Karl Marx ON HE JEWISH QUESTION
                       written Autumn 1843,published February, 1844

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The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the state in
which the Jew lives. In Germany, where there is no political state, no
state as such, the Jewish question is a purely _theological_ one. The
Jew finds himself in _religious_ opposition to the state, which
recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex
professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged
criticism -- criticism of Christian theology and of Jewish theology.
Hence, we continue to operate in the sphere of theology, however much we
may operate critically within it.
 
In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of
constitutionalism, the question of the incompleteness of political
emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion is retained here,
although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, that of a
religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to the state retains
the semblance of a religious, theological opposition.
 
Only in the North American states -- at least, in some of them -- does
the Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a
really _secular_ question. Only where the political state exists in its
completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of the
religious man in general, to the political state, and therefore the
relation of religion to the state, show itself in its specific
character, in its purity. The criticism of this relation ceases to be
theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to adopt a theological
attitude toward religion, as soon as it behaves towards religion as a

state -- i.e., politically.

.. Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from
the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is o longer
the spirit of the state, in which man behaves -- although in a limited
way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere -- as a
species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the
spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium
contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence
of difference. It has become the expression of man's separation from
his community, from himself and from other men -- as it was originally.
It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy,
and arbitrariness. The endless fragmentation of religion in North
America, for example, gives it even externally the form of a purely
individual affair. It has been thrust among the multitude of private
interests and ejected from the community as such. But one should be
under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The
division of the human being into a _public_ man and a _private_ man, the
displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not
a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation,
therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives
to do so.
 
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 radically 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
 
The droits de l'homme, 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:
 
     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."
 
What constitutes liberty?
 
     Article 6. "Liberty is the power which man has to do everything
     that does not harm the rights of others",
 
or, according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791:
 
    "Liberty consists in being able to do everything which does not
     harm others."
 
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.
 
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-like itself, society, appears as a framework external to the
individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole
bound holding them together it natural necessity, need and private
interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.
 
.. Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom.
He was not fred from property, he received freedom to own property. He
was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage
in business.
 
Therefore, Rousseau (in the Social Contract)  correctly described the abstract idea of political
man as follows:
 
    "Whoever dares undertake to establish a people's institutions must
     feel himself 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 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."
 
_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 recognized and organized his "own powers"
as -social_ powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power
from himself in the shape of _political_ power, only then will human
emancipation have been accomplished.
 
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.
 
What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. 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 organization of society which would abolish the preconditions 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 recognizes 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 recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the
_present time_, an element which through historical development -- 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 emancipation
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 favorable attitude towards them, the
     audacity of industry mocks at the obstinacy of the material
     institutions." (Bruno Bauer, _The Jewish Question_, 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 emancipated themselves insofar as
the Christians have become Jews.

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.

What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need,
egoism.
 
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 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 secularized 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.
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 of the
merchant, of the man of money in general.
 
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 humanized, nd
because the conflict between man's individual-sensuous existence and his
species-existence has been abolished.
 
The _social_ emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from
Judaism.