Selected Essays | Page 9

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