(”Karol Marks”). W Kwestii Zydowskiej [”On the Jewish Question.”] With introduction by Franz Mehring.

MARX, KARL.

Al. Debski

(London

1896)

Polish text.

First Separate Publication of Karl Marx’s Essay on the Jewish Question. Karl Marx wrote this important and controversial essay “Zur Judenfrage” (On the Jewish Question) in 1844 and it was issued in Paris in his short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The present exceptionally scarce edition is the first separate publication of it in any language. No copy recorded in WorldCat . It was published in London which was at the time a centre of socialist and revolutionary printing and such works would then be smuggled into Poland and Russia. One of Marx’s earliest political essays and first attempt to deal with categories that would later become known as the “materialist conception of history,” “On the Jewish Question” is a critical review of two texts by the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer on Jewish religious and civic emancipation. Since Poland contained the largest Jewish population in Europe, this debate was naturally intense. To many, the positions outlined here by Marx came to be seen as prefiguring the particular form of anti-Semitism that would become so prevalent in Communist regimes later in the 20th-century.