Excerpts from:

ON THE JEWISH QUESTION

by Karl Marx (Marx was Jewish -- i.e., both his parents were Jewish and his grandfather was an eminent rabbi)

Excerpted from: Karl Marx. Frederick Engels. Collected Works, Volume 3, International Publishers, New York, 1975, p. 146-174 [Marx originally wrote this in 1843, and it was first published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher in 1844]

[The emphases in the text below are in the original article].

"In wanting to be emancipated from the Christian state, the Jew is demanding that the Christian state should give up its RELIGIOUS prejudice. Does he, the Jew, give up HIS religious prejudice? Has he the right to demand that someone else should renounce his religion? ...

For us, the question of the Jew's capacity for emancipation becomes the question: What particular SOCIAL element has to be overcome to abolish Judaism? For the present-day Jew's capacity for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation necessarily results from the special position of Judaism in the contemporary enslaved world.

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew, not the SABBATH JEW, as [Bruno] Bauer does, but the EVERYDAY JEW.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? PRACTICAL need, SELF-INTEREST. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? HUCKSTERING. What is his worldly God? MONEY.

Very well then! Emancipation from HUCKSTERING and MONEY, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this PRACTICAL nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for HUMAN EMANCIPATION as such and turns against the SUPREME PRACTICAL expression of human self-estrangement.

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general ANTI-SOCIAL element of the PRESENT TIME, an element which through historical development -- has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

In the final analysis, the EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS is the emancipation of mankind from JUDAISM ...

The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, MONEY has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews ...

Indeed, in North America the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and moral expression that the PREACHING OF THE GOSPEL itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel just as the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business deals ..

Judaism continues to exist not in spite of history, but owing to history. The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails. What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.

The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes event he lavatory an object of divine law. PRACTICAL NEED, EGOISM, is the principle of CIVIL SOCIETY, and as such appears in a pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of PRACTICAL NEED AND SELF INTEREST is MONEY.

Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man -- and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established VALUE of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world -- both the world of men and nature -- of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man's work and man's existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it ...

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the REAL, CONSCIOUS standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.

The CHIMERICAL nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely FORMAL rites with which the world of self-interest surround it ...

Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self-interest, is passive and does not expand at will, but FINDS itself enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social conditions.

Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the CHRISTIAN world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes ALL national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions EXTRINSIC to man, could civl society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.

Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism.

From the outset, Christianity was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.

Christianity had only in semblance overcome real Judaism. IT was too NOBLE-MINDED, too spiritualistic to eliminate the crudity of practical need in any other way than by elevation to the skies.

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity, but this application could only become general after Christianity as a developed religion had completed THEORETICALLY the estrangement of man from himself and nature.

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

Selling is the practical aspect of alienation. Just as man, as long as he is on the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something ALIEN, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, an bestowing the significance of an alien entity -- money -- on them.

In its perfected practice, Christian egoism of heavenly bliss is necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is turned into worldly need, subjectivism into self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion, but, on the contrary, by the human basis of his religion -- practical need, egoism ...

Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the EMPIRICAL essence of Judaism -- huckstering and its preconditions -- the Jew will have become IMPOSSIBLE, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man's individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.

The SOCIAL emancipation of the Jew is the EMANCIPATION OF SOCIETY FROM JUDAISM."