Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 173

this task. Christians need only an attitude adjustment; Jews need a complete

ontological makeover. Christians need only shed their erroneous belief in the

unreality of the world and in their immaturity [Unmündigkeit] and affirm the

historical existence that they already, essentially, possess. In Bauer’s historical

ontology Jews must sacrifice themselves to historical development.^99 Jews must

realize that, as a people, they have no real historical existence, and try to become

incorporated into a people that does. Bauer’s historicized conception of human

agency, however, renders this reentry into history essentially parasitic and thus

impossible. As Bauer repeatedly makes clear, since humanity is constituted in

active participation in the historical unfolding of human freedom, Jews cannot

receive human freedom as a gift.^100 Bauer’s dialectical conception of human

development as the historicized unity of concept and being equates possess-

ing historical reality with actively contributing to historical development. Since

Christians, according to Bauer, have actively contributed to the development of

free self-consciousness, they will ultimately be able to discover the true human

core of their theologically misapprehended agency. Jews, however, are essen-

tially inert and thus can only obstruct free humanity’s advance. They possess no

human essence that could be liberated from its theological shell.

If Bauer deems the task of becoming real historical peoples so achievable for

Christians, it is because his concept of free human consciousness amounts to

a secularized version of Christian spirit, defined over against a conception of

Judaism as an inert positivity. Bauer casts Jews’ very being as a kind of doing,

a culpable act. This negative agency retains no positive content of its own, be-

cause any positive content Judaism historically possessed has been aufgehoben

in Christianity. Judaism remains only as dead weight, a kind of unproductive

refuse. It merely stands in the way, in and through its stubborn insistence on

persisting beyond all possible rationales for existence. In this way Bauer con-

tests the idea that the Jews could have suffered innocently. He gives the Jews

backhanded credit for their historical persecution, arguing that they, in their

very being (Sein), have caused it themselves: “[The Jews] were... themselves

to blame for the oppression they suffered, because they provoked it by their

adherence to their law, their language, to their whole essence. A nothing cannot

be oppressed. Whatever is oppressed must have caused the oppression by vir-

tue of its entire being and the nature of that being.”^101 Bauer’s construction of

Judaism’s ontological guilt becomes clearer in his description of the nature of

Judaism’s opposition to historical progress. He deems the Jewish Volksgeist con-

sistent in its inconsistency, for “it does not really progress in its progress, does

not really develop in its development,”^102 despite the higher ideas that Judaism

(especially the Prophets) may contain. To the extent that Judaism contains a ker-