Political discourse in exile: Karl Marx and the Jewish question of our times

Karl Marx's philosophy of writing demands his readers help develop his theory by questioning its gaps and contradictions. A crucial question concerns Marx's relation to his Jewishness.;In "On the Jewish Question," Judaism stands for civil society and the transformative power of practical need, Christianity for the "political state" and spiritual solutions to material problems. Human emancipation will spring not from politics but "the negation of Judaism": recognizing and overcoming barriers to fully human existence.;Marx thus endorses a "Jewish" viewpoint which senses reality as the Hebrew bible does. The Torah conceives human beings in dialogue with God as indispensible partners in creating the world. We are called to act; our action matters. Marx criticizes the Greeks and most Western philosophers for their static, contemplative view of reality. Any ontology which imposes a truth beyond social relations privileges some people and needs, excluding others. By rejecting God, Marx discredits the God's-eye view that leads to false universals. He retains the structure of dialogue between the species and its evolving needs.;Hegel had offered the young Marx a dialectical approach to reality, but Marx eventually found Hegel's ontology too Greek. Rather than simply reversing Hegel, though, Marx corrects him as though he were subject to a Jewish worldview. Marx's method resembles the traditional Jewish style of hermeneutics called midrash. It performs the same function: restoring sense to a chaotic world as glimpsed from a particular tradition.;The breakdown of social meaning is central to Marx's theory of alienation. The Jewish theme of exile explains Marx's urgency. A group is exiled when society constructs reality to preclude it from expressing or acting upon the needs that constitute its identity. A society in exile frustrates the realization of human purposes. Both workers and capitalist society are exiled. To return, they must believe the world can become human--as their experience under capitalism shows it cannot.;Marx's personal exile is that his audience lacks the Jewish context to recognize his theory of how we become free. Theorists continue his work by listening to people in exile and working out different roads to emancipation.