Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

172 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

leological development as having exhausted their very humanity.^96 Bauer does

not advance the thesis that Jews are merely unhistorical—outside the flow of

human Entwicklung but potentially able to rejoin and participate in it. He ar-

gues, rather, that Jews are fundamentally antihistorical: they oppose free human

development merely by virtue of their continued existence, and they prolong

their pseudo-existence only insofar as they oppose such development.^97

In this way Bauer prefigures his later opposition between Kritik and die

Masse with his distinction in Die Judenfrage between authentic historical

Völker, who advance free self-consciousness, and the chimerical Jewish people

qua historical dead weight and inert particularity, precisely the qualities Bauer

would soon subsume under the rubric of massiness. The Volk-Masse dichotomy

that redefines Bauer’s earlier and more broadly affirmative conception of the

Volk (and his own self-positioning as a critic), in other words, emerges in large

part through his opposition between the authentic historical Volk and the chi-

merical Jewish Volk:

We were all excluded through our limitations; everyone was limited, and

upon the Jewish quarter border the quarters in which we are pigeonholed

[rubricirt].

Not only the Jews, but we too no longer want to be satisfied with a chi-

mera; we too wish to become a real people, real peoples.

If the Jews wish to become a real people—however, they cannot do this

in their chimerical nationality, but rather only in the nations of our age

that are historical and capable of participating in history [geschichtsfähi-

gen und geschichtlichen]—then they must give up the chimerical preroga-

tives that will, as long as they cling to them, always separate them from the

nations [Völkern] and alienate them from history. They must sacrifice their

unbelief in the nations and their exclusive belief in their groundless national-

ity before they will even in the slightest be able to put themselves in the posi-

tion to take part in real affairs of the state and the people.

We, however, must give up our unbelief in the world in general and in the

right of the human being—and must thus give up our exclusive faith in monop-

oly and minority—before we can think about being and remaining real peoples,

and true human beings within the life of the people [des Volkslebens].^98

Bauer insists that all of “us” are just as oppressed as the Jews, even as he em-

phasizes an implicit ontological distinction between Jews and “us.” Whereas

Jews are essentially limited, “we” have wrongly been confined to particularistic

categories. Typically, while Bauer calls for both Jews and Christians to become

historical peoples, he insists that only Christians and not Jews can accomplish