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

Abstract

This article identifies two different patterns in how Karl Marx, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, portrayed the relationship between the Jews and modern capitalism. The early Marx described modern economic life as domination by a Jewish spirit that is internalized by non-Jews and objectified in economic institutions. The Jews did not drop out of Marx’s mature work, as is sometimes supposed, but there was a major shift in how he linked European Jewry to capitalist development. The mature Marx, it is argued, substituted a new narrative in which the Jews, after contributing to the creation of modern capitalism, were then superseded. In addition, the article seeks to explain these patterns: it argues that assumptions about the Jews originally derived from Christian theology but subsequently secularized and transposed to economic life formed part of the cultural toolkit with which Marx and other classical German social thinkers constructed their understanding of modern capitalism.