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Karl Marx and the Enlightenment
The western Enlightenment intended to regenerate the Jews by liberating them from superstition and despotism. Its proclaimed goal was spiritual and political emancipation which, in the case of the Jews, presupposed severing the religious and national elements in Judaism. The Jew was henceforth to become a citizen, abandoning the separatism of his ghetto existence, and adopting the habits, customs, clothing, and speech of his Gentile neighbours. Israel was to leave its tents and intermingle with the nations on the basis of the new gospel of civic equality.
Until the Enlightenment the Jews had been a people, at least in the ethnic sense. Now they were assumed to be no more than a religion. But the enlighteners had no doubt that all religion, and especially Judaism, was essentially obscurantist, fanatical, and tyrannical. The appeal of the Enlightenment was aggressively secular and hence Jews who clung to their religious tradition were viewed with undisguised hostility. The war-cry of Voltaire and the âphilosophersâ â âĂcrasez fâinfâmeâ â did not spare Jewish customs, manners, and sensibilities. The Enlightenment had many virtues, not least that it offered the Jews a way out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of European history. But the process of adaptation created a new problem for the self-image and self-esteem of the Jews. It demanded a progressive sloughing off of time-honoured traditions, a reform of Jewish life, and a gradual elimination of those âJewishâ characteristics which were deemed unattractive by the Gentile world. Paradoxically, the secular humanism of the Enlightenment was also at the root of modern Jewish self-hatred.
Examples of Jewish antisemitism can certainly be found which predate the nineteenth century, notably among baptized Jews who turned against their former co-religionists with all the passion of the neophyte. Indeed, âJewish antisemitismâ was scarcely surprising in a Christian environment which for nearly 2,000 years had encouraged open or latent Judeophobia. This historical factor, which should never be underestimated, was also pertinent to the case of Karl Marx. The psychological interpretation of Marx as a neophyte must, however, explain how radical and consistent secularism could also generate Jewish self-hatred. Even more than his radical young Hegelian contemporaries, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge, and Moses Hess, Marx insisted, in Zur Judenfrage (1844), that âwe convert theological questions into secular questionsâ. If Marxâs analysis of the Jewish question was based, as he himself asserted, on a thoroughgoing secular, âscientificâ approach which rejected theological prejudices, can the charge of antisemitism be sustained?
The answer must lie in Marxâs own definition of the way secularization affected the Jewish problem, and in his efforts to differentiate his approach from that of Bruno Bauer. Marxâs essay on the Jews was clearly framed as a polemic against Bruno Bauer, his left-wing Hegelian mentor â a Protestant theologian turned atheist and free-thinker. But what are all too frequently overlooked in Marxâs critique of Bauer are the similarities and points of agreement between the two young Hegelian thinkers. The assumption has been that, because Marx rejected Bauerâs position on Jewish emancipation and formulated a different theory of society and the state, his attitude to Judaism was less hostile. What is forgotten is that Marx praised Bauerâs antisemitic propositions on the religious antithesis between Judaism and Christianity in no uncertain terms. Thus at the outset of his essay he emphasized the âboldness, sharpness, wit and thoroughnessâ with which Bauer had dissected the essence of both the Jewish and Christian religions. He also relied on Bruno Bauerâs characterization of Judaism as a religion which âcould not be further developed theoretically, because the ideology of practical need is by its nature limited, and exhausted in a few strokesâ.
Similarly, Marx quoted with approval his mentorâs verdict on âJewish Jesuitry, the same practical Jesuitry that Bauer points out in the Talmudâ, which merely reflected the logic of egoism in the everyday world. Marx passed over in silence the antisemitic features in Bauerâs portrayal of Judaism, because for him they were self-evidently true and therefore not worth discussing. Bruno Bauer, like his teacher Voltaire, blamed Judaism for the rise of Christianity, for tyranny and superstition. He considered that the essence of Judaism lay in the fanatical intolerance and narrow-mindedness of the Jewish national spirit. In common with the French Enlightenment, Bauer regarded Jewish particularism as incompatible with the spirit of emancipation. If the Jews wanted human rights, then Bauer insisted that they strip off their âJewish essenceâ and abandon their âprivilegesâ as a medieval corporation. German Jewry must recognize that a Christian state could never emancipate them, only an atheist state, which had no room for Christians or Jews. Radical, abstract secularism as exhibited in Bruno Bauerâs essays on the Jewish question demanded that German Jews renounce unconditionally their âchimerical nationalityâ and their religious affiliation.
This was the weak point in Bauerâs case which Marx attacked with remorseless logic, offering in its place a different and more convincing interpretation of the meaning of secularization and of human rights as proclaimed by the American and French revolutions. But it is essential to notice that, in so doing, Marx did not in the least quarrel with Bauerâs antisemitic falsifications of Jewish history and of the Jewish religion. On the contrary, he radicalized Bauerâs critique of Judaism, transferring it from the realm of theological abstraction to that of social analysis.
Moreover in putting forward his own version of the Jewish âpractical essenceâ, Marx built on the young Hegelian assumptions of Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Moses Hess. The consensus among the Left Hegelians on this subject was remarkable: they all emphasized that the âJewishâ character of Christianity made it inhuman, and that in this sense emancipation from Judaism was desirable. For Feuerbach, âJudaism is worldly Christianityâ, for Bruno Bauer âJudaism is unachieved Christianityâ, for Moses Hess the blood-mystique of Judeo-Christianity is realized âin the modern Jewish-Christian peddler worldâ.
The young Marx did not disagree with any of these opinions, although his own formulation was more dialectical. âChristianity overcame real living Judaism in appearance only. It was too respectable, too spiritual, to remove the crudeness of practical need, other than by raising itself into heaven.â When the young Marx sought in 1844 the key to the negativity of his own age, it was decidedly within the framework of Left Hegelianism. âChristianity arose out of Judaism. It has now dissolved itself back into Judaism.â The implications of this standpoint for Jewish emancipation in Germany were clear. The post-revolutionary western society which had emerged after 1789 in the Christian world was already the apogee of âJudaismâ. Or as Marx put it in more provocative terms - âThe Jews have emancipated themselves, in so far as the Christians have become Jewsâ.
What, then, was the purpose of Marxâs polemic against Bruno Bauer on the issue of Jewish emancipation? Why did he declare in a letter to Arnold Ruge on 13 March 1843 that âAlthough the Israelite faith is repugnant to me, yet Bauerâs opinion seems to me too abstract.â Why did he welcome the bitterness which âgrows with every petition rejected amid protestsâ and insist that âWe must riddle the Christian state with as many holes as possible and smuggle in the rational as far as we canâ? Certainly it was not out of any love for the Jews, but rather out of hatred for the Christian-Germanic state, where âthe domination of religion is the religion of dominationâ. Jewish emancipation in Germany was, from the standpoint of radical politics, a useful weapon against Prussian absolutism. If German Jews were demanding their civil (that is, human) rights, then this for Marx was a blow struck in the name of secularization. It exposed the hypocrisy and backwardness of the Prussian state by comparison with the more progressive âconstitutionalâ bourgeois societies of France and America. With reference to Prussian conditions, Marx wrote: âAs the State evangelizes, when although a State, it adopts the attitude of a Christian toward the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands the rights of the citizen.â
This was the nub of Marxâs quarrel with Bruno Bauer over Jewish emancipation, which comes out with greater clarity and force in The Holy Family of 1845. There, he approvingly quoted Gabriel Riesser, the leading spokesman for German Jewish emancipation, who (in Marxâs view) âcorrectly expresses the meaning of the demand of the Jews who claim the recognition of free humanity, when he calls among other things, for the freedom of movement, to sojourn, travel and tradeâ. Against the clerical-authoritarian state which denied the Jews rights guaranteed by the American and French constitutions, Marx was ready to support the Jewish critics of Bruno Bauer. As a consistent secularist and enemy of the Christian-Germanic ideology which sought to confine the Jews to the ghetto, any other position would have struck Marx as regressive. But Bruno Bauer, from whom Marx had imbibed his secularism and his hostility to the Christian state and Jewish religion, did not share this view. Hence, Marx felt obliged to justify his tactical position in theoretical terms, by showing that Bauerâs concept of secularization was inadequate. The object of this demonstration was, however, in no sense intended to justify or defend Judaism. On the contrary, the arguments developed by Marx were all designed to show that political emancipation was insufficient to achieve the necessary and desirable abolition of Judaism.
For the purposes of this demonstration Marx appealed, in particular, to the example of North America, which evidently in 1844 represented for him the model of a secular society. In the blossoming of religious sects in American society Marx saw decisive evidence for his argument that political emancipation did not necessitate the abolition of religion. Quoting such European observers of American life as Hamilton, Beaumont, and De Tocqueville, Marx argued that religion and commerce were inextricably related features of a secularized civil society. He cited Hamiltonâs comments on the religion of Mammon in New England â where âthe earth in their eyes is nothing else but a stock-exchange, where they have no other calling than to become richer than their neighborsâ. But if Mammon was the worldly God of the New Englanders, this only proved to Marx how âjudaizedâ the Christian world had become: âIndeed, the practical dominance of Judaism over the Christian world has reached its unambiguous normal expression in North America.â
In secular America, Marx found the evidence he had been looking for to confound Bauerâs thesis that Jewish emancipation implied the victory of atheism. However, it is highly significant that none of the writers on America whom Marx quoted had discussed Judaism, let alone the incarnation of vulgar commercial practice in the Jewish spirit. This was gratuitously introduced by Marx himself, in terms which even the most uninhibited antisemite would have been hard put to surpass. âWith the Jew and without him, money has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples.â In 1869 Gougenot des Mousseaux was to write one of the classic antisemitic works of the nineteenth century, Le Juif, le Judaisme et la Judaisation des peuples chretiens, which elaborated similar propositions.
Marxâs references to America intended to show that Judaism would survive and even flourish under conditions of political emancipation and the separation of church and state. The elimination of Judaism required a far more radical transformation which would abolish the contradiction between civil society and the state, between the private and public sphere, between the âbourgeoisâ and the âcitoyenâ. This solution, which would finally restore to man his collective species-essence and overcome his alienation from nature, society, and his fellow man, Marx called human emancipation. This was the radical, revolutionary form of secularization which Marx proposed in answer to Bruno Bauer and it was indeed the embryonic germ of his scientific socialism. But human emancipation was impossible as long as egoistic man, the atomized privatized bourgeois, was governed by money, which Marx in common with Moses Hess saw as the omnipotent and radically self-alienating power in modern bourgeois society. In Judaism and to a lesser extent in Christianity (which, like Hess, he saw as merely the âtheoreticalâ expression of practical need) Marx felt he had discovered the source of his alienation. âThus we recognize in Judaism a general, contemporary, anti-social element which has been brought to its present height by a historical development which the Jews zealously abetted and which must necessarily dissolve itself.â The Jews had not only aided and abetted the process by which money had become a dominant factor in the modern secular world, they had actively corrupted the Christian bourgeoisie.
It is not difficult to see in this method of argument the classic procedure of the antisemite. First Marx defines the Jewish âessenceâ in abstract, mythical terms as a homogeneous, unchanging entity rooted in the Jewish religion. Then, having equated this negative essence with the Jewish group as a whole, he calls for its elimination and thereby the elimination of the related social evils of egoism, money, and avarice. Far from transcending Bruno Bauerâs âtheoreticalâ antisemitism, Marx simply generalized and radicalized it. Whereas Bauer had projected on to the Jews his hatred of Christian intolerance and fanaticism in the classic style of the Voltairean Enlightenment, Marx blamed Judaism for the alienation of the secular world created by the Christian bourgeoisie. The mythologizing of the Jewish âessenceâ simply took different forms in the two cases. For Bauer, the Jew was unchanging, static, Oriental in his passivity and indifference to modernity. For Marx, the Jew was unchanging in his practical activity, narrow-minded, money-grabbing, and parasitical. Bauerâs antisemitism combined traditional Christian and secular humanist motifs. Marxâs antisemitism was thoroughly modern, materialist, and pseudo-revolutionary.
In both cases the options left open to the Jews involved their disappearance as a social group and as a religious entity. Bruno Bauer envisaged the possibility that once the Jews were liberated from Judaism they could enjoy human rights in an atheist society. Marx held out the equally uninviting prospect that âif the Jew recognizes the futility of his practical existence and strives to put an end to it, he will work ... toward human emancipation in general and turn against the highest practical expression of human self-alienationâ.
What motivated Marx...