Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 191

It is of course not possible to account fully for why Marx shifted his line of ar-

gumentation so dramatically—and his rhetoric so bewilderingly—between ZJ 1

and ZJ 2. It seems likely, however, that Marx found useful analytical and rhetorical

tools in “Über das Geldwesen” (“On the Essence of Money”), an essay Moses

Hess submitted to Marx for publication in the Deutsch-französische Jahr bücher.

Whether or not Marx had completed his own essay before he received Hess’s,

and thus how much Marx may have taken from Hess, is a matter of some dis-

pute; but Marx most likely read Hess’s essay after writing ZJ 1 but before writing

ZJ 2.^154 Hess’s main theses are that human essence consists in “life activity,” and

that this life activity is alienated in money. Hess’s title self-consciously evokes

Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums, and indeed Hess analyzes money as

operating according to the logic of religion as Feuerbach understands it, albeit

on an emphatically social and commercial plane. If Christianity is a mystified

projection of man’s empirical collective essence, it does in theory what money

does in reality—for money, in Hess’s view, is precisely the repository of man’s

alienated essence, his “life activity.” Hess furthermore uses some quite gruesome

imagery: he writes of money as congealed blood, for example, and describes

atomized social relations organized by money as a form of cannibalism. In addi-

tion, he characterizes money as a form of waste or trash [Plunder].^155 Although

Hess derives the world of isolated, alienated individuals in religion, politics,

and commerce overwhelmingly from Christian dualism, he sometimes refers

to Judaism and Jews as also implicated in religious alienation and its secular

realization in the world of commerce. For example, he writes: “The mystery of

Judaism and Christianity is revealed in the modern Jewish-Christian world of

shopkeepers.”^156 Importing Feuerbach’s critique of alienation and personalism

to the plane of social relations, Hess—already a committed communist—argues

that under relations of private property, collective species-being is perverted

into agonistic competition among alienated individuals.^157

Hess’s essay modeled new ways to think about money’s dehumanizing ef-

fects as a mediator of social relations, as well as vivid, unsettling ways to use

rhetoric to evoke such human degradation. Hess was probably one inspiration

for Marx’s shift in argument and rhetoric, but Marx put the elements he found

in Hess’s work to his own conceptual and polemical purposes. Marx deployed

the figure of the huckstering real Jew to lend rhetorical mass to his claim to be

engaging in analysis of hard social reality—in contrast to Bauer, who never got

beyond the question of Jewish religious or theological consciousness. Marx’s

rhetorical excesses in ZJ 2 serve a function that is in part compensatory: with his

turn to coarse rhetoric Marx is clearly trying to finesse an inchoate materialist

argument in the absence of a coherent generative theory. Enzo Traverso notes