Arkush Judaism as Egoism From Spinoza to Feuerbach to Marx

Judaism as Egoism: From Spinoza to Feuerbach to MarxAuthor(s): Allan ArkushReviewed work(s):Source: Modern Judaism, Vol. 11, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 211-223Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1396268 .

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Allan Arkush

JUDAISM AS EGOISM: FROM SPINOZA TO FEUERBACH TO MARX

The names Benedict Spinoza and Karl Marx often appear together in a variety of different contexts. Rosters of the most important political philosophers of modern times almost invariably include both of them. Lists of individuals of Jewish origin who have made the most

significant cofitributions to Western civilization necessarily include them. Both names are frequently mentioned, too, in discussions of thinkers whose unflattering portraits of the Jews and Judaism have

played an important part in the history of modern antisemitism. While Spinoza and Marx are frequently found on the same list

of influential thinkers, only rarely are they closely linked to one another. This is not surprising. The chronological and intellectual dis- tance between them is great. Yet, in one respect, the connection between these two thinkers is closer than has generally been recog- nized. Marx's famous attack on Judaism as a religion rooted in egoism reflects rather strongly, albeit indirectly, the influence of Spinoza's critique of religion. The existence of such a connection is sometimes noted by scholars. Hans Liebeschiitz, for instance, once suggested that "the closest parallel" to Marx's view of Judaism and, "perhaps," the key to understanding it, is Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise.1 But neither Liebeschiitz nor anyone else has followed up this suggestion and sought to explain fully the relationship betwen these two philosophers in the hostile depiction of their ancestral religion.

Of the existence of a direct link between Spinoza's view of the Jewish religion and that of Marx there is, indeed, little evidence. It is known that Marx had read Spinoza by the time he wrote "On the Jewish Question," his principal treatment of Judaism. In that essay, however, as Joel Schwartz has pointed out, Marx makes no mention of Spinoza.2

The relationship between Spinoza and Marx can be clearly per- ceived only if we focus our attention on an intermediate figure, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. In his understanding of religion in general and Judaism in particular Feuerbach was, to a degree that he himself confessed but has seldom been fully appreciated, a

Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 211-223 ? 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



student of Spinoza. And what he absorbed from Spinoza he trans- mitted, in a somewhat altered form, to Marx. When Marx, borrowing Feuerbach's language, derided Judaism as a religion rooted in egoism, he was basically echoing Spinoza. However, as we shall see, he gave a new, malevolent twist to what he inherited from his intellectual forbears.

In order to observe in detail the process described above, it will be necessary to review briefly, in Part I, Spinoza's conception of the

origin of revealed religion and the bearing of that conception on his

understanding of Judaism. After that, in Part II, we shall demonstrate the decisive influence of Spinoza's thought on Feuerbach. In Part III we shall turn to Marx and consider the manner in which he adopted the Feuerbachian approach to religion and utilized it in his assessment of Judaism.

The "fundamental tenet" of Spinoza's anthropology, as Henry E. Al- lison has put it, is his conception of conatus. The conatus of a thing is the effort it makes to maintain itself. Each and every thing in existence, Spinoza postulates in his Ethics, "as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being."4 This is of course true of human beings, who, unlike other things, consciously desire and strive to preserve themselves. "Spinoza thus comes down on the side of Hobbes and many others who view the desire for self-preservation as the basic motivating force in human behavior."5

Spinoza's analysis of the origin of religion uses conatus to explain the conduct of human beings as they initially found themselves in nature. Desiring above all to preserve themselves, they were depen- dent on nature for the satisfaction of their basic desires and appetites. They were at the same time ignorant of the ultimate cause of the

things that occur within nature's boundaries. Naturally inclined toward wishful thinking, they imagined that "there was a ruler, or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their use."6 Some natural occurences, however, such as storms, earthquakes, and diseases, are not beneficial to human beings. Such things take place, men came to believe, on account of the gods' anger at their human creatures.7 They therefore sought to propitiate them through worship in order to advance their own welfare.8 In order to gain the favor of the divine beings and to avert the recurrence of harmful events, thereby persevering in their own existence, men developed and prac- ticed their religions.9

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This does not mean, of course, that every individual invented his own religion, or conceived of the gods as being directly attentive to his own personal welfare. A religion could be rooted in the appre- hensions of particular individuals with regard to their own well-being and at the same time represent the gods or God as being primarily concerned not with the fate of those individuals but with the group to which they belong. This is the case, in Spinoza's opinion, with

respect to the religion of Israel, which he describes at length in his

Theologico-Polotical Treatise. In that work Spinoza indicates clearly his belief that the God of

Israel is the product of human fears. He relates that if the Israelites "were at a loss to understand any phenomenon, or were ignorant of its cause, they referred it to God." Thus, "a storm was termed the

chiding of God, thunder and lightning the arrows of God, for it was

thought that God kept the winds confined in caves, His treasuries; thus differing merely in name from the Greek wind-god Eolus."'0 It was their fear of this God, Spinoza maintains, that led the Israelites to keep the commandments they believed He had revealed to them.

They hoped thereby not only to avert His wrath but to earn what had been promised them in return for obedience: "continual happiness of an independent commonwealth and other goods of this life."'1 It was, in other words, primarily their collective survival and prosperity that they sought to ensure through the practice of their religion.

The considerable influence of Spinoza's critique of religion on sub-

sequent European thought has often been noted, if only rarely ex- amined in depth.'2 This influence was no doubt greatest in the

eighteenth century, but it survived into the nineteenth century as well, as we can see quite clearly in the case of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach, as we noted earlier, was a self-confessed disciple of Spinoza. Without

taking this relationship into account, it is not possible to understand his concept of religion in general, and Judaism in particular. Before

examining the connection between Spinoza and Feuerbach, however, it will be necessary for us to examine briefly a number of recent, more or less tentative attempts to explain, without references to Spinoza, Feuerbach's concept of Judaism as a religion based on "egoism."

Some scholars, as Nathan Rotenstreich has observed, have ex- plained Feuerbach's view of Judaism in the light of the particular social and economic situation of Jewry in the first half of the nineteenth century. "The Jews at the time of Feuerbach or Marx were merchants; their occupation and way of life were therefore inter-

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preted as the human essence behind the Jewish faith." Others, like Rotenstreich himself, have sought to understand Feuerbach's con-

ception of Judaism in the context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century German philosophy, or as a reflection of the influence of still earlier thought.

It is Rotenstreich's opinion that Feuerbach may have been at-

tempting "to take up Mendelssohn's conception of Judaism and to base a criticism of Judaism upon an extreme conception of it." Men- delssohn had described Judaism as a religion of deeds and practices rather than of beliefs. For Feuerbach, too, Judaism was a religion of action; but for him

'action' has a wider meaning than it has for Mendelssohn. Action is the expression of a certain attitude towards the world. The basic human tendency revealed by 'action' is 'practicalness,' i.e., the utilitarian seeking of benefits. Feuerbach is really giving a new meaning to the concept of action . . 13

Emil Fackenheim disagrees with this analysis, "more from a desire to take Feuerbach on his own terms philosophically seriously than from available evidence."'4 He maintains that the most fruitful of the several possible explanations of this problem "understands Feuerbach's image of Judaism as part of his 'transformation' of He- gelianism."'5 Yet, he adds, "any philosophical understanding of all the left-wing images of Judaism is largely speculative."16

The most recent attempt to identify the philosophical roots of Feuerbach's conception of Judaism consists of nothing more than a brief observation included in a footnote, yet it displays greater insight into our problem than the explanations noted above. Rejecting Ro- tenstreich's admittedly tentative argument, Julius Carlebach states that "the heavy emphasis in Feuerbach on Jewish ethnocentrism leads me to suggest that his source was more likely to have been Spinoza."'7 Carlebach's suggestion, as brief and uncertain as it is, clearly points in the right direction. It does not, however, go far enough. It is not only Feuerbach's conception of Judaism that bears the imprint of Spinoza but his conception of religion in general.

Spinoza, in Feuerbach's eyes, was a great pioneer in the exploration of the nature of religion. He was, as he put it,

the only modern philosopher to have provided the first elements of a critique and explanation of religion and theology; the first to have offered a positive opposition to theology; the first to have stated, in terms that have become classical, that the world cannot be regarded as the work or product of a personal being acting in accordance with aims and purposes; the first to have brought out the all-importance of nature for the philosophy of religion.18

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Spinoza's view of religion as the product of an illusion evoked by men's instinct of self-preservation also served as the basis of Feuer- bach's own critique of religion, as he clearly acknowledged in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1848). In the first of these lectures he recalled how years earlier, in a discussion of Leibniz's theological attitude, he had had occasion to offer a critique of theology in general. "The standpoint from which I criticized it," he noted, "was Spinozan, or abstractly philosophical." That is to say, he

drew a sharp distinction between man's theoretical and practical attitudes, identifying the former with philosophy, the latter with theology and religion. In his practical attitude ... man relates things to himself, to his own profit and advantage; in his theoretical attitude he considers things only in relation to each other.

Reviewers of his work on Leibniz, Feuerbach commented, were greatly disturbed by what he had written. What they overlooked was the fact that "Spinoza in his Theologico-Political Treatise already considered and criticized theology and religion from the same standpoint. . ."19

Like Spinoza, Feuerbach sees human beings as creatures moti- vated essentially by a concern for their own well-being. This is what he has in mind when he speaks of their "egoism." In using this term he does not mean "egoism in the common sense of the word," but the "self-assertion of man in accordance with his nature and conse-

quently with his reason..." This is the same thing, he states, as "the instinct of self-preservation." Egoism is something without which man cannot live, "for in order to live I must continuously acquire what is useful to me and avoid what is harmful."20 Egoism in the larger sense of "utilitarianism" is also, Feuerbach explicitly states, "the ultimate hidden ground of religion."21

It is not very deeply hidden, though. It lies just beneath what Feuerbach refers to as man's "feeling of dependency."22 This is the term he employs to encompass both the negative and the positive ground of religion. The negative ground is fear, which Feuerbach connects with the origin of religion in much the same way as Spinoza. Human beings, he writes, finding themselves in a natural world which

they do not understand and over which they have only very limited control, are terribly frightened by much of what occurs within it. In their ignorance, they attribute these frightening events to the anger of the gods, which they seek to avert. "The chief ground of religion," according to Feuerbach, "is fear". .. ; "it was thunder which pounded religion into man."23

Unlike Spinoza (and others), however, as he himself emphasizes, Feuerbach cites "not only negative, but also positive grounds of religion; not only ignorance and fear, but also the emotions opposed

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to fear, the positive emotions of joy, gratitude, love and veneration as grounds of religion .. ."24 These are feelings which the gods inspire not through terrifying manifestations but through their supposed benefactions, which make men happy.

According to Feuerbach, the emphasis he places on these positive factors "radically" distinguishes his approach to the question of the

origins of religion from that of Spinoza.25 This claim, however, is difficult to accept. For both the negative and the positive grounds of

religion are, as Feuerbach himself observes, simply different aspects of the same state of mind, i.e., "the feeling of dependency." Under-

lying this feeling is "human egoism," which is merely another term for the instinct of self-preservation. This instinct, for Feuerbach no less than for Spinoza, is the ultimate source of religion. At bottom, therefore, the two thinkers are in accord.

Feuerbach's analysis of religion is not limited to an investigation of its sources. He also examines the kind of religious behavior to which the human feeling of dependency leads. "The essential act of religion," he writes in The Essence of Christianity, "that in which religion puts into action what we have designated as its essence, is prayer." In prayer, the religious man "lays hold on a supernatural means, in order to attain ends in themselves natural. God is to him not the causa remota but the causa proxima, the immediate, efficient cause of all natural effects." Prayer seeks to bring about an immediate act of God, "but an immediate act of God is a miracle." The belief in miracles

is no theoretical or objective mode of viewing the world and Nature; miracle realises practical wants, and that in contradiction with the laws which are imperative to the reason; in miracles man subjugates Nature, as in itself a nullity, to his own ends, which he regards as a reality; miracle is the superlative expression of spiritual or religious utilitarianism; in miracle all things are at the service of needy [not- leidenden] man.26

What he has designated as the essential act of religion, Feuerbach concludes, is "not pure, it is tainted with egoism."27

All religion, then, is grounded in egoism and consists mainly of utilitarian behavior. Men do of course worship different gods, but these gods differ "only according to the different benefits they confer on man, according to the different human drives and needs that they satisfy . .." The Greek god Apollo, for example,

is the physician of man's psychic, moral disorders, Asklepios of his physical ailments. But the ground of their cult, the principle of their divinity, what makes them into gods, is their relation to man, their utility, their beneficence, it is human egoism; for unless I first love and worship myself, how can I love what is useful and beneficial to me?28

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This is as true, Feuerbach maintains, of the Christian God as of any other god. He does, to be sure, write that the "Christian religion is the Jewish religion purified of national egoism,"29 but this does not

change the fact that for Christians, the Christian God is clearly "an

object of egoism."30 To the horror of "hypocritical theologians and philosophical fan-

tasts," as Feuerbach himself boasts, he uses "the word egoism to des-

ignate the ground and essence of religion."31 But this does not mean that he deplores such egoism. It is, after all, as he frequently asserts, only natural for men to be egoistic. What he rejects are the gods generated by an ignorant egoism, for they do not actually exist and the belief in them only does harm to mankind.

It is in the light of this characterization of all religion as grounded in egoism and as consisting of egoistic actions that we have to consider Feuerbach's famous description, in an earlier chapter of The Essence

of Christianity, of Judaism as egoism. There he reiterates a number of times one fundamental idea: the God of Israel "is nothing but the

personified selfishness of the Israelite people." The ancient Jews were

pained by the fact that "there is a chasm between the wish and its realisation, between the object in the imagination and the object in

reality." In order to relieve that pain, in order to escape the limits of

reality, they summoned into existence "the true, the highest being, One who brings forth an object by the mere I WILL." This God has all of nature at his fingertips, and regularly alters its course, the Jews believe, "for the welfare of Israel." They believe this today, Feuerbach maintains, no less than they did in antiquity. It can therefore be said that "their principle, their God, is the most practical principle in the world,-namely, egoism; and moreover egoism in the form of reli-

gion."32 The "heavy emphasis on Jewish ethnocentrism" in this passage

does indeed suggest, as Carlebach observes, the influence of Spinoza's description of Judaism in his Theologico-Political Treatise, even in the absence of any precisely parallel terminology. What is entirely clear, however, is that when Feuerbach characterizes Judaism as a religion rooted in egoism, he is analyzing it in terms of concepts ultimately derived from Spinoza's general critique of religion.

However unjust this characterization may be, and however offen- sive it may seem to believing Jews, it should be evident that it reflects no special animus toward Judaism. It simply constitutes the applica- tion to theJewish religion of Feuerbach's general principles, principles which he learned from Spinoza and which he applies in a similar fashion to the understanding of all other religions, including Chris- tianity. This is something which was, strangely enough, overlooked by some of the scholars cited at the beginning of this section, who

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Allan Arkush

mistakenly sought to account for his characterization of Judaism as

egoism as if it were an isolated phenomenon.

III

The young Karl Marx was among the numerous German intellectuals who greeted The Essence of Christianity with enormous enthusiasm when it was first published in 1841. By the beginning of 1842 he had already endorsed its basic conclusions, and he soon came to regard Feuerbach as the man who had essentially completed the task of formulating a

philosophical critique of religion.33 "The foundation of irreligious criticism," wrote Marx, clearly ech-

oing Feuerbach, "is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man." Man's fabrication of religion is a response to his real suffering in this world. Religion does not truly alleviate that suffering; it pro- vides merely illusory happiness. It is, as Marx is famous for having said, "the opium of the people."34

For all his agreement with Feuerbach, Marx did express certain minor reservations with regard to his concept of religion, as Werner Schuffenhauer has observed.35 More significant than the differences to which Schuffenhauer points, however, is Marx's tacit abandonment of Feuerbach's emphasis on what he referred to as "the positive emotions of joy, gratitude, love and veneration as grounds of religion." Marx's philosophy, as John Plamenatz has pointed out, is utterly lack- ing in the idea "that religion might sometimes express a happy acceptance of the world, a delight in being alive in it."36 Marx, in other words, failed to follow Feuerbach in what Feuerbach himself saw as his chief departure from Spinoza. He was, in effect, more of a Spi- nozist in his approach to religion than the man who, for him, served as the chief conduit of Spinoza's thought.

That religion was, as both Spinoza and Feuerbach had maintained, an illusion rooted in man's earthly needs was a matter so firmly es- tablished, for Marx, that he saw no need to dwell on it at length. His own contribution to the critique of religion consisted not in exposing its illusory character but in an attempt to identify its social roots and function. Whereas Feuerbach had sought to understand religion in terms of the needs of abstract individuals, considered independently of their relations with others, Marx sought to understand specific religions as the products of individuals living in particular social sit- uations.37 He also sought to describe the role religion played in what he described as the ruling class's control and exploitation of other classes.

In order to understand a given religion, Marx maintained, it is

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Judaism as Egoism

first necessary to examine not its dogmas but its adherents. If one wishes to understand Judaism, therefore, one must look not at the Jews' religious literature but at the Jews, not at the "sabbath Jew" but at the "realJew." When one does so, it is possible to discern that the basis of the Jewish religion is "practical need, egoism." And since "the god of practical need and self-interest is money," one can say that money "is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist." The real god of the Jews is "the bill of exchange." The god he worships "is only an illusory bill of exchange."38

Here, of course, as innumerable scholars have noted, Marx sounds very much like Feuerbach, from whom he undoubtedly took his cue. His basic idea, that Judaism originates in the practical needs of the Jews, as well as the use of the term "egoism" in this context clearly reflect the influence of that philosopher. This is not to say, however, that Marx is merely restating Feuerbach's position. In spite of the

conceptual and terminological similarities we have noted, there are, as we shall see, very significant differences between the views of these two thinkers.

The most noticeable of these is the difference between the ways in which they express themselves. Absent in Feuerbach's writings on

Judaism but present in Marx's is, as Moshe Glickson has observed, a tone of "deep aggressive antipathy."39 What this new tone reflects, it

appears, is another, more important shift. Marx employs the term "egoism" in a more limited and more pejorative sense than Feuerbach does. He uses it, in fact, in what Feuerbach refers to as "the common sense of the word."

When Feuerbach uses the term "egoism" in relation to the human needs which give rise to religion he means, as we have seen, the instinct for self-preservation, not what people usually have in mind when they speak of egoism. Marx, on the other hand, makes no such distinction. What he means by the egoistic man is what is ordinarily meant: "an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholely preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice."40 This egoism is of course something which Marx regards not as a characteristic of human nature but as a cor- ruption of it, something that has to be corrected. And it is this corrupt force that he identifies with Judaism.

When Feuerbach speaks of the Jews' egoism, he is thinking primarily, as we have seen, not of their individual ambitions but of their "national egoism," their concentration on the "wants of... [their] national existence," which they have made "the law of the world."41 For Marx, on the other hand, the egoism of the Jews is manifest in the conduct of the individual Jew toward all other men. The Jew (or the man who has absorbed the spirit of Judaism) is a man whose god

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is money, a man in whose view "the world is no more than a Stock

Exchange," and who "has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor."42

Basically, then, Marx's method in his investigation of Judaism was the one he had learned from Feuerbach. Following Feuerbach, he

sought to understand Judaism as the response of its creators, the Jews, to pressures stemming from their own earthly needs. In spite of this, however, and in spite of the fact that he described Judaism in much the same terms as Feuerbach, the conclusion at which he arrived was in some respects rather different. The essential spirit of Judaism was, for Marx, a narrower and meaner thing than it was for Feuerbach. Feuerbach saw Judaism as a religion rooted in a people's instinct of

self-preservation; Marx regarded it as based on the self-seeking greed of individual Jews.

To what can this difference be traced? It is not due, it seems safe to conclude, to Marx's divergent interpretation of the essential texts of Jewish religious literature.43 It appears, rather, to be a consequence of the different way in which he applied Feuerbach's own method. Like Feuerbach, Marx sought to understand Judaism as a religion developed by its practitioners to serve their own needs. Unlike Feuer- bach, however, he viewed it not as the creation of the Jews of ancient times but as the creed of the Jews of his own day. They were people who were, in his jaundiced eyes, completely characterized by their

egoism, in the common sense of the word.44 Their religion, therefore, could only reflect this.

That Marx's view of Judaism is an utterly unsympathetic one would seem to be beyond doubt.45 The Jewish religion clearly em- bodies, in his opinion, the worst characteristics of modern, bourgeois society, which is his real target in his essay "On the Jewish Question." Countless writers have already demonstrated the shallow and super- ficial nature of this depicton of Judaism, and it is not really necessary to repeat their arguments here.46 What it is important to note, however, is that many of the same writers erred when they dismissed Marx's conception of Judaism as a mere repetition of Feuerbach's.47

Despite his obvious dependency on him, Marx differed from Feuer- bach not only, as Moshe Glickson observed, in his tone, but in sub- stance as well.

IV

Both Spinoza and Marx are well known for having been inveterate opponents of Judaism. Over the years, scholars have often suspected

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Judaism as Egoism

that there existed a relationship of some kind between their different

critiques of their ancestral religion. Up to now, however, the existence of such a link has been conjectured but never demonstrated.

In order to understand the relationship between the concepts of

Judaism propounded by Spinoza and Marx we have focused our attention on a figure who was, to a certain degree, a student of the former and a teacher of the latter, Ludwig Feuerbach. Like Spinoza, and like Marx, Feuerbach is well known for his disparaging view of

Judaism. Up to now, however, scholars have failed to appreciate the

significance of his role as an intermediary between the two afore- mentioned thinkers.

It is, indeed, rather surprising that this crucial link should have remained unnoticed for so long. Feuerbach is quite explicit with re-

gard to his debt to Spinoza. And there has never been any doubt

concerning his own influence on Marx's concept of Judaism. If scholars have nevertheless failed up to now to identify the chain leading from Spinoza to Feuerbach to Marx, it is, it seems, because they have not asked the correct question and they have not looked in the right place.

Writers like Rotenstreich and Fackenheim have sought to understand how Feuerbach arrived at his perplexingly crude and unsympathetic assessment of Judaism as a religion rooted in "egoism." They have, unaccountably, overlooked the fact that Feuerbach characterized not only Judaism but all other religions as well as having their source in human egoism. The question, then, is not how Feuerbach came to see Judaism, but how he came to see religion in general in the way that he did. The answer to this question is found, clearly stated, not, indeed, in The Essence of Christianity, but elsewhere in his own writings. He was inspired by Spinoza.

From Spinoza, as he himself acknowledges, Feuerbach acquired the basic conceptual framework with the aid of which he sought to

comprehend the essence of religion in general and Judaism in particular. It was Spinoza that he was following when he branded all reli-

gions, including Judaism, as "egoism," a term not found in Spinoza's writings but which, as Feuerbach defines it, clearly encapsulates his un-

derstanding of the force that gives rise to religion. Marx, in turn, was

obviously following Feuerbach both when he spoke of religion as something created by man in order to alleviate his needs in this world and when he contemptuously described Judaism as egoism. But, as we have seen, he meant by "egoism" something rather different from what Feuerbach meant, something baser. In reducing Judaism to a creed sanctioning pure, individualistic selfishness Marx was clearly going beyond Spinoza and Feuerbach. He was, to be sure, traveling along a

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path marked out by his two predecessors, but it was one which his own

prejudices inspired him to take significantly further than they did.

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON

NOTES

1. Hans Liebeschiitz, "German Radicalism and the Formation of Jewish Political Attitudes during the Earlier Part of the Nineteenth Century," in Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History, ed. Alexander Altmann

(Cambridge, 1964), p. 158. More recently, Joel Schwartz has likewise observed that "the young Marx's critique of Judaism can best be understood as a sort of postscript or abbreviated sequel to Spinoza's more extensive critique," cf. "Liberalism and the Jewish Connection: A Study of Spinoza and the Young Marx," in Political Theory, Vol. 13, No. 1 (February 1985), p. 61.

2. Schwartz, "Liberalism and the Jewish Connection," p. 82. 3. Henry E. Allison, Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction (New Haven,

1987), p. 131. 4. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 1, Edited and translated by Edwin

Curley (Princeton, 1985), p. 498. 5. Allison, Benedict de Spinoza, p. 131. 6. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 1, p. 441. Here, in the appendix

to the first part of his Ethics, Spinoza is ostensibly investigating the "prejudice" according to which "God himself directs all things to some certain end," but he is really also examining the roots of religion. Cf. also Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York, 1965), pp. 215-24.

7. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 1, p. 441. 8. Benedict de Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes

(New York, 1951), pp. 3-8. Here Spinoza's discussion focuses not on religion but on what he calls supersitition. However, as Allison has observed, in Spi- noza's writings "belief in the teachings of traditional religions, as generally construed, is equated with superstition.," Allison, Benedict de Spinoza, p. 206.

9. The Epicurean roots of this theory are elucidated by Leo Strauss in

Spinoza's Critique of Religion, pp. 37ff. 10. Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 21. 11. Ibid., p. 47. 12. For a recent and highly useful examination of this question see Fred-

erick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge, 1987), p. 48ff. Cf. also Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton, 1989).

13. Nathan Rotenstreich, "For and Against Emancipation: The Bruno Bauer Controversy," in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book IV, (The Hague, 1959), pp. 5-6.

14. Emil Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (New York, 1973), p. 250n.

15. Ibid., p. 140. 16. Ibid., p. 250n.

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17. Julius Carlebach, KarlMarx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, (London, 1978), p. 390n.

18. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, trans. Ralph Man- heim (New York, 1967), pp. 7-8.

19. Feuerbach, Lectures, pp. 8-9. 20. Ibid., p. 50. 21. Ibid., p. 79. 22. Ibid., p. 31. 23. Ibid., pp. 127-9. 24. Ibid., p. 30. 25. Ibid. 26. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New

York, 1957), p. 194. I have slightly modified the translation of this passage. 27. Ibid., p. 196. 28. Feuerbach, Lectures, p. 52. 29. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 120. 30. Ibid., pp. 82, 235ff. 31. Ibid., p. 49. 32. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 113-4. 33. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1972), p.

53; cf. also Werner Schuffenhauer, Feuerbach und der Junge Marx (Berlin, 1965), p. 25.

34. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, p. 54. 35. Schuffenhauer, Feuerbach und derJunge Marx, pp. 77f. 36. John Plamenatz, Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man, (Oxford, 1975), p. 237. 37. Schuffenhauer, Feuerbach, p. 80. 38. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, p. 50. 39. Quoted in Carlebach, Karl Marx, p. 292. 40. Ibid., p. 43. 41. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, p. 120. 42. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, p. 49. 43. Marx had virtually no acquaintance with these texts, cf. Edmund Sil-

berner, "Was Marx an Anti-Semite?" in HistoriaJudaica, Vol. 11 (1949), pp. 15-7.

44. Cf. Silberner, ibid., for an exploration of the social and psychological roots of Marx's anti-Jewish prejudice.

45. On this matter there is some disagreement. "Marx's identification," writes Dennis Fischman, "of both everyday Judaism and civil society, on the one hand, with practical need, on the other, is a compliment to the former. 'Jewish' civil society fascinates Marx precisely because it is practical: It constitutes the effective reality in which people live," Dennis Fischman, "On Schwartz, 'Liberalism and the Jewish Connection,' "Political Theory, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 1985), p. 608.

46. For a useful survey of the literature cf. Carlebach, Karl Marx, pp. 280- 309.

47. Ibid., 293; Edward Andrew, "Marx and the Jews" European Judaism Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1968), p. 12.

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