Karl Marx and the Jewish Question

Abstract

Karl Marx sought virtue through suffering. His need to seek it in some form of social rebellion was a product of his early life experiences. However, his reaction to his Jewish origin determined the direction of that rebellion: the field of economics. His first paper on the Jewish question described the Jew as a greedy manipulator of money. A few years later he was still attacking greedy manipulators of money, but his target had changed from the Jew to the capitalist. Marx never disavowed his early paper on the Jewish question, but he no longer used anti-Semitism as a basic element in his attack on the rich. In his final version of the materialist theory of history and the concept of capitalism, the Jew plays no part, nor does anti-Semitism. Marx's early work on the Jewish question has often been resurrected to try to prove just the opposite, namely that the communism of Marx is an anti-Semitic doctrine.