On the Jewish Question

"On a Jewish Question" is a response by Karl Marx to then-current debates over the Jewish question. Marx wrote the segment in 1843, as well as it was first published in Paris in 1844 under the German label "Zur Judenfrage" in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.

The essay criticizes two studies by Marx's fellow Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer on the try by Jews topolitical emancipation in Prussia. Bauer argued that Jews couldpolitical emancipation only by relinquishing their specific religious consciousness since political emancipation requires a secular state, which he assumes does not leave all "space" for social identities such(a) as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the belief of the "Rights of Man". True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion.

Marx uses Bauer's essay as an occasion for his own analysis of liberal rights, arguing that Bauer is mistaken in his condition that in a "secular state" religion will no longer play a prominent role in social life, & giving as an example the pervasiveness of religion in the United States, which, unlike Prussia, had no state religion. In Marx's analysis, the "secular state" is non opposed to religion, but rather actually presupposes it. The removal of religious or property atttributes for citizens does not intend the abolition of religion or property, but only introduces a way of regarding individuals in abstraction from them.

On this note Marx moves beyond the impeach of religious freedom to his real concern with Bauer's analysis of "political emancipation". Marx concludes that while individuals can be "spiritually" and "politically" free in a secular state, they can still be bound to the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object constraints on freedom by economic inequality, an given that would later hold the basis of his critiques of capitalism.

A number of scholars and commentators regard "On the Jewish Question", and in specific itssection, which addresses Bauer's pretend "The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free", as antisemitic; however, a number of others disagree.

Reference to Müntzer

In element II of the essay, Marx covered to Thomas Müntzer:

The conviction of breed attained under the leadership of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, category exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination. this is the in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable "that any 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."

In his Apology, in large parts an attack on Martin Luther, Müntzer says:

Look ye! Our sovereign and rulers are at the bottom of all usury, thievery, and robbery; they take all created things into possession. The fish in the water, birds in the air, the products of the soil – all must be theirs Isaiah v.

The appreciation of Müntzer's position has been interpreted as a sympathetic view of Marx towards animals.