Marx: “The Christian State,” “The Jewish Question,” and “Species-Being”

Abstract

Marx, a Jewish-born Hegelian, linked the dialectic to historical materialism and posthumously provided the Bolsheviks with a powerful weapon to overthrow Russian czarism and enthrone Soviet communism in its place. Marxism became by far the most important belief system since Christianity. As an ideology, it eventually engulfed over a quarter of the globe. Its relationship to Judaism was complex. Marx was against all religion. He was also interested in the “emancipation” of all peoples and was an enemy of the Prussian Christian state, which discriminated against Jews. But the price he would exact for Jewish emancipation was very high. On the Jewish Question (1843) foresees a communist society in which neither Jew nor Christian would exist. Needless to say, the end result was a thoroughly secular, even atheistic, society, unless Marxism itself could be termed a religion. However, the honeymoon of the Jews with Bolshevism proved to be short. In the years that followed, the Jews began to be persecuted and were prohibited from emigrating. The question remains, Did Marx see Jewish emancipation as an obstacle to thoroughgoing secularization and to the creation of one “species-being”?