Introduction

It is perhaps worth recording that the author of ‘On the Jewish Question’ was himself born into a Jewish family, in the Rhineland town of Trier in 1818. The beginning of the nineteenth century was a difficult time for German Jews. Though there was a measure of civil equality, there was still considerable discrimination against Jews in the professions: Marx’s father was obliged to undergo a nominal conversion to Protestant Christianity in order to retain his position as a legal official. It is unclear to what extent Jewish customs were practised in the household Marx grew up in and how much influence either the rabbinical tradition of his family or the experience of discrimination had on the young Marx. Certainly anti-Semitic jibes were often flung at him by opponents in later controversies. And since Marx himself was not above using the rhetoric of anti-Semitism when it suited his polemic purposes – ‘What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money.’ ¹ – there is at least some evidence for the suggestion that he suffered from the pathological Jewish self-hate typical of many of the victims of that prejudice. ²