Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 185

polemical strategies by which he tries to distinguish his position from Bauer’s.

Jews, quite simply, perform no essential work for Marx in ZJ 1.^135 In ZJ 2 , in con-

trast, Marx deploys the figure of real Jews to distinguish his conception of social

agency from what he considers Bauer’s privileging of the agency of conscious-

ness. Real Jews fill the role into which Marx presses them only ambiguously

and ambivalently, but his turning to this figure at all is a result, I argue, of the

void left by the demise of the Volk as a protagonist capable of embodying agency

and effecting self-liberation. The Volk’s exit creates the space that Marx briefly

fills with real Jews before turning to the (arguably equally figural) proletariat.

Examining how the Volk falls out as a viable agent of liberation in ZJ 1 , then, will

set the stage for the appearance of real Jews in ZJ 2.

One of the most revealing indices of Marx’s abandoning of the Volk is his

reticence to discuss the Volk even when the Volk figures centrally in passages by

Bauer that Marx cites. In a passage I have already discussed, Bauer criticizes

how, in the Christian-German state, the monarch and his intermediaries reduce

the authentic Volk to an inauthentic Nicht-Volk or Masse. Bauer’s critique of the

illegitimacy and atomizing effects of the monarch and his intermediaries gener-

ally aligns with the position Marx articulates in his Kreuznach Kritik regard-

ing Hegel’s theorization of the monarch and his intermediaries. Yet when Marx

engages this passage, he gives Bauer’s critique of the Christian German state

conspicuously short shrift:

Bauer then explains that the people of a Christian state is only a non-people,

no longer having a will of its own, but whose true existence lies in the leader

to whom it is subjected, although this leader by his origin and nature is alien to

it, i.e., given by God and imposed on the people without any co-operation on

its part. Bauer declares that the laws of such a people are not its own creation,

but are actual revelations, that its supreme chief needs privileged intermedi-

aries with the people in the strict sense, with the masses, and that the masses

themselves are divided into a multitude of particular groupings which are

formed and determined by chance, which are differentiated by their interests,

their particular passions and prejudices, and obtain permission, as a privi-

lege, to isolate themselves from one another, etc. (P. 56 .)^136

Marx rebuts Bauer’s analysis here of how the Christian state atomizes the Volk

by directing a further passage from Bauer’s Die Judenfrage—in which Bauer

tries to demonstrate the Jews’ inability to separate the public from the religious

and, by extension, to demonstrate the incompatibility between Judaism and

republican citizenship—against Bauer himself: “However, Bauer himself says:

‘Politics, if it is to be nothing but religion, ought not to be politics, just as the