On the Jewish Question

A new translation of Karl Marx’s controversial 1844 essay, which uses the question of Jewish civil rights as a jumping-off point for a consideration of what true liberation might mean.

Against all expectations, Jewish questions have returned to the center of world politics. Antisemites steer the right. Anti-Zionists stir the left. Israel poses a Palestinian question for all. Everyone, everywhere, talks about the Jews. In the twentieth century, many thought the spread of liberal democracy and the creation of Israel would resolve the so-called Jewish Question. Today, there’s hardly an issue the Jewish Question does not touch—from free speech and universities to immigration, genocide, and war.

Karl Marx would have recognized this world. The scion of an illustrious line of rabbis, Marx came of age in a society roiled by multiple Jewish questions: Should the Jews be emancipated? Did they have too much power? Should they convert? Could they become “one of us”? Behind this flurry of words, Marx saw something no one else saw: a gathering storm of burgeoning capitalist societies and unstable liberal states.

Since its publication in 1844, On the Jewish Question has vexed and provoked readers. Presented here in a new English translation—the first in many years—it speaks to us in unsettling ways. Marx unpacks the Jewish Question as the first of modernity’s culture wars, where people turn their identities into property and their property into identities, even as, with characteristic urgency and wit, he makes the case that behind culture lie politics and economics, a liberalism now in decay and a capitalism now triumphant.

From Marx’s daring critical perspective, the attacks to which stigmatized groups are to this day routinely subjected—not just Jews, but also Muslims, Arabs, and others—are best combated through an understanding that takes us beyond identity to a direct confrontation with, and indictment of, the larger social order.