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On The Jewish Question

This is typically viewed and quoted as antisemitic, and used to characterize Marx as an antisemite and self hating Jew.

However, it really isn't that hard to understand. Marx does what he does, taking his time arranging an argument, and then using his interlocutors (an actual antisemite) own arguments against him.

He argues that, if the tropes about Jews are true it is only because of the social conditions which govern all of us. As he says,

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. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.

If "the worldly religion of the Jew" is "huckstering" and "his worldly god" is "money", then surely this has become true of the Christians as well. Because Marx looks at this "nature" through a historical materialist lens, he doesn't see these traits as eternal 'nature'; he sees them as products of oppression.

Marx goes on to make this comparison in several ways. Pointing out that money and private property are the two forces that truly shape religion.

Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism -- huckstering and its preconditions -- the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man's individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

If what the antisemites say is true about Jews, then the antisemite would advocate for the abolishment of the preconditions that created this Jewish character (exclusion from land, feudal privileges, and the subsequent rule of private property and money) according to their own logic. They should seek the abolition of private property and money in general, since according to them it is all that defines the Jew. Yet, doing so would also abolish Christianity, Christians, and the preconditions that create the antisemite in the same stroke. Because money is the ruler of the day, and no one escapes the rule of money.