The essay criticizes two studies[1][2] by Marx's fellow Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, on the attempt by Jews to achieve political emancipation in Prussia.
Marx concludes that while individuals can be "spiritually" and "politically" free in a secular state, they can still be bound to material constraints on freedom by economic inequality, an assumption that would later form the basis of his critiques of capitalism.
A number of scholars and commentators regard "On the Jewish Question", and in particular its second section, which addresses Bauer's work "The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free", as antisemitic,[4] although others do not.
This is the starting point of a complex and somewhat metaphorical argument that draws on the stereotype of "the Jew" as a financially apt "huckster" and posits a special connection between Judaism as a religion and the economy of contemporary bourgeois society.
[9] From December 1843 to October 1844, Bruno Bauer published the monthly Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette) in Charlottenburg (now part of Berlin).
In parts of the book, Marx again presented his views dissenting from Bauer's on the Jewish question and on political and human emancipation.
In 1879, historian Heinrich von Treitschke published an article "Unsere Aussichten" ("Our Prospects"), in which he demanded that the Jews should assimilate into German culture, and described Jewish immigrants as a danger for Germany.
This article stirred up controversy, to which the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, edited by Eduard Bernstein, reacted by republishing almost the entire second part of "Zur Judenfrage" in June and July 1881.
Money[...] An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible[...] The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations.
Maccoby writes that in later years, Marx limited what he considers to be antipathy towards Jews to private letters and conversations because of strong public identification with antisemitism by his political enemies both on the left (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin) and on the right (aristocracy and the Church).
Here Ray sees Marx in a "strand of left thinking that has been unable to address forms of oppression not directly linked to class".
[24] He argues that by framing his revolutionary economic and political project as a liberation of the world from Judaism, Marx expressed a "messianic desire" that was itself "quite Christian.
[26] Isaac Deutscher (1959)[27] compares Marx with Elisha ben Abuyah, Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud, all of whom he thinks of as heretics who repudiate Jewry, yet still belong to a Jewish tradition.
According to Deutscher, Marx's "idea of socialism and of the classless and stateless society" expressed in the essay is as universal as Spinoza's "Ethics and God".
[28] In a letter to Arnold Ruge, written March 1843, Marx writes that he intended to support a petition of the Jews to the Provincial Assembly.
[32] David McLellan argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be understood in terms of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany.
In Peled's view, "this was less than a satisfactory response to Bauer, but it enabled Marx to present a powerful case for emancipation while, at the same time, launching his critique of economic alienation".
Francis Wheen says: "Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews.
[45] The political-scientist Professor Iain Hampsher-Monk wrote in his textbook: "This work ["On The Jewish Question"] has been cited as evidence for Marx's supposed antisemitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an interpretation.