Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 179

allows him to lay claim to a grounding in emphatically—indeed, obscenely—real

social conditions. His emphasis on real rather than “sabbath Jews” advances

Marx’s inchoate attempt to relocate agency from the abstract realm of con-

sciousness into social materiality. Given Marx’s analytical and polemical need to

ground his social critique in “reality,” and his lack of theoretical tools to satisfy

this need, his rhetorical strategies necessarily become freighted. Marx’s anti-

Jewish rhetoric both serves his polemical needs and embodies a new theory of

social agency that he can as yet articulate only obscurely.

Atomized Society as the Product of Theological Politics

Marx wrote “Zur Judenfrage” at an exceedingly fecund and volatile moment

in his development. The text explodes with ideas that are still in movement;

certain arguments and strategies are at cross-purposes with others. Most crucial

for the way ZJ 1 illuminates how and why Marx resorts to his notorious char-

acterization of real Jews in ZJ 2 is the tension, throughout ZJ 1 , between Marx’s

attempt to ground his discourse in conditions of secular reality and the way he

erodes that very ground by insisting that secular conditions are governed by

the structure and dynamics of Christianity. (I will call the secularized “Chris-

tian” structures and dynamics that Marx sees governing political modernity—

dualism, alienation, and atomization—“structural Christianity,” as distinct from

the beliefs and practices of self-identified Christians.) If in 1842 and early 1843

Marx could appeal to political pragmatism as the corrective to Bauer’s and the

Freien’s abstraction, excessive focus on religion, and counterproductive tactics,

he had now come to view political democracy as essentially an iteration of reli-

gious abstraction and alienation. Marx, it bears underscoring, supported Jewish

emancipation and acknowledged that political emancipation was meaningful as

“real, practical emancipation.”^119 However, the thrust of Marx’s argument is that

political emancipation remains ineffectual because what passes as secular poli-

tics is still governed by a quintessentially religious dualism: the political state in

which citizens are free and equal (one could say redeemed) amounts to a secular

analogue of Christian heaven. An illusory realm of equality, it presupposes and

perpetuates social fragmentation and competition.

This shift in Marx’s view of the substantiality of politics obviously changes the

terms of his assessment of Bauer: pragmatic engagement in liberal politics could

no longer serve as the solid basis from which Marx could critique Bauer’s ab-

straction. In “Zur Judenfrage” Marx asserts that his critique of secular politics is

more basic than Bauer’s still theological orientation. Yet Marx’s attempt to ana-

lyze religion no longer as the “basis” [Grund] but as merely a “phenomenon”