CONCERNING THE JEWISH QUESTION 399 398 THE CLASS STRUGGLE lege, and because this restraint in life reacts upon the law, compelling it to sanction the discrimination between the oppressed and an oppressing class of citizens, who, as such are presumably all free. 65. When, then, would the Jewish question be solved for France. The Jew, for example, must inevitably cease to be a Jew, did he not permit his law to interfere with his duties to the state and to his fellow citizens, if, for instance, he should go to the Chamber of Deputies on a Sabbath and take part in public sessions. In fact, every religious privilege, including therefore the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolashed; and if a few, or a larger number, or even the majority should still feel constrained to fulfill certain religious duties, this observance would have to be left to them individually as a purely personal matter. 65. There is no more religion if there is no more privileged religion. Take away from religion its power of exclusion, and it ceases to exist. 66. Just as Martin du Nord saw in the proposal to omit mention of Sunday in the law, a declaration that Christianity had ceased to exist, just as logically would the declaration that the Sabbathlaw contained no more obligations for the Jew stand for the proclamation of the dissolution of Judaism. 71. Bauer therefore asks, on the one hand, that the Jew relinquish Judaism, that, in fact, man relinquish religion altogether, in order that he may be granted civic emancipation.
On the other hand, he deduces, that doing away with religion by political means is equivalent to simply doing away with religion altogether. The state which presupposes the pressure of religion is not yet a true, a real state. To be sure, the religious conception of life gives the state certain guarantees. But what state? What sort of state. 97. At this point Bauer one sided conception of the Jewish question becomies evident.
It would by no means be sufficient to question: Who shall emancipate? Who shall become emancipated. The critic has yet a third task. He must ask: What sort of emancipation is under consideration? What conditions are essentially contained in the demanded emancipation? It was the criticism of the larger question of political emancipation that finally absorbed the criticism of the Jewish question and actually merged it into the general problem of the age.
Since Bauer does not raise the question to this level he falls into various contradictions. He stipulates conditions which are not based upon the nature of political emancipation itself. He brings up questions which are no part of his problem and he solves problems which leave his question unsettled. When Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish freedom, Their error was only that they presupposed the Christian state as the only true state and did not subject it to the same criticism, with which they regarded Judaism (P. we find Bauer error in the fact that he subjects only the Christian state and not simply. the state to criticism, that he does not examine the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation and therefore stipulates conditions which can be explained only by an uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human emancipation, When Bauer asks the Jews, Have you from your standpoint the right to demand political emancipation? we ask on the contrary, Has anyone from the standpoint of political emancipation the right to demand of the Jew the abolition of Judaism, or for that matter, of mankind in general the abolition of religion?
The Jewish question takes on various aspects according to the state in which the Jew exists. In Germany where there is no political state, no state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological question. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which acknowledges Christianity as its foundation. This state represents theology ex professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology, double edged criticism, criticism of Christian theology and criticism of Jewish theology.
But all the time we are still concerned with theology, regardless to what extent our interest is critical.
In France, the constitutional state, the Jewish question is the question of constitutionalism, the question of the incompleteness of political emancipation. Since here the semblance of a state religion is retained (even though in an empty and inconsistent formula, the formula of a religion of the majority. the relation of the Jew to the state continues to bear the aspect of religious, theological opposition.
Only in the North American republics at least in a part of them the Jewish question loses its theological significance and becomes a really secular question. Only where the political state exists in its full development can the relation of the Jew of the religious person in general to the political state, that is to say the relation of religion to the state, stand out clearly in all