Excerpts from:
ON THE JEWISH QUESTION
by Karl Marx (Marx was Jewish -- i.e., both his parents were Jewish
and his grandfather was an eminent rabbi)
Excerpted from: Karl Marx. Frederick Engels. Collected Works, Volume
3, International Publishers, New York, 1975, p. 146-174 [Marx originally
wrote this in 1843, and it was first published in the
Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbucher in 1844]
[The emphases in the text below are in the original article].
"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 the right
to demand that someone else should renounce his religion? ...
For us, the question of the Jew's capacity for emancipation becomes
the question: What particular SOCIAL element has to be overcome 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 [Bruno]
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 --
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 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 ...
Indeed, in North America the practical domination of Judaism over the
Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and moral 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 ..
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 event he lavatory an object
of divine law. PRACTICAL NEED, EGOISM, is the principle of CIVIL SOCIETY,
and as such appears in a 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 ...
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 surround it ...
Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw 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 civl
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, Christianity 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 nature.
Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make alienated
man an alienated nature into ALIENABLE, vendible objects subjected to
the slavery of egoistic need and to trading.
Selling is the practical aspect of alienation. Just as man, as long
as he is on 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, an 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 worldly 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 ...
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, and 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."
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