On the Jewish Question

A document in which Marx elaborates on the question of the emancipation of the Jews. Written between mid-October and mid-December, 1843, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 1844.

In the 19th century Europe, the problem of political rights of the Jews had always been a serious social question in the reality of anti-Semitism. In 1843, Bruno Bauer, a Young Hegelian, published On the Jewish Question, which set off a debate on the Jewish emancipation, arguing that a feudal state with Christianity as its state religion was essentially “incapable of emancipating the Jew”, and that in order to be emancipated, Jews had to emancipate themselves, i.e., they had to give up their religious beliefs first, thus turning the social question of Jewish emancipation into a religious one. To refute this erroneous point of view, Marx wrote this article.

The full text of On the Jewish Question consists of two parts, aiming at Bauer’s two articles respectively. In Marx’s view, by reducing the political question of Jewish emancipation to a purely religious question in his treatise, Bauer undoubtedly religionized the social question of political emancipation; and by advocating the abolition of the religious state through the abolition of religion, he eliminated, as a result, the political oppression caused by religious antagonism. It can be said that this solution is fundamentally putting the cart before the horse. By analyzing the relationship between civil society and religion, Marx pointed out that religion is not the cause of political oppression, but the manifestation of it. Therefore, the narrowness of religion can only be overcome by the elimination of political oppression, and political emancipation is only the displacement of religion from the State to civil society, and does not require the absolute abolition of religion, which is obviously an “uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human emancipation”. In this way, Marx clarified the relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation in his rebuttal. In his view, the political revolution by the bourgeoisie to liberate the civil society from the yoke of feudalism and to eliminate the feudal estates and feudal privileges is a historical progress, but this political emancipation is only a revolution of the civil society, and what it realizes is only democracy and freedom of the bourgeoisie, which is far from being human emancipation of man, and what the bourgeoisie boasts of as the universal human rights in this political emancipation is in the final analysis nothing more than the right to enjoy and dispose of private property, and this right of self-interest is contrary to the demand for human emancipation. To achieve the emancipation of man, it is necessary to break through the historical limitations of bourgeois political emancipation, carry out the revolutionary transformation of society, abolish private property, eliminate the estrangement of human life itself, and make “real, individual man re-absorb in himself the abstract citizen” and recognize that only when he no longer separates the social power formed by the organization of his “own powers” “from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished”, thus elucidating the difference between the communist revolution and the bourgeois revolution, and pointing out the direction for human emancipation.

On the Jewish Question is a very important work of young Marx. In this article, by refuting Bruno Bauer’s erroneous views on Jewish emancipation, Marx elucidated his understanding of bourgeois political emancipation and the question concerning the relationship of political emancipation and human emancipation, and manifested the germination of historical materialist and communist consciousness with a language tinged with humanism, unfolding that Marx completed the transformation from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democracy to communism. Lenin once highly praised this work and remarked that the publication of this work and the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right marked the “final consummation” of the “two transitions” of Marx’s world outlook.