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On the Jewish Question is a work by Karl Marx, written in 1843, and first published in Paris in...

On the Jewish Question is a work by Karl Marx, written in 1843, and first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title Zur Judenfrage in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. It was one of Marx's first attempts to deal with categories that would later be called the materialist conception of history. The essay criticizes two studies by fellow Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer on the attempt by Jews to achieve political emancipation in Prussia. 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. Marx uses Bauer's essay as an occasion for his own analysis of liberal rights. Marx argues that Bauer is mistaken in his assumption that in a "secular state" religion will no longer play a prominent role in social life, and, as an example refers to the pervasiveness of religion in the United States, which, unlike