Notes to Chapter 4 { 327world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in
order to possess it in reality” (Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 144 ; and MEW, 1 : 346 ).
125. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 159 ; and MEW, 1 : 360.
126. McLellan (YHKM, 75 – 81 ) argues that Bauer’s method of critique continued to serve
as an important model for Marx in “Zur Judenfrage,” “Einleitung,” and even the 1844 Paris
manuscripts.
127. See note 115 of this chapter.
128. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 150 ; and MEW, 1 : 350 – 51.
129. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 158 – 59 ; and MEW, 1 : 360.
130. Breckman, DS, 295.
131. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 160 ; and MEW, 1 : 361.
132. In keeping with his ontological and historical schema, in which Jews engage in soph-
istry to avoid the dimly grasped knowledge that their existence had become chimerical and
lacked all justification, Bauer frequently takes it on himself to explain the Jews’ ontological
nullity to the Jews themselves, who are inherently incapable of seeing it. For example, Bauer
takes aim at “enlightened” Jews who “seem” on the verge of overcoming all that makes them
Jews (and thus becoming worthy of citizenship), yet who ultimately betray their egoistic Jew-
ish essence all the more starkly by wanting to be equal as Jews ( JF, 28 ). For Bauer, anything
Jews undertake as Jews bears witness to their immutable misanthropic essence. In Fischer’s
apt formulation, “the very existence of post-Biblical Judaism... contradicted the course
of historical development. By maintaining its distinct existence, post-Biblical Judaism also
amounted to an active revolt against the potential perfection of Biblical Judaism’s perfectible
elements and thus against its very essence.... Consequently, Jewry could not even provide
a comprehensive account of its own essence” (The Socialist Response, 94 ). As Fischer dis-
cusses, Bauer found a satisfying account of the Jewish essence in Johann Andreas Eisen-
menger’s Entdecktes Judenthum!
133. To appreciate how fully Marx in ZJ 1 rejects Bauer’s argument that there is anything
particularly Jewish about the contradiction between the demand for universal rights and
continued particular existence, consider Marx’s insistence that “for man as a bourgeois, ‘life
in the state’ is ‘only a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and the rule’ [“Die
Fähigkeit,” 57 (my addition)]. Of course, the bourgeois like the Jew, remains only sophisti-
cally in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen only sophistically remains a Jew or a
bourgeois. But this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The
difference between the religious man and the citizen is the difference between the merchant
and the citizen, between the day-laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citi-
zen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious
man finds himself with the political man is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois
finds himself with the citizen, and the member of civil society with his political lion’s skin”
(Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 154 ; and MEW, 1 : 355 ). As so often in “Zur Judenfrage,” Marx’s
rhetoric derives from Bauer’s, even when Marx does not make this clear. The extent to which
Marx disputes Bauer’s identification of egoism as a particularly Jewish trait becomes evident
when we compare Marx’s language to the passage in Bauer’s “Die Fähigkeit” to which Marx
here responds. Bauer contends that Jews cannot be real citizens because their sensibility and
allegiance as Jews will always trump their sensibility and allegiance as citizens. “Only sophis-
tically, in appearance,” Bauer argues, “would the Jew be able to remain a Jew in the life of the