‘Inwardly circumcised Jews’. Money,commodities,and the Jewish question in Marx’s capital

Abstract

The aim of this paper is not solely or primarily to refute the charge of anti-Semitism levelled against Marx. It also intends (1) to show that the growing anti-Semitism of his time played a far more important role than previously assumed in the genesis of his theory and in the range of issues that have driven its development; and (2) to highlight the key elements of Marx’s analytical contribution to understanding modern anti-Semitism. Both of these attempts hinge on the identification of a hitherto unnoticed structural analogy between the young Marx’s critique of the Jewish question, in which ‘the Jew’ is recognized as a reflection of the modern legal subject’s inner contradiction between bourgeois and citoyen, and the mature Marx’s critique of political economy, in which money is recognized as a reflection of the commodity’s inner contradiction between use value and exchange value. Money, to put it in a nutshell, is the Jew of commodities. This is the reason why Marx, in political, economic, and even theological opposition to the widespread money-centred conception of capitalism, famously begins Capital with an analysis of the commodity.