Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

190 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

The following quote conveys ZJ 2 ’s timbre:

Let us consider the real secular Jew—not the sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but

the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the Jew’s secret in his religion: rather let us look for the

secret of religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.

What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular God?

Money.

Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money, i.e. from practi-

cal, real Judaism, would be the same as the self-emancipation of our age.^151

Marx creates the effect of speaking from the locus of reality itself by conjuring

an image of a hyper-real Jew—here, the “everyday Jew,” “the real Jew,” “prac-

tical, real Judaism.” To take but one further example, toward the end of ZJ 2

Marx characterizes the “essence of the contemporary Jew not as an abstract, but

rather as a supremely empirical being.”^152 In ZJ 1 Marx sought to lay bare how

the cause for Jewish civil rights was ultimately determined by the logic of struc-

tural Christianity as perfected in the secular state. He now proposes to derive

religion—not just Judaism, but religion tout court—from the real Jew.

Marx further universalizes Judaism by claiming that all of civil society has

become crassly egoistic, “Jewish”: “The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jew-

ish way not only by acquiring financial power but also because, with and with-

out him, money has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has

become the practical spirit of Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated

themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.”^153 Unlike in ZJ 1 , Jews

and Judaism here wield real, practical, empirical power that easily overwhelms

ethereal Christian spirit. Jewish power is dehumanizing rather than redemp-

tive, but it is real. Although Jews have thoroughly negative connotations in ZJ 2 ,

they have the virtue, we could say, of embodying the real problem rather than

illusory solutions (Christian salvation, political rights, and so forth). Although

obviously a figure—a phantasm, even—Marx’s real Jew is a phantasm of the real.

It has the quasi-generative power to spread realness itself. This transitive power

of Jewish realness—the way it spreads and transforms the entire Christian popu-

lation into so many Jews—represents at once the ultimate human degradation

and the necessary precondition to a real solution. The universal spread of Jew-

ish realness gives the lie to Christian salvation in religion and in politics and

prepares the stage for the coming human emancipation, which will not look to

such abstract solutions but will rather transform relations among real embodied

people, not Christian souls in their various guises.