Notes to Chapter 4 { 325portrayal of Judaism as an egoistic cult and his view of the Jewish understanding of the Cre-
ation as the projection of a divine provider of natural needs. Judaism makes nature serve its
needs but, unlike Christianity, fails to transcend natural limitation.
111. Ibid., 59 – 60.
112. Bauer asserts that Judaism wrongly imbues the trivial and mundane (das Willkürliche,
Zufällige) with religious significance. This both evinces and perpetuates an inability to dis-
tinguish Geist from Natur, and the confinement of the Jewish essence [Wesen] within the
most trivial and vulgarly material mundane objects (pots, household utensils, cloths, and
ointment bowls). See JF, 37 – 38.
113. Bauer, “Die Fähigkeit,” 60.
114. Ibid., 61.
115. Marx quotes and exploits Bauer’s formulation that if the state ceases to privilege
any religion, religion will eventually disappear (for Bauer’s wording, see JF 66 ; Marx cites it
Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 350 ). Yet the thrust of Bauer’s argument is that unless individuals
root out their particularist proclivities in a rigorous way—and religious egoism is for Bauer
the “Urprivilegium” (see, for example, JF, 60 )—their egoism will continue to corrode even
formally secular and universalistic institutions (as occurred in France after the July Revolu-
tion, in Bauer’s assessment). Bauer deems real transcendence of religious limitation a pre-
requisite not merely for narrow, formal political emancipation but also for substantial human
emancipation. True human emancipation requires not only that the state, but also that indi-
viduals, have overcome religion. (On this point, see Leopold, “The Hegelian Antisemitism
of Bruno Bauer,” 191 – 92 .) Moggach shows that Bauer frequently (including in JF) stressed
the primacy of politics over religion, arguing that religion had lost its real force and was now
only being propped up by the state to serve its own particularist interests. On how Bauer,
pace Marx, also distinguished between political and human emancipation, and deemed not
only political but also social transformation necessary, see Maggoch, PP, 145. In McLellan’s
view, too, Bauer, at the end of Die Judenfrage, does “with as much clarity as Marx ever
achieved, precisely what Marx criticized him for omitting: he explains ‘The religious servi-
tude of citizens by their secular servitude’ and ‘transforms theological questions into secular
ones’” (YHKM, 77 ). Rudi Waser (Autonomie des Selbstbewußtseins, 162 – 63 ) rightly notes a
contradiction, however: Bauer claims both that secular differences have become more im-
portant than religious distinctions (for example, in JF, 96 ), and that religion is the generative
“ur-privilege,” of which all subsequent privileges are iterations (for example, in JF, 60 ).
116. On how Marx still lacked the tools of secular economic analysis he thought he was
deploying in “Zur Judenfrage,” see Breckman DS, 293 – 94. McLellan notes that Marx in
his Kreuznach Kritik repeatedly “crosses out the term ‘self-consciousness’ which he had
originally written and substitutes another term more evocative of practical realities” (YHKM,
75 ). McLellan interprets this as Marx’s attempt to counter Bauer’s privileging of self-
consciousness.
117. Karl Marx, Selected Writings (hereafter KMSW), 10 ; Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 356.
118. Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 361.
119. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 155. Implicit in ZJ 1 , this argument becomes explicit in
Marx’s revisiting of the Jewish Question (and Bauer’s treatment of it) in Die heilige Familie.
Pierre Birnbaum reads Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage” as more antisemitic than Bauer’s essays on
the Jewish Question (see Geography of Hope, 50 – 61 ) and argues that Marx takes a stand for