Karl Marx has long been held up as the archetypal self-hating Jew. On the one hand, Marx's family was (before his father's conversion) very Jewish. Both his father and mother's sides included many rabbis going back generations. On the other hand, Marx was baptized at the age of six, received no Jewish education and is infamous for quotations such as “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” Marx's contempt for Jews could not be clearer. Yet, despite this, we argue here that Karl Marx ought to be considered a Jewish thinker.

Scholars like Nathan Rotenstreich and David Nirenberg have distinguished anti-Semitism, that is, bias against Jews, from the separate notion of anti-Judaism, that is, the intention to remove Jewish thought from a full understanding of the development of the Western intellectual tradition. We will, on the one hand, follow other scholars in contending that while the anti-Judaism of Friedrich Hegel contributed to the anti-Semitism of many Young Hegelians like Marx and Bruno Bauer, Hegel was anti-Jewish, but not anti-Semitic. We contend that Marx, on the other hand, can nonetheless be reclaimed. A case can be made that he was anti-Semitic (although not in the usual way); but, when understood properly, Marx turns out not to be anti-Jewish. To the contrary, there is a meaningful sense of the concept of Jewish in which Marx can be very much thought to be a Jewish thinker.

Jewish, Greek and Christian Thought

To support the claim that Marx ought to be considered a Jewish thinker, it must be made clear what we will mean by the term “Jewish thinker” or “Jewish thought.” There are certainly straightforward examples that all would consider uncontroversial. Writers of Talmudic commentary, for example, would have to be considered “Jewish thinkers” on any reasonable account. But surely, the appellation should extend beyond religious writing. Martin Buber or Franz Rosenzweig's philosophical works surely are exam ples of Jewish thought, even those passages and elements that may be under stood from a context that is not explicitly Jewish as they are a part of a larger, coherent project in which Judaism plays a significant role.