Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 195

cal text commands Israelites to relieve themselves outside the boundaries of

their camp and to bury their waste, “for the Lord thy God walketh in the midst

of thy camp.”^168 However removed Voltaire and Hegel both, differently, were

from Christian orthodoxy (Protestant Orthodoxy’s dogmatic literalism is one

of Hegel’s targets in this passage), they both adapt without fundamentally sub-

verting a well-worn Christian theological opposition between Jew (body, letter,

and so on) and Christian (soul, spirit, and so on). In contrast to Bauer, and

both like and in contrast to Feuerbach, however, Marx is trying to overcome the

privileging of the agency of Christian spirit in its various secular guises. Far from

recommending a focus on authentic spirituality, Marx is out to reveal Bauer’s

theological assumptions and expose the Christian illusion of the immortality of

the soul as the secret and fundamental flaw of modern secular politics. In other

words, Marx is privileging, however obscurely, material social reality and mate-

rial productivity over misplaced faith in the agency of secular Christian spirit.

Feuerbach devoted a chapter of Das Wesen des Christentums to critiquing the

Jewish God as merely the Jewish people’s egoistic projection of a provider of its

material needs; the Feurbachian Jew relates to God strictly through his stom-

ach.^169 Marx goes Feuerbach one better and associates Jews with bowels and

the worship of money as a form of excrement. Marx counters what he sees as

Bauer’s exaltation of Christian spirit (however secularized) with the Jewish anus

as the obscene model of material production in society. The new Jewish world

power (Weltmacht) is a fetishized process of excretion; it transforms human es-

sence into abject matter devoid of spirit. One of the fundamental insights of Julia

Kristeva’s study of the power of the abject in Western culture is the threat that

the abject poses to subjectivity. Abject matter confuses the distinction between

life and death and between the “I” and the “not-I”; neither subject nor object,

it is what is a part of me yet what I cannot possibly be.^170 Marx deploys the

phantasm of the real Jew aggressively to subvert the forms of subjectivity and

spirit he is trying to move beyond, chiefly political rights and Bauer’s model of

critical self-consciousness. Marx mobilizes the dichotomy privileging Christian

spirit over Jewish matter, but to the aggressive end of rubbing Christian spirit

in Jewish filth.

In Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg notes how Marx remains within a Pau-

line (and, more broadly, Western) semantics that opposes Christian spirit and

Jewish body and literalism, even as he critiques Bauer’s Christian paradigm of

critique. Nirenberg notes further that Marx deploys this opposition in a way

that goes beyond mere convenient semantic shorthand. What sets Marx’s use

of this trope apart is, in Nirenberg’s phrase, “the centrality of the ‘real.’” Marx,

he observes, “requires the reality of his Jews and his Judaism.”^171 Nirenberg