On The Jewish Question - Interpretations

Interpretations

Hyam Maccoby has argued that "On the Jewish Question" is an example of what he considers to be Marx's "early anti-Semitism." According to Maccoby, Marx argues in the essay that the modern commercialized world is the triumph of Judaism, a pseudo-religion whose god is money. Maccoby has suggested that Marx was embarrassed by his Jewish background and used the Jews as a "yardstick of evil." Maccoby writes that in later years, Marx limited what he considers to be antipathy towards Jews to private letters and conversations because of strong public identification with anti-Semitism by his political enemies both on the left (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin) and on the right (aristocracy and the Church). Bernard Lewis has described "On the Jewish Question" as "one of the classics of anti-Semitic propaganda." According to several scholars, for Marx Jews were the embodiment of capitalism and the representation of all its evils.

Abram Leon in his book The Jewish Question (published 1946) examines Jewish history from a materialist outlook. According to Leon, Marx's essay states that one “must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary: the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the 'real Jew', that is to say, by the Jew in his economic and social role”.

Isaac Deutscher (1959) compares Marx with Elisha ben Abuyah, Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud, all of whom he thinks of as heretics who transcend Jewry, and yet still belong to a Jewish tradition. According to Deutscher, Marx's “idea of socialism and of the classless and stateless society” expressed in the essay is as universal as Spinoza's ethics and God.

Shlomo Avineri (1964), while regarding Marx' antisemitism as a well-known fact, points out that Marx's philosophical criticism of Judaism has often overshadowed his forceful support for Jewish emancipation as an immediate political goal. Avineri notes that in Bauer's debates with a number of Jewish contemporary polemicists, Marx entirely endorsed the views of the Jewish writers against Bauer. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, written March 1843, Marx writes that he intended to support a petition of the Jews to the Provincial Assembly. He explains that with the fact that while he dislikes Judaism as a religion, he also remains unconvinced by Bauer's view (that the Jews shouldn't be emancipated before they abandon Judaism, see above). However, he also clarifies in the letter that his support of the petition is merely tactical, to further his efforts at weakening the Christian state.

In his book For Marx (1965), Louis Althusser claims that “in On the Jewish Question, Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, etc., and even usually in The Holy Family (...) Marx was merely applying the theory of alienation, that is, Feuerbach’s theory of ‘human nature’, to politics and the concrete activity of man, before extending it (in large part) to political economy in the Manuscripts”. He opposes a tendency according to which “Capital is no longer read as On the Jewish Question, On the Jewish Question is read as Capital”. For Althusser, the essay “is a profoundly ‘ideological’ text”, “committed to the struggle for Communism”, but without being Marxist; “so it cannot, theoretically, be identified with the later texts which were to define historical materialism”.

David McLellan, however, has argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be understood in terms of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany. According to McLellan, Marx used the word "Judentum" in its colloquial sense of "commerce" to argue that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx's essay, McLellan concludes, should be read as "an extended pun at Bauer’s expense."

Hal Draper (1977) observed that the language of Part II of On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in Jewish socialist Moses Hess' essay On the Money System.

Stephen Greenblatt (1978) compares the essay with Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta. According to Greenblatt, “oth writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against that activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience”. Greenblatt is attributing Marx a “sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background”.

Yoav Peled (1992) sees Marx "shifting the debate over Jewish emancipation from the plane of theology ... to the plane of sociology", thereby circumventing one of Bauer's main arguments. In Peled's view, "this was less than a satisfactory response to Bauer, but it enabled Marx to present a powerful case for emancipation while, at the same time, launching his critique of economic alienation". He concludes that "the philosophical advances made by Marx in On the Jewish Question were necessitated by, and integrally related to, his commitment to Jewish emancipation".

Others argue that On the Jewish Question is primarily a critique of liberal rights, rather than a criticism of Judaism, and that apparently anti-Semitic passages such as "Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist." should be read in that context.

For sociologist Robert Fine (2006) Bauer's essay “echoed the generally prejudicial representation of the Jew as ‘merchant’ and ‘moneyman’”, whereas “Marx’s aim was to defend the right of Jews to full civil and political emancipation (that is, to equal civil and political rights) alongside all other German citizens”. Fine argues that “(t)he line of attack Marx adopts is not to contrast Bauer’s crude stereotype of the Jews to the actual situation of Jews in Germany”, but “to reveal that Bauer has no inkling of the nature of modern democracy”.

While sociologist Larry Ray in his reply (2006) acknowledges Fine's reading of the essay as an ironic defence of Jewish emancipation, he points out the polyvalence of Marx's language. Ray translates a sentence of Zur Judenfrage and interprets it as an assimilationist position “in which there is no room within emancipated humanity for Jews as a separate ethnic or cultural identity”, and which advocates “a society where both cultural as well as economic difference is eliminated”. Here Ray sees Marx in a “strand of left thinking that has been unable to address forms of oppression not directly linked to class”.

The political-scientist Professor Iain Hamphsher-Monk wrote in his textbook: "This work has been cited as evidence for Marx's supposed anti-semitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an interpretation." Also, McLellan and Francis Wheen argue readers should interpret On the Jewish Question in the deeper context of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer, author of The Jewish Question, about Jewish emancipation in Germany. Francis Wheen says: "Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians". Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, regards application of the term "antisemitism" to Marx as an anachronism—because when Marx wrote On the Jewish Question, virtually all major philosophers had expressed similar views, and the word "antisemitism" had not yet been coined, let alone developed a racial component, and little awareness existed of the depths of European prejudice against Jews. Marx thus simply expressed the commonplace thinking of his era, according to Sacks.