Marx and Nietzsche on the Jewish Question

Talk Presented at the Arnstein Jewish Community Center

March 26, 2007

Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are two of the better known German intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Both have had a tremendous impact on twentieth and twenty-first century thought; each has not only been studied as a significant thinker, but also been followed politically by various, sometimes misguided and dogmatic, acolytes. Both Marx and Nietzsche commented directly or indirectly on a central issue of German society in the nineteenth century, something I call “the Jewish Question,” which encompasses the emancipation of this religious and cultural minority, their place in Germany, and their rights and duties as inhabitants and/or citizens of Germany or German territories. If we examine what Marx and Nietzsche had to say about the Jewish Question, however, we find an unusual, somewhat paradoxical situation:  Marx, who was of Jewish origins, wrote an essay early in his career that is usually regarded as overtly anti-Semitic, or at least that employs the most stereotypical clichés about Jews. Friedrich Nietzsche, who comes from a long line of Lutheran pastors on both sides of his family, and who was raised in a household and in an atmosphere in which anti-Jewish remarks were part of an accepted discourse, railed against anti-Semites. But sometimes the first impression can be deceptive, and I would contend that in the case of these two complex thinkers we have to consider more carefully their views, which encompass far more than a simple validation or denial of anti-Semitism, and the context in which they expressed these views. Let me turn to them separately to elucidate what I mean.

I take up Marx first since he was chronologically the first of the two to write about issues of Jews and Judaism. Indeed, his most sustained piece of writing about Jews and Judaism occurs in an essay called “On the Jewish Question,” which he composed at the end of 1843. This essay was one of the two articles that Marx published in the one and only edition of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Yearbooks) in February of 1844. Although born in a Jewish household in which both grandfathers were rabbis, Marx was not particularly interested in the situation of Jews in Germany, at least there is little evidence in most of his works that he had any attachment to Judaism or to the Jewish community. Like many assimilated German Jews in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Marx’s entire family had converted in the 1820s; in the case of Heinrich Marx (originally Herschel), Karl’s father, the conversion to Lutheranism was necessary so that he could continue to practice law. It is difficult to imagine that Marx=s parents did not retain some remnants of Judaism C Marx’s mother probably spoke with a Yiddish accent in German, for example C but Marx himself appears to have given little thought to his religious and cultural heritage before composing “On the Jewish Question.” 

In Marx’s time the situation of Jews in Germany varied according to the political climate. Jews in Prussia, to which Marx’s home town of Trier belonged after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, had suffered a set-back following the Prussianization of the Rhineland. Napoleon’s invasion on his quest to conquer Europe had meant an expansion of rights and freedoms for Jewish inhabitants, and for this reason Napoleon and France acquired a fairly good reputation in many German-Jewish communities during the 1820s and 1830s. With the introduction of the French code civil (civil code) many German Jews were granted the status of full citizens for the first time on German territory. But with the Metternich restoration C Metternich was the Austrian prime minister and the architect of the balance of power in Europe C after the Congress of Vienna, Jews again were denied rights that were granted to Christians. Over the next few decades liberals in Germany, however, supported extending civil rights to Jews as well, and Bruno Bauer, a teacher at the University of Bonn and friend of Marx=s in the early 1840s, was one of many intellectuals who wrote a commentary about Jewish emancipation. Marx=s essay is actually a response to Bauer=s commentaries on the Jewish Question. Perhaps one other factor was important for the understanding of the Jewish Question in the early 1840s when Marx’s essay appeared: the so-called Damascus crisis. In February of 1840 in Damascus a priest and his servant were found mysteriously murdered, and accusations were leveled against the Jews, who purportedly had killed him for ritual purposes in making matzos for Passover. This incident precipitated a violent and extensive persecution of the Jews in the Islamic world, which would not have affected Europe so much except for the actions of the French government. Owing to political maneuvering in the Middle East and internal difficulties with the French Catholic party, not only did the French government not protest the affair; its consul in Damascus even supported the claims against the Jewish community and left unchallenged the charge of a blood ritual. This affair became well known in the European press. Heinrich Heine, a noted German-Jewish author, whom Marx knew well and with whom Marx was acquainted in the 1840s while he was in exile in Paris, wrote several articles on Damascus for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, at that time the leading newspaper in Germany, and news about Damascus was in the press regularly in France as well. It is unlikely that Marx C and Bauer C did not follow the Damascus affair in the press, and the support for Jewish equality under the law was probably given some impetus by the reactions of German liberals to the excesses of the “barbaric” treatment of the Jews in the Middle East.

Marx’s comment on the Jewish Question is thus a response to various circumstances involving Jews and citizen’s rights in the early nineteenth century, although it was prompted by the comments of Bauer, a former colleague and fellow radical, whose views Marx subsequently rejected. Both Bauer and Marx start from a critique of liberal thought. The liberal position was essentially the liberal position of today, advocating equal rights for citizens of a political entity regardless of religious belief. By contrast, Bauer begins his critique by taking exception to both the Jews and the Christian state. The Jews are criticized for wanting emancipation and at the same time not wanting to relinquish their religious beliefs, which are inimical to the Christian state. For Bauer the Jew as Jew cannot be emancipated because there is a contradiction inherent in a particularistic Jewish emancipation in a Christian state. Indeed, for Bauer the Jewish religion as such stands opposed to any sort of political emancipation, let alone emancipation in a Christian state. On the other hand, the Christian state, by its very nature, is incapable of emancipating the Jews. In order to do so, it would have to give up its nature as a Christian state, since for Jews to be admitted as equal citizens the state could no longer consider itself founded on strictly Christian tenets. A good deal of Bauer’s text takes up the French situation, in particular debates that occurred in French parliament with regard to the Sabbath, which of course is celebrated by Christians on Sunday C and by the Christian state on that day as well C and by Jews on Saturday. But the point that Bauer drives home in discussions is that the liberal solution is impossible without a general emancipation from religion as such: “Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition, both for the Jew who wants political emancipation, and for the state which should emancipate him and itself be emancipated” (28). To sum up Bauer’s position, Marx returns then to the dual nature of his former friend’s critique: “Thus Bauer demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should renounce Judaism, and in general that man should renounce religion, in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, he considers, and this follows logically, that the political abolition of religion is the abolition of all religion. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true or actual state” (29). The position that Bauer assumes in opposition to the liberal position is the starting point for a further critique by Marx, who believes that Bauer has failed to recognize the depth of the problem and has considered only one of its dimensions.

Now how does Marx go beyond the position outlined by Bauer?  In contrast to his former friend, he claims that the political emancipation from religion is in reality a validation of religion, not an overcoming of it at all. “If we find in the country which has attained full political emancipation [he is referring to the United States], that religion not only continues to exist but is fresh and vigorous, this is proof that the existence of religion is not at all opposed to the perfection of the state” (31). What Marx is doing here is raising the Jewish question to a more general level. It is no longer a matter of the relationship between the state and religion (whether we mean the Christian state or the secular state and any particular religion, majority or minority), but a question of the relationship between two types of emancipation: political emancipation and what Marx refers to as human emancipation. The key to understanding Marx here is to understand that religion for him is itself a type of enslavement. Thus the solution to the Jewish Question C or any religious conflict between state and religion C is only a political matter, and therefore incomplete from the perspective of human emancipation. “To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation” (32). We thus find a hierarchy of levels of the Jewish conflict outlined on the first few pages of this essay: a theological level, on which specific points of Judaism are contrasted with Christianity as it is embodied in the state; a political level, which in its most developed form deals with the relationship between a secular state and religion as such; and a human level, the level of the species-being (Gattungswesen), on which emancipation remains incomplete as long as religion itself is not subjected to critique and overcome as a distorted or inverted relationship to the real world, as “the opium of the people,” as Marx would refer to it in an essay published at the time of his remarks on the Jewish Question.

Marx’s discussion in the first part of his essay is complex, and I cannot go into all the details of it here, but it is not this initial section that has been seen as offensive. The allegedly anti-Semitic portions of Marx’s text occur in the second half of the essay. And there are good reasons for the allegations. We read, for example, that the “secret of the religion of the real Jew” and “the profane basis of Judaism” are “practical need, self-interest,” while the worldly cult of the Jew is “huckstering” and his worldly god is money. The key to this section of the essay, however, is that Marx has taken the Jew and Judaism as a symbol or metaphor of the evils of civil society in general, and of the egoism and profit-lust of economic relations in particular. Only this interpretation can explain passages such as the following: “The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money has become, through him and also apart from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews” (49)  Or: “The contradiction which exists between the effective political power of the Jew and his political rights, is the contradiction between politics and the power of money in general. Politics is in principle superior to the power of money, but in practice it has become its bondsman.”  Or: “That which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion C contempt for theory, for art, for history, and for man as an end in himself C  is the real, conscious standpoint and the virtue of the man of money. Even the species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce. Woman is bartered away” (51). The key to most of this anti-Jewish sentiment is found in the identification of Judaism with civil society. Marx gives us ample evidence that contemporary civil society is his real target, and not Jews and Judaism: “Judaism attains its apogee with the perfection of civil society; but civil society only reaches perfection in the Christian world” (51). What Marx is really criticizing are tendencies that he finds in the nineteenth century world, some of which he treated in the first half of the essay. The difference here is that he is more overtly concerned with money and economics, anticipating his later concentration on this particular aspect of civil society. The solution to “the Jew,” as Marx defines him, and to the Jewish Question is the abolishment or overcoming of the exploitative and instrumental nature of modern civil society: “As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism C huckstering and its conditions C the Jew becomes impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object” (52). In theoretical terms, then, the second part of this essay does not go very far beyond the first part; the only controversial aspect of this second section is the metaphorization of Jew as bourgeois, as capitalist, as profiteer, in short, as the prototypical member of modern civil society.

Let me turn now to the other half of our nineteenth-century duo, to Friedrich Nietzsche. In contrast to Marx, Nietzsche never wrote an essay on the Jewish Question. But the question of the place of Jews and Judaism in Germany and in Europe was something he commented on often in various contexts. Indeed, it was difficult for him to avoid the Jewish Question. Although during his life he had little sustained contact with actual Jews C with the notable exception of his friend Paul Rée C various discourses about Jews and Judaism were so prevalent in the intellectual and popular circles Nietzsche frequented that he was almost compelled to enter into dialogue with them. As a boy growing up in the cathedral town of Naumburg it is not unlikely that he imbibed a cultural anti-Jewish feeling that thrived in this narrow-minded, petty-bourgeois atmosphere. In Nietzsche’s earliest notebooks, it is therefore not surprising to find him copying down the words to a popular song that contains the lyrics “Throw out Itzig the Jew, Out of the Temple,” and we can assume that he was exposed to similar, culturally conditioned anti-Jewish songs and sentiments throughout his early years. His studies at Bonn and Leipzig brought an increase in neither tolerance nor openness. Although he was not attracted to rabid racists, from his correspondence we can detect in his friends a commonplace anti-Jewish perspective based less on principles than on cultural clichés. In Wagner and his circle, however, Nietzsche must have encountered much more vociferous discussions of Jews and Judaism. Irritated by what he perceived to be an excessive Jewish influence on the musical world, Wagner had already composed a notorious anti-Jewish essay, “Judaism and Music,” in 1850. Although in the early 1870s, when Nietzsche was a member of Wagner’s inner circle, Wagner had not yet become infatuated by the racist theories of Count Joseph Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stuart Chamberlain (who would later become his son-in-law), the Wagner household was openly ill disposed toward Jews at the time of Nietzsche’s frequent visits and actively embroiled in controversies about Wagner’s anti-Jewish sentiments. The 1869 reprint of “Judaism and Music” as a brochure elicited 170 published responses from both Jews and non-Jews. That the young Nietzsche, who considered himself to be in the vanguard of the Wagnerian cultural mission in the late sixties and early seventies, would not have been exposed to anti-Jewish convictions is therefore quite unlikely. If we consider that Nietzsche’s publisher Ernst Schmeitzner and his brother-in-law Bernhard Förster were two of the central figures in the anti-Semitic movement of the 1880s, then we can understand that Nietzsche, throughout his life, could hardly have avoided confronting opinions on the Jews, Judaism, and anti-Semitism.

Despite this exposure to a variety of anti-Semites, Nietzsche appears to have been relatively free of anti-Jewish prejudice. For a number of years his best friend was Paul Rée, a Jewish writer, and this friendship was one reason that Nietzsche gradually distanced himself from, and was rejected by, the Wagner circle. Wagner, it seems, thought the Jew Rée a bad influence on Nietzsche, but Nietzsche continued his association with Rée until Lou Salomé caused them to part ways in the early 1880s. Nietzsche was also popular in the 1870s and 1880s within Jewish circles, for example, the intellectual Jewish circles in Vienna in which Freud was active. Two members of this circle in Vienna wrote to Nietzsche, and Nietzsche, for his part, appreciated the attention (especially since he was receiving very little attention from Germany for his work). We can find anti-Jewish remarks in Nietzsche's letters to his mother and his sister, the cultural anti-Semitism that must have been common in the Nietzsche household. And if we examine Nietzsche’s historical writings on religion, then we encounter a diatribe against Judaism insofar as it became “priestly” and laid the groundwork for Christianity. The Nazis capitalized on these writings to make Nietzsche appear at times to be an anti-Semite, but even the Nazis recognized that Nietzsche did not really adhere to their standards for anti-Jewish thought, and for that reason he was rejected by prominent Nazi philosophy professors. In any event aside from occasional lapses in writing to his family, mostly in his early life, when Nietzsche tried to fit in with their level of discourse, and the historical writings on religion, which are not so much anti-Jewish as they are anti-Christian and opposed to anything that supported the life-negating religious tendencies in Western Europe, Nietzsche was not overtly anti-Semitic.

In fact, Nietzsche declared in various published works that he was decidedly against anti-Semitism. These bold proclamations have led some Nietzschean enthusiasts to claim that he was philo-Semitic, or that he was tolerant of Jews and Judaism. The problem with this conclusion, however, is that anti-Semitism meant something a bit different to Nietzsche when he wrote about it in the 1880s than it means today. If we consider this term historically, we recognized immediately that “anti-Semitism” is a misnomer; it does not mean an opposition to Semites, but rather to one Semitic tribe, to the Jews.  In Nietzsche’s time it had both a general and a specific political referent, and we must be careful to distinguish the two. Used frequently since the late nineteenth century to refer to any anti-Jewish sentiments, rather than biases or hatred for Semitic peoples as a whole, anti-Semitism arose in Germany as the designation for a political movement that came to prominence in late 1879. Until that time the word “Semitic” and the less commonly found antithesis “anti-Semitic” were not restricted to the Jewish people. The term “Semitic” had became popular in the early nineteenth century as a category to classify specific groups of languages, and only gradually in the course of the century does it become a description for a race of people. Important for this shift from historical linguistics to racist anthropology was Count Joseph Gobineau, whose Essai sur l=inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) provided pseudo-scientific legitimation for both the notion of “race” and the hypothesis that the “Aryan” race was opposed to and potentially corrupted by a “Semitic” race. According to such linguistic and race theories, then, not only the Jews, but also the Arabs were included under the category of the Semitic, and anti-Semitism encompassed an opposition to or prejudice against anyone belonging to the peoples of the Middle East. Because of its pseudo-scientific origin and its precise meaning, anti-Semitism has sometimes been rejected as a term referring specifically to anti-Jewish thought. In Nietzsche’s time Eugen Dühring, known today and referred to by Nietzsche as an anti-Semite, argued that anti-Semitism is an inaccurate designation: “It [the Jewish people] is a specific tribe, which has developed the characteristics of a race in the most marked opposition to other human beings, and not the entire Semitic race, that comes into question in our modern culture and society.”  Even the National Socialists, seeking to distinguish between the Jews and the Arab nations, rejected the use of “anti-Semitism” as a false label, “since this movement directs itself against Jewry, the corrupters of all peoples, but not against the other peoples speaking Semitic languages, who have likewise been anti-Jewish since ancient times.”  Nietzsche, like any good philologist, was apparently also uncomfortable with the equation of anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish. Even after the emergence of the political movement that went by this name, he employs the neologism “Misojuden” (literally, “Haters of Jew,” from the Greek μÃσoς, hatred, and the German word “Juden” or Jews) to designate people he would later call “anti-Semitic.”

Nietzsches relationship to anti-Semitism, to which he was unequivocally opposed, in contrast to his sentiments towards the Jews, is thus complicated by the fact that anti-Semitism has a specific referent in political agitation, especially in Berlin, during the early 1880s. Complicating Nietzsche’s diatribes against anti-Semitism is the fact that Bernhard Förster, a leader of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany, took Nietzsche’s sister away from him – he was rather fond of her in the 1870s when she served as his housekeeper and sometimes confidant – when the couple founded a vegetarian, anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist colony in Paraguay, Nueva Germania. In addition, Nietzsche’s feud with Wagner and his entourage, who openly promoted anti-Semitic sentiments in Germany, caused him to embrace any position that was anti-Wagnerian. Finally, Nietzsche was irritated that his publisher evidently preferred to promulgate anti-Semitic writings rather than Nietzsche’s philosophical texts. Nietzsche’s opposition to anti-Semitism thus had many causes on the personal level. When we consider that he also rejected any political movement associated with nationalism or socialism – and anti-Semitism of the 1880s in Germany had some associations with both of these tendencies – we can understand that the simple equation of opposition to anti-Semitism with philo-Semitism or even tolerance for Jews is not really warranted.

The lesson from my brief consideration of the Jewish Question in Marx and Nietzsche is not very complicated, but I believe it is well worth considering. Pronouncements, especially those from the historical past, are frequently not as simple as they appear. Meaning is not directly derived from mere words or a translation of words, but can only be established by close attention to context. Nietzsche’s anti-anti-Semitism as philo-Semitism, like Marx’s apparent anti-Semitism, are conclusions too hastily drawn from a superficial reading of their writings and a failure to consider the intricacies of historical circumstances. Only once we have sufficiently elucidated the historical, biographical, social, and political circumstances surrounding a statement or claim can we hope to understand what it meant for its original audience, and, by extension, what it might still mean for us today.

Posted: March 27, 2007