VII. Dissolution of the Last Illusions

333 Can self-deception be driven further than it is driven, for example, in the following Jewish turns of phrase?

[Notes for 333 here]

334 It helps nothing if, for example, Mirabeau with countless Jews and Christians asserts that the expectation of the future Messiah cannot hinder the Jews from becoming good citizens. It is also a completely insufficient expedient of the cunning which believes itself superior, when, for example, Herr Schlaier during the proceedings of the Württemberg Chamber of Deputies in the year 1828 remarked: "let the Jews only remain good citizens until their Messiah comes." This self-consciousness of Christian prudence, which believes itself safe from the Messiah of the Jews, will never put an end to the question whether those who hope to become true citizens only in the future, in a heavenly or wonderful earthly state, can be true men in this world, citizens with body and soul in the worldly state. The Christian believes himself secure and at the end of the question when he as a Christian believes himself safe from the arrival of a Jewish Messiah. For the state, for freedom, for mankind, however, it is highly indifferent whether the Messiah will really one day found the Jewish world-empire, or whether it is only the thought of this empire which alienates the Jews from the world, from history and from human interests.

[Notes for 334 here]

335 The question always remains and remains until it is decisively negated, i.e., until it is decisively recognised that those who expect their true society and association from a wonderful future cannot feel at home in the real human society.

[Notes for 335 here]

336 Only thus, but not as it is usually attempted by the modern Jews, is the matter to be decided once and for all.

[Notes for 336 here]

337 If, for example, the author of the writing on "Austria" (1842) II says, "If in the prayers passages occur which give room to the Messianic hope and the longing for the holy land, they are not those which are today prayed with the most fervour," then with this is first of all only the contradiction which the modern Jew enters into against himself and against Judaism expressed, but only expressed, not removed. It is removed only when it is recognised as such and the Jew expresses that he can no longer be a Jew as soon as he no longer recognises the last consequence of his religion, the consequence in which the essence of his religion and the (religious) reconciliation of its contradictions is given. But does that mean to save or decide the cause of Judaism, if one presents its adherents as men whose heart is no longer with their prayers, who profess dogmas with their lips and deny them in their hearts, yes, who even, as the author of that writing dares to express, "would only be terrified if the call reached them" that they should take possession of their promised inheritance? If those hopes are no longer alive, then at least "their venerable age, since many arose after the destruction of the Temple, and the memory of a great and glorious time speaks for the retention of those prayers"? "Ye hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying: This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me."

[Notes for 337 here]

338 A hope which has proceeded from the highest exertion of power of Jewish consciousness and is the anchor which chains the Jewish people to time and eternity, for whose sake (ibid. p. 186) not a single action is undertaken or omitted, a hope which has sunk to this shameful nullity — should not every honest man reject it on the spot, clearly and openly, as the most shameful thing?

[Notes for 338 here]

339 The modern Jew has given up this hope and yet retains it, yet does not dare to give it up. Its age is too venerable for him. No! he still cherishes it, he still separates his lot from that of mankind; he still wants to have his separate thing, at least indefinitely and for all cases reserve for himself the possibility of a particular destiny: for, he asks (p. 186), "is the servant who expects a new service therefore incapable of administering his interim one faithfully?"

[Notes for 339 here]

340 When a religion is near dissolution, feels its near end and once more rouses itself to maintain itself, then it is capable of the most fearful exertions of power. But when it has convulsively raised itself from its deathbed, it falls all the more terribly. In its convulsion it only exhausts its last strength. In its convulsion it strikes against itself.

[Notes for 340 here]

341 Every turn which the defenders of Judaism attempt is of this deathly convulsive kind.

[Notes for 341 here]

342 What is more fearful and terrible than the attempt of the Jew to separate his and his people's cause from that of his supposed lawgiver?

[Notes for 342 here]

343 "In the writing on 'The Jews in Austria' (I, 220) it says: 'To accuse Judaism of a deeply rooted immorality, one has not shrunk from going back to the harsh Mosaic ordinances for the displacement — should read: extermination! — of the Canaanite peoples, an accusation which concerns less the people (and least of all its late descendants) than the great leader of the people.'"

[Notes for 343 here]

344 For the critic, the whole web of those narratives of the wanderings of the patriarchs and of the people and of the invasion of Canaan is nothing but the mythical and fantastic expression for the feeling of estrangement, bitterness and consuming passion with which the Hebrew horde related itself to the kindred Canaanite hordes; for the critic, the legal precept to exterminate the Canaanites is first the result or the last peak of the struggle in which the monotheistic consciousness of the Jew tore itself away from the nature-worship of its neighbours and fellow tribesmen, without, however, coming to the point of being able to conquer its opponent otherwise than with fire and sword; for the critic and for the man for whom a mankind and a history first exist, the laws which really counted for a people as the expression of its highest duty have also proceeded from the people's life itself, i.e., the statement of what the people holds for its destiny, just as the sacred history is the expression of how the people would like to see its destiny carried out, if only it were not constrained by the laws of nature and the power of the other peoples.

[Notes for 344 here]

345 Everything is clear, simple, light and coherent in this view of history. The enlightened Jew, who still believes in sacred history and calls Moses the giver, is capable of letting the enormous harshness pass and asserting that the lawgiver gave the national spirit a direction for which he himself was most innocent. The Jew separates himself from the lawgiver and is yet still a Jew, in that he recognises Moses, the lawgiver, as the proclaimer of truth, as the one who proclaimed a new, indeed the highest moral principle. But if Moses is the lawgiver, may the Jew basely deny him? He denies him, however, if he wants to know nothing of a single law. He who is ashamed of the extreme of the law is also ashamed of the law, for in the extremes the strongest spirits stir; by means of the extremes the law maintains itself.

[Notes for 345 here]

346 The Jew therefore denies not only an insignificant part of the law when he disavows an extreme, its pudenda, but he denies the whole law. Why? Because the extreme, the pudendum, is only the alter ego of the law and expresses its nature. The passionateness, harshness and animal crudeness which expresses itself in that commandment of the extermination of the Canaanites animates the whole law.

[Notes for 346 here]

347 The modern Jew expresses this shame in the form that he praises the purity of the moral principle in the Mosaic law, i.e., mocks and derides the history, since it crossed the borders of Canaan, as a senseless superfluity.

[Notes for 347 here]

348 The Jew, if he still wants to be and remain a Jew, can only be a Jew in illusion, for he no longer has the true law, he embraces only a false shadow of the law, and of the extremes, the characteristic parts of the law, he is directly ashamed.

[Notes for 348 here]

349 He wants, however, still to be a Jew and is in fact and in the fullest sense a Jew. In his illusion, which he creates for himself about the whole history of mankind, and even in his illusory Judaism, he is a true Jew. He denies history, its progress; he wages a war of extermination against history by giving out his illusory Judaism for the highest principle of morality — and this war of extermination is a heavier crime than the war which his ancestors were supposed to wage against the Canaanite hordes. It is a war against the whole of mankind — but as this war it is the truth and fulfilment of Judaism.

[Notes for 349 here]

350 The modern Jew is capable of such self-denial that he appeals to the favourable testimonies which individual Christians have given to the law, in order to secure it against the supposed insults it has suffered. It is all over with Judaism when it must

[Notes for 350 here]

351 Yet the Jew also maintains himself even in this last moment where he seems to have given himself up, for precisely those Christians to whose testimony he appeals are as uncritical as he himself and represent within the Christian world, insofar as this is possible in it, the Jewish essence which lies so much, or rather solely and alone, at the heart of the Jew.

[Notes for 351 here]

352 It is true, Christianity is the completion of Judaism; its morality is the consistently carried-out Jewish morality; its view of the world and human society is the consequence of the Jewish; but as completion it is, as proved above, at the same time and necessarily the negation of the specifically Jewish essence. But those Christian theologians deny this negation, the thoroughgoing negation of the Old Testament essence, since they will not admit that divine revelation in its progress in world history has ever progressed and torn the thread of identity at any point. Jewish Christians want no development, no negation of the Old, and it is perfectly correct whether they make Judaism Christian or Christianity Jewish. Therefore it is rather indifferent; in every case it always brings it only to a Jewish Christianity, therefore to our Christianity, in short, after the proof, only to Judaism, to illusory Judaism.

[Notes for 352 here]

353 The Jew who knows himself one with the Christians is more a Jew, since he has given up his exclusive privilege; but in his illusory Judaism he has become a Jew in the full sense, since he, even in the illusion that he has given up his privilege, has retained it, and if he is one with those Christians, he is so only in this, that he wants no history, no development, no serious negation of the Old.

[Notes for 353 here]

354 Under these circumstances we shall immediately know what to think when the name of the Jews and that of "truth-fighters" is praised to us as synonymous.

[Notes for 354 here]

355 Because the Jews, in order to remain true to their ancestral faith, sacrificed everything, home and goods, to their "confession" and have wound themselves through centuries of pain and shame up to the present day, they have, says the author of the above-named writing I, 248, made the name of Jews synonymous with that of truth-fighters. "If, however, the name of the Parsees, who even today in India cling to their ancestral faith, is not to receive the same honour, then it would first have to be proved that the Jewish law is also today and for ever and ever and exclusively and nothing but pure, sheer truth."

[Notes for 355 here]

356 As if there were an exclusive truth, as if there were a truth incrusted in statutes which could be bequeathed as a petrefact through all centuries or could preserve itself as an eternally young — what a contradiction! — as a fresh-living relic.

[Notes for 356 here]

357 A truth is true only once, namely when it dawns upon consciousness, and so long as it struggles with the historical spirit until it is completely assimilated by it, i.e., criticised and in its dissolution has become the fruitful ground for the arising of a new form of truth.

[Notes for 357 here]

358 Even the fire-worship of the Parsees was once truth! Even the law of Jehovah!

[Notes for 358 here]

359 But truth in general is not; it is not, namely, as a stone, a mountain, a planet or solar system is, and not even of these things can it be said that they are, in the sense that they maintain themselves continually and eternally as the same; truth is not, it only becomes; it is therefore also only in history and through history, in critique and through critique. Hitherto history has produced no truth which would not have to fall prey to the fire of critique, and the highest truth which it is now — through critique — in the process of generating, man, freedom, self-consciousness, that is a truth which will least of all barricade and close itself off as a petrefact against critique and the further development of history, since it is nothing but development finally liberated.

[Notes for 359 here]

360 Judaism too was once a truth — but how many truths has history since brought onto the carpet! how many truths which first had to be added to the principal sum, i.e., also dissolved, so that the newest truth, the truth of this day, man, freedom, could become possible!

[Notes for 360 here]

361 Truth-fighters are only the heroes who discover a new truth, express it, bring it to recognition, by combating, dissolving and transforming into humus the higher, the earlier, lower-standing truth — which has become untruth only in comparison with the new — and into which the new truth sinks its roots.

[Notes for 361 here]

362 The truth-fighters create and must therefore combat and refute the old.

[Notes for 362 here]

363 But have the Jews fought? Especially fought for a truth which we call mankind and history, after Christianity had taken its place and raised itself above an older truth?

[Notes for 363 here]

364 They have suffered, but not fought. They have suffered a truth, but for a truth which had ceased to be true; they have suffered only for their truth, but not for a universal truth of mankind.

[Notes for 364 here]

365 The author of the writing on "The Jews in Austria" gives us a long list of Jews who have distinguished themselves in arts and sciences. For the private history of the Jews these names have interest; for history in general, for universal world history — (the concept of the world is for the Jew a simply unknown one) — they have none at all.

[Notes for 365 here]

366 None of the Jews whose names the author of that writing enumerates has creatively intervened in the history of mankind. None of them is to be named when it is a question of the discoveries which have unriddled for us the laws of the physical and spiritual universe.

[Notes for 366 here]

367 Universal discoveries and creations those Jews have not made and not accomplished.

[Notes for 367 here]

368 They have not even creatively intervened in the history of their own people. Since the completion of the Talmud, which itself was impossible without the influence of the church on the synagogue — the Jews have had no more history. The Jewish people consisted from the beginning of the Middle Ages up to now of a collection of atoms, which were determined by the same statute and by the same antithesis to history; but it lacked the unity of consciousness which is peculiar only to historical nations and is required for the generation of new interests and views.

[Notes for 368 here]

369 Moses Mendelssohn has influenced a part of his fellow countrymen — but this influence itself was unfruitful and a successless play, since it had no new, human idea as its basis. He has created no new people; if we were to cite the nearest examples of creators in whom and through whom peoples have created and further developed themselves, we would have to tell the history of the century which Voltaire opened and the heroes of the political and scientific revolution closed. And with what did Mendelssohn work? With the stalest remnants of a philosophy which had long been in decline and was to receive through Kant the blow which shook the general consciousness of the time and drove it into a new direction — with the remnants of the Wolfian popular philosophy. With this gift he could not help mankind, and his own people so little that he had to put them off to the time in which Jehovah, as definitely and audibly as millennia ago on Sinai, would tell them that they should be freed from the yoke of their statutes.

[Notes for 369 here]

370 The other "Moses Maimonides" can, with his unclear, confused and servile sophistry, be only an object of curiosity, while the Christian scholastics — and how many of them are stars of the first magnitude! — belong for ever to world history. What clarity in their questions and deductions compared to the murmur of the Jewish dialectician! What a gigantic edifice, yet worked out to the smallest detail with the utmost precision, are their works in themselves, let alone in comparison with the confused sand-heaps into which Maimonides throws together and apart the simply meaningless statutes of tradition!

[Notes for 370 here]

371 The Christian scholastic is an idealist, his work an ideal one in itself; let alone in comparison with the Jewish scholastic and with the counters which form the material and the profit of his spiritless game.

[Notes for 371 here]

372 The Christian struggles and wrestles with an object which in itself is the whole of mankind, man in general. This struggle is worth the trouble and a thousand-year history. This wrestling is in itself already victory; in the moment of indecision it is the triumph of light in comparison with brooding over thousands of thoughtless statutes; it is the school of completed ideality which becomes master of the alien object and makes it human, i.e., makes it what it is in itself.

[Notes for 372 here]

373 The history of the Christian world is the history of the highest struggle for truth, for in it and only in it! — is it a question of the discovery of the last or the first truth — of man and freedom.

[Notes for 373 here]

374 The Jew lacks this ideality and its first possibility, because in his statutes not mankind but only a chimerical nationality, and finally not even this any more, but only a sum of atomistic individuals, is imprisoned.

[Notes for 374 here]

375 From this lack of all ideality it is also explained that the Jew cannot attack Christianity with success, indeed can hardly attack it at all — if one understands by an attack on a religious system more than the clumsiest lie and hasty mockery — let alone recognise it and discover its essence.

[Notes for 375 here]

376 It is an empty and impotent threat when the author of the writing on "The Jews in Austria" takes up again the question already thrown out by others, whether one could doubt (I, 225) "that a Jewish Eisenmenger, who with the same satanic logic and devilish love ran through the literature of Christianity, would not succeed in hanging up, in the picture gallery of literature, alongside the discovered Judaism, a counterpart with the title: Discovered Christianity?"

[Notes for 376 here]

377 One should, however, think that the Jews would have had time enough to make this discovery, if it had been possible for them or allotted to them by history! Why have they not even made the first preparations for this voyage of discovery? Where are even the first preliminary works for a work such as "discovered Christianity" would be to be found among them?

[Notes for 377 here]

378 They cannot make this greatest of all discoveries because they do not possess the freedom of spirit, the dissolving ideality and the theoretical interest which belongs to it.

[Notes for 378 here]

379 They do not need to make this discovery; it is already made. Since de la Serre's Examen de la Religion and Boulanger's Christianisme dévoilé, does that not sound like "discovered Christianity"? Since these bold and already extremely happy attempts at discovery, attempt upon attempt, discovery upon discovery have followed one another, until in our days it has come to the point that we can truly and for ever exclaim: Christianity is "discovered," its essence unveiled, its origin illuminated: le Christianisme est dévoilé!

[Notes for 379 here]

380 No Jew is to be named who would have followed this great train of discoverers and attempts at discovery, or who would even, if it had lost the trail, have shown the right way again and himself made a discovery which led to the last and decisive discovery.

[Notes for 380 here]

381 Even at this moment the enlightened Jew himself must prove that this discovery and its first presupposition are impossible for him. The study of a system in all its parts, especially in its characteristic parts, therefore the study of Christianity in its most significant phenomena: in the writings of the Church Fathers, in the annals of the Crusades, in the chronicles of the Inquisition, in the writings of the theosophists and mystics — this study, which finds the essence of Christianity precisely in the epochs in which it has decisively intervened in history, seems to the enlightened Jew to be possible only with a "devilish love" for the object. The natural scientist, then, also lets himself be misled by a "satanic logic" and "devilish love" for the object of his study, when he determines its essence from the claws or talons and from the teeth with which the animal intervenes in its world!

[Notes for 381 here]

382 Judaism has not even been able to produce a coherent presentation of itself. Its essence has remained unknown to it and remains unknown to it in its limitation. It could only present itself if it conceived itself as the presupposition of Christianity; its essence would only open up to it if it recognised itself as the unfinished Christianity, and its true dissolution is only possible if it is discovered and dissolved in and with Christianity, its completion.

[Notes for 382 here]

383 The Jew as Jew is capable of no theoretical relation to Christianity at all; he can only relate to Christianity practically, religiously, and indeed only with his limited religiosity, which in its constriction can only make merry through slanders, lies and curses.

[Notes for 383 here]

384 Even in the struggle with critique the Jew cannot behave scientifically. Eisenmenger is far from being refuted, and the Jew will never refute him to all eternity, so long as he brings forward against a thorough work — in a theological manner — only individual Talmud passages. Eisenmenger is first refuted when he is finally really acknowledged, i.e., when the petty, theological contradiction of individual Talmud passages against the battle-line of the Jewish testimonies set up by him is explained.

[Notes for 384 here]

385 The Jew, like the Christian as Christian, is incapable of a theoretical interest and scientific behaviour; every attempt to discover their essence they regard as a personal insult, as an attack, as an immodest scrutiny. "Noli me tangere!" is their motto. For every cognition of their essence is an attack on their privilege, an attempt on their happiness and an offence, since their essence is the satisfaction of their personal need, their personal possession, therefore can never become a free, universal essence for itself and separated from the anxiety and necessity of personal self-preservation. They are not free, because they never have their essence freely.

[Notes for 385 here]

386 The author of the often-mentioned writing confuses two things when he says (II, 184) "the Jewish writers would hardly ever have let themselves be misled to such hostile expressions against Christianity as a Christian has done in our time" — Goethe, namely in that well-known poem to Suleika. Jewish polemic against Christianity and critique — be it artistic or scientific critique which those men who have passed through Christian culture have exercised — are not only quantitatively but essentially different. The religious attack of the Jew on Christianity is narrow-minded, hateful, oppressed; the struggle of one privilege with the other, therefore egoistic; its only success, because of its successlessness for the cause of mankind, is only this one, that it creates bad blood on both sides — not to mention that on the part of the Jew it is only the struggle of a lower stage of prejudice against a far higher one.

[Notes for 386 here]

387 If only the Jews stood on the standpoint where the struggle of a Goethe and of critique against Christianity, the struggle of freedom against the barrier, of mankind against distorted humanity, is possible! They would then no longer be Jews, no longer privileged in a particular way; they would discover the essence of Christianity, therefore also of Judaism, and freedom, at least the entry into the realm of freedom which the next history will establish, would be certain for them.

[Notes for 387 here]

388 If they understood Christianity and the Christian state, they would also not want to be emancipated: they would rather work towards their true freedom. Until now they still deceive themselves greatly if they think that the Christian state withholds from them not only essential freedoms, but freedom in general, or that they are the only sufferers and oppressed in the Christian state.

[Notes for 388 here]

389 The author of the writing on "The Jews in Austria" has set forth in a particular section what deprivations of rights the Jews in Austria have to suffer and how the oppression which weighs upon them stands in contradiction with recognised and in Austria valid legal determinations.

[Notes for 389 here]

390 We shall show of all his complaints that not only the Jews should be their object, that rather, if the Jews suffer, all others also suffer in their way, that it is therefore the greatest self-deception if the Jew thinks that as soon as the particular oppression which weighs upon him is removed, he will be free. Everything, rather, is unfree in the absolutist state; the Jew is only unfree in a particular way. Not on the removal of his particular misery, the abolition of his particular unfreedom, has the Jew, if he sees the matter correctly, to propose or to hope, but on the overthrow of a principle.

[Notes for 390 here]

391 The Jew, says the author of that writing which first of all occupies itself with the Jews in Austria, lacks essential civil rights. But who, then, in the absolutist state has essential civil rights? Who? No one! Not only are there Christian pariahs in this state, but even those to whom civil rights seem to be conferred by birth or by particular grace are not exempt from the general misery. Their misery is only a glittering one, therefore all the more miserable.

[Notes for 391 here]

392 The official who in his bureau fills out the prescribed rubrics of his account book, which are not even drawn by himself, cannot be called truly free and does not possess essential civil rights, so long as his whole being is absorbed in the filling out of those rubrics.

[Notes for 392 here]

393 The favoured one, i.e., favoured by birth and by possession, can at most express an opinion on diets: but does he have civil rights if his opinion has no influence at all on the development of the state; if his opinion remains and is to remain only a personal one? For the whole as for himself it can be highly indifferent whether he expresses his opinion within his four walls at home or, if he still has the ridiculous pretension of ascribing to himself and his opinion a greater significance than it possesses, makes a special journey to express his view in a larger space than at home and to have it added to other equally meaningless opinions.

[Notes for 393 here]

394 Of civil rights there can be no question at all where the state is not yet a state and its sole endeavour is directed towards not becoming a state, i.e., a universal affair of all. Even the highest stirrings of life of such a non-state, such as wars, conclusion of treaties, are not guided by an idea which would have its own positive content, but are only called forth by the reaction against real ideas of other states and have the isolation from the historical development of the state-idea as their sole purpose.

[Notes for 394 here]

395 "The Jews are burdened with extraordinary burdens beyond the ordinary duties of citizens."

[Notes for 395 here]

396 But so are we.

[Notes for 396 here]

397 If taxes and imposts are to be our only or principal state duties, and if duties must stand in correct proportion to rights, then we are excessively and beyond all correct proportion obligated, since we have no universal rights at all.

[Notes for 397 here]

398 Or if we call ordinary duties of citizens "that which the lower estates pay in correct proportion to what the upper estates pay," then even so the former are extraordinarily burdened.

[Notes for 398 here]

399 "The Jews are subject to different laws in the different provinces." So are we! Absolute monarchy knows no general territorial law, knows no state, but only at most states or provinces which, as counties, duchies, principalities and margraviates, have their particular rights and all belong to the One in their particular way.

[Notes for 399 here]

400 In Galicia the Jewish cult is subjected to a tax down to its smallest parts, which is collected with great harshness. The Jew must, for example, pay the tax for the Sabbath lights, even if his poverty does not even allow him to buy them.

[Notes for 400 here]

401 We are, however, even worse off. We must contribute taxes for the maintenance of the church, have ourselves baptised and spiritually blessed for marriage, even if we no longer stand in any connection with the church. We are forced to perform religious acts.

[Notes for 401 here]

402 "The Jewish state of grievance stands in collision with common legal principles recognised in Austria."

[Notes for 402 here]

403 Christians, however, have to raise the same grievance, because it is a necessary consequence of the whole constitution.

[Notes for 403 here]

404 The absolutist state must make the sacrifice to the newer time and place at the head of the territorial law or other pacts and treaties general legal principles which treat of the welfare of the whole and of human rights, but in the individual determinations and paragraphs it will restrict these general principles more and more, the further it goes into detail, and paralyse them through clauses, until they are finally completely dissolved. In general, for example, the principle holds that rights must be in agreement with duties; in the execution and in detail it is very easy for the overpowerful privilege to bring this principle into oblivion, or it steps forward without further ado and without shame and declares that for its benefit that principle must be silent. In a code of laws which sets up the equalisation of right and duty as a general norm, it can afterwards be said without hesitation that if a nobleman and a commoner of equal abilities apply for an office, the former is to be given preference. How easily can this law calm and satisfy itself, yes even see a satisfaction in it, if the nobleman is given preference even over the commoner who surpasses him in abilities. The Jew therefore has not alone to complain that on the long road before the principle of the necessary agreement of rights and duties reaches him, it has already become so weakened and lame that it can no longer protect him from particular harassments and from being set aside.

[Notes for 404 here]

405 "In the general code of laws the innocence of religious confession is pronounced." Good! Also to the Christian, to all, freedom of conscience is guaranteed in the modern absolutist state; no one is to suffer a setback because of his views concerning religion. Let one or several now step forward and declare that they renounce all religion, therefore can no longer perform religious acts, and that principle of freedom of conscience has, precisely where it should show that it is in earnest with itself, in the particular — lost all desire to prove itself.

[Notes for 405 here]

406 "Prejudice is expressly designated as invalid in the code of laws." It holds, however, as already demonstrated, and is the highest regulative in the determination of the inner relations of the Christian state.

[Notes for 406 here]

407 The author of the writing on "The Jews in Austria" further appeals to the general promises and assurances which have been made to the Jews repeatedly. He, as in all other cases and like all others who have appeared for the Jews, has done very wrong in not mentioning the fellow sufferers, the Christians. Promises have also been made to us, but the fulfilment has been delayed; declarations have meanwhile been made which, on the contrary, give us to understand that those promises are not to be taken seriously at all. With right we add: we are not yet ripe, not yet true, full men; we are still faint-hearted, cowardly, inwardly slaves; we want to be slaves. How the Jew should express himself will be clear to everyone after our previous exposition. "The Austrian Jews in the provinces which were subjected to France during the revolutionary wars have lost many advantages and rights which they possessed under foreign rule." But is it always only the Jews who have gained and lost in history? Are there not also other peoples who have been struck by history or experienced something? Always and always only the Jews! If it were only the Jews who had had those bitter experiences, then they could wait long until their misfortune were remedied. If they stood alone, they would be forsaken, and their cause is in fact a very unhappy, desperate one, so long as they isolate themselves in all their thoughts and feelings and do not recognise that their cause can only be carried through when and insofar as it is connected with the cause of mankind and history. The absolutist power in all Europe had the view that the rule which had enforced and exercised the power of freedom and humanity during a quarter of a century had been a foreign one, and it acted accordingly. With one stroke of the pen, with one decree, it declared the "foreign" laws null and void, or gradually but unremittingly it wrested and tricked away from its subordinates the most important and freest determinations of the "foreign" code of laws. The Jews are not alone in having been restored, and in this, that they do not stand alone, lies the only possibility of their salvation. We, historical peoples, will save ourselves by striving, through all the labours of critique and science, to furnish the proof that the principles which have transformed the shape of Europe since the end of the last century are by no means foreign to us, that they rather belong to human nature and are grown together with it. We strip off from the foreign — the appearance of foreignness, the appearance which it indeed had for all Europe at first; it therefore had to be enforced by force and, by means of a long series of wars, forced upon the recalcitrant — the appearance which alone can also justify the counter-attempts of the restoration, clarifying them for history.

[Notes for 407 here]

408 What the Jew has to do under these circumstances — alongside us and with us, from his side and in union with our efforts — is no longer a question, if it is earnest with his will to become free, and if he no longer wishes to lose himself in illusions which will keep him from freedom for ever. He must prove that the principles which also benefited him during the upheaval of all European states and gave him air for a moment were not foreign to him and their benefits no accidental gift. But does he in fact have the courage to profess the principle of freedom from prejudice? He must make the universal cause of mankind his own, his own the universal cause. But does he do this if he always fights only for himself as a Jew and does not see that he can only become free if he completely gives up the prejudice that he can stand for himself, the desire to achieve freedom for himself? The opinion that he alone is the oppressed one he must tear out with the last root, and this last root is the notion that the fate which is allotted to him in the Christian state is an inconsistency and a violation of its principles. He must come to the insight that his prejudice, to want to be something particular as a Jew, is only one of the prejudices, only a complement of the prejudices in general which determine the shape of the absolutist state.

[Notes for 408 here]

409 He has hitherto deceived himself about his position, but the self-deception was a universal one. We all have hitherto been unclear about ourselves and our position in the world.

[Notes for 409 here]

410 The time of disillusionment has come, because the religious prejudice which has hitherto deceived us was itself self-deception, interpreted, understood, unriddled and robbed of its sole dominion. We believed that the religious prejudice was a transcendent power outside us, which determines, regulates and governs our conditions, and it is nothing but a particular expression, a formula for the relations which we ourselves have created. It is only the veil which we throw over all our relations, in the belief that we thereby conceal or gloss over and justify them.

[Notes for 410 here]

411 This last illusion will now dissolve. The old is worn out by age, and the prejudices step forth in naked ugliness.

[Notes for 411 here]

412 In the course of the proceedings in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies on the conditions of the Jews in the year 1841, it was remarked, among other things, that "only religious hatred" — an obstacle, therefore, on the overcoming of which the enlightenment of our days could pride itself — still stood in the way of the liberation of the Jews from their oppression in some circles.

[Notes for 412 here]

413 How does it happen, however, that religious hatred is silent when the Jew as a common soldier is obliged to shed his blood for the state, and that it only stirs when the Jew is to become an officer?

[Notes for 413 here]

414 Is it nothing but religious hatred when, for example, the millers' and bakers' guild in Vienna conspire to admit no Jew into their midst? Why does religious hatred forget its first duty, and do nothing against it when, from the Jewish side, the first steam mill near Vienna is erected and competition is transferred from the petty barriers of the guild-incorporation to the field where it can move most freely and bring about grand results?

[Notes for 414 here]

415 Likewise: was it only a momentary weakness of religious hatred, which would like to refuse the Jew entry into the carters' guild for all eternity; did it come only from the fact that religious hatred just had a weak hour, that a Jew undertook the construction of the first great railway in Austria and could defeat in the large the carters who deny his people participation in the small profit?

[Notes for 415 here]

416 In the end, then, is it also religious hatred which makes it difficult or impossible for the commoner — who knows just as well as the nobility how to shed his blood, and whose love of the fatherland can often be called more disinterested, since his devotion is less rewarded and less exposed to the suspicion that it strengthens or even nourishes itself through the enjoyment of particular prerogatives and privileges — in the end, then, does only religious hatred make it difficult or impossible for the commoner to become an officer or a high officer? In the end, is it a particular religious hatred which makes it simply impossible for the commoner to obtain a regiment in the guard corps? Perhaps religious hatred has particular reasons to deny itself when it is a question of providing officers for the artillery?

[Notes for 416 here]

417 Correct! So it is! Religious hatred moves the nobility to close itself off from the common estate. On religious hatred rests the separation of the possessing from the poor who can rely only on their poor intelligence. Herr Bülow-Cummerow had found the correct religious and ecclesiastical expression for this state relation when he called the element of the state which represents intelligence a merely tolerated, therefore tolerated one.

[Notes for 417 here]

418 The time is past when the separation into castes, the separation of the privileged from the non-privileged or of particular prerogatives from each other, therefore also the oppression which the Jews experience, can be explained from purely religious or from religious grounds in general. Even in the Middle Ages, when one still believed in faith and could believe, because it did not lack in brilliant revelations, the cities and their guilds, when they excluded or persecuted the Jews, or let themselves be presented with or themselves presented the privilege that no Jew might penetrate into them, acted not alone in the religious interest, but at the same time for their guild and corporation interests. The religious prejudice was at the same time the prejudice for the guild; the religious privilege only the superterrestrial confirmation of the civil; religious exclusiveness the presupposition, model and ideal of the civil and political.

[Notes for 418 here]

419 For the sake of religion alone men have still done nothing historical, undertaken no army marches, waged no wars. When they thought they acted and suffered for God's sake alone, it is not only we who, according to modern insight into divine things, can say that they rather acted and suffered only because of their conception of what man must be and become; but in all religious developments, undertakings, struggles, tragedies, actions, whether worth speaking of or not, it was always political interests or echoes of them or their first stirrings which determined and guided mankind.

[Notes for 419 here]

420 We would view religious history falsely, i.e., as it itself wants to be viewed, if we thought that in it it was only a question of the cognition of a divine transcendent world. This transcendent world is rather only the world of human interests raised into the beyond, i.e., alienated from itself; the shaping of this world is the fantastic arrangement of human society, and the heretical combating of it is nothing further than the attempt to introduce the understanding of worldly interests into this chimerical world forcibly and in a still perverted manner.

[Notes for 420 here]

421 The true faith of the past was the expression, gained by a detour, namely in the elevation into a transcendent world, for the unfreedom and prejudice which ruled in all real relations; the fire of zeal of faith only the heaven-coloured fire into which the privileges fell against each other.

[Notes for 421 here]

422 It is not religious hatred that stands in the way of the emancipation of the Jews, but the validity of privileges. It is not their religion that makes it impossible for the Jews to become free, but their view that they are particularly privileged, privileged by birth, merely by the fact that they are there.

[Notes for 422 here]

423 Privileges can, however, only hold good so long as the natural prejudice of the spirit is not yet broken; they hold good, therefore, only where religious prejudice rules, and they necessarily support themselves on the ruling religious presupposition.

[Notes for 423 here]

424 If the Jew steps out of the barriers of his religion and recognises the world and human society, and insofar as he recognises them, he will also give up the pride in his privilege, and insofar he will give it up.

[Notes for 424 here]

425 If the general prejudice and unfreedom of the Christian world opens itself to the thoughts and impressions of human society and steps out of the barriers of the church, then the privileges from the first to the last are threatened. The religious prejudice and religious separation must indeed fall and cease, if the civil and political castes and prerogatives are to find their end. The religious prejudice is the basis of the civil and political, but the basis which the latter, even if unconsciously, has given itself. The civil and political prejudice is the kernel which the religious only encloses and protects.

[Notes for 425 here]

426 The method of struggle against civil and political oppression, as history has hitherto conducted it, and as it is still conducted to this day, consisted in attacking and dissolving the religious presupposition of that oppression. When the religious consecration and presupposition of the civil and political prejudice has become wavering, uncertain and overthrown, then the worldly prejudice has also become uncertain of itself, or it rarely goes so far as the shamelessness of expressing itself bluntly in its pure worldliness and confessing that it is nothing but the striving for private advantage; it will rather make the attempt to give itself again the religious and ecclesiastical foundation which formerly promised it an eternal duration.

[Notes for 426 here]

427 This attempt to restore the privileges shows that the religious prejudice, religious separation and religious feeling of dependence is the guarantee for the existing order, as if in fact everything would stand firm if those who are still in possession of power reason and reflect that the old is to be helped up! The violent haste and urgency with which the religious prejudice is favoured, pushed forward and called forth — all these last attempts betray only the secret which had hidden itself behind the naivety of earlier times. The secret is the one indicated, that the religious prejudice is the reflection, set by men themselves, of the powerlessness, unfreedom and prejudice of their civil and political life, rather of their dream.

[Notes for 427 here]

428 The political and religious prejudice are inseparable and one and the same.

[Notes for 428 here]

429 The Jew is least of all in a position to overthrow this proposition. However enlightened he may be, namely enlightened within the prejudice, he will nevertheless confirm this proposition. If he appeals to the excellence of his religion, to the purity and holiness of his moral teaching, he can only count on a hearing and on sympathy if he addresses himself to a world in which prejudice in general still rules. What self-blinding, what conceit of his sole justification, therefore of his prerogative and privilege, belongs, however, to this, if he hopes to achieve any success with those who for their part again cherish another prejudice and likewise think themselves uniquely privileged! He appeals to prejudice and hopes to be able to assert his own! One prejudice must always exclude the other, the one close itself off against the other. Each believes itself justified through itself and for its own sake; community between the two is therefore simply impossible. The Jew believes as a Jew, because of the excellence of his true and highest essence, to have a right to everything in the world; as a Jew, however, he is specifically different from all others who profess another essence and hold themselves for other beings; he excludes them and is excluded by them. The more enlightened he becomes, the more his essence loses in determinateness, the more he therefore insists solely on the fact that he is a Jew at all and is justified as a Jew, the more it betrays itself on his side that his religious privilege is only the pure and abstract notion of privilege in general.

[Notes for 429 here]

430 When in the year 1831, during the estates' proceedings in Hanover, the Jewish question also came up for a moment, Herr Stüve expressed the opinion that the empty and hollow deism of the educated Jews afforded the state even fewer guarantees than the positive religion of the uneducated Jews.

[Notes for 430 here]

431 If, however, one once stands on the standpoint where religion counts as a guarantee for the state; if one further reflects on this guarantee in the manner of comparing religious ideas as to how far they give more or fewer guarantees, then one should also be consistent and think of the question how far the religion opposed to the Mosaic law gives guarantees to the state. This question was all the more important since the newest history, after the thousandfold answers of the past, has given a new answer to it.

[Notes for 431 here]

432 Certainly the religious idea gives guarantees to the state. But to which state? To which kind of state? History has answered, also for Herr Stüve.

[Notes for 432 here]

433 And deism? the "empty, hollow" deism? is it to give no guarantees to the state? to a determinate form of the state?

[Notes for 433 here]

434 Deism is even the for the moment ruling religious system; it will therefore also rule in a determinate form of the present state.

[Notes for 434 here]

435 In deism the religious idea has sunk to that powerlessness that it has become at bottom only the idea of religion, the postulate of religion and the thought of its utility and indispensability. From it we shall therefore have to expect the most reliable self-confessions of the religious state about its essence and its maxims. In it it shows itself whether the religious idea is concerned only with itself, whether its interest is only a religious one, whether the religious privilege and prejudice is only religious exclusiveness and religious zeal.

[Notes for 435 here]

436 In a word, it will show itself whether the religious exclusiveness of the state system is anything other than the theory and the postulate of its imperfection and unfreedom.

[Notes for 436 here]

437 In the proceedings of the Baden Chamber of Deputies of the year 1831 we shall find a sufficient answer.

[Notes for 437 here]

438 Confessions of the German juste-milieu.

[Notes for 438 here]

439 Two turns of phrase, and only these two turns of phrase, are peculiar to the genuine representatives of liberalism in the treatment of the Jewish question; these two turns of phrase they bring forward, one like the other, with the pathos and self-satisfaction of the Gotha Imperial Advertiser of the Germans, and the resolution to which the representatives of the juste-milieu finally arrive through these turns of phrase and in which they unite is an instructive testimony of what counts for them as freedom.

[Notes for 439 here]

440 In the year 1831 the Baden Chamber of Deputies was stormed with petitions from Israelite communities for civil and political equalisation with the Christians. When Rotteck himself presented the petition of the Israelite citizens of Carlsruhe, he took occasion from this to bring forward those two turns of phrase. He declared that he, as on every other occasion, would act according to a double principle: first, according to the principle of searching with the greatest zeal and the greatest fidelity for what would be appropriate to right, humanity and the welfare of the state; but then, secondly, also to take the consideration compatible with strict right of the wishes, sentiments and intentions of his constituents known to him, i.e., of the more intelligent part of them (what an insult to the other part!) and in general of the Baden people." The "but," with which the transition to the second half of this double principle is made, is, however, very dangerous. It presupposes that the principle of humanity and right does not from the outset agree with the wishes, sentiments and intentions of the Baden people. From a discord of this kind we will not immediately make a reproach to a people, if it does not unconditionally resist the history and legislation which wish to remove and abolish it. Rotteck wants to remove the discord which he presupposes; he wants, as far as possible, to reconcile right with the consideration for the sentiments of his constituents; but according to which right is this reconciliation again to take place? According to which principle does he wish to mediate? According to which norm is the "justo-medium" to be struck? How is the discord to be removed? No universal norm, at least no norm grounded in the essence of freedom and humanity, is recognised in advance: the mediator is therefore referred to his arbitrariness, or rather — for that is the whole wisdom of that double principle — he is referred to the sense hidden in that "but also," to the consideration which he is absolutely obliged to give to the wishes and sentiments of his constituents known to him, should they even stand in contradiction with right and humanity. These wishes and sentiments are, however, opposed to emancipation; therefore one must first make a great show theoretically with declamations and assurances which revolve around the beauty and glory of humanity, in order then, in conclusion, in this determinate case, to set humanity aside and side with the people.

[Notes for 440 here]

441 Thus did Herr Mittermayer when the question itself (on 2 June) came up for discussion. In the first half of his long-winded speech, which indulges in protracted assurances, he gives the assembly the "voice of humanity and civilisation" to hear; but in the second part of the speech prudence advises him "to take account of the voice of the people, of the mood of the people. I still recognise the Israelites as an oppressed caste, as sharply separated by their customs; the Jews forbid themselves to regard the Christians as their brothers." According to Herr Mittermayer's view, this is only a prejudice; he should therefore, instead of subjecting the law to the prejudice, rather have thought of a determination of how the prejudice is to be broken by the law.

[Notes for 441 here]

442 Only it is not even straightforwardly to be called a mere prejudice when the people still sees in the Jews a foreign caste. As Jews they are a foreign caste. The task of the legislator would therefore have been to investigate whether the people regards the Jews in a correct way as a caste, and if this is not the case, it is his first duty to raise the people to the standpoint where it can behave humanly towards the Jews.

[Notes for 442 here]

443 The Jews as such are a caste; but for this barrier into which the Jews compress themselves, the Christian people is sensitive only in a itself narrow-minded way, since it has feeling for it only insofar as through friction with it the self-feeling of its own barrier, in which it lives, is excited. It is not humanly sensitive to Jewish narrowness, not truly elevated above Jewish demarcation, since it does not yet possess in the consciousness of its own freedom the free, true critique of it. The task of legislation is therefore no longer to consolidate both barriers against each other, but to give the people that freedom which makes it possible for it to give the Jews the possibility of full freedom and thereby occasion for the proof whether they are in fact capable of freedom or must perish in universal freedom and punish themselves.

[Notes for 443 here]

444 On the standpoint, however, on which liberalism moves, the people does not possess and know this freedom, and its privileged representatives do not consider it a misfortune that it is withheld from it.

[Notes for 444 here]

445 In the track prescribed by the principle, Herr von Itzstein assures us, "proceeding from the standpoint of man and citizen, he knows no distinction between rich and poor, between Jew and Christian." But rightly had Rotteck, who had appeared before him, made it noticeable that in the state the poor man also has no state rights, without having to complain or being allowed to complain about the prerogative which is granted to some preferentially. Thus the government does no injustice if it does not give the Jews all rights.

[Notes for 445 here]

446 Rotteck, namely, after he had also "taken account of the consideration of humanity and justice," i.e., had set it back behind the consideration for the wishes and interests of the intelligent and educated of his constituents, had been so candid as to express openly that the general will in the granting of political rights has a completely free scope (rather, if it is itself still limited, a very limited scope). It assigns the rights to this or that class, it limits them or refuses them, according as it holds them for itself (!) advantageous or useful or disadvantageous for more or less cogent reasons (how candid!). In short, he appeals to the arbitrariness with which a determinate electoral census separates the voters and the eligible from the whole; to the arbitrariness which therefore subjects an enormous, indeed a disproportionate majority of the whole to a small number of privileged — in short, to the arbitrariness of monopoly and privilege. This arbitrariness of prerogative, against which in the Christian state there is no other consolation than a transcendent one; the arbitrariness which penetrates all relations, rules all relations down to the family and subjects woman to the crudeness and barbarism of man; this arbitrariness of prerogative is sovereign and irresponsible when it excludes the Jews from public rights, for the simple reason that it is universal and the Jews do not suffer alone, therefore may not complain particularly when they suffer.

[Notes for 446 here]

447 Constitutional liberalism is the system of the privileged, of limited and interested freedom. Its basis is still prejudice, its essence still religious.

[Notes for 447 here]

448 "The European state," cries Herr Rindeschwender, "is a Christian state; all institutions are more or less founded on Christianity or at least (!) sanctified by it. If you do not preserve the Christian state, all is lost! Or first put something else in the place of Christianity; but it must connect heaven with earth just as firmly as this; a sure equilibrium you must find against the selfish nature of man, but this you can only achieve if you restore the holiness of the state." Amen!

[Notes for 448 here]

449 What the gentlemen understand by the holiness of the state they have openly expressed, and Herr Rindeschwender does not conceal it either: it is a high-sounding word in the literal sense, since it acts as if it sprang with one leap from the earth into a higher region, a hypocritical word only for the exclusiveness of private interests and prerogatives. And this principle of selfishness you call an "equilibrium against the selfish nature of man"? Is egoism to set a dam against egoism? For some time the law can indeed secure its prerogatives against non-privileged egoism. But there is not only egoism in the world, but also a history which will secure the rights of the general interests of humanity and freedom against privileged selfishness.

[Notes for 449 here]

450 Only then will Herr Rindeschwender permit us to put something else in the place of Christianity, the other connecting "heaven with earth" just as firmly as Christianity? We should think, however, that it is time to put something which rather connects men with men.

[Notes for 450 here]

451 We now come to the second turn of phrase of which the deputies availed themselves to reject the demands of the Jews. The critique of this turn of phrase is contained in the saying about the mote and the beam. Herr Paulus already used the turn of phrase in the letter which he addressed to the Chamber in connection with the transmission of his memorandum on Jewish national separation.

[Notes for 451 here]

452 "Even the most encouraging liberalism," he writes, "has its dangers." One must not go too far at once. The Jews must also do something, above all improve themselves. "The yoke of the alien lawgiving, the whole Pharisaic-Talmudic rabbinical system must be unconditionally abolished."

[Notes for 452 here]

453 So? Only the Jews have something to accomplish in this?

[Notes for 453 here]

454 But even the most enlightened rationalism regards it as its holiest duty to torture the understanding and a scripture alienated from our culture, the "holy" scripture, and to torment the understanding so long until it, in order to save its life in this torture, submits to the yoke of a scripture which has become only more alien to it through the rationalistic explanation. Alien it was to it before; still more alien it becomes through the senseless violence of the rationalist who makes it silly.

[Notes for 454 here]

455 When the Christian still ascribed to baptism its magical power and believed in the Lord's Supper really to enjoy the body of the Redeemer, then it still had a meaning when he had his children baptised and sought his true food in the Lord's Supper. When, however, rationalism has taken from baptism its power, from the Lord's Supper its wonderful content, and his view of the former sacraments is the now ruling one, then those usages have lost all and every meaning, and the law which prescribes them subjects the spirit to the yoke of an alien lawgiving.

[Notes for 455 here]

456 The Commission Report, which after the proceedings of 2 June was adopted by the majority, has fully carried through the turn of phrase which we find in Herr Paulus's letter. "The Jews can indeed," it reads, "become compliant, with lawful treatment also grateful and useful subjects, but never earnest members of the nations among which they currently live, still less be inspired for their national honour and constitution." As conditions which they above all have to fulfil if they are to become capable of being real members of the nations and of enthusiasm for national honour and constitution, the Commission Report designates the following.

[Notes for 456 here]

457 They must renounce:

[Notes for 457 here]

458 "They must

[Notes for 458 here]

459 Why, however, should baptism remain if circumcision ceases? Does not baptism also separate us from the first days of our life, and indeed without our consent being awaited, from the state, from the world, from the rest of mankind?

[Notes for 459 here]

460 "It is known," remarks the Commission Report, "that the sign of circumcision takes possession of him who has once fallen to the nation with his body to such a degree that even when he publicly and earnestly converts to another religion, he does not cease to belong to the nation of the Israelites, is never released by them, and can at any moment, without formal reversion, behave and regard himself as their fellow community member."

[Notes for 460 here]

461 Everything as with us! The ceremony through which from earliest childhood we fall to the church with our body takes possession of us to such a degree that even when we have simply renounced faith, we do not cease to belong to the wonderful people of the community, are not released by the church, and must see how many weak ones, through the mere memory of the sign which they bear on their body, are forced to flee back in full fear into the circle to which they belong through their second birth.

[Notes for 461 here]

462 The Jews are finally to renounce

[Notes for 462 here]

463 And we are then to have the exclusive right to separate ourselves from them and from all our fellow men through the enjoyment of our wonderful, heavenly food?

[Notes for 463 here]

464 "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

[Notes for 464 here]

465 "Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

[Notes for 465 here]

466 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

[Notes for 466 here]

467 All negotiations with the Jews, the Commission Report wills, are to be impossible if the stated demands — to which a fourth is added, that they hold their day of rest simultaneously with the Christian one — are not unconditionally recognised beforehand.

[Notes for 467 here]

468 Since, however, no one can jump out of his skin at the moment when another demands it and because he demands it, the Jews could not possibly fulfil the demands which were made of them! Since they could also judge more sensibly about their skin than others who were not in it, they could not even recognise the demands. One does not throw away a healthy skin like a piece of useless cloth; but it had not yet been proved to the Jew that everything about them was sore and sick, and this could hardly be proved to them from a side which itself greatly deceived itself about its supposedly robust health.

[Notes for 468 here]

469 The Baden deputies could not give the Jews the freedom which they themselves did not possess. The right for which they also fight against the Jews is only the right of prerogative, the privilege, as they themselves again experience when other privileges fight against them in the same way as they have fought against the Jews.

[Notes for 469 here]

470 We have here to do not with relations where the individual as such, or perhaps alone as an individual, is responsible for his speech and deed and for its success. The sphere of life in which the individuals move, and the principle which they serve and obey, are principally responsible and receive from history their punishment and their reward. We can therefore, without exciting in a false way and without fearing the slightest misunderstanding, express that the punishment for that exclusiveness of constitutional prerogative and privilege lies in the successlessness with which the deputies combat another privilege. If they had the courage to give up their privilege and surrender themselves to the thought of human right, they would, if not overthrow every other privilege on the spot, yet completely put it to shame in advance, before the alone-almighty and victorious history puts an end to it.

[Notes for 470 here]

471 The religious state cannot and dares not give the Jews freedom. Its more or less brutal physics fights alone for the prerogatives, and if it grants the Jews rights, they are also only prerogatives and privileges.

[Notes for 471 here]

472 It remains for us to depict the sophistry of the Jews, which makes it impossible for them sincerely to receive freedom, even if it were given to them.

[Notes for 472 here]

473 The proceedings of the Grand Sanhedrin under Napoleon gave us the opportunity to become acquainted with this sophistry.

[Notes for 473 here]

474 The decree of the National Assembly of 27 February 1791, which granted the Jews all civil rights if they would take the constitutional oath, had no great influence on the development of their condition. They remained, as before, outside the nation and its great interests; the history of the revolution passed by them without influence; none of them intervened in it in any way and linked his name with its history; the only thing the revolution meant for them was only this one, that it gave them an unpunished opportunity for usury.

[Notes for 474 here]

475 The complaints about usury finally became so threatening — especially in the Rhine departments — that Napoleon believed he had to apply a decisive means. He summoned an assembly of Jewish deputies to Paris and had several questions put to them by his government officials as to whether, according to their law, it was permitted to them to regard the laws of the people in whose midst they lived also as their own, the members of the people as their brothers, and to arrange their way of life accordingly. After the deputies had answered the question in the affirmative, Napoleon in the year 1807 summoned a Grand Sanhedrin, so that through its resolutions the decisions of the Jewish deputies might receive the force of legal resolutions.

[Notes for 475 here]

476 The deputies and the Sanhedrin conceived their task as an apologetic one. They could not and were not allowed — they were no critics and no pure theorists — to say: Judaism views the world and its relations thus and so; the sincerity of the critic was not possible for them, since they had a determinate practical purpose and were of the opinion that this purpose, admission into the state union, was compatible with their religious principles. As apologists and apologetic theologians — again, they were neither critics nor pure politicians — they therefore had to endeavour to represent their religious principles and the recognition of the political laws of France not only as compatible with each other, but also to secure for the former the glory that they were by their original nature not opposed to the latter.

[Notes for 476 here]

477 A desperate undertaking!

[Notes for 477 here]

478 In his speech at the close of the sessions, the Nassi — (the head) — of the Sanhedrin said: "You have recognised religious and political ordinances, but you have also declared that to overstep the boundary of the former is nothing but confusion, blasphemy, profanation of the holy."

[Notes for 478 here]

479 If this proposition were set up independently for itself and without historical collateral reference as a constitutive determination, one could perhaps let it pass as well-meant, although even in this way it is false, since it lies in the essence of the religious principle to overstep its so-called or supposed boundary and to secure sole dominion. If, however, the proposition — as is here the case — is at the same time to count as an authentic interpretation of the Old Testament law, then it is doubly false, and the theological way out which it is to open is closed again in the first moment.

[Notes for 479 here]

480 The declaration of the Sanhedrin is nothing more and nothing less than an accusation of the law of Jehovah, that it has overstepped the boundaries which every religious ordinance must observe. The own law of Jehovah, the law written by the fingers of God, has therefore made itself guilty of blasphemy; the law which owes its origin directly to the Holy One, of profanation of the holy. Everything in Judaism is divine, nothing human; everything is religion, and politics, if it is to be nothing but religion, may not be politics, just as little as the cleansing of cooking pots, if it is to count as a religious concern, may be regarded as a household matter.

[Notes for 480 here]

481 "You have recognised," continues the Nassi, "that the rank of a sovereign includes the right to dispose of certain political institutions; you have acknowledged the authority of the prince and commanded obedience."

[Notes for 481 here]

482 According to the law, however, there is only one sovereign — Jehovah — and if it tolerates a worldly prince out of consideration for the weakness of its subjects, it is far from conceding to him sovereignty and the authority of sovereign legislation.

[Notes for 482 here]

483 "You have recognised the full validity of certain civil constitutions (civil acts); have at the same time confirmed their non-connection with matters of religion."

[Notes for 483 here]

484 In itself quite good and praiseworthy! But bad enough if at the same time the unity with a law to which all civil affairs and concerns are religious and according to whose principle there are no purely civil affairs is to be preserved.

[Notes for 484 here]

485 In the declaration which the deputies prefixed to the answers to the questions put to them, they assure that "their religion commands them to regard the law of the territorial lord in civil and political affairs as the highest law." Their religion itself? Their religion which is nothing outside the law, which is nothing but the law, which therefore also exists only in and with the law and still exists when the law exists as law, as the sole highest law?

[Notes for 485 here]

486 The deputies and the Sanhedrin appeal — this is a turn of phrase which has been used countless times by the Jews — to the letter which Jeremiah sent to the captives in Babylon. If, however, the prophet writes: "Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace," then firstly the motive is a purely egoistic one; the command is only the instruction for an interim; and finally, despite all prayers for the city in which the servants of Jehovah dwell until redemption, the certainty remains that Babylon is to be destroyed.

[Notes for 486 here]

487 The deputies remark that this exhortation of the prophet found so much "acceptance" that only a few, and only "people from the needy class," made use of Cyrus's permission to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple.

[Notes for 487 here]

488 But these few are also praised for it; the rich who remained behind are blamed for their lack of legal sense. The few who went up to Jerusalem were "stirred up by the spirit of God."

[Notes for 488 here]

489 The Jew who distinguishes between civil and religious ordinances and yet thinks himself still a Jew is only a Jew in an illusory way.

[Notes for 489 here]

490 It will, however, immediately be discovered how illusory Judaism becomes true Judaism and the Jew makes himself immortal in his illusion.

[Notes for 490 here]

491 "You have recognised," says the Nassi of the Sanhedrin in his speech at the close of the sessions, "that man in social union has different kinds of duties to fulfil: duties towards the Creator, duties towards his creatures, submission, obedience and reverence towards the princes."

[Notes for 491 here]

492 The Jew, however, knows no social unions,

[Notes for 492 here]

493 as already remarked, the concept of the world and of human society does not exist for him; Judaism does not admit that distinction of duties; it knows — and rightly, so long as man counts for nothing to it! — only duties towards God.

[Notes for 493 here]

494 The Nassi will immediately say the same; he says it even in the same breath in which he speaks of that distinction of duties.

[Notes for 494 here]

495 "You have recognised the nothingness of the creature before the Creator."

[Notes for 495 here]

496 Thus man is nothing! Thus there are no duties towards man, at least not towards man as such and for man's sake! Thus there are duties towards God, before whom the creature is nothing; towards the latter there are only duties for God's sake, by the detour which goes through consideration for God, and on this detour the experience is made that man is properly nothing and constitutes no obligation for himself.

[Notes for 496 here]

497 "Penetrated by a holy respect for His works — wherein this respect consists has just been expressed — you have guarded yourselves against admitting any unworthy, any God-profaning conception which contains the slightest violation of His commands."

[Notes for 497 here]

498 This lie — for the Sanhedrin has indeed set aside respect for the "Creator" when it declares that a part of the law no longer obliges and must recede before human ordinances — this secret, if the words are to have any sense and not be spoken into the blue — this concealed dig at Christianity, whose veneration of even one man and against the modern view of human society, finds its just punishment still in the same speech of the Nassi.

[Notes for 498 here]

499 "And Thou, Napoleon," it says at the close, "Thou comforter of the human race, father of all peoples, Israel builds Thee a temple in its heart!"

[Notes for 499 here]

500 Fine observance of the principle that the creature is nothing before the Creator!

[Notes for 500 here]

501 It is the same whether the temple which Israel builds to Napoleon, the father of all peoples, is erected in stones or not in sensuous material. This temple is in any case the testimony of the apostasy from the One God and from the true — according to Jewish view — the only true father of all peoples.

[Notes for 501 here]

502 From this inconsistency, however, the religious and Jewish consciousness saves itself and appears all the greater and stronger, just as virtue which has raised itself from its fall appears more valuable, and a sinner who repents is more pleasing before God than a hundred righteous who need no repentance.

[Notes for 502 here]

503 Thus the Grand Sanhedrin declares that marriage between Jews and Christians, which is concluded according to the laws of the Civil Code, is civilly binding and valid, but is not capable of being clothed with the ecclesiastical forms. Evidently in this distinction lies the presupposition that the marriage which has only civil validity lacks that consecration which first makes it a true marriage. Such a marriage is, as the Jewish deputies declared, without force according to the laws of the church.

[Notes for 503 here]

504 In this view of marriage the Grand Sanhedrin does not stand alone. Also in the following point it does not stand alone, since also in another ecclesiastical system the most important acts are performed in a language which distinguishes them from ordinary life and lets them appear in an alien light.

[Notes for 504 here]

505 The most important speeches in the Sanhedrin are held in the Hebrew language and then read in a French translation. The manner in which these men wish to enter the ranks of French citizens is thereby aptly characterised. The Hebrew is the original, the primary, the proper, the true, the kernel; the French the translation, a copy, the improper, the appearance, the shell of the kernel.

[Notes for 505 here]

506 The purely Jewish, however, shows itself in its completion when the Sanhedrin cannot cease to speak of the "shame" with which one has hitherto wished to cover Israel, and to cast a hateful light on the "popular prejudice" which "represented the Jewish dogmas as unsocial." They, the Jews, stand with their eternal treasure of truth alone in a world which could only slander them, judge them falsely, but could not prevent their final victory.

[Notes for 506 here]

507 They, the Jewry, are "the faithful flock of God." God has always protected them and has shown his protection especially in this, that he has let them live to see the present moment. Now it is a question of "the future happiness of Israel" — thus always Israel! Always only Israel! Israel remains something particular — thus it is not a question of human interests in the proceedings of the Sanhedrin, not of France and the French, but always, always only of Israel!

[Notes for 507 here]

508 "Our assembly," says the Nassi of the Sanhedrin in his speech at the close of the sessions, "is a living image of the venerable tribunal whose origin is lost in the night of times — (what a senseless phrase!) — clothed with the same rights, animated by the same spirit, the same zeal, the same faith."

[Notes for 508 here]

509 A very dangerous praise,

[Notes for 509 here]

510 The religious self-admiration of the Sanhedrin, the manner in which it sees God in its glory and lets the spectacle of its glory be admired by deputations of foreign Jews, the self-contemplation of the "assembly surrounded by glory, reverence and solemnity" in contrast to the "shame" which was formerly done to Israel, is in its constant repetition tiring and finally disgusting.

[Notes for 510 here]

511 The Constituante and the Convention would not, as they did, have created new concepts, new laws, new beings and men, if they had always only admired themselves and "seen" the hand or finger of God in their glory with holy shudder in their hearts.

[Notes for 511 here]

512 In the manner in which the Sanhedrin has attempted it, the servants of the Mosaic law cannot be helped to freedom. The distinction between religious and political statutes in the revealed law, the declaration that only the former are absolutely binding, but the latter lose their force in changed social conditions, is in itself an attack on the Old Testament law and a concession that it contains ideas and statutes which contradict our idea of human society. This concession is, however, in fact withdrawn again by the assertion that all reproaches which have hitherto been made against the law rest on prejudices and are a shame done to the holiest. The sophistry and Jesuitism of a clumsy exegesis now brings it out that the law, for example, never thought of distinguishing and separating the Israelite and the stranger as the "adversaries" of Judaism have hitherto asserted.

[Notes for 512 here]

513 It comes to the same lie with the distinction of religious and political statutes in the law. In this distinction lies the concession that the servant of a law such as the Mosaic cannot live in the real world and cannot take part in its interests. If, however, the Jew would only express this concession openly, definitely and clearly and declare: since I want to remain a Jew after all — I will retain from the law only so much as seems to me its purely religious element; all else, which I recognise as anti-social, I will separate from it and sacrifice! Instead, he deludes himself and wants to delude others that with this distinction between religious and political statutes he remains in harmony and unity with the law, since it itself recognises and sets up this distinction. Instead of breaking with a part of the law, he remains the servant of the whole, and as such he must give up that distinction again and, through his religious consciousness, alienate himself from the real world.

[Notes for 513 here]

514 The lie cannot help Judaism up again and cannot reconcile the Jew with the world.

[Notes for 514 here]

515 But neither can coercion free him from his chimerical tyrant, the law, and give him back to the world, especially when it proceeds from slaves who obey the same tyrant.

[Notes for 515 here]

516 How, then, is help to be given?

[Notes for 516 here]

517 We must first become free ourselves before we can think of inviting others to freedom. We must first cast the beam out of our own eye before we have a right to draw the brother's attention to the mote in his eye. Only a free world can free the slaves of prejudice.

[Notes for 517 here]

518 The lie of Jewish sophistry is a sure sign that Judaism too is approaching its dissolution.

[Notes for 518 here]

519 It is, however, also a lying condition when in theory the political rights are withheld from the Jew, while in practice he possesses an enormous power and exercises his political influence, if it is curtailed in detail, en gros. The Jew who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines through his money-power the fate of the whole empire. The Jew who in the smallest German state can be without rights, decides over the fate of Europe. While the corporations and guilds close themselves to the Jew or are not yet inclined towards him, the boldness of industry mocks the obstinacy of the medieval institutions. The barriers of the old have long been overstepped by the new movement, and the existence they still have can only be called a theoretical one. The power of the old is only a sophistical theory, opposed by the theory of sincerity and the enormous superiority of a practice whose significance already reveals itself in daily life.

[Notes for 519 here]

520 Judaism has followed Christianity on its march through the world, in order always to remind it of its origin and its true nature. It incorporated the doubt about the heavenly origin of the solely justified Christianity, and not even the small community of those from whose midst it had proceeded could it overcome. Judaism was the touchstone on which Christian culture most purely proved that its essence was that of privilege.

[Notes for 520 here]

521 Both could for two millennia mock, deride, torment each other and make life sour for each other, but not overcome each other.

[Notes for 521 here]

522 The crude religious critique which Judaism exercised — with it Judaism itself — has finally been made superfluous by the free human critique, which has decided the cause of Christianity and thereby also demonstrated Judaism as a medieval luxury, as a mere appendage to the history of Christianity and as unjustified, in that it could only proceed from the midst of Christian culture.

[Notes for 522 here]

523 Theory has now done its part when it has recognised and dissolved the hitherto existing antithesis of Judaism and Christianity, and can with calm confidence await history, which pronounces judgment on antitheses that have become unworthy.

[Notes for 523 here]

524 Theory has now done its part when it has recognised and dissolved the hitherto existing antithesis of Judaism and Christianity, and can with calm confidence await history, which pronounces judgment on antitheses that have become unworthy.

[Notes for 524 here]

525 Theory has now done its part when it has recognised and dissolved the hitherto existing antithesis of Judaism and Christianity, and can with calm confidence await history, which pronounces judgment on antitheses that have become unworthy.

[Notes for 525 here]

526 Theory has now done its part when it has recognised and dissolved the hitherto existing antithesis of Judaism and Christianity, and can with calm confidence await history, which pronounces judgment on antitheses that have become unworthy.

[Notes for 526 here]

527 The Jewish Question.

[Notes for 527 here]

528 The Innocence of the Jews.

[Notes for 528 here]

529 The Jewish Question.

[Notes for 529 here]

530

[Notes for 530 here]

531 The legal life of the Jew.

[Notes for 531 here]

532 The crude religious critique which Judaism exercised, and with it Judaism itself, has finally been made superfluous by the free human critique, which has decided the cause of Christianity

[Notes for 532 here]

533 The funda-

[Notes for 533 here]

534 The crude religious critique which Judaism exercised, and with it Judaism itself, has finally been made superfluous by the free human critique, which has decided the cause of Christianity

[Notes for 534 here]

535 The inconsistency and rigidity of the Jewish national consciousness. 31

[Notes for 535 here]

536 The crude religious critique which Judaism exercised, and with it Judaism itself, has finally been made superfluous by the free human critique, which has decided the cause of Christianity

[Notes for 536 here]

537 In the present discussions on the Jewish question the great words "freedom, human rights, emancipation" have often been heard and received with much applause; the cause itself, however, they have not advanced very far, and it will perhaps be of use to employ them less often for once and instead to think more seriously about the object with which we are concerned.

[Notes for 537 here]

538 irae «---'

[Notes for 538 here]

539 The Jewish Question.

[Notes for 539 here]

540 The Jews have never been able to attain to a unity, to a state whole, to inner order.

[Notes for 540 here]

541 Christianity abolished the barriers of peoples and founded the universal community, but it also completed Judaism in the respect that it made particularism, exclusiveness, perfect and universal. Judaism excluded only the other peoples besides the one people; the Christian community, on the contrary, excludes every national being, all nationality, and directs its zeal against every national being which would believe in itself and, from its faith in itself and in the confidence of its justification, give itself its laws. It excludes in general everyone who relies on himself, on his rights which he possesses as a man, therefore on the rights of mankind. It does not want the real man, but the man who is driven out of his true humanity, the reborn, the wonderful man.

[Notes for 541 here]

542 The Jewish Question.

[Notes for 542 here]

543 The Jewish Question.

[Notes for 543 here]

544

[Notes for 544 here]

545 The Fundamental Illusion. — Confessions of the German juste-milieu.

[Notes for 545 here]

546 The crude religious critique which Judaism exercised, and with it Judaism itself, has finally been made superfluous by the free human critique, which has decided the cause of Christianity

[Notes for 546 here]

547 The Jewish Question.

[Notes for 547 here]

548

[Notes for 548 here]

549 How, then, is help to be given?

[Notes for 549 here]

550 By the manner in which we have grasped the matter — we have, however, grasped it only as the whole previous history has done and, by the nature of the matter, had to do — the affair of the Jews seems to have become an almost desperate one.

[Notes for 550 here]

551 leader concerns."

[Notes for 551 here]

552 In recent times the Jews have striven in many ways to obtain their emancipation, but in doing so they have always kept only one side of the question in view: civil equalisation. They have not considered that civil society itself is not yet emancipated, and that they, the Jews, can first be truly free when society is freed from the fetters of Christianity.

[Notes for 552 here]

553 In the present discussions on the Jewish question the great words "freedom, human rights, emancipation" have often been heard and received with much applause; the cause itself, however, they have not advanced very far, and it will perhaps be of use to employ them less often for once and instead to think more seriously about the object with which we are concerned.

[Notes for 553 here]

554 The Fundamental Illusion. — Confessions of the German juste-milieu. The Grand Sanhedrin in Paris. — Conclusion.

[Notes for 554 here]

555 The defenders of Jewish emancipation have not sought out and actually presented this connection. In a time in which critique has dared to attack everything that has hitherto ruled the world, they have simply let the Jews and Judaism

[Notes for 555 here]

556 Confessions of the German juste-milieu.

[Notes for 556 here]

557 In the present discussions on the Jewish question the great words "freedom, human rights, emancipation" have often been heard and received with much applause; the

[Notes for 557 here]

558 The Jewish Question.

[Notes for 558 here]

559

[Notes for 559 here]

560 The Jews have shown themselves in history as a people which, even when it suffers under the pressure of circumstances, has always preserved its peculiar strength and tenacity.

[Notes for 560 here]

561 In recent times the Jews have occupied themselves much with the question whether they should let themselves be emancipated or not, and the Christians have occupied themselves much with the question whether they should emancipate the Jews or not. Both parties, however, have hitherto not been able to agree on what emancipation actually is.

[Notes for 561 here]

562 The crude religious critique which Judaism exercised, and with it Judaism itself, has finally been made superfluous by the free human critique, which has decided the cause of Christianity

[Notes for 562 here]

563 The crude religious critique which Judaism exercised, and with it Judaism itself, has finally been made superfluous by the free human critique, which has decided the cause of Christianity and thereby also demonstrated Judaism as a medieval luxury, as a mere appendage to the history of Christianity and as unjustified, in that it could only proceed from the midst of Christian culture.

[Notes for 563 here]

564 "Freedom, rights of mankind, emancipation and atonement for a thousand-year-old injustice" are such great rights and duties that the mere appeal to them can certainly be sure of finding an echo in every honourable man — indeed, the mere words are often sufficient to make the cause for whose defence they are employed popular.

[Notes for 564 here]

VII. Dissolution of the Last Illusions

English

Illusory Judaism

The Jews as “Fighters for Truth.”

Judaism and Christianity Revealed

The Jew in the Absolutist State

The Fundamental Delusion

Confessions of the German Juste-Milieu

The Great Sanhedrin in Paris

Conclusion