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.