For a survey of the many responses to Bauer’s writings on the Jewish Question by
Jewish and non-Jewish authors, see Nathan Rotenstreich, “For and against Emancipation.”
On the proposed law to relegate Jews to a separate corporation and the controversy
that ensued, see Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, 67 – 69 ; Edmund
Silberner, Moses Hess, 110 ; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter
MEGA), section 2 , 1 (part 2 ): 648.
See Silberner, Moses Hess, 106.
Ibid., 100.
Marx and Engels, MECW, 1 : 391 – 92 As I discuss below, Bauer originally submitted
Die Judenfrage to the Rheinische Zeitung, but it was rejected by the censor. Hermes, editor
of the rival Kölnische Zeitung (see note 1 ), had published a number of articles opposing Jew-
ish emancipation.
Written in 1845 – 46 in Brussels, The German Ideology was not published until the
twentieth century. The chapter on Feuerbach appeared in the 1920 s, the work in its entirety
in 1932.
Wendy Brown, for example, leans heavily on Marx’s critique of the depoliticization
of social differences and the illusory nature of political rights in States of Injury, chapter 5 ,
especially 100 – 103 , and “Rights and Identity in Late Modernity,” especially 90 – 109.
Cornu is an important example of this tendency; see Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels,
1 : 462 – 80 ).
Carlebach (Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, 165 ) describes as “the
misfortune of the Jews” the fact that the substantive ideas of part 1 of Marx’s “Zur Juden-
frage” (hereafter ZJ 1 ) were developed under the title “On the Jewish Question,” thereby
lending credence to the “incomparably weaker and less convincing” part 2 of Marx’s “Zur
Judenfrage” (hereafter ZJ 2 ). Elisabeth de Fontenay reads ZJ 2 as merely the “verification” and
“illustration” of the thesis elaborated in ZJ 1 (Les Figures juives de Marx, 26). See also David
McLellan, Marx before Marxism, 141 – 42 ; and Lawrence Simon’s headnote in Marx, Selected
Writings, 2.
See, for example, Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 188 – 208 ; Arnold Künzli, Karl
Marx: Eine Psychographie, 207 ; Hyam Maccoby, Antisemitism and Modernity, 63 – 72 ; Paul
Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (hereafter RA), 296 –
305 ; Edmund Silberner, “Was Marx an Anti-Semite?”; Robert Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews
from Marx to Trotsky, chapter 1 (Wistrich refers to Marx’s self-hatred on 34 , 35 , 37 , and 43 ).
For two works that each convincingly contest the purported antisemitism of Marx’s “Zur Ju-
denfrage,” see David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx, 163 – 80 ; and Thomas Haury’s lucid con-
textualization of Bauer’s and Marx’s writings on the Jewish Question in “Zur Judenfrage.”
Jay Geller places Marx’s rhetoric in “Zur Judenfrage” in a much wider context of
rhetorical signifiers in Marx’s oeuvre that, he argues, bear Jewish connotations (The Other
Jewish Question, chapter 6 ).
On socialist misreadings and uses and abuses of Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage,” see chap-
ters 2 and 3 , respectively, of Lars Fischer, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial
Germany. Fischer argues compellingly that “Socialists’ preconceptions regarding ‘the Jews’
clearly did shape their understanding of ‘Zur Judenfrage,’ but ‘Zur Judenfrage’ in no way
shaped their stance vis-à-vis ‘the Jews,’ which would have been no different had ‘Zur Juden-
frage’ never been written” (ibid., 39 ).
