Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 175

wirklichen Volkslebens], contradicts the development that alone could lend it

a certain support [Halt], and wishes to preserve itself uncoupled from it. The

supposed divine curse consists in nothing else than the natural consequences

of the contradiction into which the Jews have brought themselves with history

at large and with their law.”^108 Bauer substitutes his secular dialectic of infinite

human consciousness for the Christian theology of a Fluch. Divine judgment

disappears, and Bauer locates Christians simply on the right, and Jews on the

wrong, side of history. Constituted in heteronymous (and eventually perfectly

chimerical) law rather than the historical law of autonomous Entwicklung, Jews

can only be mangled, never improved, by the workings of the historical dialectic.

Thus while history propels Christians in the right direction eventually, Jews

remain barred from true historical participation.

The same secularized Christian supercessionism structures “Die Fähigkeit,”

Bauer’s second, shorter contribution to the debate around the Jewish Question.

In this philosophy of history Christians appear as cryptohumans: they contain,

within their alienated consciousness, a true human core that needs only to be

liberated. Jews, in contrast, are defined by their historical-ontological Unrecht:

they are nothing but the husk that history, with the advent of Christianity, has

sloughed off. Although it has become incumbent on Christians—in the wake

of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Bauer’s (in his own assess-

ment) epochal brand of Kritik—to overcome their theological narrowness,

they possess the necessary force to do so. Antithetical to human Entwicklung,

Jews, however, cannot develop a human core that, Bauer insists, they radically

lack. Instead they must cease to exist. Here, too, Bauer simultaneously calls

on Jews to transcend their particularity and defines Jews as incapable of such

self- transcendence.^109 In “Die Fähigkeit,” the main intertext of the second part

of Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage,” Bauer contrasts, perhaps still more emphatically

than in Die Judenfrage, Christian universal spirit with the Jewish orientation to

material practice and need. He presents the base materiality of Jewish practice

as evidence of Jews’ lack of true human spirit and historical agency, a contrast

that will largely structure Marx’s strategy of exploiting Jewish materiality in

his attempt to counter Bauer’s overvaluation of the agency of autonomous self-

consciousness with an inchoate theory of materialist praxis.

Bauer contends Christianity has a human core that enables it to contest itself.

Since according to Bauer “the full human being,” “developed consciousness,”

and the “spirit that nowhere sees a limit that contains it” are nowhere to be

found in Judaism, it has no resources at its disposal for such a struggle.^110 In-

stead of participating in the development of free human consciousness, Judaism

remains limited to the satisfaction of natural needs: