ON THE JEWISH QUESTION 1. Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question), Brunswick 1843.
2. Bruno Bauer, Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden (The Capacity of Modern Jews and Christians to become free), Zurich 1843.
1. Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage, Brunswick 1843. The German Jews crave for emancipation. What emancipation do they crave? Civic, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer answers them: Nobody in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are unfree. How shall we liberate you? You Jews are egoists, if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans you ought to labour for the political emancipation of Germany, as men for human emancipation, and you ought to feel the special nature of your oppression and your disgrace not as an exception from the rule, but rather as its confirmation.
Or do Jews demand to be put on an equal footing with Christian subjects? Then they recognize the Christian State as justified, then they recognize the régime of general subjugation. Why are they displeased at their special yoke, when the general yoke pleases them? Why should Germans interest themselves in the emancipation of the Jews, if Jews do not interest themselves in the emancipation of Germans?
The Christian State knows only privileges. In that State the Jew possesses the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which a Christian has not. Why does he crave the rights which he has not, and which Christians enjoy?
If the Jew wants to be emancipated from the Christian State, then he should demand that the Christian State abandon its religious prejudice. Will the Jew abandon his religious prejudice? Has he therefore the right to demand of another this abdication of religion?
By its very nature the Christian State cannot emancipate the Jews; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated.
So long as the State is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, both are equally incapable of granting and receiving emancipation.
The Christian State can only behave towards the Jew in the manner of a Christian State, that is in a privileged manner, by granting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but causing him to feel the pressure of the other separated spheres, and all the more onerously inasmuch as the Jew is in religious antagonism to the dominant religion. But the Jew also can only conduct himself towards the State in a Jewish fashion, that is as a stranger, by opposing his chimerical nationality to the real nationality, his illusory law to the real law, by imagining that his separation from humanity is justified, by abstaining on principle from all participation in the historical movement, by waiting on a future which has nothing in common with the general future of mankind, by regarding himself as a member of the Jewish people and the Jewish people as the chosen people.
Upon what grounds therefore do you Jews crave emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the State religion. As citizens? There are no citizens in Germany. As men? You are as little men as He on whom you called.
After giving a criticism of the previous positions and solutions of the question, Bauer has freshly posited the question of Jewish emancipation. How, he asks, are they constituted, the Jew to be emancipated, and the Christian State which is to emancipate? He replies by a criticism of the Jewish religion, he analyses the religious antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, he explains the nature of the Christian State, and all this with boldness, acuteness, spirit, and thoroughness, in a style as precise as it is forcible and energetic.
How then does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? The formulation of a question is its solution. The criticism of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question.
The summary is therefore as follows: We must emancipate ourselves before we are able to emancipate others.
The most rigid form of the antagonism between the Jew and the Christian is the religious antagonism. How is this antagonism resolved? By making it impossible. How is a religious antagonism made impossible? By abolishing religion.
As soon as Jew and Christian recognize their respective religions as different stages in the development of the human mind, as different snake skins which history has cast off, and men as the snakes encased therein, they stand no longer in a religious relationship, but in a critical, a scientific, a human one. Science then constitutes their unity. Antagonisms in science, however, are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew is particularly affected by the lack of political emancipation in general and the pronounced Christianity of the State. In Bauer's sense, however, the Jewish question has a general significance independent of the specific German conditions.
It is the question of the relation of religion to the State, of the contradiction between religious entanglement and political emancipation. Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition, both for the Jews, who desire to be politically emancipated, and for the State, which shall emancipate and itself be emancipated.
"Good, you say, and the Jew says so too, the Jew also is not to be emancipated as Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he has such an excellent, general, human principle of morality; the Jew will rather retire behind the citizen and be a citizen, although he is a Jew and wants to remain one: that is, he is and remains a Jew, in spite of the fact that he is a citizen and lives in general human relationships: his Jewish and limited nature always and eventually triumphs over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains in spite of the fact that it has been outstripped by general principles. If, however, it remains, it rather outstrips everything else." "Only sophistically and to outward seeming would the Jew be able to remain a Jew in civic life; if he desired to remain a Jew, the mere semblance would therefore be the essential thing and would triumph, that is, his life in the State would be only a semblance or a passing exception to the rule and the nature of things" ("The Capacity of modern Jews and Christians to become free," p. 57).
Let us see, on the other hand, how Bauer describes the task of the State: "France has recently (proceedings of the Chamber of Deputies, 26th December 1840) in connection with the Jewish question—as constantly in all other political questions—given us a glimpse of a life which is free, but revokes its freedom in law, and therefore asserts it to be a sham, and on the other hand contradicts its free law by its act." "The Jewish Question," p. 64.
"General freedom is not yet legal in France, the Jewish question is not yet solved, because legal freedom—that all citizens are equal—is limited in practice, which is still dominated by religious privileges, and this unfreedom in practice reacts on the law, compelling the latter to sanction the division of nominally free citizens into oppressed and oppressor," p. 65.
When, therefore, would the Jewish problem be solved for France?
"The Jew, for instance, must cease to be a Jew if he will not allow himself to be hindered by his law from fulfilling his duties towards the State and his fellow-citizens, going, for example, to the Chamber of Deputies on the Sabbath and taking part in the public sittings. Every religious privilege, and consequently the monopoly of a privileged Church, must be surrendered, and if few or many or even the great majority believe they ought still to perform religious duties, this performance must be left to themselves as a private matter," p. 65. "When there is no longer a privileged religion, there will no longer be a religion. Take from religion its excommunicating power, and it exists no longer," p. 66.
On the one hand, Bauer states that the Jew must abandon Judaism, and that man must abandon religion, in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, he feels he is logical in interpreting the political abolition of religion to mean the abolition of religion altogether. The State, which presupposes religion, is as yet no true, no real State. "At any rate the religious idea gives the State guarantees. But what State? What kind of State?" p. 97.
At this point we are brought up against the one-sided conception of the Jewish question.
It was by no means sufficient to inquire: Who shall emancipate? Who shall be emancipated? Criticism had a third task to perform.
It had to ask: what kind of emancipation are we concerned with? Upon what conditions is the desired emancipation based? The criticism of political emancipation itself was only the eventual criticism of the Jewish question and its true solution, in the "general question of the time."
Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level he falls into contradictions. He posits conditions which are not involved in the nature of political emancipation itself. He suggests questions which his problem does not imply, and he solves problems which leave his questions unsettled. Whereas Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation: "Their mistake was that they assumed the Christian State to be the only real State, and did not subject it to the same criticism that they applied to Judaism," we find Bauer's mistake to consist in the fact that it is only the Christian State, and not the "general State," that he subjects to criticism, that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation, and consequently lays down conditions which are only explicable from an uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human emancipation.
When Bauer asks Jews: Have you the right from your standpoint to crave political emancipation? we would inquire on the contrary: Has the standpoint of political emancipation the right to demand of Jews the abolition of Judaism, or from men generally the abolition of religion.
The complexion of the Jewish question changes according to the State in which Jews find themselves. In Germany, where no political State, no State as State exists, the Jewish question is a purely theological question. The Jew finds himself in religious antagonism to the State, which acknowledges Christianity as its basis. This State is theologian ex professo. Here criticism is criticism of theology, is two-edged criticism, criticism of Christian and criticism of Jewish theology. But however critical we may be, we cannot get out of the theological circle.
In France, in the constitutional State, the Jewish question is the question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political emancipation. As the semblance of a State religion is there preserved, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, in the formula of a religion of the majority, the relationship of Jews to the State retains the semblance of a religious and theological antagonism.
It is only in the North American Free States—at least in part of them—that the Jewish question loses its theological significance and becomes a really secular question. Only where the political State exists in its completeness can the relation of the Jew, of the religious man generally, to the political State, and therefore the relation of religion to the State, be studied in its special features and its purity. The criticism of this relationship ceases to be theological criticism when the State ceases to adopt a theological attitude towards religion, when its attitude towards religion becomes purely political. The criticism then becomes criticism of the political State. At this point, where the question ceases to be theological, Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical. In the United States there is neither a State religion nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another. The State is alien to all cults. (Marie ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis, etc., by G. Beaumont, Paris 1835, p. 214.) There are even North American States where "the constitution does not impose religious beliefs or the practice of a cult as a condition of political privileges" (l. c. p. 225). Yet "nobody in the United States believes that a man without religion might be an honest man" (l. c. p. 224). Yet North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamilton assure us with one voice. Meanwhile, the North American States only serve us as an example. The question is: What is the attitude of completed political emancipation towards religion? If even in the country of completed political emancipation we find religion not only existing, but in a fresh and vital state, it proves that the existence of religion does not contradict the completeness of the State. But as the existence of religion indicates the presence of a defect, the source of this defect may only be looked for in the nature of the State. We are no longer concerned with religion as the basis, but only as the phenomenon of secular shortcomings. Consequently we explain the religious handicap of the free citizens from their secular handicap. We do not assert that they must remove their religious handicap as soon as they cast off their secular fetters. We do not transform secular questions into theological questions. We transform theological questions into secular questions.
After history has for so long been dissolved in superstition, we dissolve the superstition in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political State by criticizing the political State in its secular construction, apart from the religious weaknesses. We transmute the contradiction of the State with a specific religion, like Judaism, into the contradiction of the State with specific secular elements, and the contradiction of the State with religion generally into the contradiction of the State with its general assumptions.
The political emancipation of the Jew, of the Christian, of the religious man in general, means the emancipation of the State from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion generally. In its form as State, in the manner peculiar to its nature, the State emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the State religion, that is, by the State as State acknowledging no religion.
Political emancipation from religion is not a thorough-going and consistent emancipation from religion, because political emancipation is not effectual and consistent human emancipation.
The limit of political emancipation is immediately seen to consist in the fact that the State can cast off a fetter without men really becoming free from it, that the State can become a free State without men becoming free men. Bauer tacitly assents to this in laying down the following condition for political emancipation. "Every religious privilege, and therefore the monopoly of a privileged Church must be surrendered, and if few or many or even the great majority believe they ought still to perform religious duties, this performance must be left to themselves as a private matter." The State may therefore achieve emancipation from religion, although the great majority are still religious. And the great majority do not cease to be religious by being religious privately.
The political elevation of the individual above religion shares all the defects and all the advantages of political elevation generally. For example, the State as State annuls private property, the individual declares in a political manner that private property is abolished as soon as he abolishes the census for active and passive eligibility, which has been done in many North American States. Hamilton interprets this fact quite correctly from the political standpoint: "The great multitude has won the victory over the property owners and the monied men." Is not private property ideally abolished when the have-nots become the legislators of the haves? The census is the last political form to recognize private property.
Yet private property is not only not abolished with the political annulment of private property, but is even implied therein. The State abolishes in its fashion the distinctions of birth, status, education, and occupation when it declares birth, status, education, and occupation to be unpolitical distinctions, when, without taking account of these distinctions, it calls upon every member of the community to participate in the popular sovereignty on an equal footing, when it deals with all the elements of the real popular life from the State's point of view. Nevertheless the State leaves private property, education, occupation operating in their own manner, that is, as education, as occupation, and developing their potentialities.
From abolishing these actual distinctions, it rather exists only upon their basis, and is conscious of being a political State and enforcing its communal principle only in opposition to these its elements. Consequently Hegel defines the relation of the political State to religion quite correctly when he says: "If the State is to have reality as the ethical, self-conscious realization of spirit, it must be distinguished from the form of authority and faith. But this distinction arises only in so far as the ecclesiastical side is in itself divided into several churches. Then only is the State seen to be superior to them, and wins and brings into existence the universality of thought as the principle of its form." ("Philosophy of Right," Eng. tr. p. 270.)
By its nature the completed political State is the generic life of man in contradistinction to his material life. All the assumptions of this egoistic life remain in existence outside the sphere of the State, in bourgeois society, but as the peculiarities of bourgeois society.
Where the political State has attained its true development, the individual leads not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, a double life, a heavenly and an earthly life, a life in the political community, wherein he counts as a member of the community, and a life in bourgeois society, wherein he is active as a private person, regarding other men as a means, degrading himself into a means and becoming a plaything of alien powers.
The political State is related to bourgeois society as spiritualistically as heaven is to earth. It occupies the same position of antagonism towards bourgeois society; it subdues the latter just as religion overcomes the limitations of the profane world, that is, by recognizing bourgeois society and allowing the latter to dominate it. Man in his outermost reality, in bourgeois society, is a profane being. Here, where he is a real individual for himself and others, he is an untrue phenomenon.
In the State, on the other hand, where the individual is a generic being, he is the imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, he is robbed of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.
The conflict in which the individual as the professor of a particular religion is involved with his citizenship, with other individuals as members of the community, reduces itself to the secular cleavage between the political State and bourgeois society.
For the individual as a bourgeois, "life in the State is only a semblance, or a passing exception to the rule and the nature of things." In any case, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically in political life, just as the citizen remains a Jew or a bourgeois only sophistically; but this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political State itself. The difference between the religious individual and the citizen is the difference between the merchant and the citizen, between the labourer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious individual is involved with the political individual is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois is involved with the citizen, in which the member of bourgeois society is involved with his political lionskin.
This secular conflict to which the Jewish question is finally reduced, the relation of the political State to its fundamental conditions, whether the latter be material elements, like private property, etc., or spiritual elements, like education or religion, the conflict between the general interest and the private interest, the cleavage between the political State and bourgeois society—these secular antagonisms are left unnoticed by Bauer, while he controverts their religious expression. "It is precisely its foundation, the need which assures to bourgeois society its existence and guarantees its necessity, which exposes its existence to constant dangers, maintains in it an uncertain element and converts the latter into a constantly changing mixture of poverty and wealth, distress and prosperity," p. 8.
Bourgeois society in its antagonism to the political State is recognized as necessary, because the political State is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation at least represents important progress; while not the last form of human emancipation generally, it is the last form of human emancipation within the existing world order. It is understood that we are speaking here of real, of practical emancipation.
The individual emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from public right into private right. It is no longer the spirit of the State, where the individual—although in a limited manner, under a particular form and in a special sphere—behaves as a generic being, in conjunction with other individuals; it has become the spirit of bourgeois society, of the sphere of egoism, of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of the community, but the essence of social distinctions.
It has become the expression of the separation of the individual from his community, from himself and from other individuals—what it was originally. It is only the abstract profession of special perversity, of private whim. The infinite splitting-up of religion in North America, for example, gives it outwardly the form of a purely individual concern. It has been added to the heap of private interests, and exiled from the community as community. But there is no misunderstanding about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the individual into a public and a private individual, the expulsion of religion from the State into bourgeois society, is not a step, it is the completion of political emancipation, which thus neither abolishes nor seeks to abolish the real religiosity of the individual.
The splitting-up of the individual into Jew and citizen, into Protestant and citizen, into a religious person and citizen, this decomposition does not belie citizenship; it is not a circumvention of political emancipation; it is political emancipation itself, it is the political manner of becoming emancipated from religion. Moreover, in times when the political State as a political State is forcibly born of bourgeois society, when human self-liberation strives to realize itself under the form of political self-liberation, the State is driven the whole length of abolishing, of destroying religion, but it also proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the law of maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it proceeds to the abolition of life, to the guillotine. In the moment of its heightened consciousness, the political life seeks to suppress its fundamental conditions, bourgeois society and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real and uncontradictory generic life of the individual. It is, however, only enabled to do this by a flagrant violation of its own conditions of life, by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and the political drama therefore ends as inevitably with the restoration of religion, of private property, and all the elements of bourgeois society, as war ends with peace.
Why not even the so-called Christian State, which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the State religion, and therefore adopts a proscriptive attitude towards other religions is the completed Christian State. The latter is rather the atheistic State, the democratic State, the State which consigns religion among the other elements of bourgeois society. The State which is still theological and which still officially prescribes belief in Christianity, has not yet succeeded in giving secular and human expression to those human foundations whose exaggerated expression is Christianity. The so-called Christian State is simply no State at all, because it is not Christianity as a religion, but only the human background of the Christian religion which can realize itself in actual human creations.
The so-called Christian State is the Christian denial of the State, although it is not by any means the political realization of Christianity. The State, which still professes Christianity in the form of religion, does not yet profess it in the form of the State, for its attitude towards religion is a religious attitude. It is not yet the actual realization of the human basis of religion, because it still operates upon the unreality, upon the imaginary shape of this human kernel. The so-called Christian State is the incomplete State, and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the complement and the redemption of its imperfection. Consequently religion becomes its instrument, and it is the State of hypocrisy. The so-called Christian State needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a State. The democratic State, the real State, does not need religion for its political completion. It can rather do without religion, because it represents the realization of the human basis of religion in a secular manner. The so-called Christian State, on the other hand, adopts a political attitude towards religion and a religious attitude towards politics. If it degrades the State form to the level of a fiction, it equally degrades religion to a fiction.
In order to elucidate these antagonisms, let us consider Bauer's construction of the Christian State, a construction which has proceeded from contemplating the Christian-Germanic State.
Says Bauer: "In order to demonstrate the impossibility or the non-existence of a Christian State, we are frequently referred to that pronouncement in the Gospel which it not only does not follow, but cannot follow without dissolving itself completely as a State." "But the question is not settled so easily. What then does this Gospel text enjoin? Supernatural self-denial, subjection to the authority of revelation, the turning away from the State, the abolition of secular conditions. Now all this is enjoined and carried out by the Christian State. It has absorbed the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not repeat it in the same words as the Gospel expresses it, the reason is only because it expresses this spirit in the State form, that is, in forms which are indeed derived from the State of this world, but which are degraded to a sham in the religious rebirth which they have to undergo."
Bauer goes on to show how the people of the Christian State are only a sham people, who no longer have any will of their own, but possess their real existence in the chief to whom they are subject, but from whom they were originally and naturally alien, as he was given to them by God; how the laws of this people are not their creation, but positive revelations; how their chief requires privileged mediators with his own people, with the masses; how these masses themselves are split up into a multitude of special circles, which are formed and determined by chance, which are distinguished by their interests, their particular passions and prejudices, and receive as a privilege permission to make mutual compacts (p. 56).
The separation of the "spirit of the Gospel" from the "letter of the Gospel" is an irreligious act. The State, which makes the Gospel speak in the letter of politics, in other letters than those of the Holy Spirit, commits a sacrilege if not in human eyes, at least in its own religious eyes. The State, which acknowledges Christianity as its supreme embodiment and the Bible as its charter, must be confronted with the words of Holy Writ, for the writings are sacred to the letter. The State lapses into a painful, and from the standpoint of the religious consciousness, irresolvable contradiction, when it is pinned down to that pronouncement of the Gospel, which it "not only does not follow, but cannot follow without completely dissolving itself as a State." And why does it not want to completely dissolve itself? To this question it can find no answer, either for itself or for others. In its own consciousness the official Christian State is an Ought, which is impossible of realization. Only by lies can it persuade itself of the reality of its existence, and consequently it always remains for itself an object of doubt, an unreliable and ambiguous object. The critic is therefore quite justified in forcing the State, which appeals to the Bible, into a condition of mental derangement where it no longer knows whether it is a phantasm or a reality, where the infamy of its secular objects, for which religion serves as a mantle, falls into irresolvable conflict with the integrity of its religious consciousness, to which religion appears as the object of the world. This State can only redeem itself from its inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic Church. As against the latter, which declares the secular power to be its serving body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power which claimed to be the rule of the religious spirit.
In the so-called Christian State it is true that alienation counts, but not the individual. The only individual who counts, the king, is a being specially distinguished from other individuals, who is also religious and directly connected with heaven, with God. The relations which here prevail are still relations of faith. The religious spirit is therefore not yet really secularized.
Moreover, the religious spirit cannot be really secularized, for what in fact is it but the unworldly form of a stage in the development of the human mind? The religious spirit can only be realized in so far as the stage of development of the human mind, whose religious expression it is, emerges and constitutes itself in its secular form. This is what happens in the democratic State. It is not Christianity, but the human basis of Christianity which is the basis of this State. Religion remains the ideal, unworldly consciousness of its members, because it is the ideal form of the human stage of development which it represents.
The members of the political State are religious by virtue of the dualism between the individual life and the generic life, between the life of bourgeois society and the political life; they are religious inasmuch as the individual regards as his true life the political life beyond his real individuality, in so far as religion is here the spirit of bourgeois society, the expression of the separation and the alienation of man from man. The political democracy is Christian to the extent that it regards every individual as the sovereign, the supreme being, but it means the individual in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, the individual in his fortuitous existence, the individual just as he is, the individual as he is destroyed, lost, and alienated through the whole organization of our society, as he is given under the dominance of inhuman conditions and elements, in a word, the individual who is not yet a real generic being.
The sovereignty of the individual, as an alien being distinguished from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the present, and the secular maximum.