One can only assume that Marx was familiar with Bauer’s December 1843 reply to crit-
ics of his two essays on the Jewish Question when Marx wrote ZJ 2 , though he did not engage
this text by Bauer explicitly until Die heilige Familie.
Bauer, “Neueste Schriften über die Judenfrage” ( 1843 ). Bauer’s letter to Ruge quoted
above anticipates this opposition between the Volk, which Bauer aspires to galvanize, and
the many enemies he wishes merely to antagonize—that is, the intellectually mediocre Ju-
denfreunde, whom he would soon relegate to the ranks of die Masse. Bauer continued to
welcome new enemies. In a further response to critics of his writings on the Jewish Question,
he wrote gleefully of Abraham Geiger’s criticims of his Die Judenfrage: “The number of our
opponents has grown. We congratulate ourselves!” (“Neueste Schriften über die Judenfrage”
[ 1844 ], 14 ).
Bauer, for example, claims that Jewish dietary laws would inevitably belie Jews’ “most
beautiful words [Reden] about equality with others and about humanity” by declaring, in
practice, that non-Jews are not the Jew’s “equal, not fellow human beings [Mit-Menschen] .”
Yet his characterization of Jewish dietary laws only reinforces his argument about the lin-
guistic impossibity of a Jew’s expressing a wish to transcend particularism and join a wider
collectivity: dietary practices would betray Jews’ irremediable particularism even if the Jew
“wished, although this is not possible, to be vigilant in his language and hold at bay all the
locutions that give the lie to his assurances—but once again! It is not possible!” ( JF, 30 ).
For David Leopold’s illuminating commentary on Bauer’s two essays on the Jewish
Question, see “The Hegelian Antisemitism of Bruno Bauer.” On this particular tension in
Bauer’s argument, see ibid., 192.
Douglas Moggach, “Republican Rigorism and Emancipation in Bruno Bauer,” 130 – 33.
In Moggach’s apt wording, “Bauer fuses teleology and freedom and situates them in
the rational subject, in opposition to the sphere of positive, irrational institutions” (PP, 112 ).
Bauer’s form of Hegelianized (historicized) Kantian autonomous moral subjectivity indeed
defines the rational—that is, the human—subject in terms of its relationship to a perceived
teleological development of free self-consciousness in history. Subject positions deemed to
embody and propel the teleological development of human freedom possess true human
being. Subjectivities deemed to be particular (or “immediate”) subordinate free conscious-
ness to matter and thus lack the autonomous universality that is constitutive of humanity
itself. Bauer defines rational subjectivity as a fusion of historical teleology and freedom, not
only in contrast to “irrational institutions,” then, but also to other subjects—such as the
“geschichtswidrigen” Jews (Bauer, JF, 34 ).
Leopold aptly notes of Bauer’s argument: “That the Jews lack ‘an ability to develop
with history’ is no trivial failing for a Hegelian... [because] the historical rationale for the
existence of an entity is its continued contribution to that progress” (“The Hegelian Anti-
semitism of Bruno Bauer,” 187). For this reason, as Leopold also notes, Bauer deems Jewish
tenacity deplorable, not admirable (ibid., 188 ).
Bauer, JF, 61.
According to Bauer’s logic of sacrifice (see, for example, JF, 34 – 35 and 61 , and “Die
Fähigkeit,” 64 and 71 ), Christians must sacrifice the nonhuman part of themselves—the
