FROM THEOLOGY TO SOCIOLOGY: BRUNO BAUER AND KARL MARX ON THE QUESTION OF JEWISH EMANCIPATION Yoav Peled* The Jews (like the Christians) are fully politically emancipated in various states. Both Jews and Christians are far from being humanly emancipated. Hence there must be a difference between political and human emancipation. Karl Marx, The Holy Family Understanding any proposition requires us to identify the question to which the proposition may be regarded as the answer. Quentin Skinner, A Reply to My Critics Introduction The many commentaries on Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, have generally fallen into two broad categories. On one side are those who regard the essay as an anti-semitic tract; a testimony, perhaps, to Marx’s own antisemitism or pathological Jewish self-hatred.1 On the other side are commentators who emphasize the important philosophical innovations made by Marx in that essay and downplay his discussion of the Jewish question itself.2 These two traditional readings suffer from parallel but opposite weaknesses. The first reading, focused on Marx’s views on the Jewish question, correctly identifies his question but completely misses his answer; the second, by * I would like to thank, for their very useful comments and suggestions, José Brunner, Jack Jacobs, Moshe Mishkinsky, Leah Rosen, Wendy Sarvasy, Gershon Shafir, Adam Seligman, Victor Wolfenstein, an anonymous referee and, especially, Horit Herman-Peled. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1990 annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, in Boston. 1 E. Silberner, ‘Was Marx an Anti-Semite?’, Historia Judaica, 11 (1949), pp. 1–52; J. Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London, 1978); R.S. Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (New York, 1976); R.S. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (Rutherford, NJ, 1982); N. Rotenstreich, ‘For and Against Emancipation: The Bruno Bauer Controversy’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 4 (1959), pp. 3–36; N. Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy: The Polemics of Emancipation (New York, 1984); E.L. Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York, 1973); cf. H. Hirsch, ‘The Ugly Marx: An Analysis of an ‘‘Outspoken Anti-Semite’’ ’, Philosophical Forum, 8 (1978), pp. 150–62. 2 G. Labica, Marxism and the Status of Philosophy (Sussex, 1980); D. McLellan, Marx Before Marxism (London, 1980); J.M. Barbalet, Marx’s Construction of Social Theory (London, 1983); cf. Carlebach, Karl Marx, pp. 278–9; D. Fischman, ‘The Jewish Question About Marx’, Polity, 21 (1989), pp. 755–9. HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XIII. No. 3. Autumn 1992 464 Y. PELED ignoring what Marx had to say about the Jews, fails to explain Marx’s motivation in making the philosophical advances he made in On the Jewish Question. Those who view On the Jewish Question as an anti-semitic document have found it difficult to account for the fact that Marx wrote the essay in order to argue for the emancipation of German Jewry. They have tended, therefore, to belittle the significance of this fact. Thus, Carlebach has claimed: it is not quite correct to argue . . . that Marx championed political emancipation for Jews. It would be more correct to say that the Marxian concept of political emancipation made it impossible to exclude any category in civil society from it.3 In the same vein, Wistrich has argued: support for Jewish emancipation remained for the ‘socialist’ [i.e. later] Marx a purely legalistic concession — necessary only so long as egoism constituted the natural basis of civil society.4 This reading of the text seems to have influenced its alternative reading as well. Accepting the view that the essay contains anti-semitic slurs, and trying to rescue its philosophical kernel from its anti-semitic shell, some readers have contended that On the Jewish Question does not deal primarily with the Jewish question at all. Labica, for example, having cited Marx’s expression of interest in the Jewish question in 1842, goes on to argue in the next paragraph: ‘In the question as such, the Jewish question, Marx had no interest. It was not his concern.’5 This interpretation requires a radical separation between the ‘philosophical’ first part of the essay and its ‘anti-semitic’ second part. Thus McLellan has made the rather astonishing claim that ‘it would be little exaggeration to say that this latter part of Marx’s review is an extended pun at Bauer’s expense’.6 3 Carlebach, Karl Marx, p. 165. 4 Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews, p. 38; cf. Silberner, ‘Was Marx’, p. 50. 5 Labica, Marxism, p. 207. 6 McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, p. 142; cf. H. Pachter, ‘Marx and the Jews’, Dissent, 26 (1979); J. Kovel, ‘Marx on the Jewish Question’, Dialectical Anthropology, 8 (1983). Hal Draper (Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 1: State and Bureaucracy, Book 1 (4 vols., New York, 1977), pp. 109–28) provides a balanced account of the essay, but his account does not go beyond simple exposition. Shlomo Avineri seems to be opting for the easy way out by focusing his discussion on The Holy Family. In this later work (1845) Marx’s language is much more sympathetic to the Jews and he explicitly supports Bauer’s Jewish critics. In essence, however, the relevant sections in The Holy Family are but a commentary on On the Jewish Question, and Avineri’s characterization of Marx’s attitude applies equally well to both essays: ‘Marx’s criticism of bourgeois society and of the role the Jews play in it, according to his view, does not prevent him from demanding full civil and political rights for the Jews; not because Jewish emancipation signifies the journey’s end, but because those rights are in accordance with the premises of bourgeois society itself’ (S. Avineri, ‘Marx and Jewish Emancipation’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 (1964), p. 448). The opening sentence of Avineri’s article is often quoted as authoritative evidence of Marx’s anti-semitism (Carlebach, Karl Marx, pp. 278–9). That sentence, however, is actually written in a carefully BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 465 My purpose in this paper will be to suggest a different reading of On the Jewish Question. In my reading Marx’s views on Jews and Judaism are seen both as a contribution to the contemporary debate over Jewish emancipation in Prussia, and as the occasion for the philosophical advances Marx made in that essay. This reading begins by taking seriously Marx’s manifest intent in writing On the Jewish Question — subjecting Bruno Bauer’s views on Jewish emancipation to a thoroughgoing critique — and then considers the essay in the context of the evolution of historical materialism as well. Most commentators have not paid serious attention to the arguments made by Bauer in the essays criticized by Marx; relying, in many cases, on Marx’s own summary for a brief statement of Bauer’s main points. This neglect is understandable if Marx’s views are seen as fundamentally similar to Bauer’s (both were anti-semites) or if the debate over the Jewish question is taken to be peripheral to Marx’s essay. However, an analysis of Bauer’s arguments becomes essential if On the Jewish Question is to be viewed in its proper polemical context. I will begin, therefore, with an examination of Bauer’s comments on the Jewish question, and will then proceed to Marx’s response. My key argument will be that by shifting the debate over Jewish emancipation from the plane of theology, where it had been traditionally fought, to the plane of sociology, Marx was able to circumvent one of Bauer’s main arguments against emancipating the Jews. Bauer had contended that as a religion of law, not of faith, Judaism was by its very nature a public creed. It was incompatible, therefore, with life in a free state, where religion could only be a private matter. Marx chose to ignore this argument, treat Judaism as no different from Christianity, and focus his discussion on the nature of the state on the one hand and on the role played by the Jews in civil society on the other. This was less than a satisfactory response to Bauer’s argument, but it enabled Marx to present a powerful case for emancipation while, at the same time, launching his critique of economic alienation. Thus, the philosophical advances made by Marx in On the Jewish Question were necessitated by, and integrally related to, his commitment to Jewish emancipation. I Bruno Bauer: The Theological Exclusion Of Judaism The debate over Jewish emancipation, in which Bauer, Marx and others took part, was triggered by the attempt of the Prussian government of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to standardize the status of Jews throughout its territorial possessions. In 1841 the government circulated a draft law which pointed to the need to preserve the Jews’ ‘miraculous essence’, without, however, allowing them to ‘impinge on the Christian state’. The solution proposed was to re-institute special corporations for the Jews, a medieval arrangement which by then had non-committal way: ‘That Karl Marx was an inveterate antisemite is today considered a commonplace which is hardly ever questioned’ (Avineri, ‘Marx’, p. 445). 466 Y. PELED remained in effect only in Prussia’s eastern, former Polish, territories. The draft law encountered intense opposition and was quietly shelved, but not before it gave rise to a heated debate on the status of the Jews in Prussia.7 As Carlebach pointed out, the debate turned on three distinct, though interrelated questions: ‘the meaning of Jewish history, the meaning of Jewish law and the relationship of the Jews to the state’.8 For Bauer and Marx, two radical critics of the Christian German state, the three questions were focused on one central issue: the relationship between the particularity of religion, both Jewish and Christian, and the proclaimed universality of the modern state. In two articles published in 1842–3,9 Bauer argued that the demand for Jewish emancipation in Germany was unrealistic, for two reasons: 1. In the Christian German state no one was free, and ‘without being free oneself, one cannot help another to freedom’.10 2. The particular nature of Jewish law would prevent Jews from being truly free, even if formal emancipation could be granted by the state. In a state where Christianity was the official state religion, Jews could not be emancipated: ‘one prejudice must exclude the other! Each one believes that his religion is the only true and justifiable one. Cooperation between such individuals is therefore absolutely impossible’.11 Moreover, the principle of the absolute Christian monarchy, such as Prussia, was power and privilege, not equality. So how could the Jews demand what nobody else had: ‘the Christian state knows only the exclusiveness of power, of hierarchical organization, because the state and the ruling class know only force and class as their nature’.12 That Jews could not be free in a self-proclaimed Christian state was a rather trivial point. But this was not the end of Bauer’s argument. Even in a constitutional state in which church and state had been separated, such as the July (1830) Monarchy in France, he contended, Jews could still not be free and equal. As long as religion received any kind of public recognition, even by a particular faith being designated ‘religion of the majority’, a religious minority would inevitably be oppressed. Only the complete abolition of all religious privileges, which, in Bauer’s view, would amount to the total abolition of religion itself, could ensure real freedom and equality for the Jews. So instead of fighting for their own religious emancipation, Jews should join in the struggle for general freedom, that is, for the general abolition of religion. 7 Carlebach, Karl Marx, p. 68. 8 Ibid., p. 76. 9 B. Bauer, The Jewish Question, trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati, 1958), in the series Readings in Modern Jewish History, ed. E. Rivkin; B. Bauer, ‘The Capacity of the Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free’, Philosophical Forum, 8 (1978), pp. 135–49. 10 Bauer, The Jewish Question, p. 60. 11 Ibid., pp. 102–3. 12 Ibid., p. 60. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 467 Bauer’s second point had to do with the capacity of the Jews themselves to be emancipated. Religious freedom, he argued, entailed the privatization of religion, its complete removal from the public sphere. Judaism, by its very nature, was incapable of becoming a purely private creed. Therefore, as long as they continued to observe their religion, Jews were inherently incapable of becoming free. Bauer’s view of Judaism combined two strands of thinking about Jewish religion which had been current in German philosophy at the time. Both strands had their origins in the writings of Moses Mendelssohn, but Bauer received one of them directly from Mendelssohn and the other through the mediation of Hegel’s discussions of Judaism. Mendelssohn had regarded Judaism as a system of revealed law, rather than revealed truth. As he stated in his Jerusalem, published in 1783: I believe that Judaism knows of no revealed religion in the sense in which Christians understand this term. The Israelites possess a divine legislation — laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life, instruction in the will of God as to how they should conduct themselves in order to attain temporal and eternal felicity. Propositions and prescriptions of this kind were revealed to them by Moses in a miraculous and supernatural manner, but no doctrinal opinions, no saving truths, no universal propositions of reason. These the Eternal reveals to us and to all other men, at all times, through nature and thing, but never through word and script.13 As revealed law, Judaism was eternally binding in its original form, until such time as ‘it pleases the Supreme Lawgiver to make known to us His will on this matter, to make it known in as clear a voice, in as public a manner, and as far beyond all doubt and ambiguity as He did when He gave the law itself’.14 Since it was a system of legislation designed to control actions, not beliefs, Judaism corresponded better than Christianity to Mendelssohn’s liberal model of the good state: a secular state which regulates its citizens’ behaviour, not their thoughts. In such a state, Mendelssohn argued, there would be no impediment to Jews being equal citizens as Jews, without giving up their religion. If Prussia sought to turn itself into a modern enlightened state, it should have no hesitation about emancipating its Jewish subjects. Mendelssohn did not consider, however, an obvious difficulty which arose from his call for Jewish emancipation in conjunction with his description of Judaism as a system of law: What would happen if the laws of the state should come into conflict with the laws of Judaism? What, for example, if a Jew were 13 M. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Alan Arkush (Hanover and London, 1983), pp. 89–90. 14 Ibid., p. 133. The obvious implication of this statement is a rejection of the possibility of reform within Judaism (cf. Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy, p. 24). Both Bauer and Marx followed Mendelssohn in regarding orthodox Judaism as the appropriate subject matter for the emancipation debate. 468 Y. PELED required by state law to render service to the state on the Sabbath or eat non-Kosher food?15 Bauer used this lacuna in Mendelssohn’s reasoning to buttress his own argument. As a sovereign system of law, he maintained, Judaism could not coexist in the same state with another legal system claiming sovereignty over the Jews as citizens. As to the argument that Jews had participated in the German wars against Napoleon, and had fought even on Saturday, Bauer retorted that the synagogue and these Rabbis, who have just given permission [to fight on Saturday] in this one case exceptionally, stand in principle above the State, which receives only a precarious privilege, which might not be properly granted to it to the uttermost under the divine law. A service which is rendered to the State with a conscience which should see in it a sin, since the Rabbi has given a dispensation and has said — what at other times he is not used to saying, since he might never really say it — that it is not a sin this once to render this service: such a service is immoral, since the conscience repudiates it. It is precarious, since the law forbids it . . .16 Moreover, the specific content of Jewish law, according to Bauer, was designed precisely to ensure the Jews’ separateness and exclusivity from the Gentiles. This was evident in the idea of a chosen people, in the Jews’ messianic expectations and in the laws governing behaviour on the Sabbath and the consumption of food and drink.17 The immutability of Jewish law, attested to by Mendelssohn, guaranteed that Jews would never overcome their separateness, as long as they remained true to their religion. This made Judaism not only anti-social but anti-historical as well: Moses Mendelssohn said the advantage of the Jewish religion is that it does not teach universal truths, but gives only positive commandments for which no universal reason can be given. He declared therefore — and he is right, for if something is beyond my horizon and I can give no account of it to myself, then I have no power over it — that the Law keeps its validity for the Jew until Jehovah abolishes it expressly and unmistakably, as He revealed it on Sinai. Is this tenacity an honor? Does it make the nation, whose existence is due to it, an historical nation? It only keeps it alive against history.18 15 cf. A. Funkenstein, ‘The Political Theory of Jewish Emancipation from Mendelssohn to Herzl’, Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte (Supplement 3: Deutsche Aufklärung und Judenemanzipation) (Tel Aviv, 1980), pp. 15–23. 16 Bauer, ‘The Capacity’, pp. 136–7. 17 Bauer, The Jewish Question, pp. 16, 19, 21–2, 32–4. 18 Ibid., p. 14. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 469 The other element in Bauer’s conception of Judaism, derived from Mendelssohn through Hegel,19 viewed Judaism as a religion espousing the total submission of man to an arbitrary foreign power — God. Since the moral law governing Judaism was not based on the community’s own will but was imposed from above, Bauer argued, it could not create a real nation, but only a chimerical one. Members of that nation were each isolated from the other, their chimerical community consisting only in common submission to an alien force. As long as Jews insisted on maintaining their chimerical nationality, therefore, they could not become members in a real nation (such as a future deChristianized Germany). Christianity did not fare any better than Judaism in Bauer’s two essays. He accepted the traditional theological view of Christianity as the perfection of Judaism, and concluded from it that the ‘daughter’ suffered from all of her ‘mother’s’ ailments, in a perfected form. This, however, did give Christianity one advantage over Judaism: since it represented the highest possible stage in the development of religious consciousness, its dissolution would be the dissolution of religion itself. This would result in the inauguration of real human freedom in the realization that God is nothing but universal human consciousness. It would be easier for Christians, therefore, to become free through religious emancipation than it would be for Jews, ‘but with man nothing is impossible’.20 To sum up, Bauer’s claim was that Jewish survival was anti-historical, Jewish law was anti-social and Jews, therefore, could not become free and equal citizens in the modern state. Similarly, the Christian German state was also clinging to an antiquated, anti-social form of political organization based on power and privilege and could not, for its part, treat the Jews as anything but a foreign element in the body of the nation. Thus the question of Jewish emancipation was the wrong question; the real question was that of general human emancipation from religion. II Karl Marx: The Sociological Inclusion of Jewry Far from being uninterested in the issue of Jewish emancipation, Marx had already in 1842 announced his intention to address this question, and to do so in a manner ‘which, even if it does not finally settle the . . . question, will nevertheless make it take another course’.21 Marx’s antagonist at the time was to be Karl Heinrich Hermes, editor of the conservative Kölnische Zeitung, who, 19 Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy, pp. 99–100; N. Rotenstreich, ‘Hegel’s Image of Judaism’, Jewish Social Studies, XV (1953), pp. 33–52. 20 Bauer, ‘The Capacity’, p. 149; Z. Rosen, ‘The Anti-Jewish Opinions of Bruno Bauer (1838– 1843): Their Sources and Significance’, Zion, 33 (1968) (Hebrew), pp. 59–76. 21 K. Marx, ‘[Letter] to Dagobert Oppenheim’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (45 vols., New York, 1975), Vol. 1, p. 392. 470 Y. PELED in a series of articles in July and August of 1842, had defended the draft law of 1841 against its liberal critics.22 Marx never carried out his plan to engage Hermes in a debate on this issue, but in a letter to Arnold Ruge in March 1843 he related his agreement to draft ‘a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly’, at the request of ‘the chief of the Jewish community here’ (in Cologne).23 That letter also provided an early clue to Marx’s position on Jewish emancipation, and to his reaction to Bauer’s views on the subject: ‘However much I dislike the Jewish faith’, he stated in that letter, ‘Bauer’s view seems to me too abstract. The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational’.24 The key word in this comment is ‘abstract’, a term that can be understood in the present context in two different, though complementary, ways: 1. One-sided, that is, not taken in the fullness of its manifold relations. This refers to Bauer’s analysis of the Jewish question in purely theological terms, rather than looking at the Jews through the entirety of their social existence. 2. Non-political, that is, divorced from real social-historical conditions. This refers to what Marx later describes as Bauer’s confusion between political and human emancipation. Marx’s critique of Bauer, written in late 1843,25 is divided into two sections, each purportedly dealing with one of Bauer’s essays. The issues discussed in each section do not fully correspond to the actual content of each of Bauer’s articles, but there is a clear division of labour between the two parts of Marx’s own essay: the first part deals primarily with the general question of citizenship in the modern state; the second part deals with the capacity of the Jews to be citizens of such a state. 1. The First Part: From Political to Human Emancipation Marx’s essay begins with a concise and accurate restatement of the two major points made by Bauer: that the Germans, not being free themselves, cannot emancipate the Jews, and that the Jews, so long as they adhere to their religion, are incapable of being free. Marx then proceeds to summarize Bauer’s formulation of the Jewish question in one sentence: ‘We must emancipate ourselves 22 Carlebach, Karl Marx, pp. 82–5. 23 The Provincial Assembly (Landtag) of the Rhine Province debated the issue of Jewish emancipation in July 1843, and voted to recommend to the King of Prussia ‘to prepare for the removal of all existing restrictions which prevent equality between the Jew and his Christian subjects in civil and political matters’ (Carlebach, Karl Marx, p. 89). According to Silberner no trace has ever been found of a petition written by Marx (Silberner, ‘Was Marx an Anti-Semite?’, p. 19). 24 25 K. Marx, ‘[Letter] to Arnold Ruge’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 400. K. Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London, 1975), pp. 146–74. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 471 before we can emancipate others.’26 This one-sentence summary is perplexing, however, because it is either surprisingly one-sided or very unclearly stated. On a simple reading it would seem to capture only the first of Bauer’s two points, the one referring to the Germans. The other point, arguing that the Jews themselves could not become free as long as they held on to their religion, seems to have vanished from Marx’s view. Perhaps Marx intended his summary to capture both points, sacrificing clarity for stylistic elegance. I believe, however, that he left the second point out because, as I show later on, he was not planning to respond to it. The essence of Marx’s critique of Bauer’s first point — that the Christian state could not emancipate the Jews — was that Bauer demanded of the state (as of the Jews themselves) both too much and too little. This because Bauer was asking only ‘Who is to emancipate?’ and ‘Who is to be emancipated?’. He was not asking ‘What kind of emancipation’ was involved? This last question was the most crucial, however, since it pointed to the concrete social-historical conditions under which the question of emancipation presented itself in real life; and without considering these conditions the question, hence necessarily the answer as well, remained abstract. In trying to specify what kind of emancipation was actually on the agenda in Germany at the time, Marx made the distinction between political emancipation and general human (or social) emancipation. The former meant the granting of citizenship rights in the ‘truly political’, that is, democratic state. The latter referred to emancipation not in the political state but rather from that state and from its presuppositions in civil society. Bauer, according to Marx, had confused these two types of emancipation. Political emancipation did not require the abolition of religion any more than it required the abolition of the other conditions of civil society, such as private property. Quite the contrary. The modern political state liberated those conditions of civil society from political control, thus allowing them to flourish in the most unencumbered way. To demand the abolition of religion as a precondition for political emancipation was to completely misunderstand the nature of the political state and of the rights enjoyed by its citizens: 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?27 If, on the other hand, Bauer was talking about real human emancipation, then he should have not been satisfied with the abolition of religion only, he should have demanded the abolition of all the alienating conditions of civil society. Marx’s comments on this issue revealed that his answer to the question ‘What kind of emancipation?’ was quite different from Bauer’s. Marx saw the Juden26 Ibid., p. 147. 27 Ibid., p. 150. 472 Y. PELED frage as having to do with the citizenship status of individual Jews. His notion of ‘political emancipation’ was clearly a liberal notion, which corresponded to the position of the emancipation movement itself.28 He viewed political emancipation as a purely legal matter, of equalizing the formal rights of Jews to the rights of non-Jewish citizens. Bauer, on the other hand, had a collectivist conception of the Judenfrage, and meant by ‘emancipation’ the cultural integration of the Jews as a group into the national community.29 By historically concretizing Bauer’s argument through the twin categories of political and human emancipation, Marx was able to show that Bauer’s notion of emancipation was purely fantastic, fitting neither the reality of the actually existing political state (in the United States, for example), nor that of the future, truly free state. (Marx was still not using the term ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ society at this point, but this is obviously the type of state he had in mind.) The type of emancipation Bauer was talking about could exist only in his dream-like ‘critical state’.30 Marx’s overall polemical strategy becomes clear in the first part of his essay. There is no specifically Jewish question, he contends, there is only a general religious question which is but a reflection of a more fundamental secular question: This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces itself [emphasis added], [is] 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 . . .31 In the modern state, which has separated itself from religion, 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 . . . . It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness.32 28 J. Toury, ‘ ‘‘The Jewish Question’’: A Semantic Approach’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 11 (1966), pp. 100–5; cf. Avineri, ‘Marx’, p. 447. 29 Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy, pp. 80–1; Toury, ‘The Jewish Question’, pp. 97– 100; cf. Funkenstein, ‘Political Theory’, p. 25; Reinhard Rürup, ‘Jewish Emancipation and Bourgeois Society’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 14 (1969), pp. 73–4. 30 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Moscow, 1980), p. 130; see also p. 122. 31 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, pp. 154–5; see also p. 151. 32 Ibid., p. 155. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 473 Political emancipation entails the ‘decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen’.33 In the political state, therefore, privatized Judaism would be just as divisive as privatized Christianity: there would be no more a Jewish community than there would be a Christian community. There would only be individuals with their own private religious illusions, as evidenced by the ‘endless fragmentation of religion in North America’.34 Once Jewish exclusivity had been privatized in this way, its onus transferred from the Jewish collectivity to the individual Jew, then Bauer’s contention that Jews were not capable of acquiring equal rights in the political state could be shown to make no sense: . . . 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.35 The Jew’s mode of participation in the political state is thus no different than the Christian’s. If, in Bauer’s characterization, behind the Jewish citizen forever lurks the Jew, in Marx’s characterization behind the citoyen of the political state forever lurks the homme of civil society. Both Jewish and Christian members of civil society participate in the state only sophistically, by donning ‘political lion skins’ on their empirical, anti-social selves.36 This was precisely the meaning of citizenship in the modern state, and the Jew’s title to it was as good as the Christian’s. Marx’s line of argument clearly avoided Bauer’s specific criticism of Judaism. As we have seen, Bauer had argued that, as a religion of law and not of faith, Judaism was by its very nature a communal religion. It was not capable of being privatized, and Jews, therefore, were not capable of becoming, like Christians, free citizens in the modern state. Marx chose not to confront this argument directly but to try and work around it through a two-pronged strategy of avoidance. The first prong, developed in the first part of the essay, was to ignore what Bauer had to say about the specific character of Judaism altogether and to treat Judaism simply as ‘religion’, that is, as no different from Christianity. The second prong, to be developed in the second part of Marx’s essay, was to shift the grounds of the debate from Judaism as a religion to Jews as a social group. Marx’s overall purpose, however, remained the same in both parts of the essay: to demonstrate the absence of any difference between Jews and Christians which could justify denying Jews equal citizenship in the political state.37 33 Ibid., p. 155; last two emphases added. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., pp. 162–3. 36 Ibid., p. 154. 37 cf. Draper, Theory of Revolution, Vol. 1, Book 1, pp. 123–5. 474 Y. PELED 2. The Second Part: From the Sabbath Jew to the Everyday Jew According to Marx, ‘Bauer . . . 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 . . . in the enlightened form: which of them is more capable of emancipation.’38 Unlike Bauer, however, 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.39 The kind of emancipation Marx has in mind here is obviously human emancipation, because he has already shown that political emancipation does not require the abolition of Judaism. To understand ‘the special position of Judaism in the contemporary enslaved world’, he argues, we have to examine not Judaism as a religion but the historically concrete social and economic activities of the Jews themselves: 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.40 Marx’s argument is not, as frequently asserted, a simple restatement of Feuerbach’s ‘anthropological’ notion that religion is a reflection of human interests and human alienation taken in the abstract. His claim, rather, is that in order to understand the Jewish question, one has to analyse the social-historical role played by the Jews in European society through the ages: Jewry has maintained itself and developed through history, in and with history, and . . . this development is to be perceived not by the eye of the theologian, but only by the eye of the man of the world, because it is to be found not in religious theory, but only in commercial and industrial practice.41 38 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 168. 39 Ibid., p. 169. 40 Ibid. 41 Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, p. 136; cf. Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 171; K. Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (New York, 1964), pp. 352–3. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 475 For the theologian, ‘the world-historic significance of Jewry must cease the moment Christianity was born. Hence he had to repeat the old orthodox view that it has maintained itself in spite of history’. In reality, however, ‘secular Jewry and hence religious Jewry too, is being continually produced by the present-day civil life and finds its final development in the money system’.42 Historically, Marx is arguing, Jews had embodied the mercantile spirit in a Europe otherwise dominated by a natural economy. They had done this not because their religion was mercantile in nature, but because their actual living conditions led them to perform the limited market activities required by feudal society. This, not their arbitrary, revealed law, as claimed by Bauer, was the source of their social cohesion: ‘The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.’43 As a religion, Judaism reflected this particular social location by seeking to regulate the Jews’ daily activities, the fulfilment of their practical needs. It was thus an egotistical, practical, utilitarian religion.44 Having established the historicity of Judaism, in rebuttal of Bauer’s claim, Marx went on to make the point that would serve as the lynchpin of his argument in the second part of the essay: Jewish particularity, which had preserved the Jews historically, has disappeared in modern civil society. The specific Jewish occupations, hence the specific Jewish spirit as well, have been generalized throughout the Christian world. There is no longer any economic basis for distinguishing between Jew and Gentile, hence no room for legal discrimination between them. Indeed, the Judaization of society has enabled the Jews to emancipate themselves Jewishly, that is, practically; all that remains is to put the official stamp of legality on this situation, as was done already in the ‘truly political’ states. In making this argument, Marx brilliantly turned Bauer’s conception of the relations between Judaism and Christianity on its head. Christianity, he stated, was indeed the perfection of Judaism, for the practical completion of Judaism was impossible without it: 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 speciesties 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 42 Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, pp. 135–6; cf. Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 171. The last two quotations are taken from The Holy Family because Marx expresses himself much more simply and clearly in that work. The same ideas, however, occur also in On The Jewish Question, in the places indicated. 43 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 172. 44 cf. L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (Buffalo, 1989), pp. 112–19; 298–9. 476 Y. PELED are inimically opposed to one another. Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism.45 Christianity did not dissolve, then, as Bauer had anticipated, into universal human consciousness; it dissolved, rather, into the mercantile spirit of Judaism. Christians were, therefore, neither more nor less capable than Jews of becoming free. Both were entitled, as egoistic, alienated individuals, to the negative freedom of the political state; both would attain real, positive freedom only in a society liberated from ‘Judaism’, that is, from ‘the preconditions of huckstering’.46 In stressing the similarity between the spirit of Jewish law and the norms of contemporary civil society, Marx did not limit himself to the view of Judaism as a religion of practical needs, a view associated more with Feuerbach than with Bauer. He also pointed out that the alien, arbitrary essence attributed by Bauer to Jewish law, and its purported contempt for culture, theory and art, have come to characterize civil society itself: The view of nature attained under the dominion 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. 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 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.47 By thus focusing his analytic sights on the social–historical role played by the Jews in European society, Marx succeeded in turning around all of Bauer’s points, save one. He has shown that, far from being an ahistorical relic of the past, Jews were actually the carriers of the most dynamic spirit of the present, the spirit of practical rationality and private gain. Jewish law, depicted by Bauer as a law of practical need and as an arbitrary law of unfreedom, as well as a law meant to separate the Jews from other people, was but the religious manifestation of the actual norms governing civil society. The Jews’ relation to the state, both the political state and the future truly free state, was thus no different than the Christians’. 45 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 173. 46 Ibid., p. 170. 47 Ibid., p. 172; cf. Feuerbach, Christianity, pp. 112–19, 298–9. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 477 Only one of Bauer’s arguments was left standing, but it was, perhaps, his strongest: That as a religion of law, not of faith, Judaism was by its very nature public; it could not be reconstituted as a purely private creed without losing its essence. As such, Judaism failed the essential test that, even according to Marx, religion must pass in order to survive in modern society. The adherents of this religion were, therefore, inherently incapable of becoming citizens of the modern political state. In The Holy Family Marx admitted, ironically, that in his earlier essay, ‘the old Jewish question was not . . . brought into its ‘‘correct setting’’, the Jewish question was rather dealt with and solved in the setting which recent developments have given to old questions of the day, and as a result of which the latter have become ‘‘questions’’ of the present instead of ‘‘questions’’ of the past’.48 But the question of whether Judaism could survive the loss of its public, communal character was not, on Marx’s own argument, ‘a question of the past’. True, he expected that the Jews’ ‘religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society’, but that was about to happen only in a ‘society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering’.49 In the political state, meanwhile, Judaism, like all other religions, would continue to exist because of the deficiencies of civil society. Like Christianity, however, Judaism would have to exist in a private form, because the private sphere is where religion was relegated to in the political state. Whether or not Judaism could withstand that transformation was, therefore, a relevant question of the present.50 Unlike many other champions of Jewish emancipation, Marx could not take the easy way out of this dilemma by expecting Judaism to reform itself in order to become suitable for citizenship in the modern state.51 This would have meant conceding Bauer’s point, that as orthodox Jews, Jews could become citizens neither of the Christian state, nor of the political state. Because he was committed to advocating the emancipation of Jews as Jews Marx had no choice but to try and work his way round this particular element of Bauer’s argument, rather than confronting it in a direct critical assault. 3. An Anti-Semitic Document? The issue of Marx’s anti-semitism has coloured the way in which On the Jewish Question has been read by most analysts. Marx’s detractors have regarded the essay as an unabashedly anti-semitic document and ignored his clearly-stated arguments in favour of Jewish emancipation. Marx’s supporters have tended to 48 Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, p. 132. 49 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 170. 50 A substantive discussion of this intriguing question, from the perspective of one hundred and fifty years later, would be a worthwhile project. It would exceed, however, the confines of this paper. 51 cf. Funkenstein, ‘Political Theory’, p. 25. 478 Y. PELED shy away from the ‘Jewish’ elements of On the Jewish Question and have viewed it solely in the context of the evolution of Marx’s thought. In this section I will try to assess the validity of the charge that On the Jewish Question is an anti-semitic document. The accusations of anti-semitism centre on Marx’s identification, in the second part of the essay, of Judaism with the capitalist spirit (‘huckstering’) and on his conclusion that ‘The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism’.52 In view of the future development of German– Jewish relations, the last statement, repeated in different forms throughout the second part of the essay, can indeed make one shudder.53 But such an anachronistic reading would violate the most basic tenet of textual analysis. On a more rational level, it has repeatedly been argued by Marx’s critics that the identification of Jews and Judaism with capitalism lacks an empirical basis or is at least exaggerated to the point of injustice. Thus, according to Carlebach, the second part of Marx’s essay ‘must be regarded as an anti-semitic document. It is offensive in its language, untrue, and not only unsupported by any empirical reality but, if anything, is contrary to it.’54 Curiously, when these accusations are made they are rarely accompanied by supporting empirical data. Occasionally they are accompanied by data which tend to corroborate Marx’s view of the Jews as the early carriers of capitalism. Thus Wistrich waxes indignant at Marx’s alleged depiction of the Jews as ‘the bearers of a commercial ethos that had infiltrated the Christian bourgeois world and prevented the emancipation of humanity’.55 A few pages later, however, he points out that ‘around 1850 half of all the known entrepreneurs in Berlin were Jews’ and that ‘by the 1870s the Jews appeared as the bourgeois par excellence in a society that was still not fully embourgeoised’.56 A succinct description of the position of Jews in the German economy in the period of emancipation has been provided by David Sorkin: The Jews entered the bourgeoisie through commerce, credit, and, to a lesser extent, industry. These occupations were not identical with the itinerant peddling, used-clothes dealing, and small-scale usury, which had been a mark of the Jews’ indigence in the eighteenth century. Yet, ironically, those ignominious occupations placed the Jews in an auspicious position for the economic developments that followed . . . The Jews’ 52 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 174. The German word used by Marx, Schachern, usually translated as ‘haggling’ or ‘huckstering’, was derived from Yiddish (Pachter, ‘Marx’, p. 457). It originally came from the Hebrew word for ‘trade’, sachar. 53 See Carlebach, Karl Marx, p. 355, for a revealing anecdote. 54 Ibid., p. 357; see also pp. 180, 183; cf. Rotenstreich, ‘For and Against Emancipation’, pp. 24–7; Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy, pp. 98–100; Fackenheim, Encounters, p. 147; Kovel, ‘Marx’, p. 35. 55 Wistrich, Socialism, p. 29. 56 Ibid., p. 56. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 479 familiarity with trade and credit allowed them to ascend the economic ladder through the new commerce of retailing and wholesaling, import and export, based on the industrialization and accompanying improvement of transportation in the first half of the [nineteenth] century . . . German Jews for the most part participated not in industrialization itself, but in the ‘tertiary’ activities of trade and commerce that complemented it. In 1848–49, 44.7 percent of the Jews in Prussia were employed in commerce and credit, whereas in Württemberg the number reached 52.2 percent and in Bavaria 51.2 percent. By 1861 the percentage of Prussian Jewry engaged in commerce had risen to 58; only 2 percent of the Christian population was similarly employed.57 In view of these facts, it should not be too surprising that Judentum came to be synonymous with ‘commerce’, or that Marx should refer to the Jews as a nation of merchants and financiers.58 It may still be argued, however, that Marx was being anti-semitic in attributing this objective social-historical situation to some Jewish ‘essence’ or to the peculiar nature of Jewish religion.59 If true, this would mean that Marx was untrue to his own dictum: ‘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.’60 In other words, this would mean that Marx was guilty of the same theological fallacy of which he was accusing Bauer. Such an interpretation, however, would belie not only Marx’s own professed method of analysis but also the entire course of his intellectual development up to that point. It hardly needs mentioning that in the early 1840s Marx was working with a Feuerbachian materialist-humanist philosophical framework while, at the same time, trying to critically transcend that framework.61 In the Feuerbach-inspired Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law which preceded On the Jewish Question (but remained unpublished in his lifetime), Marx chastised Hegel for attributing to state functionaries an ‘essence’ beyond that of their social location and social activity: 57 D. Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry (New York, 1987), pp. 108–9; cf. D.S. Landes, ‘The Jewish Merchant: Typology and Stereotypology in Germany’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 19 (1974), pp. 11–23; M. Richarz, ‘Jewish Social Mobility in Germany during the Time of Emancipation (1790–1871)’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 20 (1975), pp. 69–77; Rürup, ‘Jewish Emancipation’, pp. 81–2. For comparable figures on the Jews of the Russian Empire see Y. Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (London, 1989), pp. 21–5 and the sources cited there. 58 cf. Landes, ‘The Jewish Merchant’; Draper, Theory of Revolution, Vol. 1, Book 2 (New York, 1977), pp. 591–608; R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1971), p. 112n; Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 170 (note). Identifying the Jews with the spirit of capitalism does not imply, of course, identifying all of them with great wealth, as some of Marx’s critics have alleged. 59 Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy, p. 99. 60 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 169. 61 Barbalet, Social Theory, Ch. 2. 480 Y. PELED He forgets that the essence of a ‘particular personality’ is not its beard, its blood, its abstract physical character, but its social quality, and that state functions, etc., are nothing but modes of being and modes of action of the social qualities of men. Clearly, therefore, insofar as individuals are bearers of state functions and powers, they must be regarded in the light of their social and not of their private qualities.62 It would hardly make sense to argue that what was true of Prussian state officials would be completely reversed with respect to Jewish merchants and financiers. As to Marx’s view of religion, in November 1842 he had written to Ruge that ‘religion itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself’.63 In the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, written and published at the same time as On the Jewish Question, Marx further elaborated that point: The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world . . . To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.64 Finally, in the first part of On the Jewish Question itself, Marx stated categorically: We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore we explain the religious limitations of the free citizens by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular 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 questions. We turn theological questions into secular ones.65 62 K. Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 21–2. 63 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 395, cited in McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, p. 10. 64 K. Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London, 1975), pp. 175–6. 65 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 151. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 481 There is, then, no textual basis whatever for interpreting Marx’s view of Judaism as anything but a reflection of the Jews’ concrete social-historical activity.66 His call for the abolition of Judaism is, therefore, nothing but a call for the abolition of all religion through the correction of the ‘secular defect’ of civil society. His naming of that defect ‘Judentum’, and the resultant play on words which some have seriously termed a tautology (‘the abolition of Judaism requires as its precondition the abolition of Judaism’), is a rhetorical device which, indeed, offends our post-Holocaust sensibilities. This rhetorical device, however, in no way affects the structure of Marx’s argument. The final count in the indictment of Marx for anti-semitism has to do with his use of language. Without any question, expressions such as ‘What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money’, or ‘We recognize in Judaism . . . a general anti-social element of the present time’,67 must be taken as highly offensive. But they, too, have to be seen in their proper context. Marx is famous for his jocular use of language, in public as well as in private, and many other groups and nationalities, as well as individuals, found themselves at the butt of his sharp tongue.68 As a rule, polite understatement was not the tenor of Young Hegelian discourse. Heinrich Heine, another converted Jew, who is not usually accused of anti-semitism,69 had this to say about French Jews: ‘For French Jews, as for all other Frenchmen, gold is the god of the day and industry is the dominant religion.’ This condition, moreover, was not limited to Jews and Frenchmen: ‘The Americans make a great deal of fuss about Christianity and are the keenest church goers’, but ‘worldly need is their real religion and money is their god, their only, almighty god’. Finally, in general, ‘money is the god of our time and Rothschild is his prophet’.70 Even more telling, perhaps, are the words of Moses Hess, Marx’s onetime friend and collaborator and a would-be proto-Zionist thinker. In his essay, ‘On the Essence of Money’, Hess had this to say about Jews, money and God: The Jews, whose world historical role in the social world has been to develop the predator out of mankind, have finally accomplished this role . . . equal predators now mutually suck blood from each other. In the Goldstate, the state of free competition, . . . [a]ll human animals exercise their common natural rights, their common qualities as predators, bloodsuckers, Jews, gold-wolves . . . 66 The oft-repeated observation that Marx was not versed in Jewish religion is therefore completely irrelevant as a critique of his position on the Jewish question. 67 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 170. 68 cf. Pachter, ‘Marx and the Jews’, pp. 453–6. In June 1844 Jenny Marx implored her husband: ‘Only don’t write with too much rancour and irritation’ (‘Jenny Marx to Karl Marx’, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 579). 69 See the comparison between Heine and Marx in Fackenheim, Encounters, pp. 148–9. 70 Cited in Carlebach, Karl Marx, pp. 79–80. 482 Y. PELED The discovery of gold . . . [is] attributed to the Phoenicians, the same people who invented the Jewish God.71 The use of this earthy rhetoric by the Young Hegelians may have been an indication of theoretical immaturity and lack of confidence, in view of their recent radical break with lofty Hegelian idealism. Marx’s language was already much more restrained in The Holy Family, and his rhetoric would become calmer as his analytic tools sharpened throughout his life (it is easy to forget that Marx was only twenty-five when he wrote On the Jewish Question). But even at this early stage Marx’s rhetoric should not obscure what he actually had to say, namely, that Jews were entitled to equal rights with all other citizens. 4. ‘On The Jewish Question’ and the Evolution of Marx’s Thought Marx’s thought was developing rapidly in the period 1843–5. In each of his works, from the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law to The German Ideology, he made marked advances towards the crystallization of his mature theoretical system.72 In this section I will discuss some of the major changes that occurred between the Critique and On the Jewish Question and argue that those changes were integrally related to Marx’s critique of Bauer’s position on Jewish emancipation. The most obvious difference between the Critique and On the Jewish Question is Marx’s disillusionment with political emancipation. In the earlier work he regarded the illusory universality of the existing state, resulting from the dichotomy between state and civil society, as the cause of human alienation: ‘The separation of civil society and political state necessarily appears as a separation of the political citizen, the citizen of the state, from civil society, from his own, actual, empirical reality’.73 He expected emancipation to result from the true universalization of the state through the institution of universal suffrage. The democratization of the state, he believed, would mean the politicization of civil society, that is its elevation to and reabsorption by the state, leading to the Aufhebung of both.74 In On the Jewish Question a completely new category — ‘human emancipation’ — is introduced, to be distinguished from ‘political emancipation’ which 71 Cited in M. Mishkinsky’s review of Shlomo Avineri’s book, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York, 1985), Polin, Vol. 3 (1988), p. 388. On the possible influence of Hess’s article on Marx and On the Jewish Question, see Avineri, Moses Hess, Ch. 5; Carlebach, Karl Marx, pp. 110–24; McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (New York, 1969), pp. 153–8. 72 Barbalet, Construction; R.N. Berki, ‘Through and Through Hegel: Marx’s Road to Communism’, Political Studies, 38 (1990), pp. 654–71. 73 74 Marx, ‘Critique’, pp. 77–8. Ibid., p. 121; S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 36–7; Barbalet, Construction, pp. 120–5; Draper, Theory of Revolution, Vol. 1, Book 1, pp. 77–93. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 483 is now seen as an important but only partial step towards overcoming alienation. The cause of alienation is no longer seen as fundamentally political, but as rooted, rather, in economic activity — ‘huckstering and its conditions’. Human liberation, therefore, could not be achieved by extending the suffrage only, but would require a more radical transformation: the abolition of the alienating conditions of civil society, economic and otherwise.75 Marx’s critique of Bauer in On the Jewish Question is, thus, at least partially a critique of his own earlier work as well. That critique has two salient points: the over-valuation of political emancipation and the neglect of what may be termed the activities of ‘everyday man’ as opposed to the ‘Sabbath man’. To the best of my knowledge there is no evidence to suggest that Bauer’s essays caused Marx to re-evaluate his early position.76 However, I believe a credible argument can be constructed to the effect that Marx’s encounter with Bauer’s views occasioned, or at least facilitated, his realization that political emancipation was only the first step on the road to human emancipation. As we have seen, Bauer had argued that even in contemporary France, where religious freedom had been decreed, Jews could not be free. This because religious oppression survived in the form of the constitutional designation of Christianity ‘religion of the majority of Frenchmen’. As evidence, Bauer cited the 1840 debate in the National Assembly on making Sunday a mandatory day of rest for children factory workers. If Sunday was to be a mandatory day of rest, it was argued, orthodox Jews would be faced with the choice of either working on Saturday in violation of religious law, or being idle two days a week. Therefore, ‘Freedom of religion . . . does not mean that all religions have equal rights or that different religions have equal status; it means the monopoly of one religion which is almost the only one of all citizens’.77 Marx responded to this by arguing that France was a constitutional monarchy, hence not a truly political state. In the North American states where church and state had been completely separated, however, the Jewish question lost its theological significance and became a purely secular question.78 But a secular, political Jewish question was still a religious question at the level of civil society. Marx had to consider, therefore, what is the relation between complete political emancipation and religion? If we find in the country which has attained full political emancipation, that religion not only continues to exist but is fresh and vigorous, this is proof that the existence of religion is not at all opposed to the perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence 75 cf. Labica, Marxism, Ch. 11. 76 Zvi Rosen, who studied Bauer’s influence on Marx (Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx: The Influence of Bruno Bauer on Marx’s Thought (The Hague, 1977)), has not alluded to this point. 77 Bauer, Jewish Question, p. 70. 78 Marx, ‘Jewish Question’, p. 150. 484 Y. PELED of a defect, the source of this defect must be sought in the nature of the state itself.79 As posed by Bauer, the existence of religion, in the form of religious privileges, contaminated the constitutional state and had to be done away with before that state could be really free. Jewish emancipation, therefore, was an empty slogan as long as religion itself continued to exist. Marx’s conclusion was analytically more profound, as well as being favourable to Jewish emancipation. If in the truly political state people still needed religion, as they did in the United States, the fault could not lie with religion; it had to lie with the state itself. Since that state had already attained its ‘completely developed form’,80 political emancipation was evidently deficient: The Jews (like the Christians) are fully politically emancipated in various states. Both Jews and Christians are far from being humanly emancipated. Hence there must be a difference between political and human emancipation.81 The efforts at human emancipation had to shift now to civil society. These efforts, however, required as their precondition the separation of church and state, the relegation of religion to the private sphere, hence, necessarily, the emancipation of the Jews as well. Conclusion Bauer’s position on the Jewish question was a radical version of the claim that Jewish emancipation required Jewish assimilation as its precondition. For him assimilation meant not only acculturation to the norms of German bourgeois society, but the renunciation of Jewish religion as well. Until German Jews were ready to renounce their religion as an eternally binding sovereign system of law, and until the German state was ready to renounce its own Christian character, the idea of Jewish emancipation would remain a chimera. Only the struggle against religion in general held a promise of human liberation. Marx viewed Bauer’s position as ‘abstract’, that is, as both ahistorical and one-sided. He himself had looked at the actual states where political emancipation had been accomplished or was well on its way, and discovered the partial nature of that emancipation. Under the veil of the universality of the state, the conflict of particular interests continued to rage in civil society. The privatization of religion did not result, as Bauer had expected, in its elimination; it only enhanced its vigour. The continued flourishing of religion in the truly political states proved, according to Marx, the vacuity of Bauer’s demand that the Jews renounce their religion as a precondition for emancipation. Political emancipation entailed, 79 Ibid., p. 151. 80 Ibid., p. 150. 81 Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, p. 137. BAUER AND MARX ON JEWISH EMANCIPATION 485 indeed, the liberation of the state from religion (and vice versa), but not of the individual citizen. On the contrary, one of the inalienable rights guaranteed the citizens of the political state was the freedom of religious observance. If freedom of religion was an important achievement of political emancipation, the continued need for religion pointed to its shortcomings. That people required religious illusions to sustain them in the political state, showed that the universality of that state was illusory. Emancipation from religion could come only with the overcoming of alienation which, Marx now believed, would require the transformation of civil society, the abolition of ‘huckstering and its conditions’. Throughout his discussion of Jewish emancipation Marx sought to emphasize the similarity between Jews and Gentiles, as against Bauer who had stressed their differences. He focused his analysis on the Jews’ economic activities which, he argued, had already assimilated completely into the mainstream Christian economy (or actually the latter had assimilated into the former). He tried to stay away from a debate about Jewish religion, arguing that it was irrelevant for political emancipation and would be done away with, like all religion, with human emancipation. It was Marx’s reluctance to engage in a theological discussion of Judaism, and his concentration on the role played by Jews in civil society, that gave rise to the two interpretative traditions I criticize in this paper. His advocacy of Jewish emancipation did not take the conventional form of apologizing for Jewish religion. It was couched, rather, in the idiom of his general social analysis. Furthermore, Marx identified the survival of Judaism, as of all religion, with social conditions he had come to regard as transient. This, together with the insulting language he used when discussing the Jews, could easily mask the real intention of his essay, which was to argue for Jewish emancipation in Prussia. Similarly, Marx’s insistence on translating the Jewish question into the general secular issues of the day could create the impression that he was not really interested in the Jewish question per se. As I have shown, however, On the Jewish Question was not only motivated, but was guided throughout, by Marx’s concern to make the case for Jewish emancipation in as forceful a manner as possible. Marx’s approach to the question failed to counter Bauer’s most powerful argument, namely, that as a system of law Judaism was incapable of being privatized, hence of existing in a modern political state. It accomplished something much more significant, however: it laid the foundation for a historical-materialist analysis of Jewish history and of the problem of alienation in general. As he had promised Oppenheim in 1842, Marx indeed made the debate over the Jewish question ‘take another course’. Yoav Peled TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY