olitical power of the Jew
and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and
financial power generally. While the former is raised ideally above
the latter, it has in reality become its bond slave.

Judaism has persisted alongside of Christianity not only as religious
criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the
religious parentage of Christianity, but equally because Judaism has
maintained itself, and even received its supreme development, in
Christian society. The Jew who exists as a peculiar member of
bourgeois society, is only the particular expression of the Judaism
of bourgeois society.

Judaism has survived not in spite of, but by virtue of history.

Out of its own entrails, bourgeois society continually creates Jews.

What was the foundation of the Jewish religion? Practical needs,
egoism. Consequently the monotheism of the Jew is in reality the
polytheism of many needs. Practical needs or egoism are the principle
of bourgeois society, and they appear openly as such so soon as
bourgeois society gives birth to the political state. The God of
practical needs and egoism is money.

Money is the jealous God of Israel, by the side of which no other god
may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into
commodities. Money is the general and self-constituted value of all
things. Consequently it has robbed the whole world--the world of
mankind as well as Nature--of its peculiar value. Money is the being
of man's work and existence alienated from himself, and this alien
being rules him, and he prays to it.

The God of the Jews has secularized himself and become the universal
God. Exchange is the Jew's real God.

The conception of Nature which prevails under the rule of private
property and of money is the practical degradation of Nature, which
indeed exists in the Jewish religion, but only in imagination.

In this sense Thomas Muenzer declared it to be intolerable "that all
creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the
birds in the air, the growths of the soil."

What remains as the abstract part of the Jewish religion, contempt for
theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself, is the
real conscious standpoint and virtue of the monied man. The generic
relation itself--the relation of man to woman, etc., becomes an object
of commerce. Woman is bartered.

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of t