Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
172 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
leological development as having exhausted their very humanity.^96 Bauer does
not advance the thesis that Jews are merely unhistorical—outside the flow of
human Entwicklung but potentially able to rejoin and participate in it. He ar-
gues, rather, that Jews are fundamentally antihistorical: they oppose free human
development merely by virtue of their continued existence, and they prolong
their pseudo-existence only insofar as they oppose such development.^97
In this way Bauer prefigures his later opposition between Kritik and die
Masse with his distinction in Die Judenfrage between authentic historical
Völker, who advance free self-consciousness, and the chimerical Jewish people
qua historical dead weight and inert particularity, precisely the qualities Bauer
would soon subsume under the rubric of massiness. The Volk-Masse dichotomy
that redefines Bauer’s earlier and more broadly affirmative conception of the
Volk (and his own self-positioning as a critic), in other words, emerges in large
part through his opposition between the authentic historical Volk and the chi-
merical Jewish Volk:
We were all excluded through our limitations; everyone was limited, and
upon the Jewish quarter border the quarters in which we are pigeonholed
[rubricirt].
Not only the Jews, but we too no longer want to be satisfied with a chi-
mera; we too wish to become a real people, real peoples.
If the Jews wish to become a real people—however, they cannot do this
in their chimerical nationality, but rather only in the nations of our age
that are historical and capable of participating in history [geschichtsfähi-
gen und geschichtlichen]—then they must give up the chimerical preroga-
tives that will, as long as they cling to them, always separate them from the
nations [Völkern] and alienate them from history. They must sacrifice their
unbelief in the nations and their exclusive belief in their groundless national-
ity before they will even in the slightest be able to put themselves in the posi-
tion to take part in real affairs of the state and the people.
We, however, must give up our unbelief in the world in general and in the
right of the human being—and must thus give up our exclusive faith in monop-
oly and minority—before we can think about being and remaining real peoples,
and true human beings within the life of the people [des Volkslebens].^98
Bauer insists that all of “us” are just as oppressed as the Jews, even as he em-
phasizes an implicit ontological distinction between Jews and “us.” Whereas
Jews are essentially limited, “we” have wrongly been confined to particularistic
categories. Typically, while Bauer calls for both Jews and Christians to become
historical peoples, he insists that only Christians and not Jews can accomplish