Introduction

1 “Freedom, rights of mankind, emancipation and atonement for a thousand-year-old injustice” are such great rights and duties that the mere appeal to them can certainly be sure of finding an echo in every honourable man — indeed, the mere words are often sufficient to make the cause for whose defence they are employed popular.

2 Only too often, however, one believes one has already won a cause when one uses for it only words that serve, as it were, as a sacred sign which no one may contradict who does not wish to be regarded as an inhuman wretch, a scoffer or a friend of tyranny. In this way one can achieve momentary successes, but not win the cause, not overcome the real difficulties.

3 In the present discussions on the Jewish question the great words “freedom, human rights, emancipation” have often been heard and received with much applause; the cause itself, however, they have not advanced very far, and it will perhaps be of use to employ them less often for once and instead to think more seriously about the object with which we are concerned.

4 If the cause of the Jews has become a popular one, this cannot be a merit of its defenders, but can only be explained by the fact that the people have an inkling of the connection in which the emancipation of the Jews stands with the development of our entire conditions.

5 The defenders of Jewish emancipation have not sought out and actually presented this connection. In a time in which critique has dared to attack everything that has hitherto ruled the world, they have simply let the Jews and Judaism be what they are, or rather they do not even ask what they are, and without investigating whether their essence is compatible with freedom, they want to exalt freedom.

6 They even cry out as if it were a betrayal of humanity when critique sets about investigating the essence which is peculiar to the Jew as a Jew. The very same people who perhaps look on with pleasure when critique takes possession of Christianity, or consider this critique necessary and themselves demand it, are capable of condemning him who now also subjects Judaism to critique.

7 Is Judaism, then, to have a privilege — now, when privileges are falling under the blows of critique, and also later, when they have all fallen?

8 The defenders of Jewish emancipation have therefore placed themselves in the strange position of fighting against privileges and at the same moment granting Judaism the privilege of immutability, inviolability and irresponsibility. They fight with the best intentions for the Jews, but true enthusiasm is lacking in them, since they treat the cause of the Jews as one alien to them. If they have taken the side of progress, of the further development of mankind, they exclude the Jews from their party. From the Christians and from the Christian state they demand that they should abandon the prejudices which have not only grown into their hearts but constitute their heart and their essence, but from the Jews they demand nothing. Judaism is not to be touched to the heart.

9 The Christian world must still pay great pains for the birth of the new age which is now forming: are the Jews to suffer no pains, are they to have equal rights with those who have fought and suffered for the new age?

10 Those, therefore, are the worst enemies of the Jews who would not let them feel the pains of critique, which has now seized everything. Without having passed through the fire of critique, nothing will be able to enter the new world which has drawn near.

11 You have also not yet made the cause of the Jews a truly popular, a general people's cause. You have spoken of the injustices of the Christian states, but have not yet asked whether these injustices and severities are not grounded in the essence of the previous state constitutions.

12 If the conduct of the Christian state towards the Jews is grounded in its essence, then the emancipation of the Jews is possible only on the presupposition of a total transformation of its essence — namely, insofar and to the extent that the Jews abandon their essence, i.e., the Jewish question is only a part of the great and general question on whose solution our age is working.

13 The opponents of Jewish emancipation have hitherto been far superior to its defenders, since they have really taken into view the antithesis in which the Jew as such stands to the Christian state. Their error was only that they presupposed the Christian state as the only true one and did not subject it to the same critique with which they regarded Judaism. Their conception of Judaism seemed hard and unjust only because they did not at the same time critically examine the state which denied and had to deny them freedom.

14 We shall direct critique against both sides of the antithesis: only thus and not otherwise will it find its resolution. It may be that our conception of Judaism will seem even harder than that which one has hitherto been accustomed to from the opponents of Jewish emancipation. It may be that it is really harder: but my sole concern can only be whether it is true; the only question will always remain whether an evil is thoroughly removed if one does not go to its root, and whoever insists on complaining, let him complain only of freedom, that it demands from other peoples as well as from the Jews the sacrifice of outmoded traditions before it gives itself to them. If critique seems hard or is really so, it will nevertheless, and it alone, lead to freedom.

15 We begin by giving the question its correct position and dissolving the false turns which have hitherto been given to it.