The two Marxes: From Jewish domination to supersession of the Jews

Introduction

German intellectuals devoted considerable attention in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the social origins and consequences of modern capitalism, and references to Jews abounded in their discussions. Indeed, in those years, “the role of Jews in the formation of modern economies … was a burning issue” (Nirenberg, 2003: 230 n. 8). In both scholarly and popular discourse, Jews were widely portrayed as agents and symbols of modern capitalism and the egoism, utilitarianism, and materialism associated with it (Lange, 2007; Muller, 2002: 234, 237–238, 253–255; Muller, 2010: 33–61; Nirenberg, 2003; Nirenberg, 2013: 423–445). This attention to Jews partly reflected the historical approach that German thinkers typically took and the actual role of Jews in European economic history. As the Jews in Europe were pushed out of land-owning by the Church and excluded from medieval guilds, they engaged increasingly by the thirteenth century in commerce and money-lending (Muller, 2002: 10–12; Muller, 2010: 23–28). The precise relationship of these activities to modern capitalism and the extent to which they reflected Jewish preferences rather than restricted opportunities were among the questions debated by German historians and social scientists. ¹ However, because attention to the Jews was often disproportionate to their involvement in historical events, and because in the social thought of some German intellectuals the Jews were assigned subject positions that went far beyond their actual empirical roles, historical facts alone cannot fully account for the interest in them.

This article suggests another reason for the attention to Jews in German discussions of modern capitalism: ideas about the Jews formed part of the cultural toolkit (Swidler, 1986) with which classical German social thinkers constructed their understanding of modernity and of German or European identity in an era of rapid social change. When portrayed as agents of capitalist modernization, Jews were typically constructed as antithetical and threatening to communal solidarity. Building on previous efforts to trace the persistent symbolic construction of Jews as an anti-civil other to the history of religious antagonism in Europe (Alexander, 2006: 8–9, 459–547; Nirenberg, 2003, 2013), I suggest that cultural schemas derived from Christian theology shaped how German social thinkers described the relationship between Jews and modern capitalism. ² Although the late nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of new forms of secular and racial antisemitism, close examination of classical German social thought suggests that Christian theological schemas were at least sometimes rearticulated in secular or racial terms rather than abandoned altogether. These schemas, I suggest, formed part of the doxa – the taken for granted, broadly shared, and partly preconscious assumptions and conceptual categories – of the German intellectual field. ³

Full support for this thesis would require careful exegesis and comparison of a range of works by multiple authors, a task that is beyond the scope of a single article. Instead, I concentrate on how Karl Marx in collaboration with Friedrich Engels described the relationship of the Jews to modern capitalism. This focus on Marx and Engels is warranted by their important influence (notwithstanding the conservatism of the German academic establishment) upon subsequent German social thinkers, who had to engage with the Marxian legacy regardless of whether they were critical or sympathetic to it, especially in discussions about modern capitalism. While highlighting Marx’s allusions to and use of motifs derived from Christian theology, I reveal a significant shift in how he linked European Jewry to the development of modern capitalism. The early Marx, it is shown, constructed a narrative of Jewish domination in which “the Christians have become Jews” (Tucker, 1978: 49). That narrative echoed the venerable discourse of “judaizing” that began with Paul and periodically reappeared in Christian Europe, most notably in polemics among the early Church Fathers and again during the Reformation (Nirenberg, 2003: 215–227; Nirenberg, 2013: 59–60, 87–134, 246–268). However, the mature Marx, followed by Engels, substituted a new and different narrative in which the Jews, after contributing to the creation of modern capitalism, were subsequently surpassed and supplanted. This later narrative can be understood as a secularized version of Christian supersessionism – the doctrine that the New Testament church is the new Israel that has forever superseded national Israel as the people of God (Marshall, 1997; Vlach, 2009) – transposed by Marx to the material realm of economic history. In the article’s conclusion, I elaborate on the implications of this argument for scholarly debates about the purported Jewishness of Marx’s ideas, his interest in the Jews and their significance in his thinking, the relationship of Marx’s ideas to antisemitism, and the basis of the antisemitic stereotypes that appear in Marx’s work.

How did cultural schemas, derived from Christian theology, come to influence Marx and Engels? To begin with, they shared a Protestant religious background. Although Marx was born into a Jewish family, his father converted to Lutheranism circa 1819, Karl himself was baptized in 1824, and his mother accepted baptism in 1825 (Birnbaum, [2004] 2008: 48–50; Sperber, 2013: 17, 23). Since Marx did not receive a Jewish education, his socialization minimized cultural schemas derived from alternative or competing religious traditions, the availability of which might have made the reproduction of Christian schemas less likely. ⁴ For his part, Engels was raised in a Pietist family in an intensely Protestant region; his father was a prominent lay proponent of the Great Awakening, and the son would later complain that socialist ideas “reawakened all the religious fanaticism of [his] old man” (Sperber, 2013: 137–141). In addition, Marx and Engels were further inculcated with Protestant traditions via the habit-forming force of formal schooling. A Gymnasium education (though not completed by Engels) included instruction in religion, and post-secondary schooling at the University of Berlin (where both of them studied) familiarized them with German idealism, a philosophical tradition that was deeply informed by Protestantism (Löwy, 1979: 22 n. 10; Ringer, 1969: 90–98; Sperber, 2013: 29–31, 61–63, 66, 129, 134). ⁵ The relative homogeneity of the German educated middle class and the density of social ties among its members likely reinforced the effectiveness of this socialization. Lastly, Christian theological schemas became legitimized by the endorsement of authoritative thinkers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and taken for granted as a result of repeated use among other German intellectuals with whom Marx and Engels interacted. ⁶ In light of these considerations, it is not surprising that Marx turned to religious analogies to understand modern capitalism. Since “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (Tucker, 1978: 53), as he put it, “we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world” (Tucker, 1978: 321) to understand capitalism. This article aims to show how the Christian theological schemas he adopted for his own ends shaped, probably in ways he did not fully intend, his account of the origins of modern capitalism.

The early Marx: The modern money economy as Jewish domination

When Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question” in 1843, it was still a live question in German lands. France had already emancipated its Jews in 1790–1791, shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution, and despite the setback of Napoleon’s décret infâme (infamous decree) of 1808, the emancipation of French Jewry was not reversed. In contrast, progress toward Jewish emancipation in German lands was slower, piecemeal, and at times rolled back. Historically, the rulers of German principalities decided whether to admit Jews to their respective domains, how many, and under what terms. The rulers of the Prussian kingdom whence Marx hailed had typically sought to restrict or reduce Jewish settlement. In a landmark essay On the Civil Improvement of the Jews published in 1781, several years before the French Revolution, the Prussian civil servant Christian Wilhelm Dohm argued that equal civil rights and freedom of occupation would bring about the moral regeneration of the Jews and render them useful to the state. His proposals appeared prescient in the wake of the upheavals that followed: Revolutionary France imposed emancipation in the German territories it conquered, and the Napoleonic military threat induced Prussia to take its own initial steps in that direction in 1812. However, after the Napoleonic threat was defeated in 1815, the Jews in Prussia and other post-Napoleonic German states experienced a combination of political reaction, economic restriction, and cultural exclusion. These setbacks were part of a broader reaction against French conquest which extolled the “organic” society of medieval Christendom over the rationalism of the French Enlightenment (Gartner, 2001: 121, 134–135; Vital, 1999: 66, 171–179; Wasserman, 2007: 655–656). They induced Karl Marx’s father to convert to Protestantism, and they also shunted many young educated Jews into journalism, a new profession that remained open to them and which the baptized Karl Marx also entered. ⁷

Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” was a response to another essay on the same topic by Marx’s erstwhile mentor, the German philosopher Bruno Bauer, whom Marx had encountered at the University of Berlin. Both Bauer and Marx were influenced, in turn, by Hegel’s idealist philosophy. For Hegel, world history was the process through which human beings became progressively conscious of their freedom. From its nadir in the ancient Orient, Hegel ([1840] 1988) argued, where it was restricted to a single despotic ruler, this consciousness reached its zenith among “the Germanic peoples, through Christianity, who came to the awareness that every human is free by virtue of being human, and that the freedom of spirit comprises our most human nature” (p. 21). This view of history formed the backdrop for Bauer’s essay, though unlike Hegel, Bauer rejected Jewish emancipation. The Jews, Bauer argued, were an oriental people who subjugated themselves to an unchanging body of law seemingly imposed by an external power. On that basis, they separated themselves from others and removed themselves from history. Consequently, they were incapable of realizing their own potential as free agents and rational beings. “The placing of Judaism at the bottom of a sort of hierarchy of religions and states of spiritual being and the notion that the Jewish people were outside history partook of long-established Christian criticism of Judaism” (Vital, 1999: 192). But conversion to Christianity was insufficient to emancipate the Jews. In Bauer’s view, Judaism and Christianity alike were merely phases in humanity’s progressive consciousness of its own freedom, both of which had to be transcended if that consciousness was to become complete. Therefore, according to Bauer ([1843] 1958), the state could not emancipate the Jews as long as it remained a Christian state, and the Jews could not be emancipated as long as they remained Jews.

Marx agreed with Bauer that the modern state was a secular state in which politics was separated from religion. However, Marx argued, this exclusion from the political realm could not be equated with the abolition of religion. On the contrary, he pointed out, religion continued to thrive outside of politics, even and especially in the United States, where the separation of state and church was most fully developed. Moreover, Marx suggested, what is true of religion is true of private property as well. When the right to vote and hold office is no longer restricted to property owners, property ownership loses its public significance, or, to put it differently, the state emancipates itself from property. But again, this separation of the modern state from property ownership is in no way equivalent to the abolition of property, which continues to exist and operate in private. The continued flourishing of religion and property was detrimental to Bauer’s argument and troubling for Marx because it indicated that alienation had yet to be really overcome even in the most advanced states, where political emancipation had already been achieved. Marx argued that instead of overcoming alienation, political emancipation divided the modern individual into the public role of citizen and the private role of bourgeois. Furthermore, the political community of public citizens, which is supposed to be oriented to the general interest, is illusory; in reality, it is subordinated to the bourgeois or civil society (Bürgergesellschaft) of private persons oriented to their own egoistic and particular ends. For this reason, Marx implied, the extension of citizenship to the Jews and their incorporation into the modern state were not sufficient to bring about the improvement (Verbesserung) that Dohm and other advocates of emancipation predicted in the eighteenth century. Failing to provide more than an illusory solution to alienation, political emancipation fell short of what Marx called human emancipation, in which the “the real, individual man,” the egoistic member of civil society, absorbs into himself the ideal, “abstract citizen” (Tucker, 1978: 44). Human emancipation aims at a genuine, non-alienated form of community which must therefore also be universal, that is, not limited to the political community of public citizens; it must encompass all of social life.

Only in the second part of Marx’s essay did he turn his attention squarely to the Jews. Marx, in opposition to Bauer, supported Jewish emancipation as a progressive development (Avineri, 1964; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 1:400). This stance was consistent with the first part of Marx’s essay, which made clear that political emancipation entailed only the privatization of Judaism and not its abolition. By the same token, Marx had pointed out that political emancipation was insufficient to liberate human beings from religion or property. Bauer failed to grasp the limits of political emancipation, Marx suggested, because he sought the chains of human beings in their consciousness instead of in their real life. Marx, in contrast, began his criticism not with the Jewish religion, with the “sabbath Jew,” but with the practical activity of the “real” or “everyday” Jew. In nineteenth-century Prussia, Jews mainly earned their livelihoods by means of peddling, shopkeeping, innkeeping, commerce, and the livestock trade (Traverso [1990], 1994: 20; Wasserman, 2007: 656). Marx summed up this activity in a single pejorative word: huckstering (Schacher).

What was the relationship between the religious consciousness of the sabbath Jew and the practical activity of the real, everyday Jew? Huckstering, based on practical need and self-interest, was in Marx’s view a material form of self-alienation analogous to the spiritual form found in religion:

Just as man, so long as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, … namely money.

Money was in reality, like God in the pious man’s imagination, an alienated expression of man himself; it was the “worldly god” of the “everyday Jew” corresponding to the spiritual God of the “sabbath Jew” (Tucker, 1978: 48). Bauer ([1843] 1958: 123) had insisted that money made the Jews powerful despite their lack of political rights. Without disputing this antisemitic claim, Marx added that money was not simply a means of Jewish power, but became a power in its own right over Jews and Christians alike. Marx thereby extended his vicious characterization of the Jews to civil or bourgeois society in toto and turned the most hateful stereotypes of Jews back upon Christians. With the universal domination of money, he wrote, “the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations,” and “the Christians have become Jews” (Tucker, 1978: 49).

Having revealed the nature and source of humanity’s alienation, Marx could now clarify the meaning of human emancipation. Religion was a protest against material alienation as well as an expression of it. However, like political emancipation, religion failed to offer a genuine solution to the alienation in man’s practical life; it, too, provided only a fantastic and partial form of community, limited in this case not to the citizens (from whose ranks the sabbath Jew was excluded) but to the faithful. Just as the real, universal form of community to which human emancipation aspires cannot be limited to the political life of public citizens (it must encompass all of social life), neither can it be limited to particular forms of community based on religion (it must encompass all of humanity). Marx did not dispute Bauer’s assumption (derived from Christian theology via Hegelian philosophy) that Judaism was a narrower, more parochial, and therefore more backward form of community than Christianity, nor that both religions had to be transcended in favor of more expansive forms of community. But where Bauer attacked symptoms, Marx struck at the root. Only by “emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism,” Marx wrote, would the modern age “emancipate itself. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions and thus the very possibility of huckstering would make the Jew impossible.” The Jewish religion would not be abolished by demanding apostasy as an entry ticket to political citizenship, but only by eliminating its “profane basis,” the material conditions which gave rise to it and which it expressed. Since the spiritual self-alienation found in religious consciousness reflected the material self-alienation found in man’s practical activity, the Jew’s “religious consciousness would evaporate” (Tucker, 1978: 48) once the preconditions and possibility of huckstering were eliminated. For Marx, “the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism [Judentum]” (Tucker, 1978: 49), both in its spiritual sense but also and more fundamentally in the “real and practical” sense of commerce. ⁸

Through the remainder of the 1840s and into the early 1850s, Marx continued to identify hucksterism as the “practical Jewish spirit” which in turn had become the “practical spirit of the Christian nations.” The Holy Family, co-authored with Engels and published in 1845, continued Marx’s polemic against Bauer and extended it to other radical followers of Hegel; it revisited the Jewish question only to reiterate the argument that Marx had already made in his earlier essay (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 4:87–90, 94–99, 106–118). Marx’s unpublished “Theses on Feuerbach,” written in 1845, and The German Ideology, written by Marx and Engels in 1845–1846, concluded their critical reassessment of the Hegelian philosophical tradition and worked out their own materialist conception of history in opposition to it. The Jews were rarely mentioned in these works, but when they were, it was in connection with hucksterism. Marx’s first thesis criticized the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach for narrowly conceiving practice “only in its dirty-judaical [schmutzig-jüdisch] manifestation” in contrast to “revolutionary” or “practical-critical activity” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 5:3). ⁹ Likewise, The German Ideology identified the Jews with “small-scale commercial and industrial swindling” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 5:369; see also 180). In essays and articles written in the 1850s, Marx and Engels continued to identify Jews as a commercial people: middlemen who monopolized the exchange of manufactured goods for agricultural produce in eastern Germany (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 11:44), traders in the Ottoman Empire (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 12:9), merchants in Algeria (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 18:64), and horse dealers in Russia (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 18:305). At the same time, Marx continued to insist that what he called the “practical Jewish spirit” was no longer the spirit of the Jews alone; it was, Marx and Engels wrote in The Holy Family, “the fully developed practice of the Christian world itself.” The “present-day world,” they reiterated, was “Jewish to the core,” and the task of emancipation was therefore “the task of abolishing the Jewish character of civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of the present-day practice of life, the most extreme expression of which is the money system” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 4:109–110). Marx repeated the point several years later in a discussion of the British Parliament. British Jews already had civil rights, but after restrictions were lifted on non-Anglican Protestants in 1828 and Catholics in 1829, they remained the only group disqualified from the Parliament on religious grounds. Consequently, Jewish banker Lionel de Rothschild, who was elected to the House of Commons in 1847 and repeatedly thereafter, could not be sworn in until the House of Lords agreed in 1858 to omit the words “on the true faith of a Christian” from the necessary oath (Gartner, 2001: 133, 160). “It may be questioned,” Marx wrote about Rothschild in 1853, “whether the English people will be very contented with this extension of suffrage to a Jewish usurer” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 11:512). But in another article written shortly thereafter, Marx added, “The exclusion of Jews from the House of Commons, after the spirit of usury has so long presided in the British Parliament, is unquestionably an absurd anomaly” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 11:522–523).

Intermezzo: The 1848 revolutions and the Jews

In the mid-nineteenth century, Engels endorsed Marx’s identification of the Jews with hucksterism while introducing a new theme: the Jews as a reactionary people without history. ¹⁰ The hucksterism theme remained apparent in a polemic that Engels wrote against the Austrian-Jewish poet Karl Beck in 1847. To demand that members of the Rothschild banking family purge “selfishness, cunning and the practice of usury” from the memories of the Jews, Engels suggested, was “the equivalent of requiring Louis-Philippe,” the French king brought to power by a bourgeois revolution in 1830, “to teach the bourgeoisie … to abolish property” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 6:239). When revolutions swept Europe in 1848, the new theme began to appear without entirely displacing the earlier one. Marx and Engels returned to Cologne to participate in the revolution in Germany, where they vigorously opposed Prussia’s suppression of the 1848 Polish uprising and the subsequent support of the German national assembly in Frankfurt for Prussian annexations in Poland (Anderson, 2010: 60). These positions were consistent with their earlier support for the Poles, which was then considered “a litmus test for demarcating the democratic and revolutionary cause from its conservative opponents” (Anderson, 2010: 56). Engels supported Jewish emancipation as a revolutionary measure in Poland and elsewhere (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 6:550; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 9:455), but in an article on the Polish question written in August 1848 he castigated what he called “the profit-hungry Jewish-Prussian small fry from Posen, who fought against the Poles” and “acted in close unity with … all who were reactionary and old-Prussian” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 7:355). Engels later suggested that the uprising in Posen had been suppressed by Prussia “in alliance with the Jews” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 9:360). Marx, picking up the new theme and extending it beyond Poland, wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in November 1848 that the Jews “since the emancipation of their sect have everywhere put themselves, at least in the person of their eminent representatives, at the head of the counter-revolution” – a counter-revolution which, he predicted, would only betray them (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 8:32; see also Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 8:94, 415–416).

The reality was more complex. Although Jews in the Hapsburg lands generally supported the imperial regime, Jewish representatives sat in the revolutionary assemblies in Paris, Vienna, and Frankfurt, and though the revolutionary upheavals did bring emancipation while the new regimes lasted, they also brought anti-Jewish riots in some parts of Europe (Brenner, 1997: 280–294; Gartner, 2001: 155–161). Moreover, even where violence against Jews was absent, they did not fit easily into a Europe reimagined along national lines (Vital, 1999: 254–255). Certainly Engels saw no room for them in the new dispensation. He distinguished “peoples without history” (geschichtlosen Völker) from the “historic nations” which, in his view, were more economically developed and therefore destined to assimilate the former. Within this framework, Engels categorized the Jews of central and eastern Europe as a people without history, an anachronistic and reactionary caste of commercial intermediaries eking out a living in the interstices of Europe’s most backward social formations, turned inward upon themselves but typically allied with the dominant powers, lacking a national culture but obstinately opposed to assimilation (Anderson, 2010: 49–50; Traverso, [1990] 1994: 22–25). In contrast to Marx’s early essay on the Jewish question, wherein Jews represented the dominant and dominating spirit of the age, Marx and Engels now portrayed Jews as a people blindly and obstinately clinging to old and soon-to-be superseded social arrangements. Europe was no longer haunted by the specter of judaization, but of communism. ¹¹

The mature Marx: Modern capitalism as supersession of the Jews

As Marx developed his critique of capitalism from the late 1850s through the 1860s in the Foundations (Grundrisse) of the Critique of Political Economy, in his economic manuscript of 1861–1862, and Capital, he continued to identify Jews with commerce and usury, but these activities were reconceived as historical preconditions of modern capitalism and no longer as its defining features. Marx distinguished two basic presuppositions of the capitalist mode of production: there must be free laborers, on the one hand, who must sell their labor power to survive, and “owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence,” on the other hand, “who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power” (Tucker, 1978: 432). Both figures arose as a result of historical processes. The suspension of slavery or serfdom meant that the producer no longer formed part of the means of production, and the dissolution of small, free landed property, or communal land ownership meant that the means of production no longer belonged to him individually or collectively. But how did the laborer, now free in this double sense, find himself up against capital? Where did it come from?

“The monetary wealth which becomes transformed into capital in the proper sense, into industrial capital,” Marx (1973) wrote, “is … the mobile wealth piled up through usury – especially that practised against landed property – and through mercantile profits” (p. 504). The usurer and merchant were uniquely suited for this role because in precapitalist economic formations, wealth appeared as an end in itself only among “commercial peoples,” while the principal owners of the surplus-product that the merchant sought to appropriate – slave owners, feudal lords, and rulers – were mainly consumers of it (Marx, 1973: 487, 505; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:329–330). The usurer acquired his wealth through the direct appropriation of others’ labor, “but in a form which makes the actual producer into his debtor, instead of making him a seller of his labour to the capitalist”; he thus engaged in “capitalist exploitation without a capitalist mode of production” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 34:118–119). The merchant’s methods were equally unsavory: since new value could only be generated through production and not through exchange or circulation, Marx reasoned that the merchant’s profits derived from cheating, fraud, and the advantage gained from inserting himself “parasitically” (Marx’s term) as a middleman between the selling and buying producers (Marx, 1973: 859; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 35:174–175; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:327–330). Marx described the wealth accumulated by usurers and merchants in this fashion as an initial or antediluvian form of capital, though he stressed that its formation and existence preceded the capitalist mode of production and that it could only become capital in its “modern standard form” or “in the proper sense” under specific historical circumstances, namely, when labour and its conditions were commodified (the other presupposition of modern capitalism) and when the owners of monetary wealth took possession of production itself (Marx, 1973: 233, 505–512, 856, 859; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 32:464; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:323, 325, 332–335, 588, 592–593).

Although Marx was clear that not all merchants and usurers were Jews, ¹² it was in this role and only in this role that they appeared in his historical analysis (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 32:396–397, 464–465, 541; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 35:165, 173; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:328, 414, 592, 606–607). In an image borrowed from Bauer ([1843] 1958: 10) which reappeared in the Grundrisse and again in the first and third volumes of Capital, Marx described the Jews as a commercial or trading people living in the pores of medieval or Polish society (Marx, 1973: 487, 858; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 35:90; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:328). With this image Marx also linked Jews to usury: “it [usury] is a form in which the capital of the Jews was created everywhere in the Middle Ages, where they appear as money-lenders in the pores of purely agricultural peoples. (Debt slavery in distinction to wage slavery.)” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 34:119; cf. Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:593). As merchants and usurers in the pores of precapitalist production, Marx suggested, Jews helped to further the development of modern capitalism. The primary contribution of these activities, as we have seen, was to promote the formation and concentration of money-capital, but merchants and usurers also advanced the other basic precondition of modern capitalism – free labor – insofar as their activities helped to dissolve the old precapitalist forms of production in which the worker was also a proprietor. Commerce and usury did so in several related ways: by subordinating production to exchange value, ruining feudal landlords and small producers (i.e. the owners of the old conditions of labor), accelerating the separation of worker-proprietors from the conditions and instruments of their labor, and appropriating those conditions and instruments. To be sure, in Marx’s view, commerce and usury played only a limited role in the transition to modern capitalism: these activities did not create the conditions and instruments of labor; their dissolving effects on precapitalist production depended on the nature of the producing communities between and within which commerce and usury operated and on the current stage of historical development, and therefore, by themselves, commerce and usury were not sufficient to bring about a new mode of production. Nevertheless, Marx assigned considerable historical significance to these activities and by extension to the Jews who engaged in them (Marx, 1973: 507–512, 858–859; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 35:90; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:325, 328, 330, 334, 589, 592, 605). It was “in the pores of the old society,” he asserted in 1847, that “a new society has taken shape” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 6:327–328). Capital qualified that assertion 20 years later but did not entirely reject it.

As merchants and usurers, Jews helped to bring the modern capitalist mode of production into existence, but in a familiar Marxian twist they were eventually subjugated by the very forces they helped to create. “[W]herever merchant’s capital still predominates,” Marx wrote in the third volume of Capital, “we find obsolete conditions … In the pre-capitalist stages of society commerce ruled industry. In modern society the reverse is true” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:325, 328; cf. Marx, 1973: 858). Once manufacture and large-scale industry gained sufficient strength to create a market for itself, commerce became “the servant of industrial production” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:334–335). In the case of usurer’s capital, subordination to industry was initially accomplished through “violence (the State) … by means of compulsory reduction of interest rates, so that it is no longer able to dictate terms to industrial capital” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 32:465). As an example of this development, Marx noted that in the eighteenth century, the Prussian king Frederick II fixed interest rates at 10 percent, though only for Jews, not Christians (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 32:541; Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:592). Later, industrial capital subjugated interest-bearing capital by “the creation of a procedure specific to itself – the credit system.” The credit system was originally “directed against the old-fashioned usurers (goldsmiths in England, Jews, Lombards, and others)” insofar as it deprived them of their former monopoly (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 32:465; see also Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 37:594–595, 598). Marx added that “the credit system [was] essentially Protestant” because it implied “faith in the social character of production.” ¹³ In these ways, Jews as representatives of antediluvian merchant’s and usurer’s capital were superseded by modern industrial capital. As if to underscore this point, Marx noted in the first volume of Capital that to the capitalist all commodities were “in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 35:165). The metaphor again identified Jews with money while alluding to a spiritual supersession analogous to the material one that Marx described: the capitalist converted commodities into money (C-M) like Christianity transformed gentiles into a new Israel inwardly marked by their circumcised hearts (Romans 2:29; cf. Deuteronomy 30:6). Marx thus returned to a key theme of his early essay “On the Jewish Question,” namely, that “the Christians have become Jews,” but in his later critique of capitalism Christianity was no longer “reabsorbed into Judaism” (Tucker, 1978: 49, 52). Rather, like the sculptures of Ecclesia ascendant over Synagoga displayed at cathedrals in Bamberg, Paris, Reims, Strassbourg, and elsewhere, Christian industry now dominated the Jewish commerce and usury that once promoted it.

Following the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867 (and the civil emancipation of Jews throughout the newly formed German Empire in 1871), Engels adopted this view of the Jews and modern capitalism in his own writings. In a manuscript on German history written in late 1873 to early 1874, Engels continued to view Jews as representatives of “practical gain” and “petty swindling” while stressing their role in capitalist development. “[The] Jewish element [was] absolutely vital to Germany,” he wrote; “the Jews [were] a class that stood even lower than the serfs, [with] no homeland, no rights … but [they were] free and because dependent on trade, an element of the future in themselves.” Echoing Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question,” Engels suggested that eventually “the Germans become Jewish and the Jews German” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 23:604–607). However, in a letter on antisemitism published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1890, Engels took a position closer to what Marx suggested in Capital, namely, that the Christian nations were ruled by industry, not money, once capitalism was fully developed. Only in the economically backward regions of Europe, Engels wrote,

where capital is not yet strong enough to gain control of national production as a whole, so that its activities are mainly confined to the Stock Exchange – in other words, where production is still in the hands of the farmers, landowners, craftsmen and suchlike classes surviving from the Middle Ages – there, and there alone, is capital mainly Jewish.

Consequently, he suggested, it was only there that antisemitism emerged among the declining social classes ruined by capital. But in England and America, he argued, where modern industry was fully developed, capital was no longer “mainly Jewish” – in fact, Engels added, as a result of industrialization and migration, there were “thousands upon thousands of Jewish proletarians” in those countries – and antisemitism was correspondingly absent (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, 27:50–51). As one astute commentator has put it,

Engels clearly assumed that industrialization and modernization would render obsolete the causes of antisemitism not only by robbing those strata inclining towards it of their existence but also by dislodging the Jews (to the extent of turning increasing numbers of them into proletarians) and asserting the dominance of non-Jewish over Jewish capital.

Here, as in Marx’s writings in the late 1850s and 1860s, Jews appeared primarily as usurers and merchants who helped to bring the capitalist mode of production into existence only to be superseded within it later.

Conclusion

Both the early and the mature Marx, in collaboration with Engels, defined modern capitalism in relation to the Jews, but Marx’s changing views about the nature of that relationship resulted in two different narratives. These alternative Marxian legacies could then be taken in different directions by subsequent thinkers; they provided the tracks, so to speak, along which later discussions among German intellectuals about the Jews and modern capitalism proceeded. For the early Marx, “the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations,” and “the Christians have become Jews” because the Jews epitomized civil or bourgeois society (Tucker, 1978: 49). This was a narrative of Jewish domination – not necessarily domination by individual Jews, but rather, as Werner Sombart later put it, by a Jewish spirit internalized by non-Jews and objectified in modern economic institutions. Indeed, Sombart explicitly appealed to the authority of Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” to bolster his own claims (Sombart, [1911] 1951: 256, 394 n. 506; Sombart, [1934] 1937: 178). His insistence in 1934 that it was “the chief task of the German people” to “free [themselves] from the Jewish spirit” (Sombart, [1934] 1937: 179) thus finds its source in this line of thinking by Marx. ¹⁴

In Marx’s mature work, the Jews appear primarily as usurers and merchants who helped to bring the capitalist mode of production into existence only to be superseded within it later. This account may be understood as Christian supersessionism secularized and transposed to economic development. The later Marx dispenses with the earlier narrative of Jewish domination, but in doing so, he makes the Jews an anachronism, a people who, as in Hegel’s philosophy of history, remain obstinately on the stage after their world-historical role has been fulfilled. Initially identified with the spirit of the age – a spirit that had to be transcended if humanity was to be emancipated – the Jews now come to represent, in a familiar Christian trope, the old dispensation surpassed by the new but stubbornly refusing to yield to the progress of history. Max Weber’s argument (constructed in opposition to Sombart) about the supersession of Jewish pariah capitalism by Puritan rational capitalism is a later variation on the same narrative, following the second of the two tracks that Marx laid down (Weber, [1917] 1952; Weber, [1920] 1958; Weber, [1922] 1978: 492–500, 611–623, 1200–1204; Weber, 1927: 352–369).

While Marx’s relationship to Jews and Judaism is hardly a new issue, this article has contributed to the existing scholarship in several ways. One line of interpretation suggests that Marx’s ideas have a Jewish lineage or character. The Christian theologian Paul Tillich (1968: 485–487), for instance, compared Marx to the Jewish prophets. “Marx as a Jew,” he maintained, “was in the tradition of Jewish criticism which had lasted through the millennia” (Tillich, 1968: 485). In contrast, Isaac Deutscher ([1958] 1968: 25–41) famously described Marx not as a Jewish prophet but as a Jewish heretic whose thinking transcended a community he found “too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting” (p. 26). However, Deutscher, too, insisted that despite – or rather by virtue of – his heresy, Marx “belongs to a Jewish tradition” (p. 26). Apostates like Marx, Deutscher suggested, remained in some ways “very Jewish indeed. They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect” (p. 27). The problem with this kind of interpretation is that it seeks essentially Jewish traits in Marx’s thought instead of examining his relations to real Jews. As Ivan Strenski (1997) has argued, “Jewishness is … learned, negotiated, and practiced over time … The extent to which Jewishness becomes a significant marker of identity for an individual depends, then, on … historic and social circumstances” (p. 6). Contrary to the view that Marx was a Jewish thinker, I have argued that Christian traditions (in Protestant form) were inculcated into and influenced Marx far more than any Jewish tradition.

A contrasting but no less influential interpretation of Marx minimizes his interest in the Jews and their significance in his thinking. According to some scholars, this interest was confined to his early work. Silberner (1949: 38), for instance, maintained that subsequently in Capital the Jews were not “shown to be of any essential significance in the genesis of capitalism.” Likewise, Carlebach (1978) suggested that the Jews “ceased to be of interest or consequence [to Marx]; the author of Capital has virtually nothing to say on them” (pp. 356–357). According to Blanchard (1984), “the Jew plays no part” in Marx’s “final version of the materialist theory of history and the concept of capitalism” (p. 365); “his mature works do not reflect any essential relationship between capitalism and the Jew” (p. 374). Birnbaum ([2004] 2008: 65–68) concludes that the Jews vanished with only minor exceptions from Marx’s major texts after 1845 and that he no longer treated them as key actors or assigned them any role in “the accumulation of capital, the circulation of goods, … [or] change in the mode of production.” Going further, other scholars have argued that even in Marx’s early work, his interest in Jews was merely incidental, “a convenient peg on which to hang his criticism of the liberal state” (McLellan, [1973] 1995: 72). By highlighting the continuing work that theologically derived ideas about Jews and Judaism did for Marx in his efforts to understand the origins and nature of modern capitalism, this article challenges such assessments. To be sure, Marx wrote more extensively about the Jews in his earlier works, but this point should not be overstated; they do not drop out of his mature work, as is sometimes supposed. To borrow a metaphor from historian David Nirenberg (2013: 6), Marx’s ideas about the Jews were not merely an ornament on the edifice of his thinking but a tool with which he constructed and then reconstructed the edifice.

A third line of interpretation concerns whether and to what extent Marx’s thinking was antisemitic. Some scholars have underscored its antisemitic aspects (Birnbaum, [2004] 2008: 36–82; Bloom, 1942; Carlebach, 1978: 344–358; Gilman, 1984; Ray, 2006; Silberner, 1949), while others have denied or downplayed them (Avineri, 1964; Draper, 1977: 591–608; Fine, 2006, 2014; Peled, 1992; Wheen, 1999: 56, 340–341). With the end of the Cold War, this debate has lost some of its former import. In addition, as recent scholarship has come to recognize, the “clear-cut juxtaposition of antisemites and non-antisemites” on which this debate rests hinders our understanding of the past because it elides the “extent to which both self-avowed antisemites and those opposed to political antisemitism” in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany “subscribed to many of the same anti-Jewish stereotypes” (Fischer, 2007: xii–xiii). Accordingly, the principal aim of this article has been neither to convict nor to exonerate Marx of antisemitism, but to clarify what role his assumptions about the Jews played in the development of his thinking about modern capitalism.

Lastly, a related line of scholarship has investigated the sources or roots of the antisemitic stereotypes that can be found in Marx’s work. Scholars with a materialist bent have emphasized the real historical basis of such stereotypes in the role that Jews played in European economic history and their highly visible concentration in commerce and finance (Arendt, [1951] 1958: 3–120; Draper, 1977: 597–600; Peled, 1992). Other scholars have stressed ideal factors ranging from Marx’s purported inner psychological conflicts (Blanchard, 1984; Gilman, 1984) to more general cultural, philosophical, and intellectual influences on his thinking (Arkush, 1991; Bloom, 1942; Carlebach, 1978). This article has taken a synthetic view: it has acknowledged the material basis of the stereotypes, while affirming the idealist insight that the facts never speak for themselves; their selection and interpretation is always shaped by cultural schemas that precede experience. ¹⁵ Building on previous scholarship (Alexander, 2006: 8–9, 459–547; Durkheim, [1912] 1995; Fischman, 1989; Herberg, 1943; Nirenberg, 2003, 2013), it has emphasized the religious origin of these schemas in Christian theology. At the same time, it extends this argument in several respects: it applies Durkheimian insights about the religious origin of mental categories to modern European social thought; it does not treat Judaism and Christianity as elements of a unified religious heritage; and because it does not limit its scope to Marx’s early work, it was able to reveal a significant shift over time in his thinking about the Jews and modern capitalism. To say that the tradition of all dead generations shaped Marx’s thinking is not to say that his thinking was incapable of new developments. Cultural schemas inherited from the past operate as constraining frameworks, not fixed recipes; they make it possible to produce a range of intellectual practices that are neither completely predictable nor infinitely diverse (Bourdieu, 1990: 54–55). ¹⁶ This understanding of cultural schemas allows us to understand how Marx’s thinking was both continuous with the past and capable of innovation.