Ed. 

The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the 
polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the 
lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the 
principle of civil society, and as such appears in a pure form as 
soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The 
god of practical need and self-interest is money. 

Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other 
god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns 
them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established 
value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world—both 
the world of men and nature—of its specific value. Money is the 
estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this 
alien essence dominates him, and he worships it. 

The god of the Jews has become secularised and has become the 
god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. 
His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. 

The view of nature attained under the dominion of private 
property and money is a real contempt for and practical debase- 
ment of nature; in the Jewish religion nature exists, it is true, but 
it exists only in imagination. 

It is in this sense that Thomas Munzer declares it intolerable 

“that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, 
the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become 
free”. 

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in 
himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish 
religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of 
money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and 
woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought 
and sold. 

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the 
merchant, of the man of money in general. 

The groundless? law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of 
groundless* morality and right in general, of the purely formal 
rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself. 

Here, too, man’s supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to 
laws that are valid for him not because they are laws of his own 
will and nature, but because they are the dominant laws and 
because departure from them is avenged. 

Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer 

4 In German a pun on the term grund- und bodentlos, which can mean “without 
land” or “without reason” — Ed. 

On the Jewish Question 173 

discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self- 
interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of which 
consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws. 

Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of 
laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law. 

Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not 
develop further theoretically, because the world outlook of practi- 
cal need is essentially limited and is completed in a few strokes. 

By its very nature, the religion of practical need could find its 
consummation not in theory, but only in practice, precisely because 
its truth is practice. 

Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the 
new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its 
activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self- 
interest, is passive and does not expand at will, but finds itself 
enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social 
conditions. 

Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil 
society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains 
perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which 
makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions 
extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from 
the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism 
and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the 
human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are 
inimically opposed to one another. 

Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in 
Judaism. 

From the outset, the Christian was the theorising Jew, the Jew is 
therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has 
become a Jew again. 

Christianity had only in semblance overcome real Judaism. It 
was too noble-minded, too spiritualistic to eliminate the crudity of 
practical need in any other way than by elevation to the 
skies. 

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism is the 
common practical application of Christianity, but this application 
could only become general after Christianity as a developed 
religion had completed theoretically the estrangement of man from 
himself and from nature. 

Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make 
alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, vendible objects 
subjected to the slavery of egoistic need and to trading. 

174 . Karl Marx 

Selling is the practical aspect of alienation." Just as man, as long 
as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential 
nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, 
so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active 
practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his 
products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, 
and bestowing the significance of an alien entity—money—on 
them. 

In its perfected practice, Christian egoism of heavenly bliss is 
necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Jew, 
heavenly need is turned into worldly need, subjectivism into 
self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion, 
but, on the contrary, by the human basis of his religion—practical 
need, egoism. 

Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been 
universally realised and secularised, civil society could not convince 
the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only 
the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the 
Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the 
nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as 
one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a 
narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society. 

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of 
Judaism—huckstering and its preconditions—the Jew will have 
become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an 
object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has 
been humanised, and because the conflict between man’s individu- 
al-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished. 

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society 
from Judaism.