The Jewish Question

The Jewish Question is an 1843 book by German historian and theologian Bruno Bauer, written and published in German (original title Die Judenfrage).

Bauer argued that Jews can achieve political emancipation only if they relinquish their particular religious consciousness, since political emancipation requires a secular state, which he assumes does not leave any "space" for social identities such as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the idea of the "Rights of Man." True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion. He described the contemporary concept of Jewish nationalism as "chimerical" and "baseless", as, according to him, Judaism is a primitive stage of development that would require surmounting one more stage than Christians before reaching the state of renouncing religion.

In his commentary On the Jewish Question also published in 1843, Karl Marx, who wrote The Communist Manifesto, criticizes Bauer's book (as well as Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden ("The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free") for, among other things, assuming that Jewish religions aren't based on their huckster nature, a stereotype that Marx takes as fact.