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philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’
    Unlike most of the thinkers whom Marx chewed up and spat out, Feuerbach earned his lasting gratitude. ‘ I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and – if I may use the word – love which I feel for you,’ he wrote to Feuerbach in 1844. ‘You have provided – I don’t know whether intentionally – a philosophical basis for socialism … The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society !’
    In his last weeks at Kreuznach, Marx wrote two important essays which were to appear in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher . The first, ‘On the Jewish Question’, is usually mentioned only en passant , if at all, in Marxist hagiographies. But it has provided powerful ammunition for his enemies.
    Was Marx a self-hating Jew? Although he never denied his Jewish origins, he never drew attention to them either – unlike his daughter Eleanor, who proudly informed a group of workers from the East End of London that she was ‘a Jewess’. In his later correspondence with Engels, he sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee: the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a frequent victim, was described variously as the Yid, Wily Ephraim, Izzy and the Jewish Nigger. ‘ It is now quite plain to me – as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify – that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt, unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger,’ Marx wrote in 1862, discussing the ever-fascinating subject of Lassalle’s ancestry. ‘Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.’
    Some passages from ‘On the Jewish Question’ have an equally rancid flavour if taken out of context – which they usually are.
    What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.
    What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling.
    What is his secular God? Money …
    We therefore recognise in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.
    The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
    Those critics who see this as a foretaste of Mein Kampf overlook one essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians. Although (or perhaps because) Bauer was an ostentatious atheist, he thought Christianity a more advanced phase of civilisation than Judaism, and therefore one step closer to the joyful deliverance which would follow the inevitable destruction of all religion – just as a gravedigger might regard a doddery dowager as a more promising potential customer than the local Queen of the May.
    This perverse justification for official bigotry, which allied Bauer with the most reactionary boobies in Prussia, was demolished with characteristic brutality. True, Marx seemed to accept the caricature of Jews as inveterate moneylenders – but then so did almost everyone else. (The German word ‘ Judentum ’ was commonly used at the time as a synonym for ‘commerce’.) More significantly, he didn’t blame or accuse them: if they were forbidden to participate in political institutions, was it any wonder that they exercised the one power permitted to them, that