Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

194 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Midas’s obscene twin, Judaism transforms all that it touches into excrement,

and it touches everything:^163

Money is the jealous god of Israel, before which no other god may exist.

Money degrades all the gods of human beings [des Menschen]—and turns

them into a commodity.... Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and

existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has become worldly; he has become the god of the

world [Weltgott].^164

Money is the god of Judaism’s base needs, and it is filthy money indeed. Marx

exploits the strong psychic link between money and feces and insinuates that

in the alienated form of money, humanity’s true essence is transformed into a

fetishized waste product.^165

Marx’s association of Jews and Judaism with the toilet echoes thinkers before

him such as Voltaire and Hegel, who made the same association. In his lectures

on the philosophy of religion, Hegel refers to a remark in which Voltaire ridi-

cules Judaism for the way it makes even latrines part of religious practice, even

as the Pentateuch lacks any explicit mention of the eternality of the soul. In a

witticism he quotes from the English deist Anthony Collins, Voltaire maintains

that the Jewish God cares more about the Jews’ derrières than their souls.^166

Hegel uses Voltaire to distinguish between merely formal faith in contingent

content and events (for example, the specific miracles Christ is said to have per-

formed, or whether the Jewish houses in Egypt really were marked with red as

a sign to God’s angel) and authentic faith, which is a matter of spirit. If literalist

fundamentalism defines faith, Hegel argues, then no cultivated person can have

faith. He evokes Voltaire’s critique of literalist belief approvingly:

Voltaire’s bitterest attacks are directed against the demand for this sort of

belief. He says, among other things, that it would have been better if God

had given the Jews instruction about the immortality of the soul rather than

teaching them how to go to the privy [Abtritt] (aller à la selle). This is to

make latrines part of the content of faith.

What is unspiritual, by its nature, cannot be part of the content of faith

[kein Inhalt des Glaubens]. When God speaks, what he says is spiritual, for

spirit reveals itself only to spirit.^167

Presumably picking up on these remarks by Hegel and Voltaire, Marx deploys

the association of Jews and defecation to very different ends. Both Hegel and

Voltaire see in Deuteronomy 23 : 13 – 15 evidence of Judaism’s inability to distin-

guish between base material content and genuine faith and spirit. The bibli-