Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.
Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.
What  is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is  the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God?  Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money,  consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the  self-emancipation of our time.
An organization of society which  would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the  possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious  consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital  air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this  practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates  himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation  as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human  self-estrangement.
We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general  anti-social element of the present time, an element which through  historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have  zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at  which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.
In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way.
“The  Jew, who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines the fate  of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who may have no  rights in the smallest German state, decides the fate of Europe. While  corporations and guilds refuse to admit Jews, or have not yet adopted a  favorable attitude towards them, the audacity of industry mocks at the  obstinacy of the material institutions.†(Bruno Bauer, The Jewish  Question, p. 114)
This is no isolated fact. The Jew has  emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired  financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him,  money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has  become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have  emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.
Captain Hamilton, for example, reports:
“The  devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of  Laocoön who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which  are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his  lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the  world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has  no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor.  Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation  than to exchange objects. When he travels he carries, so to speak, his  goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit.  If he loses sight of his own business for an instant it is only in  order to pry into the business of his competitors.â€
Indeed, in  North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian  world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the  preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become  articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel just as  the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business deals.
“The  man who you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a  trader; his business having failed, he became a minister. The other  began as a priest but as soon as he had some money at his disposal he  left the pulpit to become a trader. In the eyes of very many people, the  religious ministry is a veritable business career.†(Beaumont, op.  cit., pp. 185,186)
According to Bauer, it is
“a fictitious  state of affairs when in theory the Jew is deprived of political rights,  whereas in practice he has immense power and exerts his political  influence en gros, although it is curtailed en détail.†(Die Judenfrage,  p. 114)
The contradiction that exists between the practical  political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction  between politics and the power of money in general. Although  theoretically the former is superior to the latter, in actual fact  politics has become the serf of financial power.
Judaism has held  its own alongside Christianity, not only as religious criticism of  Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the religious  derivation of Christianity, but equally because the practical Jewish  spirit, Judaism, has maintained itself and even attained its highest  development in Christian society. The Jew, who exists as a distinct  member of civil society, is only a particular manifestation of the  Judaism of civil society.
Judaism continues to exist not in spite of history, but owing to history.
The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.
What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.
The  monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the  many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of  divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society,  and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully  given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and  self-interest is money.
Money is the jealous god of Israel (not the state in the middle-east, israel = all the jews living all around the world)  , in  face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man  – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal  self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the  whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value.  Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and  this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.
The god of  the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The  bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an  illusory bill of exchange.
The view of nature attained under the  domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and  practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists,  it is true, but it exists only in imagination.
It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable
“that  all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water,  the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must  become free.â€
Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an  end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish  religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of  money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman,  etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
The  groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless  morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the  world of self-interest surrounds itself.