Notes to Chapter 5 { 33 1has endowed the human body, and which observant Jews recite either every time they relieve
themselves, or just once in the course of early morning blessings.
169. Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, “Die Bedeutung der Kreation im Juden-
tum” (The significance of the creation in Judaism).
170. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror. For a discussion of the threats and possibilities that
the abject presents to and beyond subjectivity, see Jonathan Strauss, Human Remains, chapter 8.
171. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 437.
172. Ibid., 433.
173. Ibid., 437.
174. Ibid., 438.
175. Instead of trying to answer his own question through analysis Nirenberg merely re-
fers to certain tendencies among groups of unspecified interpreters of Marx’s “Zur Juden-
frage” before concluding that Marx’s reasons for insisting on the reality of “Jews” surely are
“overdetermined” (Anti-Judaism, 438 ).
176. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 439.
177. Marx would reproduce a somewhat reworked version of “Zur Judenfrage” in his and
Engels’s 1844 polemic (directed chiefly against Bruno Bauer), Die heilige Familie. Although
Marx exploits Jews (and real Jewish critics of Bauer) as, in their “massiness,” preferable to
Bauer, the critic of die Masse, Marx already had more effective “massy” protagonists at his
disposal to marshal against Bauer, and he here almost completely omits the rhetoric with
which he figures the Jew as the obscene embodiment of the real. Jews would never again fig-
ure in a prominent way in his theoretical writings.
178. Marx, KMEW, 421 – 22 (translation modified); MEW, 3 : 5 - 7.
179. Auguste Cornu also identifies this passage in Feuerbach as what Marx is referring to
(Marx’ “Thesen über Feuerbach,” 11 , note 14 ).
180. Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, 120.
181. Marx, EPW, 55 ; Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 376.
5. Patriotic Pantheism
- Benedict de Spinoza, B. v. Spinoza’s Sämmtliche Werke. Aus dem Lateinischen mit dem
Leben Spinoza’s von Berthold Auerbach. - Phönix (Frankfurt), unsigned review of Spinoza.
- For details about Auerbach’s life, I have drawn on Anton Bettelheim’s Berthold Auer-
bach (hereafter BA). - In a letter to Jakob Auerbach, his cousin and confidant, of June 29 , 1830 , Berthold
Auerbach remarks with evident delight that he and Spinoza share the name Baruch (Briefe
an Seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach, 5 ). - See Berthold Auerbach, “Spinoza-Arbeiten,” September 14 (hereafterSA 1 ). Auerbach
wrote this piece in 1880 for the occasion of the unveiling of the Spinoza monument in The
Hague, which he attended. - Auerbach’s first published piece was a pseudonymous commissioned two-volume bi-
ography of Frederick the Great (published in 1834 – 35 ). - Berthold Auerbach, “Ephraim Moses Kuh.” The work was originally serialized in Zei-
tung für die elegante Welt.