Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 183

human mind” or spirit manifests itself only imperfectly in religion proper and is

most fully expressed in its super-Christian, secular political form.

Whereas Bauer wanted to propel human autonomy forward through the

ruthless critique of religion, Marx one-ups Bauer and calls not for a critique

of religion generally, or of the universal religion, Christianity, but of the super-

Christianity of the secular democratic state. Such criticism will enable human

spirit to take the decisive step forward toward true emancipation. Even as Marx

is obviously straining toward a theory of ideology according to which religious

consciousness reflects secular reality, he is unable to conceive of reality as any-

thing but a secular version of precisely the Christian dualistic consciousness

he is tying to ground. As already noted, Marx would eventually locate a more

satisfying historical motor in the means and relations of production, social rela-

tions that he would see reflected in ideology. In “Zur Judenfrage” he begins with

the structure of dualistic theological consciousness and merely rediscovers this

structure in a series of increasingly empirical iterations: religious consciousness

reappears in political consciousness (in ZJ 1 ) and, as we will see, in conscious-

ness structured by a fetishized relationship to money (in ZJ 2 ). As much as Marx

wants to secularize what he attacks as Bauer’s theological conception of agency,

he cannot theorize a compelling alternative. Throughout ZJ 1 the secularized

theological principle of super-Christian politics remains the active force that

alienates species consciousness and thereby engenders social atomization. The

corrective that Marx proposes to both theological politics and to Bauer’s still

theological critique of theological consciousness comes down to a critique of yet

another layer of theological (secular, super-Christian) consciousness.

Marx’s view of political modernity as the ultimate manifestation of structural

Christianity determines his treatment of Jews and Judaism in ZJ 1. Given how

heavily he leans on the figure of the real Jew in ZJ 2 , it is striking how unim-

portant Jews remain—and must remain—within ZJ 1 ’s conceptual architecture.

Marx never argues that Jews embody egoism in an exemplary way, and he even

repeatedly rebuts Bauer’s claims that they do. Marx treats Jews as no more than

one group among others that inevitably become caught in political modernity’s

super-Christian dualism: it is Christianity’s dualistic structure—not any Jewish

quality—that determines the Jews’ contradictory relation to the state:

We do not say to the Jews as Bauer does: You cannot be emancipated po-

litically without emancipating yourselves radically from Judaism. On the

contrary, we tell them: Because you can be emancipated politically without

renouncing Judaism completely and incontrovertibly, political emancipation

itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews want to be emancipated po-