Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

174 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

nel of universal truth, Jews must paradoxically evade it in order to continue to

exist, for the truth of (their own) history is that there is no longer any historical

justification for their continuing existence. Since Jews can neither participate in

history nor prevent history from progressing, they can only deny (verläugnen)

history.^103 In defining Jewish existence as an active denial of the historical truth

of the nullity of that very existence, Bauer inscribes guilt in Jews’ very being.

Continued Jewish existence becomes a crime against history and, given Bauer’s

definition of humanity in terms of free self-consciousness’s historical unfolding,

against humanity itself. At a fateful dialectical fork in the road, Jews opted for

particular existence over truth and so lost their historical innocence; they have

become geschichtswidrig: “Under these circumstances, he [the Jew] is, however,

no longer what he was: (the Jew capable of this particular development, who had

it before him and necessarily had to posit [setzten] it): after that development

and after he has denied it, he is instead the Jew who exists contra the intention of

his history, thus also despite his history, the Jew who exists in opposition to his

determination—in short the history-transgressing [geschichtswidrige] Jew.”^104

Bauer places Jews in a dialectical double bind: if the Jew realizes (verwirklichen)

the ideas to which his history and faith lead (that is, his historical truth), then

he cannot remain “the real Jew” (der wirkliche Jude). Jews are not merely stub-

born; they owe their very existence to their stubbornness. Their existence is

thus so wrongheaded as to constitute a wrong (Unrecht): “The fact that he [the

Jew] must be so stubborn and groundless [haltlos]—because he could no longer

be the lawful [gesetzliche] and exclusive, i.e. the real, Jew [der wirkliche Jude] if

he realized [verwirklichte] the ideas to which his history and his faith led him of

themselves—makes his entire essence a contradiction, his existence a sickly one,

indeed even a wrong [Unrecht] .”^105 Jews can preserve their existence only by

evading the truth of their essential nonexistence through the “chimerical” and

“hypocritical” midrashic and Talmudic reinterpretation of Jewish law.^106 Thus

the Jews’ historical-ontological guilt is inescapable; the measure of their Unrecht

is their continued existence itself.

Albeit in the name of a radically atheistic interpretation of history, Bauer

only secularizes, without fundamentally rethinking, Christian triumphalism

and Christian Jew-hatred.^107 He rehearses secularized versions of the Chris-

tian theological bias that deems Jews stubborn and interprets Jewish suffering

as bearing witness to a divine curse (Fluch). In his secularization of the latter

idea, Bauer interprets the Fluch under which Jews suffer as the consequence

of the contradictory relationship they maintain to history: “What one calls the

divine curse is nothing but the natural consequence of a law, that, in itself al-

ready chimerical and unable to build the soul of a real life of a people [eines