"On the Jewish Question" is a response by Karl Marx to then-current debates over the Jewish question. Marx's father had converted to Lutheran Christianity, and his wife and children were baptized in 1825 and 1824, respectively. Marx wrote the piece in 1843, and it was first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title "Zur Judenfrage" in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.
The essay criticizes two studies by Marx's fellow Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, on the attempt by Jews to achieve political emancipation in Prussia. Bauer argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only by relinquishing their particular religious consciousness since political emancipation requires a secular state; Bauer assumes that there is not any "space" remaining for social identities such as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the idea of the "Rights of Man". True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion.
