The Jewish Question according to Otto Ruhle (1928):
Another of Marx’s contributions to the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbülcher” dealt with the Jewish question. He took as his theme an article on the same topic which had been contributed by Bruno Bauer to the “Deutsche Jahrbülcher,” and had subsequently been published as a pamphlet.
The Jewish question was a topical one. Those who then used the phrase, had in mind the political and civic liberation of the Jews from their exceptional position before the law, a position which was a relic of the Middle Ages. The reactionaries, naturally, had done nothing to bring about this emancipation. Nay more, they had deprived the Jews of certain advantages gained in Germany under the stimulus of French advocacy of the rights of man. In Prussia alone, says Mehring, there were no less than eighteen laws dealing with the Jews.
On the other hand, the Jews had themselves shown little inclination to come into close contact with the intellectual life of the German nation. Thanks to the conservatism of their Old Testament ideology, they could not but seem foreign bodies in the community during a period of growing enlightenment and emancipatory movement. In so far as they had become objects of political attention, it was because their most notable representatives (moneylenders who kept the princes and other feudal magnates in funds, farmers of the taxes, debasers of the currency, financiers of one kind and another) were regarded with detestation as being the secret and last but powerful props of the feudal system.
The general economic progress of the times was advantageous to Jews as well as Gentiles. Jews had become of economic importance, and in proportion to this development there was a tendency towards the growth of their civic and political importance. But whereas in the actual world they had already acquired a better position, their legal and ideological positions lagged behind. Such was the content of the Jewish question. Amid the chorus of the voices of the day, Jewish voices were raised ever more insistently in criticism of the injustices from which the Jews suffered. Thus Jews made common cause with liberals and even with revolutionists, turning the mental and moral sciences, and philosophy itself, to account in the struggle for Jewish emancipation. The Young Hegelians’ fierce attack on Christianity and religion brought grist, here, to the Jewish mill.