Works of Karl Marx 1844
On The Jewish Question
Written: Autumn 1843;
First Published: February, 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher;
Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, February 2005.
See Citizen in the Encyclopedia of Marxism, for an explanation of the various words for “citizen.”
I
Bruno Bauer,
The Jewish Question,
Braunschweig, 1843
The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of
emancipation do they desire? Civic, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer replies to them: No one in Germany is politically
emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jews
are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves
as Jews. As Germans, you ought to work for the political emancipation of
Germany, and as human beings, for the emancipation of mankind, and you
should feel the particular kind of your oppression and your shame not as
an exception to the rule, but on the contrary as a confirmation of the
rule.
Or do the Jews demand the same status as Christian subjects
of the state? In that case, they recognize that the Christian state
is justified and they recognize, too, the regime of general oppression.
Why should they disapprove of their special yoke if they approve of the
general yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation of
the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?
The Christian state knows only privileges. In this
state, the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights
which the Christians do not have. Why should he want rights which he does
not have, but which the Christians enjoy?
In wanting to be emancipated from the Christian state, the Jew
is demanding that the Christian state should give up its religious
prejudice. Does he, the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? Has
he, then, the right to demand that someone else should renounce his religion?
By its very nature, the Christian state incapable of emancipating
the Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated.
So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as
incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.
The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way
characteristic of the Christian state – that is, by granting privileges,
by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but making
him feel the pressure of all the other separate spheres of society, and
feel it all the more intensely because he is in religious opposition
to the dominant religion. But the Jew, too, can behave towards the state
only in a Jewish way – that is, by treating it as something alien to him,
by counterposing his imaginary nationality to the real nationality, by
counterposing his illusory law to the real law, by deeming himself justified
in separating himself from mankind, by abstaining on principle from taking
part in the historical movement, by putting his trust in a future which
has nothing in common with the future of mankind in general, and by seeing
himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the
chosen people.
On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account
of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens?
In Germany, there are no citizens. As human beings? But you are no more
human beings than those to whom you appeal.
Bauer has posed the question of Jewish emancipation in a new form,
after giving a critical analysis of the previous formulations and solutions
of the question. What, he asks, is the nature of the Jew who is
to be emancipated and of the Christian state that is to emancipate him?
He replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, he analyzes the religious
opposition between Judaism and Christianity, he elucidates the essence
of the Christian state – and he does all this audaciously, trenchantly,
wittily, and with profundity, in a style of writing what 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 emancipated ourselves before we can emancipate others.
The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the
Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved?
By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By
abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that
their respective religions are no more than different stages in the
development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history,
and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian
is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human
relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions
in science are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew, in particular, is confronted by the general
absence of political emancipation and the strongly marked Christian character
of the state. In Bauer’s conception, however, the Jewish question has a
universal significance, independent of specifically German conditions.
It is the question of the relation of religion to the state, of the contradiction
between religious constraint and political emancipation. Emancipation
from religion is laid down as a condition, both to the Jew who wants to
be emancipated politically, and to the state which is to effect emancipation
and is itself to be emancipated.
“Very well,” it is said, and the Jew himself says it, “the Jew is to
become emancipated not as a Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he
possesses such an excellent, universally human principle of morality; on
the contrary, the Jew will retreat behind the citizen and
be a citizen, although he is a Jew and is to remain a Jew. That
is to say, he is and remains a Jew, although he is a citizen
and lives in universally human conditions: his Jewish and restricted nature
triumphs always in the end over his human and political obligations. The
prejudice remains in spite of being outstripped by general
principles. But if it remains, then, on the contrary, it outstrips everything
else.”
“Only sophistically, only apparently, would the Jew be able to
remain a Jew in the life of the state. Hence, if he wanted to remain a
Jew, the mere appearance would become the essential and would triumph;
that is to say, his life in the state would be only a semblance
or only a temporary exception to the essential and the rule.” (“The Capacity
of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free,” Einundzwanzig Bogen,
pp. 57)
Let us hear, on the other hand, how Bauer presents the task of the state.
“France,” he says, “has recently shown us” (Proceedings of the Chamber
of Deputies, December 26, 1840) “in the connection with the Jewish question
– just as it has continually done in all other political questions
– the spectacle of a life which is free, but which revokes its freedom
by law, hence declaring it to be an appearance, and on the other hand contradicting
its free laws by its action.” (The Jewish Question, p. 64)
“In France, universal freedom is not yet the law, the Jewish question
too has not yet been solved, because legal freedom – the fact that
all citizens are equal – is restricted in actual life, which is still
dominated and divided by religious privileges, and this lack of freedom
in actual life reacts on law and compels the latter to sanction the division
of the citizens, who as such are free, into oppressed and oppressors.”
(p. 65)
When, therefore, would the Jewish question be solved for France?
“The Jew, for example, would have ceased to be a Jew if he did not
allow himself to be prevented by his laws from fulfilling his duty to the
state and his fellow citizens, that is, for example, if on the Sabbath
he attended the Chamber of Deputies and took part in the official proceedings.
Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a
privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some or
many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed themselves
bound to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be left to them
as a purely private matter.” (p. 65)
“There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged
religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer
exist.” (p. 66)
“Just as M. Martin du Nord saw the proposal to omit mention of
Sunday in the law as a motion to declare that Christianity has ceased to
exist, with equal reason (and this reason is very well founded) the declaration
that the law of the Sabbath is no longer binding on the Jew would be a
proclamation abolishing Judaism.” (p. 71)
Bauer, therefore, demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should renounce
Judaism, and that mankind in general should renounce religion, in order
to achieve civic emancipation. On the other hand, he quite consistently
regards the political abolition of religion as the abolition of
religion as such. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true,
real state.
“Of course, the religious notion affords security to the state. But
to what state? To what kind of state?” (p. 97)
At this point, the one-sided formulation of the Jewish question
becomes evident.
It was by no means sufficient to investigate: Who is to emancipate?
Who is to be emancipated? Criticism had to investigate a third point. It
had to inquire: What kind of emancipation is in question? What conditions
follow from the very nature of the emancipation that is demanded? Only
the criticism of political emancipation itself would have been the
conclusive criticism of the Jewish question and its real merging in the
“general question of time.”
Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level, he becomes
entangled in contradictions. He puts forward conditions which are not based
on the nature of political emancipation itself. He raises questions
which are not part of his problem, and he solves problems which leave this
question unanswered. When Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation:
“Their error was only that they assumed the Christian state to be the only
true one and did not subject it to the same criticism that they applied
to Judaism” (op. cit., p. 3), we find that his error lies in the fact that
he subjects to criticism only the “Christian state,” not the “state
as such", that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation
to human emancipation and, therefore, puts forward conditions which
can be explained only by uncritical confusion of political emancipation
with general human emancipation. If Bauer asks the Jews: Have you, from
your standpoint, the right to want political emancipation? we ask
the converse question: Does the standpoint of political emancipation
give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from
man the abolition of religion?
The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the
state in which the Jew lives. In Germany, where there is no political state,
no state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological one.
The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which
recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex
professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged criticism
– criticism of Christian theology and of Jewish theology. Hence, we continue
to operate in the sphere of theology, however much we may operate critically
within it.
In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question
is a question of constitutionalism, the question of the incompleteness
of political emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion
is retained here, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula,
that of a religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to the
state retains the semblance of a religious, theological opposition.
Only in the North American states – at least, in some of them
– does the Jewish question lose its theological significance and
become a really secular question. Only where the political state
exists in its completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and
of the religious man in general, to the political state, and therefore
the relation of religion to the state, show itself in its specific character,
in its purity. The criticism of this relation ceases to be theological
criticism as soon as the state ceases to adopt a theological attitude toward
religion, as soon as it behaves towards religion as a state – i.e.,
politically. Criticism, then, becomes criticism of the political
state. At this point, where the question ceases to be theological, Bauer’s
criticism ceases to be critical.
“In the United States there is neither a state religion nor a religion
declared to be that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over
another. The state stands aloof from all cults.” (Marie ou l’esclavage
aux Etats-Unis, etc., by G. de Beaumont, Paris, 1835, p. 214)
Indeed, there are some North American states where “the constitution
does not impose any religious belief or religious practice as a condition
of political rights.” (op. cit., p. 225)
Nevertheless, “in the United States people do not believe that
a man without religion could be an honest man.” (op. cit., p. 224)
Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity,
as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure
us. The North American states, however, serve us only as an example. The
question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to
religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation,
religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that
is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the
perfection of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion is the
existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the
nature of the state itself. We no longer regard religion as the cause,
but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain
the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations.
We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in
order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will
overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular
restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones. History
has long enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition
in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion
becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to
human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political
state by criticizing the political state in its secular form, apart from
its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction between the state
and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is given by us a human
form as the contradiction between the state and particular secular
elements; the contradiction between the state and religion in general as
the contradiction between the state and its presuppositions in general.
The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in
general, of religious man, is the emancipation of the state from
Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In its own form,
in the manner characteristic of its nature, the state as a state emancipates
itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion –
that is to say, by the state as a state not professing any religion, but,
on the contrary, asserting itself as a state. The political emancipation
from religion is not a religious emancipation that has been carried through
to completion and is free from contradiction, because political emancipation
is not a form of human emancipation which has been carried through
to completion and is free from contradiction.
The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from
the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man
being really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free
state [pun on word Freistaat, which also means republic] without
man being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he
lays down the following condition for political emancipation:
“Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a privileged
church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some or many persons,
or even the overwhelming majority, still believed themselves bound to fulfil
religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be left to them as a purely
private matter.” [The Jewish Question, p. 65]
It is possible, therefore, for the state to have emancipated itself
from religion even if the overwhelming majority is still religious.
And the overwhelming majority does not cease to be religious through being
religious in private.
But, the attitude of the state, and of the republic [free state] in particular, to religion is, after all, only the attitude to religion
of the men who compose the state. It follows from 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 constraint.
The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects
and all the advantages of political elevation in general. The state as
a state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares by political
means that private property is abolished as soon as the property qualification
for the right to elect or be elected is abolished, as has occurred in many
states of North America. Hamilton quite correctly interprets this fact
from a political point of view as meaning:
“the masses have won a victory over the property owners and financial
wealth.” [Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2 vols, Edinburgh,
1833, p. 146.]
Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has
become the legislator for the property owner? The property qualification
for the suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to private
property.
Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not
only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state
abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education,
occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation,
are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these
distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant
in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of
the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows
private property, education, occupation, to act in their
way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and
to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing
these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of
their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its
universality only in opposition to these elements of its being. Hegel,
therefore, defines the relation of the political state to religion quite
correctly when he says:
“In order [...] that the state should come into existence as the self-knowing,
moral reality of the mind, its distraction from the form of authority and
faith is essential. But this distinction emerges only insofar as the ecclesiastical
aspect arrives at a separation within itself. It is only in this way that
the state, above the particular churches, has achieved and brought into
existence universality of thought, which is the principle of its form”
(Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1st edition, p. 346).
Of course! Only in this way, above the particular elements,
does the state constitute itself as universality.
The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life,
as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic
life continue to exist in
civil society
outside the sphere of the state,
but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained
its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but
in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly
life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a
communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private
individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means,
and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The relation of the political
state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relations of heaven
to earth. The political state stands in the same opposition to civil society,
and it prevails over the latter in the same way as religion prevails over
the narrowness of the secular world – i.e., by likewise having
always to acknowledge it, to restore it, and allow itself to be dominated
by it. In his most immediate reality, in civil society, man is a secular
being. Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded
by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand,
where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of
an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed
with an unreal universality.
Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in
conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community.
This conflict reduces itself to the secular division between the
political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois
[i.e., as a member of civil society,
“bourgeois society” in German], “life in the
state” is “only a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and
the rule.” Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically
in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen
[‘citizen’ in French, i.e., the participant in political life] only sophistically
remains a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal. It is
the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the
merchant and the citizen [Staatsbürger], between the day-laborer and the citizen, between
the landowner and the citizen, between the merchant and the citizen, between
the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction
in which the religious man finds himself with the political man is the
same contradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen,
and the member of civil society with his political lion’s skin.
This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question ultimately
reduces itself, the relation between the political state and its preconditions,
whether these are material elements, such as private property, etc., or
spiritual elements, such as culture or religion, the conflict between the
general interest and private interest, the schism between the political
state and civil society – these secular antitheses Bauer allows to persist,
whereas he conducts a polemic against their religious expression.
“It is precisely the basis of civil society, the need that ensures
the continuance of this society and guarantees its necessity, which exposes
its existence to continual dangers, maintains in it an element of uncertainty,
and produces that continually changing mixture of poverty and riches, of
distress and prosperity, and brings about change in general.” (p. 8)
Compare the whole section: “Civil Society” (pp. 8-9), which has been drawn
up along the basic lines of Hegel’s philosophy of law. Civil society, in
its opposition to the political state, is recognized as necessary, because
the political state is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True,
it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the
final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order.
It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing
it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no
longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves – although in a limited
way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere – as a species-being,
in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society,
of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer
the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become
the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and
from other men – as it was originally. It is only the abstract avowal
of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness. The endless
fragmentation of religion in North America, for example, gives it even
externally the form of a purely individual affair. It has been thrust among
the multitude of private interests and ejected from the community as such.
But one should be under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation.
The division of the human being into a public man and a private
man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this
is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation,
therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives
to do so.
The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and
citizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed against
citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it is
political emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating oneself
from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as such is
born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form
in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must
go as far as the abolition of 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 expression – 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 realization 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 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 realized 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 realization.” (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 determined 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 realization of which is unattainable, 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 of faith. The religious spirit,
therefore, is still not really secularized.
But, furthermore, the religious spirit cannot be really
secularized, 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
secularized insofar as the stage of development of the human 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 Christianity 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 owning 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 individuality, 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 everyman, ranks as sovereign, as the highest being, but it is
man in his uncivilized, unsocial form, man in his fortuitous existence,
man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted by the whole organization
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 consciousness
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 product 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 contradictions 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 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. If you
Jews want to be emancipated politically, without emancipating yourselves
humanly, the half-hearted approach 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 evangelizes 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 community with
others. Their 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 d’homme,
insofar as these differ from the droits d’citoyen.
Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to practice
any religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized
either as a right of man or as the consequence of a right of man, that
of liberty.
Déclaration des droits de l’droits et du citoyen, 1791, Article
10: “No one is to be subjected to annoyance because of his opinions, even
religious opinions.” “The freedom of every man to practice the religion of which he
is an adherent.”
Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among the rights
of man, Article 7: “The free exercise of religion.” 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: “The necessity of proclaiming
these rights presupposes either the existence or the recent memory of despotism.”
Compare the Constitution of 1795, Section XIV, Article 354.
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.”
Constitution of New Hampshire, Article 5 and 6: “Among these natural rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing can replace them. The rights of conscience are among them.” (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 213,214)
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 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. 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 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 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 labor and industry.”
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
(à 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 realization of his own freedom,
but the barrier to it. But, above all, it proclaims the right of man
“of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of
the fruits of his labor and industry.”
There remains the other rights of man: égalité and sûreté.
Equality, 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 this significance,
as follows:
Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the law being
the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.”
And security?
Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection
afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his
person, his rights, and his property.”
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.”
The concept of security does not raise civil society above its
egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of 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-like
itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as
a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them
together it 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 interest 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 egotistic 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 private individual [bourgeois] who is considered
to be the essential and true man.
“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.)
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 is civil society. It is true that its 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 “unlimited freedom
of the press” (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 “freedom of the press should not be permitted when it
endangers public liberty.” (“Robespierre jeune,” Historie parlementaire
de la Révolution française by Buchez and Roux, vol.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 contradiction 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 relationship,
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. 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 labor, 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
organization of national life did not raise property or labor 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 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 general 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 organization, 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 recognized as such
by this state in the rights of man.
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 relation with one another
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 “rights of man” appears as “natural
rights,” 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 revolutionizing these components themselves
or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of
needs, labor, 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 his sensuous, individual, immediate existence,
whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an
allegorical, juridical person. The real man is recognized only in the shape
of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape
of the abstract citizen.
Therefore, Rousseau 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.
II
Bruno Bauer,
“The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free,”
Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, 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 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 emancipation 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 consequences, free humanity.” (p. 70)
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 emancipation 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 – i.e.,
the Critique of the Evangelical History of the Synoptics and the
Life of Jesus, 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 emancipation 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. 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.
Captain Hamilton, for example, reports:
“The devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind
of Laocoön 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 than his neighbor. 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.
“The man who you see at the 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.” (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 because 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.
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.
The view of nature attained under the domination of private property
and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature;
in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in
imagination.
It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer
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 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 practical 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 theorizing 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.
Selling [verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation [Entausserung].
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 world 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
realized and secularized, 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 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.