324 } Notes to Chapter 4
nonessential part—so that their human essence can prevail. In contrast, Jews must sacri-
fice themselves so that humanity—to which Jews do not contribute—can prevail: “[The Jew
must] renounce himself utterly and completely and negate the Jew [sich ganz und gar auf-
geben und den Juden verneinen]” (“Die “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen,”
71 ). This is also why Bauer says that Christians, when they become secular, give humanity
everything (they profer humanity itself ), whereas Jews give humanity nothing (they have no
humanity to give); see ibid., 65.
100. The thought that Jews could ultimately get something for nothing vexes Bauer con-
siderably. He repeatedly fantasizes about parasitic Jews who take delight (sich kitzeln) at the
prospect of cashing in on the heroic critical labor of people like him. See, for example, “Die
Fähigkeit,” 58 – 59.
101. Bauer, JF, 4.
102. Ibid., 33.
103. Ibid., 34.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. For Bauer’s assessment of Jewish law as “chimerical” and of the midrashic imagina-
tion and Talmud as mere dead sophistry, see ibid., 24 – 30. For remarks on Jewish practice as
hypocritical, see, for example, ibid., 42 – 43. On this aspect of Bauer’s argument, see Leopold,
“The Hegelian Antisemitism of Bruno Bauer,” 183 – 84.
107. On Bauer’s conceptual indebtedness to Christianity even after he became its radical
critic, see Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, 169 – 79. Moses Hess attacks Bauer as
“Christian” even in his atheism in “Die letzten Philosophen.”
108. Bauer, JF, 23.
109. Bauer’s Hegelian orientation thus rehearses, in historicized terms, the Kantian apo-
ria regarding how to integrate Jewish heteronomy into a human community defined by its
autonomy, which Fichte in 1793 could resolve only through a fantasy of Jewish decapita-
tion. Moggach notes how influential Kantian moral philosophy remained for Bauer’s un-
derstanding of human autonomy (“Republican Rigorism,” 125 – 27 ; and PP, 112 – 13 and 148 ).
Notwithstanding Moggach’s valiant defense of Bauer’s “republican rigorism,” Bauer’s “his-
torically” arrived at definition of Jews as antithetical to the quintessentially human work of
advancing infinite consciousness remains problematic for even the most rigorist definition
of republicanism. Since Bauer defines Judaism as recalcitrance to universal values, the only
sufficiently “rigorous” adjustment of Jewish interiority to universal values would be the oblit-
eration of Judaism. The symmetry in Bauer’s call for Christians to overcome Christianity
is only apparent. To become human, Christians need only liberate the truth of their inner
being, which is mystified, but not cancelled, in Christianity. Lacking such an inner human
core, Jews are called on to obliterate not merely their misguided Jewishness, but their entire
being. Anything that remains in a Jew—be it a (pseudo-)enlightend Jew, who abandons Jew-
ish observance; a Reform Jew, who renounces Jewish peoplehood; or a Jew who understands
his demand for rights as part of a universal campaign—remains for Bauer Jewish, and not
human. Spinoza is the sole example, in Bauer’s two essays on the Jewish Question, of a Jew
who managed to leap out of Judaism into humanity. The thrust of Bauer’s argument, how-
ever, constructs such a transformation as an ontological impossibility.
110. Bauer, “Die Fähigkeit,” 59. Bauer’s account of Judaism strongly echoes Feuerbach’s