Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

184 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

litically without emancipating yourselves humanly, the half-hearted approach

and contradiction is not in you alone, it is inherent in the nature and category

of political emancipation. If you find yourself within the confines of this cat-

egory, you share in a general confinement. Just as the state evangelises when,

although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the

Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.^131

Marx’s rhetorical moves are certainly objectionable. As Bauer is so wont to

do, Marx interprets the truth of Jews for Jews (who clearly need such assis-

tance).^132 Marx’s patronizing apostrophe tells Jews that if even they can be politi-

cally emancipated, political emancipation clearly has serious limitations. Marx’s

larger point, nonetheless, is that the contradiction between wishing to maintain

particular interests and demanding political emancipation—a contradiction that

Bauer derives from the quintessential egoism of Jews—is in fact determined by

the Christian logic of the political state. Jews remain one particular social group

(and so many egoistic individuals) vis-à-vis the political state in precisely the

same way as do other social groups and individuals of civil society. Jews share in

a general confinement (Befangenheit) determined by the essence and category

of political emancipation itself. When Marx says the state “evangelizes” the Jew,

he does not mean the Christian state, but rather the secular state that remains

(secretly, structurally) Christian “although it is a state.” As his analogy between

evangelisieren and politisieren makes clear, Marx considers “acting politically”

to entail a necessary submission to what he considers the deep logic of Christian

dualism. In demanding emancipation while remaining Jewish, Jews only submit

to the evangelizing logic of the super-Christian state with its promise of abstract

salvation. Marx rebuts Bauer’s argument about the incorrigible particularity

and egoism of the Jews with the contention that Jewish particularity is deter-

mined by the deep logic of Christianity as perfected in the secular state, which

grants political freedoms, and even human rights, only to atomized individuals

(secularized Christian souls).^133 Political emancipation naturalizes individuals

in society in their brute positivity and redeems only their secular souls as citi-

zens of the state. When Jews demand political rights, they do not express their

corrosive Jewish particularism but rather, ineluctably, behave like (structural)

Christians! Whatever egoism Jews may embody is analogous to the private inter-

ests of other groups differentiated by both material (private property) and spiri-

tual factors (Bildung and religion).^134 Christianity’s dualistic logic—understood

properly as humanity’s arrested stage of development, its secularly Christian

spirit—governs all of humanity: Jews, Christians, atheists, everyone.

Jews are central neither to Marx’s critique of political emancipation nor to the