    Written: Autumn 1843;

    First Published: February, 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher;

    Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, February 2005.

    See Citizen in the Encyclopedia of Marxism, for an explanation of the
    various words for “citizen.”

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    I

    Bruno Bauer,

    The Jewish Question,

    Braunschweig, 1843

    The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they
    desire? Civic, political emancipation.

    Bruno Bauer replies to them: No one in Germany is politically
    emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jews
    are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews.
    As Germans, you ought to work for the political emancipation of Germany,
    and as human beings, for the emancipation of mankind, and you should
    feel the particular kind of your oppression and your shame not as an
    exception to the rule, but on the contrary as a confirmation of the
    rule.

    Or do the Jews demand the same status as Christian subjects of the
    state? In that case, they recognize that the Christian state is
    justified and they recognize, too, the regime of general oppression. Why
    should they disapprove of their special yoke if they approve of the
    general yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation of
    the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?

    The Christian state knows only privileges. In this state, the Jew has
    the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which the
    Christians do not have. Why should he want rights which he does not
    have, but which the Christians enjoy?

    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,
    then, the right to demand that someone else should renounce his
    religion?

    By its very nature, the Christian state incapable of emancipating the
    Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated.
    So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as
    incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.

    The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way
    characteristic of the Christian state – that is, by granting privileges,
    by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but
    making him feel the pressure of all the other separate spheres of
    society, and feel it all the more intensely because he is in religious
    opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew, too, can behave
    towards the state only in a Jewish way – that is, by treating it as
    something alien to him, by counterposing his imaginary nationality to
    the real nationality, by counterposing his illusory law to the real law,
    by deeming himself justified in separating himself from mankind, by
    abstaining on principle from taking part in the historical movement, by
    putting his trust in a future which has nothing in common with the
    future of mankind in general, and by seeing himself as a member of the
    Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people.

    On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account of your
    religion? It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? In
    Germany, there are no citizens. As human beings? But you are no more
    human beings than those to whom you appeal.

    Bauer has posed the question of Jewish emancipation in a new form, after
    giving a critical analysis of the previous formulations and solutions of
    the question. What, he asks, is the nature of the Jew who is to be
    emancipated and of the Christian state that is to emancipate him? He
    replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, he analyzes the religious
    opposition between Judaism and Christianity, he elucidates the essence
    of the Christian state – and he does all this audaciously, trenchantly,
    wittily, and with profundity, in a style of writing what is as precise
    as it is pithy and vigorous.

    How, then, does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? The
    formulation of a question is its solution. The critique of the Jewish
    question is the answer to the Jewish question. The summary, therefore,
    is as follows:

    We must emancipated ourselves before we can emancipate others.

    The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian
    is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it
    impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing
    religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective
    religions are no more than different stages in the development of the
    human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is
    the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no
    longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation.
    Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science
    are resolved by science itself.

    The German Jew, in particular, is confronted by the general absence of
    political emancipation and the strongly marked Christian character of
    the state. In Bauer’s conception, however, the Jewish question has a
    universal significance, independent of specifically German conditions.
    It is the question of the relation of religion to the state, of the
    contradiction between religious constraint and political emancipation.
    Emancipation from religion is laid down as a condition, both to the Jew
    who wants to be emancipated politically, and to the state which is to
    effect emancipation and is itself to be emancipated.

    “Very well,” it is said, and the Jew himself says it, “the Jew is to
    become emancipated not as a Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he
    possesses such an excellent, universally human principle of morality; on
    the contrary, the Jew will retreat behind the citizen and be a citizen,
    although he is a Jew and is to remain a Jew. That is to say, he is and
    remains a Jew, although he is a citizen and lives in universally human
    conditions: his Jewish and restricted nature triumphs always in the end
    over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains in spite
    of being outstripped by general principles. But if it remains, then, on
    the contrary, it outstrips everything else.”

    “Only sophistically, only apparently, would the Jew be able to remain a
    Jew in the life of the state. Hence, if he wanted to remain a Jew, the
    mere appearance would become the essential and would triumph; that is to
    say, his life in the state would be only a semblance or only a temporary
    exception to the essential and the rule.” (“The Capacity of Present-Day
    Jews and Christians to Become Free,” Einundzwanzig Bogen, pp. 57)

    Let us hear, on the other hand, how Bauer presents the task of the
    state.

    “France,” he says, “has recently shown us” (Proceedings of the Chamber
    of Deputies, December 26, 1840) “in the connection with the Jewish
    question – just as it has continually done in all other political
    questions – the spectacle of a life which is free, but which revokes its
    freedom by law, hence declaring it to be an appearance, and on the other
    hand contradicting its free laws by its action.” (The Jewish Question,
    p. 64)

    “In France, universal freedom is not yet the law, the Jewish question
    too has not yet been solved, because legal freedom – the fact that all
    citizens are equal – is restricted in actual life, which is still
    dominated and divided by religious privileges, and this lack of freedom
    in actual life reacts on law and compels the latter to sanction the
    division of the citizens, who as such are free, into oppressed and
    oppressors.” (p. 65)

    When, therefore, would the Jewish question be solved for France?

    “The Jew, for example, would have ceased to be a Jew if he did not allow
    himself to be prevented by his laws from fulfilling his duty to the
    state and his fellow citizens, that is, for example, if on the Sabbath
    he attended the Chamber of Deputies and took part in the official
    proceedings. Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly
    of a privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if
    some or many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed
    themselves bound to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be
    left to them as a purely private matter.” (p. 65)

    “There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged
    religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer
    exist.” (p. 66)

    “Just as M. Martin du Nord saw the proposal to omit mention of Sunday in
    the law as a motion to declare that Christianity has ceased to exist,
    with equal reason (and this reason is very well founded) the declaration
    that the law of the Sabbath is no longer binding on the Jew would be a
    proclamation abolishing Judaism.” (p. 71)

    Bauer, therefore, demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should renounce
    Judaism, and that mankind in general should renounce religion, in order
    to achieve civic emancipation. On the other hand, he quite consistently
    regards the political abolition of religion as the abolition of religion
    as such. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true, real
    state.

    “Of course, the religious notion affords security to the state. But to
    what state? To what kind of state?” (p. 97)

    At this point, the one-sided formulation of the Jewish question becomes
    evident.

    It was by no means sufficient to investigate: Who is to emancipate? Who
    is to be emancipated? Criticism had to investigate a third point. It had
    to inquire: What kind of emancipation is in question? What conditions
    follow from the very nature of the emancipation that is demanded? Only
    the criticism of political emancipation itself would have been the
    conclusive criticism of the Jewish question and its real merging in the
    “general question of time.”

    Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level, he becomes
    entangled in contradictions. He puts forward conditions which are not
    based on the nature of political emancipation itself. He raises
    questions which are not part of his problem, and he solves problems
    which leave this question unanswered. When Bauer says of the opponents
    of Jewish emancipation: “Their error was only that they assumed the
    Christian state to be the only true one and did not subject it to the
    same criticism that they applied to Judaism” (op. cit., p. 3), we find
    that his error lies in the fact that he subjects to criticism only the
    “Christian state,” not the “state as such", that he does not investigate
    the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation and,
    therefore, puts forward conditions which can be explained only by
    uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human
    emancipation. 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?

    The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the state in
    which the Jew lives. In Germany, where there is no political state, no
    state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological one. The Jew
    finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which recognizes
    Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex professo.
    Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged criticism –
    criticism of Christian theology and of Jewish theology. Hence, we
    continue to operate in the sphere of theology, however much we may
    operate critically within it.

    In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of
    constitutionalism, the question of the incompleteness of political
    emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion is retained here,
    although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, that of a
    religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to the state retains
    the semblance of a religious, theological opposition.

    Only in the North American states – at least, in some of them – does the
    Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a really
    secular question. Only where the political state exists in its
    completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of the
    religious man in general, to the political state, and therefore the
    relation of religion to the state, show itself in its specific
    character, in its purity. The criticism of this relation ceases to be
    theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to adopt a theological
    attitude toward religion, as soon as it behaves towards religion as a
    state – i.e., politically. Criticism, then, becomes criticism of the
    political state. At this point, where the question ceases to be
    theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to be critical.

    “In the United States there is neither a state religion nor a religion
    declared to be that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult
    over another. The state stands aloof from all cults.” (Marie ou
    l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis, etc., by G. de Beaumont, Paris, 1835, p.
    214)

    Indeed, there are some North American states where “the constitution
    does not impose any religious belief or religious practice as a
    condition of political rights.” (op. cit., p. 225)

    Nevertheless, “in the United States people do not believe that a man
    without religion could be an honest man.” (op. cit., p. 224)

    Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity,
    as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure
    us. The North American states, however, serve us only as an example. The
    question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to
    religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political
    emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and
    vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not
    in contradiction to the perfection of the state. Since, however, the
    existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this
    defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. 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 citizen 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 ones. History has long
    enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition in
    history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to
    religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political
    emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness
    of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular
    form, apart from its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction
    between the state and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is
    given by us a human form as the contradiction between the state and
    particular secular elements; the contradiction between the state and
    religion in general as the contradiction between the state and its
    presuppositions in general.

    The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in general,
    of religious man, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from
    Christianity, from religion in general. In its own form, in the manner
    characteristic of its nature, the state as a state emancipates itself
    from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion – that is
    to say, by the state as a state not professing any religion, but, on the
    contrary, asserting itself as a state. The political emancipation from
    religion is not a religious emancipation that has been carried through
    to completion and is free from contradiction, because political
    emancipation is not a form of human emancipation which has been carried
    through to completion and is free from contradiction.

    The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact
    that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being
    really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state
    [pun on word Freistaat, which also means republic] without man being a
    free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he lays down the
    following condition for political emancipation:

    “Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a
    privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some or
    many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed
    themselves bound to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be
    left to them as a purely private matter.” [The Jewish Question, p. 65]

    It is possible, therefore, for the state to have emancipated itself from
    religion even if the overwhelming majority is still religious. And the
    overwhelming majority does not cease to be religious through being
    religious in private.

    But, the attitude of the state, and of the republic [free state] in
    particular, to religion is, after all, only the attitude to religion of
    the men who compose the state. It follows from this that man frees
    himself through the medium of the state, that he frees himself
    politically from a limitation when, in contradiction with himself, he
    raises himself above this limitation in an abstract, limited, and
    partial way. It follows further that, by freeing himself politically,
    man frees himself in a roundabout way, through an intermediary, although
    an essential intermediary. It follows, finally, that man, even if he
    proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state – that is,
    if he proclaims the state to be atheist – still remains in the grip of
    religion, precisely because he acknowledges himself only by a roundabout
    route, only through an intermediary. Religion is precisely the
    recognition of man in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. The
    state is the intermediary between man and man’s freedom. Just as Christ
    is the intermediary to whom man transfers the burden of all his
    divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the intermediary
    to whom man transfers all his non-divinity and all his human constraint.

    The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects and
    all the advantages of political elevation in general. The state as a
    state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares by political
    means that private property is abolished as soon as the property
    qualification for the right to elect or be elected is abolished, as has
    occurred in many states of North America. Hamilton quite correctly
    interprets this fact from a political point of view as meaning:

    “the masses have won a victory over the property owners and financial
    wealth.” [Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2 vols,
    Edinburgh, 1833, p. 146.]

    Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has
    become the legislator for the property owner? The property qualification
    for the suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to
    private property.

    Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails
    to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state
    abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank,
    education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank,
    education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it
    proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the
    nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats
    all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the
    state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education,
    occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as
    education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special
    nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only
    exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a
    political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these
    elements of its being. Hegel, therefore, defines the relation of the
    political state to religion quite correctly when he says:

    “In order [...] that the state should come into existence as the
    self-knowing, moral reality of the mind, its distraction from the form
    of authority and faith is essential. But this distinction emerges only
    insofar as the ecclesiastical aspect arrives at a separation within
    itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the particular
    churches, has achieved and brought into existence universality of
    thought, which is the principle of its form” (Hegel’s Philosophy of
    Right, 1st edition, p. 346).

    Of course! Only in this way, above the particular elements, does the
    state constitute itself as universality.

    The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as
    opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic
    life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state,
    but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has
    attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in
    consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a
    heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which
    he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in
    which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means,
    degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien
    powers. The relation of the political state to civil society is just as
    spiritual as the relations of heaven to earth. The political state
    stands in the same opposition to civil society, and it prevails over the
    latter in the same way as religion prevails over the narrowness of the
    secular world – i.e., by likewise having always to acknowledge it, to
    restore it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. In his most
    immediate reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here, where
    he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded by others,
    he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where
    man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an
    illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and
    endowed with an unreal universality.

    Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in conflict
    with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community.
    This conflict reduces itself to the secular division between the
    political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois [i.e., as a
    member of civil society, “bourgeois society” in German], “life in the
    state” is “only a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential
    and the rule.” Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only
    sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen
    [‘citizen’ in French, i.e., the participant in political life] only
    sophistically remains a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not
    personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The
    difference between the merchant and the citizen [Staatsbürger], between
    the day-laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen,
    between the merchant and the citizen, between the living individual and
    the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious man finds himself
    with the political man is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois
    finds himself with the citoyen, and the member of civil society with his
    political lion’s skin.

    This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces
    itself, 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 – these secular antitheses Bauer
    allows to persist, whereas he conducts a polemic against their religious
    expression.

    “It is precisely the basis of civil society, the need that ensures the
    continuance of this society and guarantees its necessity, which exposes
    its existence to continual dangers, maintains in it an element of
    uncertainty, and produces that continually changing mixture of poverty
    and riches, of distress and prosperity, and brings about change in
    general.” (p. 8)

    Compare the whole section: “Civil Society” (pp. 8-9), which has been
    drawn up along the basic lines of Hegel’s philosophy of law. Civil
    society, in its opposition to the political state, is recognized as
    necessary, because the political state is recognized as necessary.

    Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True, it is
    not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final
    form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order. It
    goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical
    emancipation.

    Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from
    the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer
    the spirit of the state, in which man behaves – although in a limited
    way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere – as a
    species-being, in community with other men. 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 – as it was originally. It is
    only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and
    arbitrariness. The endless fragmentation of religion in North America,
    for example, gives it even externally the form of a purely individual
    affair. It has been thrust among the multitude of private interests and
    ejected from the community as such. But one should be under no illusion
    about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the human
    being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion
    from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political
    emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither
    abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so.

    The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen,
    religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed against
    citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it is
    political emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating
    oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as
    such is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation
    is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state
    can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of
    religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the
    abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to
    progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life,
    the guillotine. At times of special self-confidence, political life
    seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society and the elements
    composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real
    species-life of man, devoid of contradictions. But, it can achieve this
    only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of
    life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore,
    the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of
    religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as
    war ends with peace.

    Indeed, the perfect Christian state is not the so-called Christian state
    – which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the state religion,
    and, therefore, adopts an exclusive attitude towards other religions. On
    the contrary, the perfect Christian state is the atheistic state, the
    democratic state, the state which relegates religion to a place among
    the other elements of civil society. The state which is still
    theological, which still officially professes Christianity as its creed,
    which still does not dare to proclaim itself as a state, has, in its
    reality as a state, not yet succeeded in expressing the human basis – of
    which Christianity is the high-flown expression – in a secular, human
    form. The so-called Christian state is simply nothing more than a
    non-state, since it is not Christianity as a religion, but only the
    human background of the Christian religion, which can find its
    expression in actual human creations.

    The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state,
    but by no means the political realization of Christianity. The state
    which still professes Christianity in the form of religion, does not yet
    profess it in the form appropriate to the state, for it still has a
    religious attitude towards religion – that is to say, it is not the true
    implementation of the human basis of religion, because it still relies
    on the unreal, imaginary form of this human core. The so-called
    Christian state is the imperfect state, and the Christian religion is
    regarded by it as the supplementation and sanctification of its
    imperfection. For the Christian state, therefore, religion necessarily
    becomes a means; hence, it is a hypocritical state. It makes a great
    difference whether the complete state, because of the defect inherent in
    the general nature of the state, counts religion among its
    presuppositions, or whether the incomplete state, because of the defect
    inherent in its particular existence as a defective state, declares that
    religion is its basis. In the latter case, religion becomes imperfect
    politics. In the former case, the imperfection even of consummate
    politics becomes evident in religion. The so-called Christian state
    needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The
    democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its
    political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because
    in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The
    so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude
    to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms
    of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere
    semblance.

    In order to make this contradiction clearer, let us consider Bauer’s
    projection of the Christian state, a projection based on his observation
    of the Christian-German state.

    “Recently,” says Bauer, “in order to prove the impossibility or
    non-existence of a Christian state, reference has frequently been made
    to those sayings in the Gospel with which the [present-day] state not
    only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it does not want to
    dissolve itself completely [as a state].” “But the matter cannot be
    disposed of so easily. What do these Gospel sayings demand? Supernatural
    renunciation of self, submission to the authority of revelation, a
    turning-away from the state, the abolition of secular conditions. Well,
    the Christian state demands and accomplishes all that. It has
    assimilated the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not reproduce this
    spirit in the same terms as the Gospel, that occurs only because it
    expresses this spirit in political forms, i.e., in forms which, it is
    true, are taken from the political system in this world, but which in
    the religious rebirth that they have to undergo become degraded to a
    mere semblance. This is a turning-away from the state while making use
    of political forms for its realization.” (p. 55)

    Bauer then explains that the people of a Christian state is only a
    non-people, no longer having a will of its own, but whose true existence
    lies in the leader to whom it is subjected, although this leader by his
    origin and nature is alien to it – i.e., given by God and imposed on the
    people without any co-operation on its part. Bauer declares that the
    laws of such a people are not its own creation, but are actual
    revelations, that its supreme chief needs privileged intermediaries with
    the people in the strict sense, with the masses, and that the masses
    themselves are divided into a multitude of particular groupings which
    are formed and determined by chance, which are differentiated by their
    interests, their particular passions and prejudices, and obtain
    permission as a privilege, to isolate themselves from one another, etc.
    (p. 56)

    However, Bauer himself says:

    “Politics, if it is to be nothing but religion, ought not to be
    politics, just as the cleaning of saucepans, if it is to be accepted as
    a religious matter, ought not to be regarded as a matter of domestic
    economy.” (p. 108)

    In the Christian-German state, however, religion is an “economic matter”
    just as “economic matters” belong to the sphere of religion. The
    domination of religion in the Christian-German state is the religion of
    domination.

    The separation of the “spirit of the Gospel” from the “letter of the
    Gospel” is an irreligious act. A state which makes the Gospel speak in
    the language of politics – that is, in another language than that of the
    Holy Ghost – commits sacrilege, if not in human eyes, then in the eyes
    of its own religion. The state which acknowledges Christianity as its
    supreme criterion, and the Bible as its Charter, must be confronted with
    the words of Holy Scripture, for every word of Scripture is holy. This
    state, as well as the human rubbish on which it is based, is caught in a
    painful contradiction that is insoluble from the standpoint of religious
    consciousness when it is referred to those sayings of the Gospel with
    which it “not only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it
    does not want to dissolve itself completely as a state.” And why does it
    not want to dissolve itself completely? The state itself cannot give an
    answer either to itself or to others. In its own consciousness, the
    official Christian state is an imperative, the realization of which is
    unattainable, the state can assert the reality of its existence only by
    lying to itself, and therefore always remains in its own eyes an object
    of doubt, an unreliable, problematic object. Criticism is, therefore,
    fully justified in forcing the state that relies on the Bible into a
    mental derangement in which it no longer knows whether it is an illusion
    or a reality, and in which the infamy of its secular aims, for which
    religion serves as a cloak, comes into insoluble conflict with the
    sincerity of its religious consciousness, for which religion appears as
    the aim of the world. This state can only save itself from its inner
    torment if it becomes the police agent of the Catholic Church. In
    relation to the church, which declares the secular power to be its
    servant, the state is powerless, the secular power which claims to be
    the rule of the religious spirit is powerless.

    It is, indeed, estrangement which matters in the so-called Christian
    state, but not man. The only man who counts, the king, is a being
    specifically different from other men, and is, moreover, a religious
    being, directly linked with heaven, with God. The relationships which
    prevail here are still relationships dependent of faith. The religious
    spirit, therefore, is still not really secularized.

    But, furthermore, the religious spirit cannot be really secularized, for
    what is it in itself but the non-secular form of a stage in the
    development of the human mind? The religious spirit can only be
    secularized insofar as the stage of development of the human mind of
    which it is the religious expression makes its appearance and becomes
    constituted in its secular form. This takes place in the democratic
    state. Not Christianity, but the human basis of Christianity is the
    basis of this state. Religion remains the ideal, non-secular
    consciousness of its members, because religion is the ideal form of the
    stage of human development achieved in this state.

    The members of the political state are religious owning to the dualism
    between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil
    society and political life. They are religious because men treat the
    political life of the state, an area beyond their real individuality, as
    if it were their true life. They are religious insofar as religion here
    is the spirit of civil society, expressing the separation and remoteness
    of man from man. Political democracy is Christian since in it man, not
    merely one man but everyman, ranks as sovereign, as the highest being,
    but it is man in his uncivilized, unsocial form, man in his fortuitous
    existence, man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted by the whole
    organization of our society, who has lost himself, been alienated, and
    handed over to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements – in short,
    man who is not yet a real species-being. That which is a creation of
    fantasy, a dream, a postulate of Christianity, i.e., the sovereignty of
    man – but man as an alien being different from the real man – becomes,
    in democracy, tangible reality, present existence, and secular
    principle.

    In the perfect democracy, the religious and theological consciousness
    itself is in its own eyes the more religious and the more theological
    because it is apparently without political significance, without worldly
    aims, the concern of a disposition that shuns the world, the expression
    of intellectual narrow-mindedness, the product of arbitrariness and
    fantasy, and because it is a life that is really of the other world.
    Christianity attains, here, the practical expression of its
    universal-religious significance in that the most diverse world outlooks
    are grouped alongside one another in the form of Christianity and still
    more because it does not require other people to profess Christianity,
    but only religion in general, any kind of religion (cf. Beaumont’s work
    quoted above). The religious consciousness revels in the wealth of
    religious contradictions and religious diversity.

    We have, thus, shown that political emancipation from religion leaves
    religion in existence, although not a privileged religion. The
    contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion finds
    himself involved in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of
    the universal secular contradiction between the political state and
    civil society. The consummation of the Christian state is the state
    which acknowledges itself as a state and disregards the religion of its
    members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the
    emancipation of the real man from religion.

    Therefore, we do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: You cannot be
    emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radically from
    Judaism. On the contrary, we tell them: Because you can be emancipated
    politically without renouncing Judaism completely and incontrovertibly,
    political emancipation itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews
    want to be emancipated politically, without emancipating yourselves
    humanly, the half-hearted approach and contradiction is not in you
    alone, it is inherent in the nature and category of political
    emancipation. If you find yourself within the confines of this category,
    you share in a general confinement. Just as the state evangelizes when,
    although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews,
    so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic
    rights.

    [ * ]

    But, if a man, although a Jew, can be emancipated politically and
    receive civic rights, can he lay claim to the so-called rights of man
    and receive them? Bauer denies it.

    “The question is whether the Jew as such, that is, the Jew who himself
    admits that he is compelled by his true nature to live permanently in
    separation from other men, is capable of receiving the universal rights
    of man and of conceding them to others.”

    “For the Christian world, the idea of the rights of man was only
    discovered in the last century. It is not innate in men; on the
    contrary, it is gained only in a struggle against the historical
    traditions in which hitherto man was brought up. Thus the rights of man
    are not a gift of nature, not a legacy from past history, but the reward
    of the struggle against the accident of birth and against the privileges
    which up to now have been handed down by history from generation to
    generation. These rights are the result of culture, and only one who has
    earned and deserved them can possess them.”

    “Can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew, the
    restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the
    human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will
    separate him from non-Jews. He declares by this separation that the
    particular nature which makes him a Jew is his true, highest nature,
    before which human nature has to give way.”

    “Similarly, the Christian as a Christian cannot grant the rights of
    man.” (p. 19,20)

    According to Bauer, man has to sacrifice the “privilege of faith” to be
    able to receive the universal rights of man. Let us examine, for a
    moment, the so-called rights of man – to be precise, the rights of man
    in their authentic form, in the form which they have among those who
    discovered them, the North Americans and the French. These rights of man
    are, in part, political rights, rights which can only be exercised in
    community with others. Their content is participation in the community,
    and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state.
    They come within the category of political freedom, the category of
    civic rights, which, as we have seen, in no way presuppose the
    incontrovertible and positive abolition of religion – nor, therefore, of
    Judaism. There remains to be examined the other part of the rights of
    man – the droits d’homme, insofar as these differ from the droits
    d’citoyen.

    Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to practice any
    religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized
    either as a right of man or as the consequence of a right of man, that
    of liberty.

    Déclaration des droits de l’droits et du citoyen, 1791, Article 10: “No
    one is to be subjected to annoyance because of his opinions, even
    religious opinions.” “The freedom of every man to practice the religion
    of which he is an adherent.”

    Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among the rights
    of man, Article 7: “The free exercise of religion.” Indeed, in regard to
    man’s right to express his thoughts and opinions, to hold meetings, and
    to exercise his religion, it is even stated: “The necessity of
    proclaiming these rights presupposes either the existence or the recent
    memory of despotism.” Compare the Constitution of 1795, Section XIV,
    Article 354.

    Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, § 3: “All men have received
    from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according
    to the dictates of their conscience, and no one can be legally compelled
    to follow, establish, or support against his will any religion or
    religious ministry. No human authority can, in any circumstances,
    intervene in a matter of conscience or control the forces of the soul.”

    Constitution of New Hampshire, Article 5 and 6: “Among these natural
    rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing can replace them.
    The rights of conscience are among them.” (Beaumont, op. cit., pp.
    213,214)

    Incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is to such a
    degree absent from the concept of the rights of man that, on the
    contrary, a man’s right to be religious, in any way he chooses, to
    practise his own particular religion, is expressly included among the
    rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man.

    The droits de l’homme, the rights of man, are, as such, distinct from
    the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is homme as
    distinct from citoyen? None other than the member of civil society. Why
    is the member of civil society called “man,” simply man; why are his
    rights called the rights of man? How is this fact to be explained? From
    the relationship between the political state and civil society, from the
    nature of political emancipation.

    Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits
    de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the
    rights of a member of civil society – i.e., the rights of egoistic man,
    of man separated from other men and from the community. Let us hear what
    the most radical Constitution, the Constitution of 1793, has to say:

    Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

    Article 2. “These rights, etc., (the natural and imprescriptible rights)
    are: equality, liberty, security, property.”

    What constitutes liberty?

    Article 6. “Liberty is the power which man has to do everything that
    does not harm the rights of others,” or, according to the Declaration of
    the Rights of Man of 1791: “Liberty consists in being able to do
    everything which does not harm others.”

    Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one
    else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone
    else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is
    determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as
    an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why is the Jew, according to
    Bauer, incapable of acquiring the rights of man?

    “As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is
    bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man
    with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews.”

    But, 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.

    The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to
    private property.

    What constitutes man’s right to private property?

    Article 16. (Constitution of 1793): “The right of property is that which
    every citizen has of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his
    goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry.”

    The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy
    one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré),
    without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of
    self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the
    basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the
    realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it. But, above all,
    it proclaims the right of man

    “of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income,
    of the fruits of his labor and industry.”

    There remains the other rights of man: égalité and sûreté.

    Equality, used here in its non-political sense, is nothing but the
    equality of the liberté described above – namely: each man is to the
    same extent regarded as such a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution
    of 1795 defines the concept of this equality, in accordance with this
    significance, as follows:

    Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the law being
    the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.”

    And security?

    Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection
    afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his
    person, his rights, and his property.”

    Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of
    police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in
    order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his
    person, his rights, and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel
    calls civil society “the state of need and reason.”

    The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism.
    On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

    None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man,
    beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual
    withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and
    private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man,
    he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary,
    species-like itself, society, appears as a framework external to the
    individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole
    bond holding them together it natural necessity, need and private
    interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

    It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate
    itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and
    to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly
    proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated
    from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats
    this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can
    save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment
    when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the
    order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration
    of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793.) This fact becomes still more
    puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to
    reduce citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for
    maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen
    is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the sphere in
    which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the
    sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not
    man as citoyen, but man as private individual [bourgeois] who is
    considered to be the essential and true man.

    “The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural
    and imprescriptible rights of man.” (Declaration of the Rights, etc., of
    1791, Article 2.)

    “Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment of his
    natural and imprescriptible rights.” (Declaration, etc., of 1793,
    Article 1.)

    Hence, even in moments when its enthusiasm still has the freshness of
    youth and is intensified to an extreme degree by the force of
    circumstances, political life declares itself to be a mere means, whose
    purpose is the life is civil society. It is true that its revolutionary
    practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. Whereas, for
    example, security is declared one of the rights of man, violation of the
    privacy of correspondence is openly declared to be the order of the day.
    Whereas “unlimited freedom of the press” (Constitution of 1793, Article
    122) is guaranteed as a consequence of the right of man to individual
    liberty, freedom of the press is totally destroyed, because “freedom of
    the press should not be permitted when it endangers public liberty.”
    (“Robespierre jeune,” Historie parlementaire de la Révolution française
    by Buchez and Roux, vol.28, p. 159.) That is to say, therefore: The
    right of man to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into
    conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only
    the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and
    therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with
    its aim, with these rights of man. But, practice is merely the
    exception, theory is the rule. But even if one were to regard
    revolutionary practice as the correct presentation of the relationship,
    there would still remain the puzzle of why the relationship is turned
    upside-down in the minds of the political emancipators and the aim
    appears as the means, while the means appears as the aim. This optical
    illusion of their consciousness would still remain a puzzle, although
    now a psychological, a theoretical puzzle.

    The puzzle is easily solved.

    Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old
    society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign
    power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be
    described in one word – feudalism. The character of the old civil
    society was directly political – that is to say, the elements of civil
    life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labor, were
    raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of
    seigniory, estates, and corporations. In this form, they determined the
    relation of the individual to the state as a whole – i.e., his political
    relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the
    other components of society. For that organization of national life did
    not raise property or labor to the level of social elements; on the
    contrary, it completed their separation from the state as a whole and
    constituted them as discrete societies within society. Thus, the vital
    functions and conditions of life of civil society remained,
    nevertheless, political, although political in the feudal sense – that
    is to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and
    they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state
    as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as
    they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his
    general activity and situation. As a result of this organization, the
    unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of
    this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear
    as the particular affair of a ruler isolated from the people, and of his
    servants.

    The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised
    state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the
    political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real
    state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and
    privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the
    people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished
    the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into
    its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the
    other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content
    of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the
    political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and
    dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the
    dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture
    with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the
    general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular
    elements of civil life. A person’s distinct activity and distinct
    situation in life were reduced to a merely individual significance. They
    no longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the
    state as a whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the
    general affair of each individual, and the political function became the
    individual’s general function.

    But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same time
    the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing off the
    political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the bonds which
    restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation
    was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics,
    from having even the semblance of a universal content.

    Feudal society was resolved into its basic element – man, but man as he
    really formed its basis – egoistic man.

    This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis, the
    precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this
    state in the rights of man.

    The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty,
    however, is rather the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the
    spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life.

    Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom.
    He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He
    was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage
    in business.

    The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil
    society into independent individuals – whose relation with one another
    on law, just as the relations of men in the system of estates and guilds
    depended on privilege – is accomplished by one and the same act. Man as
    a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however,
    as the natural man. The “rights of man” appears as “natural rights,”
    because conscious activity is concentrated on the political act.
    Egoistic man is the passive result of the dissolved society, a result
    that is simply found in existence, an object of immediate certainty,
    therefore a natural object. The political revolution resolves civil life
    into its component parts, without revolutionizing these components
    themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society,
    the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of
    its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation
    and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil
    society is held to be man in his sensuous, individual, immediate
    existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man
    as an allegorical, juridical person. The real man is recognized only in
    the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in
    the shape of the abstract citizen.

    Therefore, Rousseau correctly described the abstract idea of political
    man as follows:

    “Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel
    himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming
    each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a
    part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives
    his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence
    for the physical and independent existence. He has to take from man his
    own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ
    without the help of other men.”

    All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to
    man himself.

    Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a
    member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on
    the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.

    Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract
    citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in
    his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular
    situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers”
    as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power
    from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human
    emancipation have been accomplished.

    II

    Bruno Bauer,

    “The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free,”

    Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, pp. 56-71

    It is in this form that Bauer deals with the relation between the Jewish
    and the Christian religions, and also with their relation to criticism.
    Their relation to criticism is their relation “to the capacity to become
    free.”

    The result arrived at is:

    “The Christian has to surmount only one stage, namely, that of his
    religion, in order to give up religion altogether,”

    and therefore become free.

    “The Jew, on the other hand, has to break not only with his Jewish
    nature, but also with the development towards perfecting his religion, a
    development which has remained alien to him.” (p. 71)

    Thus, Bauer here 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 here
    in the enlightened form: which of them is more capable of emancipation.
    No longer is the question asked: Is it Judaism or Christianity that
    makes a man free? On the contrary, the question is now: Which makes man
    freer, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?

    “If the Jews want to become free, they should profess belief not in
    Christianity, but in the dissolution of Christianity, in the dissolution
    of religion in general, that is to say, in enlightenment, criticism, and
    its consequences, free humanity.” (p. 70)

    For the Jew, it is still a matter of a profession of faith, but no
    longer a profession of belief in Christianity, but of belief in
    Christianity in dissolution.

    Bauer demands of the Jews that they should break with the essence of the
    Christian religion, a demand which, as he says himself, does not arise
    out of the development of Judaism.

    Since Bauer, at the end of his work on the Jewish question, had
    conceived Judaism only as crude religious criticism of Christianity, and
    therefore saw in it “merely” a religious significance, it could be
    foreseen that the emancipation of the Jews, too, would be transformed
    into a philosophical-theological act.

    Bauer considers that the ideal, abstract nature of the Jew, his
    religion, is his entire nature. Hence, he rightly concludes:

    “The Jew contributes nothing to mankind if he himself disregards his
    narrow law,” if he invalidates his entire Judaism. (p. 65)

    Accordingly, the relation between Jews and Christians becomes the
    following: the sole interest of the Christian in the emancipation of the
    Jew is a general human interest, a theoretical interest. Judaism is a
    fact that offends the religious eye of the Christian. As soon as his eye
    ceases to be religious, this fact ceases to be offensive. The
    emancipation of the Jew is, in itself, not a task for the Christian.

    The Jew, on the other hand, in order to emancipate himself, has to carry
    out not only his own work, but also that of the Christian – i.e., the
    Critique of the Evangelical History of the Synoptics and the Life of
    Jesus, etc.

    “It is up to them to deal with it: they themselves will decide their
    fate; but history is not to be trifled with.” (p. 71)

    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.

    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.

    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 – to which
    in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – 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 already emancipated himself in a Jewish way.

    “The Jew, who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines the
    fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who may have
    no rights in the smallest German state, decides the fate of Europe.
    While corporations and guilds refuse to admit Jews, or have not yet
    adopted a favorable attitude towards them, the audacity of industry
    mocks at the obstinacy of the material institutions.” (Bruno Bauer, The
    Jewish Question, p. 114)

    This is no isolated fact. 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.

    Captain Hamilton, for example, reports:

    “The devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of
    Laocoön who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which
    are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his
    lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the
    world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has
    no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor.
    Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation
    than to exchange objects. When he travels he carries, so to speak, his
    goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit.
    If he loses sight of his own business for an instant it is only in order
    to pry into the business of his competitors.”

    Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the
    Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal 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.

    “The man who you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as
    a trader; his business having failed, he became a minister. The other
    began as a priest but as soon as he had some money at his disposal he
    left the pulpit to become a trader. In the eyes of very many people, the
    religious ministry is a veritable business career.” (Beaumont, op. cit.,
    pp. 185,186.)

    According to Bauer, it is

    “a fictitious state of affairs when in theory the Jew is deprived of
    political rights, whereas in practice he has immense power and exerts
    his political influence en gros, although it is curtailed en détail.”
    (Die Judenfrage, p. 114)

    The contradiction that exists between the practical political power of
    the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics
    and the power of money in general. Although theoretically the former is
    superior to the latter, in actual fact politics has become the serf of
    financial power.

    Judaism has held its own alongside Christianity, not only as religious
    criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the
    religious derivation of Christianity, but equally because the practical
    Jewish spirit, Judaism, has maintained itself and even attained its
    highest development in Christian society. The Jew, who exists as a
    distinct member of civil society, is only a particular manifestation of
    the Judaism of civil society.

    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 even the lavatory an object of
    divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society,
    and as such appears in 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.

    The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the
    world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only
    an illusory bill of exchange.

    The view of nature attained under the domination 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.

    It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it
    intolerable

    “that all 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.”

    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 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.

    Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in
    the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self-interest to the laws
    governing that world, the chief art of which consists in the cunning
    circumvention of these laws.

    Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound
    to be a continual suspension of law.

    Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop
    further theoretically, because the world outlook of practical need is
    essentially limited and is completed in a few strokes.

    By its very nature, the religion of practical need could find its
    consummation not in theory, but only in practice, precisely because its
    truth is practice.

    Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the 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 civil 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, the Christian 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 from nature.

    Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make alienated
    man and alienated nature into alienable, vendible objects subjected to
    the slavery of egoistic need and to trading.

    Selling [verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation
    [Entausserung]. Just as man, as long as he is in 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, and 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 world 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.

    Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally
    realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of
    the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal
    aspect of practical need. 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, nd
    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.