Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 14 9

displace attention from what the figure of “the real Jew” does for Marx. Argu-

ments that see in Marx’s Judentum a mere allegory for capitalistic commerce

(Judentum had this connotation in Marx’s day) fail to account for his rhetorical

excesses and choice to privilege anti-Jewish stereotypes as the vehicle for his

critique. Arguments from self-hatred on Marx’s part understand his anti-Jewish

remarks as an attempt to dissociate himself from Jews and Jewishness, and they

typically underscore the long line of rabbis on both sides of Marx’s family; his

conversion to Protestantism at age six; the occasional antisemitic insult Marx

endured from adversaries (including Ruge after their break, Mikhail Bakunin,

and Eugen Dühring); and the numerous offensive statements Marx made about

Jews in his private correspondence and occasionally in published writings.^18 In

a classic essay Silberner documents how Marx’s published, unpublished, and

private remarks about Jews were consistently negative throughout his life.^19 Yet

to harbor antisemitic sentiments and to choose to publish them in the service of

a polemical philosophical-political project are different things. I seek to redirect

the question. Instead of asking what Marx’s anti-Jewish remarks in “Zur Juden-

frage” can tell us about Marx as a person, I ask what they can tell us about the

evolution of his early thought.

This requires an archeology of multiple philosophical and polemical con-

texts, including the relationship of Marx’s evolving project to those of Feuer-

bach, Bauer, and Hess; his waning faith in liberal politics; and his complex turn

from an idealist to a materialist theory of historical agency. Given the densely

imbricated nature of this discursive constellation, this chapter traces crucial ar-

guments and strategies of Marx’s most important interlocutors before elaborat-

ing a reading of “Zur Judenfrage.”

In this period what Marx understands to constitute critical bedrock (the

foundation on which he bases his critique of politics and society) repeatedly

dissolves and is replaced by something ostensibly more basic. What Marx takes

to be solid reality in one moment he may come to view as so much abstraction

in the next. It is a testimony to the velocity of this trajectory that one finds three

distinct and theoretically incompatible articulations by Marx in the pages of the

Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher of February 1844. In a May 1843 letter to Ruge,

Marx used the ideal collective political agent, the Volk, as a yardstick with which

to measure the abjection of German subjects and petty rulers. Half a year later,

in “Zur Judenfrage,” he used the figure of the real Jew (der wirkliche Jude) to

describe the egoistic members of civil society. In the essay he wrote immediately

after “Zur Judenfrage,” “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einlei-

tung” (“A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduc-

tion”), the proletariat makes its initial appearance. Marx deploys a rhetoric of