I regard "On the Jewish Question" as one of the most difficult and seminal of all Marx's work. On the surface the problem is whether some of his remarks, transposed across time and space to the present, are anti-semitic. I will leave that till later.
The more important feature is its dialectical analysis of civil society. Contrary to soft Gramscianism (of which I am in many ways an adherent), civil society is not just a wide sphere for the contesting of ideological hegemony alongside the struggle for political power. Certainly some gains can be made by persistent and imaginative use of the possibilities, and a few weeks ago Hinrich Kuhls posted an interesting lament from capitalists about how "civil society" is used as a banner to harass their diligent and productive efforts.
But "On the Jewish Question" clearly shows Marx analysing civil society as the necessary counterpart of the triumph of commodity exchange. The individual members of bourgeois civil society are as essentially fragmented as commodities in a large capitalist market. They attempt to preserve their fragmented individual bourgeois civil rights, finding themselves in constant battle with everyone else. He contrasts this more "sensuous" and I think by implication, interdependent social relationships, which perhaps might be found in an alternative society.
Lest anyone think that this difficult text is better pushed to the back of the shelf as an aberration of Marx in his early developmental phase (it certainly was developmental and grew out of criticism of others, as did all his work), notice the echoes of the same analysis 40 years later in the critical references to bourgeois right in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
Therefore I submit if we are fully to orientate ourselves in the even more complex global civil society that is sweeping across the world, it is essential to have a dialectical understanding of the possibilities and the difficulties. Otherwise we are just radical bourgeois democrats. (Not bad as human species go, but lacking direction).
I would also add that this essay by Marx has some very important dialectical observations about religion, which make it clear that religious motivation should not be treated with contempt by dialectical materialists even though there are many mechanical materialist marxists who do so.
I am deliberately coming last to the controversial passages suggestive to our eyes of anti-semitism.
The work is laden with sarcasm and irony. The significance of particular passages is very difficult to discern without understanding the whole context. Real scholarship needs to be done by university departments (probably more than one) into this article together with the series of polemical articles at the same time on the same theme, preferably including an analysis of his opponents.
Furthermore I would posit that although Marx was not a social anthropoligist as we now know them, nor a member of a department of psycho-social studies, he had a keen understanding of symbolic social roles. I will jump to recall a comment in the early years of marxism-space (1994-5) from a wise old member of the South African communist party, who said that when trying to explain capitalism to the people of indigenous African descent in the prevailing language (I cannot remember whether it was Xhosa or Zulu) the nearest word was linked etymologically to that of jew.
I would suggest a wider explanation of these far flung facts has to go into the special, precarious, and creative role the jewish community played in precapitalist societies (as did also the merchants) with special license to go outside the conventions of social solidarity expressed in the usury laws. As a separate community suspected of its own internal communications and special form of trust, at times of economic crisis, the mistrust between them and the majority community would become acute and was in great danger of being expressed in antagonistic form.
In his article Marx places the political thrust of his criticism actually against crude assimilationism into the all engulfing bourgeois civil society. But Marx also criticises the distorted roles that the Jewish community have come to hold, and I would suggest he is struggling too, to express its highly contradictory role as symbolising capitalist accumulation in the distorted image of individual greed.
I have not rechecked the text before writing this and I would be in no position to have an extensive discussion about individual passages with anyone who wanted to argue that Marx must be denounced as an anti-semite. But we have to use e-mail as a collective endeavour and maybe others can take this forward if necessarily critically.
I do think any serious published scholarly analysis should probably discuss the contradictions of Marx's own position. Marx was the dearly loved son of an accomplished member of the German intelligentsia who happened to be of Jewish extraction who got the best educational chances his father gave him (cf Einstein and his father who was actually a small capitalist and similarly rather rebellious in an indirect way). He takes his place without equivocation among the foremost intellectual thinkers of the European intelligentsia. That is what he claims and that is what he does not yield ever.
This was an intellectual climate in which respect and esteem were often expressed in social or personal attributes. Also affection: Engels customarily called Marx, "Moor" (not "Jew"). To pose the question that there was a latent racism if not anti-semitism in Engels' towards Marx implied in this superficially friendly epithet, I suggest is to be transhistorical.
Marx would however have carried within him some of the painful contradictions, and it may be that some of the wording in "On the Jewish Question" conveys that passion as he asserts his own identity.
In this context I would like to draw attention finally to the dramatic assimilationist nature of his school-leaving certificate from the Gymnasium at Trier at the age of 17:
"Karl Marx
from Trier, 17 years of age, of evangelical faith, son of a barrister-at-law, Herr Justizrat Marx in Trier, was five years at the gymnasium in Trier, and two years in the first class.
I Moral behaviour towards superiors and fellow pupils was good.
II Aptitudes and diligence. He has good aptitudes, and in ancient languages, German, and history showed a very satisfactory diligence, in mathematics satisfactory, and in French only slight diligence.
III Knowledge and accomplishments
1. Languages:
[Detailed comments follow in turn on German, Latin, Greek, and French.]
In Hebrew ... [nothing is filled in.]
I submit that this absence is not accidental. On the contrary it is over-determined, in both the colloquial and the more specialised sense of the term!
But the more important question is the contradictory nature of bourgeois civil society and bourgeois right.
Chris Burford
London