Marx on the Jewish Question by Yuri Slezkine

Marx began the same way as Mazzini and Mickiewicz. The emancipation of the German, he wrote when he was twenty-five years old, is the emancipation of man. Or rather, as he had written a month or two earlier, emancipation from Judaism is the self-emancipation of our time. The emancipation of man was to proceed in stages.


The root of all evil was private proper and money. The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of nature .  .  . It is in this sense that Thomas Muntzer 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.’ To become free was to abolish private property and money. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. No one worships it more than the Jews, who are the living embodiment of egoism. The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the great god of the world.

What is the  secular base of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.
What is the worldly religion of the Jews? 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.

Whether Marx wanted to abolish money by abolishing the Jews or abolish the Jews by abolishing money, the real question was how it would be done. Or as it turned out, where it could be done. The answer was that the emancipation of man was the emancipation of Germany because Germany was an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of generally recognized axioms , the nothingness of the ancien regime exhibited to the world. And what was a modern ancient regime? The comedians of a world order* whose true heroes are dead; nothing but wretchedness in office.

Fortunately for Germany this is not all.  If . . .the whole German development did not exceed the German political development, a German could at most  have of the share in the problems- of-the-present that Russia has. But the Germans are not Russians, their philosophical development did exceed their political development, as well as the philosophical development of the more advanced nations[*]. In politics, the Germans thought what other nations did, Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and presumption of its thought was always in step with the one-sidedness and lowliness of its reality.

The more profound the wretchedness, the better for the final outcome. Marx’s History was Faust’s Mephistopheles -  part of that power which the evil ever do ,and ever does the good. The lowliness of German reality had sharpened its thought, and the sharpness of Germany’s thought would help bring about the revolution, which would usher in the emancipation of man. The proliferation of people who, with the greatest facility and on the highest occasion, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons and prophesied the approaching end, signified that the end was, indeed, approaching. The greatest achievement of German philosophy would be to dethrone religion (by which Marx meant Christianity):

The abolition of religion as the the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

The performance of this task had begun –like most things in history- with the attempt abolish the opposite. It had begun in Germany’s revolutionary past, the Reformation

Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests .  .  .But, if Protestantism was not the true solution to the problem, it was at least the true setting of it .  . .And if the Protestant transformation of the German layman into priests emancipated lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and the philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people.

Just as the revolution then began in the brain of a monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher. Much of the work had been done by Hegel; it was up to the twenty-five year old Marx to complete he task by bringing history and politics together. One of the two 1843 essays that launched Germany’s- and the world’s- ultimate philosopher was the introduction to  A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

The fundamental questions were clear:

Can Germany attain a practice a la hauteur des principes – i.e. a revolution which will raise it no only to the official level of modern nations, but to the height of humanity which will be the near future of those nations? Will the monstrous discrepancy between the demands of German thought and the answers of German reality find a corresponding discrepancy between civil society and the state, and between civil society and itself? Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical needs? . Can[Germany] do a somersault, not only over its own limitations, but at the same time over the limitations of modern nations?

The answer was, by now, familiar: it was precisely the monstrosity of the discrepancy that would allow Germany to rise to the height of humanity. Germany, as the deficiency of the political present constituted a world of its own, will not be able to throw down the specific German limitations without throwing down the general limitations of the political present – its own and everyone else’s.

But how could it be done politically? Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?

Answer: in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetrated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood: a sphere finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.

Just as the Jewish spirit was embodied in capitalism, the spirit of German was embodied in the proletariat. Just as the Jews stood for unbridled acquisitiveness and self-interest, the Germans stood for the creativity of absence and innocence. As  philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought was squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished. And once the emancipation of Germans into men was accomplished, the emancipation of man would be assured:

Let us sum up the result. The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man, Germany can only emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy , its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy.

When all the inner connections are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul.

The solution to the German question followed from the solution to the Jewish question: Once society

has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jews will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been been abolished. On the one hand the social emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of society from Judaism, and the emancipation of society from Judaism is the emancipation of mankind from oppression. On the other, the emancipation of the German from all forms of bondage is the alliance of Germany philosophy with the universal proletariat in the name of the emancipation of man. The emancipation of man ultimately depends on the reformation of the Jews and the resurrection of Germany.

The entire edifice of Marxist theory- complete with its Meophistopelian frame and rich rhetorical ornamentation- was built on these foundations. Hegel’s preface to  his Philosophy of Right ends with the owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the approach of dusk. Marx’s introduction to his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ends with the cock of Gaul (the gallus from Gallus) crowing at the dawn of the new day  the same one, presumably, that awoke the god of day and chased off the ghost of Hamlet’s father. As Marx himself would explain; the philosophers had only interpreted the world in various ways; the point as to change it- through revolution and resurrection. Marx’s discovery of the proletariat had accomplished this task.

The question of why Marx, of all the cocks heralding the German resurrection, ended up conquering much of the world is just as impossible and irresistible as the question of why Jesus, of all the Jewish prophets who assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons, ended up founding one of the world’s most owl-resistant civilizations. One possible answer is that they were, in fact, quite similar. Marx, like Jesus and unlike Mazzini or Mickiewicz, succeeded in translating a tribal prophesy into a language of universalism. He was his own Paul (in case Engels proved ineffective); the emancipation from Judaism and the resurrection of Germany were buried under the weight of the emancipation from capitalism and the resurrection of humankind.

Perhaps most remarkably,, he succeeded in translating a prophesy of salvation into a language of science. As Celsus wrote about Jesus and the other would-be messiahs and their visions, “To these promises are added strange, fanatical, and quite unintelligible words, of which no rational person can find meaning: for so dark are they, as to have no meaning at all; but they give the occasion to every fool or impostor to apply them to suit his own purposes.” Marx too, combined oracular formulas that defied the comprehension of his future followers – much to their satisfaction, apparently. But Marx did not just alternate simplicity with complexity, clarity with obfuscation, striking metaphors with commodity-money-commodity equations, he expressed his eschatology in the form of a scientific forecast based on falsified claims, and most important, involving sociologically defined protagonists.

[There follows detailed comparisons and analogies between the, Marxist and Christian eschatology- or any Millenarian, and Apocalyptic prophesy, the central theme of  Yuro Slezkine’s The House of Government; A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2017.]

* I use italics for Marx, bold for his italics, except here, which is my own emphasis. All this is novel to me. I’m watching how Slezkine/Marx  develop their implicit claim to literal truth, and the signifying by abstract concepts that goes on; how far their generalities condense and elide  the complexity of the phenomena the they purport to signify? What aspects of this polemic are really useful in the quest for social justice? That not just so much ‘theoretical’  wheel-spinning?