On the Jewish Question: Marx, Bauer, and the History of a Phrase

Short answer

• "On the Jewish Question" is Karl Marx's 1844 essay, written in German as "Zur Judenfrage," replying to Bruno Bauer's writings on Jewish emancipation in Prussia.
• Bauer argued that Jews could only gain political equality if they gave up Judaism, and that Christians must do the same with Christianity, because a truly free state could have no privileged religion.
• Marx disagreed with Bauer's starting point. He argued that political emancipation, meaning equal citizenship in a state that professes no religion, is real and valuable, but it is not the same as human emancipation, meaning freedom from the deeper social divisions of civil society.
• Marx used the United States as his main example: a state with no established religion could still be a deeply religious society, which showed, in his argument, that removing a religious test for citizenship does not remove religion from social life.
• In the second part of the essay, Marx turned from the state to Judaism itself and argued, in his own controversial terms, that its secular basis lay in practical need, self-interest, and commerce. Scholars still dispute how to read this part, and critics have long charged that it relies on antisemitic stereotypes.
• The phrase "the Jewish question" long outlived the essay. In the late 19th century and under the Nazis, it was used to frame the presence of Jews in Europe as a problem to be solved, ending in the Nazi code name for genocide, the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." That later use is not Marx's argument, and it should not be read back into his essay without noting the break.

Most readers meet the title “On the Jewish Question” in one of two ways: as the name of an early essay by Karl Marx, or as a phrase with a much darker later history. The two are connected, but they are not the same thing. Marx’s essay, written in the autumn of 1843 and first published in February 1844, was a reply to another philosopher, Bruno Bauer, about whether Jews in Prussia should receive equal civil rights. The phrase itself, however, was already in use before Marx, and it was later taken up by antisemitic movements and by the Nazi regime in a sense very different from the 1840s debate about citizenship. This article explains the essay on its own terms, sets out what Marx actually argued, and traces how the phrase changed meaning after him. Where the article reports Marx’s or Bauer’s views about Judaism, it reports them as their views, not as facts about Jewish people or Jewish religion.

Before Marx: What the Phrase Meant

The expression “the Jewish question” did not begin with Marx or Bauer. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as European states debated whether to grant Jews civil equality, writers and politicians used the phrase to describe a cluster of questions: should Jews be admitted to full citizenship, on what conditions, and what place would religious difference have in a modern state? The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that, beginning in the 19th century and long before the Nazis came to power, some German and other European writers, philosophers, and theologians claimed that the presence of a Jewish minority in society was a problem that needed to be solved, and that the status of European Jews became the subject of heated debate in an era when they were gradually being granted civil rights and equality.

That framing matters because it shows why the phrase is now treated with caution. In the emancipation debates, the “question” was posed by the majority society about a minority, and the answers on offer often made equality conditional: Jews were expected to adapt, assimilate, or abandon customs, behavior, traditions, or religion in order to count as full members of society. The museum’s account adds a crucial distinction. Many who supported this belief expected adaptation or assimilation, but racial antisemites denied that conversion or acculturation were real solutions at all, because they treated Jews as a separate race whose character was fixed. The same phrase thus covered very different positions, from liberal arguments for equal rights, to demands for religious renunciation, to racist exclusion. Keeping those positions apart is the first step to reading Marx fairly.

The phrase also resembled other “national questions” of the period: debates about a minority group within a state or a nation in formation. It was a label for a debate, not a single doctrine, and different writers filled it with different content.

Prussia in the Early 1840s: The Emancipation Debate

To understand the essay, it helps to picture Prussia in the early 1840s. Prussia was a monarchy whose state identity was closely tied to Christianity, and Jews there faced legal restrictions on participation in civil institutions. Liberals and republicans in the opposition movement generally advocated emancipation, meaning the removal of those restrictions and the grant of equal civil rights. Conservative opponents defended the state’s exclusive confessional allegiance, meaning its official Christian character. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Bruno Bauer describes this as the central issue of the moment: whether the explicitly Christian state of Prussia could eliminate restrictions on Jewish participation in civil institutions.

Bauer was an unusual figure in this debate. He was a philosopher and theologian of the Young Hegelian movement, a group of radical followers of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He had lost his university teaching post at Bonn in the spring of 1842 because of the unorthodoxy of his writings on the New Testament, and from 1842 to 1849 he worked as a political journalist. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, Bauer argued against the emancipation of Prussian Jews in 1842 and 1843, not because he defended the Christian state’s privileges, but because he saw the proposal as a political legitimation of particular religious interests. That position cost him his leading place in the opposition movement, since it challenged one of that movement’s central demands.

Marx, at this stage of his life, was also a Young Hegelian, and he had worked closely with Bauer before their paths diverged. He wrote his reply in the autumn of 1843, around his move to Paris, and it appeared in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a short-lived journal he co-edited with Arnold Ruge. The journal ran for only one issue, which is one reason the essay’s first publication is sometimes hard to place. Its German title, “Zur Judenfrage,” is usually translated as “On the Jewish Question.” Readers should not confuse Marx’s essay with Bauer’s book of 1843, which in German is “Die Judenfrage,” or “The Jewish Question.” Marx’s title echoes Bauer’s, because Marx’s essay is a critique of Bauer.

Bauer’s Position: Renounce Religion First

Bauer’s argument, as Marx presents it and as the Stanford Encyclopedia summarizes it, ran as follows. Nobody in Germany, Bauer said, was yet politically emancipated, because the German state was not a free state. Jews who demanded a special emancipation for themselves as Jews were therefore, in Bauer’s word, egoists: they were asking for an exception rather than joining a common struggle for the political emancipation of Germany and, beyond that, for the emancipation of humanity. If Jews instead demanded equality with Christian subjects, Bauer argued, they were accepting the Christian state as legitimate, with all its general subjugation. Either way, on Bauer’s view, the demand was wrongly framed.

Bauer’s solution was radical and evenhanded in its own terms, but demanding. He held that political and social freedom required the renunciation of all particularistic ties with the past, so that, as a precondition of juridical equality, Jews must renounce their religious allegiance, and Christians must do the same. In Bauer’s account, Christianity showed a historically higher degree of consciousness than Judaism, because it cancelled the externality of the deity, but this was not, in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s summary, a simple claim of Christian superiority, because Christianity, and especially Protestantism, generalized alienation to cover all aspects of life. The way forward, for Bauer, was through criticism and science: once Jew and Christian recognized their religions as different stages in the development of the human mind, the religious opposition between them would dissolve into a critical, scientific, and human relation. As Marx quotes Bauer, the formulation of the question is its solution, and the critique of the Jewish question is the answer to it.

Two features of Bauer’s position are worth holding in mind, because Marx attacks both. First, Bauer made emancipation conditional on giving up religion. Second, Bauer treated the abolition of religion by the state, meaning the state’s refusal to privilege any religion, as if it were the same as the abolition of religion in society. Marx denied both moves, but for reasons that are easy to misunderstand. Marx did not defend the Christian state’s privileges, and he did not argue that Jews should keep a privileged position. He argued that Bauer had asked the wrong question.

Marx’s Reply, Part One: Political Emancipation Is Not Human Emancipation

Marx’s central move was to change the question. Bauer had asked who should emancipate whom, and on what conditions. Marx asked a third question: what kind of emancipation is in question? In his view, criticism had to investigate the nature of political emancipation itself before it could judge Bauer’s conditions. That distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation is the essay’s most durable idea, and it is the part of the essay most often cited in later political theory.

Political emancipation, for Marx, means the emancipation of the state from religion: the state professes no religion, imposes no religious test for citizenship, and treats religion as a private matter. Human emancipation, by contrast, means a deeper transformation in which people stop living a divided life, split between their public role as citizens and their private life in civil society, where each person pursues private interests and treats others as means to those interests. Marx’s claim was that political emancipation is a big step forward, and indeed the final form of human emancipation within the existing world order, but it is not human emancipation carried through to completion, because it leaves the divisions of civil society intact.

His main evidence was the United States. In the North American states, Marx argued, there was no state religion and no religion declared to be that of the majority, and the state stood aloof from all cults. Yet, he pointed out, drawing on writers such as Gustave de Beaumont, people in the United States did not believe that a man without religion could be an honest man, and North America was, in his phrase, pre-eminently the country of religiosity. For Marx, this showed that the secular state does not abolish religion but presupposes it: the state can free itself from a restriction without the individual being really free from it, and a state can be a free state without the individual being a free person. The state, in his argument, treats birth, rank, education, occupation, and religion as nonpolitical distinctions when it declares every member of the nation an equal participant in sovereignty, but it allows property, education, and occupation to go on acting in their own way in civil society. Far from abolishing those real distinctions, the state exists on the presupposition of their existence.

Marx applied the same logic to the rights of man. Bauer had doubted whether a Jew, while remaining a Jew, could receive or grant the universal rights of man, because those rights seemed to require a universal human nature that religious particularity would block. Marx answered by examining the rights of man in their authentic form, as proclaimed in the French and American declarations. He argued that the rights of man, as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are the rights of the member of civil society: liberty, property, security, and equality understood as the equal standing of self-sufficient individuals. Liberty, on this reading, is the right to do everything that harms no one else, and its practical application is the right to private property, to enjoy and dispose of goods at one’s discretion without regard to others. In Marx’s argument, therefore, the rights of man do not presuppose the abolition of religion at all. On the contrary, freedom of conscience, the right to practice any religion one chooses, is expressly included among them. Bauer’s condition, that Jews must give up Judaism to qualify for the rights of man, fails on Marx’s reading, because those rights are built for egoistic, separate individuals, not for people who have already overcome separation.

This is also why Marx could write, in a passage often quoted out of context, that the political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and religious man in general is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, and from religion in general, while insisting in the next breath that this is not the emancipation of real people from religion. The state emancipates itself from religion by not professing any religion. People remain religious, because religion, in Marx’s theory, is the expression of their separation from community, from themselves, and from others in civil society. Overcoming that separation would require changing civil society itself, not merely changing the state’s attitude to religion. Readers who quote only the first half of Marx’s sentence, about the emancipation of the state from Judaism, and drop the second half, about the limits of that emancipation, reverse his point.

Marx’s Reply, Part Two: Judaism, Money, and Civil Society

The second part of the essay is shorter, sharper, and far more controversial. Having argued that the Jewish question reduces, in its secular form, to the relation between the political state and civil society, Marx turned to Judaism itself. He asked what he called the secular basis of Judaism, and he answered, in his own terms, with practical need and self-interest. He described what he called the worldly religion of the Jew as huckstering, or small-scale trading for profit, and its worldly god as money. He then argued that, in modern civil society, money had become a world power and the practical spirit he associated with Judaism had become the practical spirit of Christian nations as well. In his closing formulation, the emancipation of Jews, understood in this secular sense, would coincide with the emancipation of society from the rule of money and self-interest, which for Marx meant human emancipation itself.

This part of the essay must be read with care, and with its status as Marx’s argument kept in view. Marx was not reporting survey data about Jewish occupations, and he was not describing Jewish theology. He was offering a philosophical diagnosis in which “the Jew” functioned, in his argument, as a figure for the member of civil society in general: the egoistic individual pursuing private interest. Many later readers, including sympathetic readers of Marx, have objected that this move trades on familiar antisemitic stereotypes about Jews and money, even if Marx’s target was civil society as a whole. The criticism matters because the figure does not stay neutral in the text: Marx attributes to Judaism, as a religion, features drawn from contemporary stereotypes about commerce, and then generalizes them to society at large. Whether that counts as antisemitism in Marx, or as a flawed but nonracist critique of capitalism that uses an unfortunate figure, is a genuine scholarly dispute, and this article does not settle it by assertion. What can be said with confidence is that the second part is the reason the essay remains contested, while the first part is the reason it remains cited.

It is also worth noting what the second part does not do. Marx does not call for the exclusion, expulsion, or persecution of Jews, and he does not argue that Jews are racially distinct or unchangeable. His conclusion points in the opposite political direction from Bauer’s condition: because political emancipation does not require renouncing Judaism, Jews can be emancipated politically without renouncing Judaism completely, and the limits of that emancipation are limits inherent in political emancipation itself, not a defect peculiar to Jews. That distinction does not remove the objection to his language, but it does mark a real difference between Marx’s 1844 position and the racial antisemitism that later used the same phrase. Conflating the two flattens the history and makes both harder to understand.

Common Misreadings to Avoid

Several misreadings circulate online, and each is worth correcting briefly. First, Marx’s essay is not a defense of the Christian state or of religious privilege. Marx criticized the Christian state at length, calling the so-called Christian state an imperfect state that uses religion as a means and therefore as a hypocritical state. Second, the essay is not an argument against Jewish emancipation. Marx’s point was that emancipation should not be made conditional on giving up Judaism, and that political emancipation, while incomplete, is a genuine advance. Third, the essay is not a work of theology or a statement about what Judaism truly teaches. It is a work of political philosophy that uses Judaism as a test case for a general theory of the state and civil society, and its claims about Judaism should be read as Marx’s philosophical claims, not as neutral descriptions.

Fourth, the title should not be read as if Marx invented the phrase or owned its later meanings. The phrase predates him, and its later career, especially in Nazi usage, belongs to a different political project. Fifth, Marx’s use of the United States as an example should not be taken as a claim that the United States had achieved human emancipation. For Marx, the United States proved the opposite point: complete political emancipation could coexist with vigorous religious life, which showed that political emancipation leaves the deeper divisions of civil society untouched. Keeping these five corrections in mind prevents the most common distortions of the essay.

Reception: From 1844 to the 20th Century

The essay’s immediate reception was limited, because the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher closed after one issue. Marx returned to the argument with Friedrich Engels in The Holy Family, published in 1845, where the two men again presented views dissenting from Bauer’s on the Jewish question and on political and human emancipation. In the later 19th century, the essay was republished in socialist newspapers and journals, including republication of much of its second part in the Sozialdemokrat in June and July 1881 and a full republication in the Berliner Volksblatt in October 1890, which brought it to a wider socialist readership at a moment when antisemitism was also gaining ground in German politics.

That overlap created the essay’s most painful afterlife. In 1879, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke published an article demanding that Jews assimilate to German culture and describing Jewish immigrants as a danger for Germany, which stirred a major controversy. Marx’s essay, with its language about money and commerce, could be and sometimes was quoted in debates that Marx himself had not joined, by readers who detached his second part from his first part’s argument about political emancipation. Later, the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Bauer himself was claimed as a precursor by some National Socialist authors because of his anti-Semitism, though scholars such as Ernst Barnikol disputed a direct connection. The lesson of this reception history is not that Marx or Bauer caused later antisemitism, which would be a crude causal claim, but that texts written inside the emancipation debate were later reused in a debate with different stakes, where the question was no longer about citizenship conditions but about exclusion and, eventually, murder.

The Nazi use of the phrase marks that break most starkly. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that, once in power, the Nazi Party began taking measures to solve the “Jewish Question” in Germany, first by laws that turned German Jews into second-class citizens, then by expulsion and forced emigration, and during World War II by a program of systematic mass murder called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” On January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich informed representatives of German government agencies that he had been tasked with preparing the “Final Solution,” which the museum says was understood to affect some 11 million Jews then living in Europe. The museum also notes that, by that stage, almost one million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union had already been murdered, most of the Jews in Serbia eliminated, and the first killing center established in Chelmno. Nothing in Marx’s 1844 essay proposes anything of this kind, and the continuity is one of phrase, not of program. The Nazi regime took a 19th century label for a debate about citizenship and turned it into a code name for genocide. Recognizing that discontinuity is essential to honest history.

After World War II, scholarship on the essay split in ways that still shape how it is taught. Some scholars read it as a foundational text of Marx’s theory of alienation and emancipation, and treat its second part as a critique of capitalism in which Judaism stands for civil society in general. Others read it as an early text marred by antisemitic tropes. Still others take a middle position: the theory of political emancipation is powerful and remains useful, while the language about Judaism is indefensible and should be named as such when the essay is taught. This article states the dispute rather than resolving it by fiat, because the dispute itself is part of what a reader needs to know.

How the Phrase Is Used Today

Today, historians generally use the phrase only in a historical sense, for the 19th and 20th century debates, and usually in quotation marks to signal that it is a historical label, not their own framing. In other writing, it is avoided, because its later associations make it sound as if Jewish existence were itself a problem awaiting a solution. When scholars do use it, they specify whose question they mean: Bauer’s, Marx’s, Treitschke’s, or the Nazis’.

For a reader coming to Marx’s essay for the first time, the safest approach is to read it in two passes. On the first pass, follow the argument about the state: what political emancipation can and cannot do, and why Marx thought Bauer’s condition was misplaced. On the second pass, attend to the language of the second part, ask what work the figure of the Jew is doing in the argument, and read at least one critical response alongside Marx’s text. That approach respects both halves of the essay: it does not excuse the second part because the first part is strong, and it does not discard the first part because the second part is troubling.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is “On the Jewish Question” about?

It is Karl Marx’s 1844 reply to Bruno Bauer about Jewish emancipation in Prussia. Marx argues that political emancipation, meaning equal citizenship in a state that professes no religion, is valuable but incomplete, and he distinguishes it from human emancipation, meaning freedom from the deeper divisions of civil society.

Who was Bruno Bauer, and what did he argue?

Bauer was a Young Hegelian philosopher and theologian who argued that Jews could only gain political equality by renouncing Judaism, and that Christians must likewise renounce Christianity, because a free state could have no privileged religion. Marx replied that this condition misunderstands political emancipation, which does not require giving up religion.

When was Marx’s essay written and published?

Marx wrote it in the autumn of 1843, and it was first published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, under the German title “Zur Judenfrage.” The journal ran for only one issue.

Is Marx’s essay antisemitic?

Scholars disagree, and the disagreement is part of the essay’s reception history. Critics argue that its second part relies on antisemitic stereotypes about Jews and money. Defenders argue that Marx’s target was civil society and capitalism in general, and that he did not advocate exclusion or persecution of Jews. Readers should weigh both positions against the text.

What is the difference between political emancipation and human emancipation?

Political emancipation, for Marx, is the emancipation of the state from religion: no state religion and no religious test for citizenship. Human emancipation is deeper: it would mean overcoming the split between public citizenship and private life in civil society, where people pursue private interests and treat one another as means. Marx held that political emancipation is a real advance but not the completion of human emancipation.

How is Marx’s essay related to the Nazi “Final Solution”?

Only by the reuse of a phrase. The Nazis used “the Jewish Question” and the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” as code names for the persecution and genocide of European Jews. Marx’s essay proposed no such program, and its argument was about citizenship and emancipation in the 1840s. The continuity is in the label, not in the program, and the difference must be kept clear.

Conclusion

“On the Jewish Question” repays careful reading precisely because it is two things at once: a sharp and still influential theory of what equal citizenship can and cannot achieve, and a text whose second part uses language that later readers rightly challenge. Marx’s distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation helps explain why a state can be neutral about religion while society remains divided, and why equal rights, though essential, do not by themselves heal social separation. At the same time, the essay’s history shows how a phrase born in a debate about citizenship could be refashioned into a code name for genocide, which is why the phrase itself now belongs in quotation marks and in history. Read in context, criticized in the open, and kept distinct from its later uses, the essay remains a useful window onto 19th century debates about freedom, religion, and the state.

Sources & references

• Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," written autumn 1843, first published February 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher; text as published in Marx: Early Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, and in the Marxists Internet Archive edition proofed by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant, and Matthew Carmody, 2008/9.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Bruno Bauer": Bauer's career, his 1842 and 1843 writings on the Jewish question, his argument about the Christian state of Prussia, and the later claim of National Socialist authors discussed with Barnikol's dispute.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, "The Jewish Question": 19th century origins of the phrase, expectations of assimilation, racial antisemitism, Nazi measures, the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, and the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, "The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution": coordination of the killing program and the description of the "Final Solution" as the Nazis' code name for the destruction of European Jews.