Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

10 } Introduction

it was only to Hegel’s state that they could gain access. In contrast to a prevalent

tendency to assume that Hegel was bad for the Jews, I take seriously the Verein’s

project of a Hegelian Jewish politics.

Chapter 4 focuses on the function of “the Jew” in the evolution of Marx’s

thought around the pivotal year 1843 , when he radicalized his critique of lib-

eralism in “Zur Judenfrage,” a two-part review article responding to essays by

Bruno Bauer on the Jewish Question, and in other essays. In contrast to my

focus in the other chapters of this study on how Jewish thinkers draw on and

sometimes contest philosophical models of subjectivity and the state and other

forms of community in order to imagine new Jewish involvements in politics,

I read Marx as doing nearly the opposite. He mobilizes a philosophical ver-

sion of a stereotype of Jewish subjectivity—the Jew as the crude embodiment

of materialistic egoism—in order to critique the institution of liberal politics per

se as chimerical. Scholars interested in the evolution of Marx’s thought typi-

cally pass over in silence, summarily explain away, or simply consider irrelevant

Marx’s antisemitic rhetoric in “Zur Judenfrage,” while scholars who take Marx’s

antisemitic language seriously generally understand it in terms of Jewish self-

hatred, without inquiring into its function within Marx’s theoretical project.

In a provocative rereading of Marx’s infamous essay, I locate the antiheroes of

part 2 of “Zur Judenfrage”—“real Jews”—at an ambivalent theoretical crossroad

between two other, more viable heroes of different stages of Marx’s evolving

theory, the Volk of his 1842 political journalism and the proletariat, which Marx

half discovered and half invented immediately after writing “Zur Judenfrage.”

Situating Marx’s essay within the Left Hegelian assault on narrow subjectivity

in favor of variously conceived social ontologies of the self, I argue that Marx

deploys antisemitic rhetoric of the egoistic, radically “real” Jewish subject in an

attempt to conjure up a social reality that he still lacked the analytical tools to

theorize. On this conjured reality he could ground his critique of Hegelian and

neo-Hegelian idealism (above all that of Bruno Bauer). It is a commonplace to

see in Marx’s diatribe against “Jewish” civil society an anticipation of his mature

critique of the bourgeoisie. Through a reading of figures of social abjection in

Marx’s early texts, I show how in his figuration of “real Jews” Marx begins,

ambivalently, to productivize social abjection, a strategy that would gain theo-

retical coherence as he developed his conception of the proletariat within his

broader theory of production and the social relations it organizes in 1844 – 45.

Chapters 5 and 6 tell a tale of two Spinozas in the Germany of the 1830 s and

1840 s. Auerbach and Hess were close friends for a number of years in the late

1830 s and early 1840 s, a period when each was intensely engaged both with

Spinoza and with trying to find his own political orientation and intellectual