III. The Position of Christianity Toward Judaism

214 Judaism had set itself the goal that the Messiah should come, the sacrificial rite cease, and the law be ennobled into the inner law of morality and personal conviction. But it had not the courage to reach this goal.

215 The Christian community — we presuppose for this proposition the correctness of the proofs of the newer critique — arose with the declaration that Judaism had completed its course and reached its limit. It is Judaism which says to itself: Punctum! the goal is reached. I am what I should become, I have what I should possess. The community, the Judaism which drew this mighty stroke, is therefore cast out and has separated itself from the Judaism which wished to remain what it had always been, which therefore did not wish to reach its goal and its end.

216 If, however, Christianity is the completed Judaism, then it is not enough that it declares the goal is reached, the Messiah has come, the law is fulfilled; it must also create the counterpart for that endless development in which Judaism sees its essence and its destiny. It must therefore at the same time declare that the goal is not reached, that the true arrival of the Messiah, which has now become his second arrival, his return, is still to be expected. The Messiah has indeed been present, but his true revelation, that revelation in which he will reveal himself in his true glory and enter upon world dominion, is still to come. The community, therefore, has not yet become what it should be, it does not yet have what it should possess — it must, like Judaism, expect everything from the future.

217 Judaism is the unbelief which is directed against all peoples and national relations; it is therefore inconsistent if it is still the faith in this one people and makes the attempt to support itself on national relations.

218 Christianity abolishes this inconsistency, this false appearance of national existence. It drives man out of his house, his homeland, his worldly relations and connections, also out of his connection with the people, in order to give him back everything he has lost for the sake of the Gospel in a wonderful form: a wonderful homeland, a wonderful house, a wonderful father, a wonderful mother, wonderful children, wonderful siblings, a wonderful wife.

219 Christianity entered when the peoples had lost faith in themselves and despaired of their political life. It is the religious expression of this unbelief which the peoples had directed against themselves, and the dissolution of political and civil relations into their wonderful counterpart.

220 The Jewish people was the people which was properly no people, the people of the chimera, and only still inconsistent in that it wanted to exist as a real people. Christianity abolishes this inconsistency, this false appearance of national existence, and creates the wonderful, the holy people, the people of the "royal priesthood."

221 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.

222 According to the Jewish law, man cannot escape the inevitable that he defiles himself in various ways. Nature, in which he lives, lies in wait for him, is an enemy and draws defilements upon him, from which he must free himself again through holy washings.

223 Christianity makes earnest with the inevitability of defilement and raises the impure nature in which man lives to the universal, to the nature of man in general. Man is by nature impure; he therefore also needs a washing which removes not individual stains, but impurity in general. For this baptism is instituted.

224 Judaism distinguishes between particular pure and particular impure foods and overlooks the fact that all have one and the same origin. Christianity therefore permits all foods as nature supplies them, but thereby only makes it possible for itself to complete the distinction between pure and impure food: to the daily, natural food it opposes the one, the true, the proper, the truly nourishing, the holy and wonderful food which is administered in the Lord's Supper.

225 Its purity and dietary laws separate it from the other peoples; the Lord's Supper separates the Christian from all other men, wonderfully purified, and all others live in the impurity which, according to his faith, clings to human nature. Man as such is impure.

226 The Jewish people could produce no real state and law and was only a collection of atoms. This isolation is grounded in the essence of Judaism, therefore had to be completed in Christianity and became the duty and highest destiny of the believer. The believer must make himself into a private affair, into his highest concern. For nothing should he care but for himself, his soul and its salvation; this he must esteem so highly that in case of need he is obliged to sacrifice to it what otherwise holds good among men and is esteemed as the highest.

227 The Jew must in constant hypochondria watch that he is not defiled by some accident, and brood over whether he has not perhaps really defiled himself. The Christian lives in a nature which is in general impure — in human nature, which is corrupted by original sin; he therefore has still more cause to brood and to be hypochondriacal. His sole care and question may alone be whether he is pure or not, chosen or rejected. Further he has nothing to ask, for nothing further to care.

228 For the sake of this hypochondriacal isolation, the bare and holy people of the community of the elect is less a real people than the Jewish people. It is not itself a people, not through itself a people, and through, wholly and entirely a people; in itself it is nothing. It is real only in its High Priest, in the head which thinks for it and decides and resolves in all affairs — in the Messiah.

229 If the people as such is nothing and everything happens only in the High Priest and through him, then the universal, moral determinations which have formed themselves in this wonderful people have their validity not because in them the people has given its national voice and sees its will, also not because they are true in themselves and must hold good for their own sake, but they hold good solely because they are prescribed and revealed by the One who alone thinks and decides for the whole. They thus cease to be moral, and rather form the peak to which the positive nature of Judaism has only been able to soar.

230 In Judaism art and science were impossible: in its consequence even more so, since in it everything is completed and driven to the extreme which in Judaism itself made free and sincere occupation with the world and its universal laws impossible. Art and science are always possible only when care for personal need no longer exclusively occupies man. In the community, however, man should never come to the thought that he could rid himself of care for his needs; he should be thoroughly and absolutely the needy one, in himself empty and null, therefore never become free from care for himself: art and science, which would raise him at one stroke above his nullity and put an end to his egoistic and hypochondriacal care for himself, are therefore impossible or strictly forbidden.

231 In short, if the new law is the completed Judaism and the fulfilment of the old law, then it is also the completion of the antithesis in which the same stood to the world and its real relations.

232 Further: if the old law was the contradiction with itself and its consistency consisted in its taking back and denying its consequences, therefore reducing them to inconsistencies, then this contradiction will reach its peak in the new law. The consequences to which its universality and universality would have to lead, it will abolish, and must abolish all the more, since universality is fundamentally only the completed exclusiveness.

233 The correct execution of the old law is casuistry.

234 We shall secure our impartiality in everyone's eyes if we let a man speak for us whom one will have to allow the credit of having correctly explained the law.

235 The proselyte Fränkel says in his writing: "The Impossibility of the Emancipation of the Jews in the Christian State" (1842): "Christianity in no way contradicts the worldly emancipation of the Jew as a man; on the contrary, Christianity preaches and teaches love of the neighbour, and human pettinesses — whether a Jew as an official, as a teacher, as a merchant or as a beggar should earn and eat his bread — lie truly deep beneath its sublimity."

236 First, however, it very much depends on what this sublimity is, whether it is the sublimity which proves itself by throwing something away, or that which, e.g., man proves when he remains free and conscious of his dignity in those various forms of his existence, or recognises the man whom he encounters in these different forms as a man. The latter kind of sublimity would have to count as the true one, since it, as Herr Fränkel remarks, is not opposed to the Jew and in general the love of the neighbour.

237 But does it also carry out its teachings? Does it act according to what it preaches? Does it really recognise the man in the accidental distinctions in which it finds him? If it distinguishes man from the accidental determinateness in which he lives, does it really hold him as such higher than his accidental way of being? Or does it make man pay for his accidental determinateness? Does it withdraw its love for man because of the distinctions in which he lives? Or does it forget man over the Jew, Turk, heathen?

238 Herr Fränkel gives us the correct answer: "Christianity does not resist the worldly emancipation of the Jew as a man, but it combats the emancipation of man when he, as a Jew, wishes to assert the truth of his religion outside Christ"; i.e., it distinguishes man and Jew, the abstract and the concrete, chimera and reality; in the abstract, the unreal, the chimerical world of thought it is love; in the concrete, reality, where it should prove that it is in earnest with love, it withdraws it. Man pays for the Jew. Or rather, man is not yet really there, not yet recognised. Only the Jew is, and cannot claim, cannot receive what would be granted to man if he were really present. But he is not yet there. The Jew does not yet count as a man, nor as Jew and man, but simply only as a Jew, i.e., as a different being from the Christian, as a being with whom the Christian as such may have no community.

239 Why, however, must love deny itself and man recede behind the Jew? "Because according to the teaching of Christ," answers Herr Fränkel, "there is no salvation for man outside Christ." Because the Christian possesses this salvation, he must regard all others who do not possess it as alien beings. The love which he as a Christian has promised to others he must as a Christian at the same time withdraw. He must: for, remarks Herr Fränkel, "the egoism of the world must and will finally succumb to the Christian striving for unity — (i.e., to the holy and solely justified egoism)."

240 "Now, however," continues Herr Fränkel, "the liberal ideas of the time (to which the idea of emancipation also belongs) are identical with the egoism of the world and have a common ground outside Christ, whereas Christianity preaches a love which is rooted only in Christ and draws its wonderful nourishment from this eternal source of right, truth and equality." This wonderfully nourished, therefore itself wonderful love is not grounded in the nature of human life-relations, does not draw its charm and nourishment from the content of these relations and from the entanglements to which they give occasion; it does not draw the drive for equality from the living sympathy with everything human — (homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto) — but outside real humanity it draws its nourishment; it is a superhuman, no human love; it is supernatural, and the equality after which it strives is a wonderful equality which can only take offence at the distinctions in this world, but cannot really abolish them, i.e., cannot recognise the man who lives in these distinctions.

241 The Jews regard themselves as a particular people; "Christianity, however," remarks Herr Fränkel very correctly, "recognises no other nationality than that which is rooted in Christ Jesus." Real nationalities are otherwise accustomed to be rooted in the natural endowments of mankind and to develop in history. If peoples exclude and fight each other, they do so because their interests have come into collision; they make peace when they mutually recognise their interests; they unite for common undertakings when the higher idea unites them which precisely requires this union of natural endowments in order to bring itself to execution; in the real state and in the history of states, the Jew as such must always remain a foreign element, not because he has a particular nationality, but because his nationality is a chimerical, not a real one, therefore also not capable of fraternising or fusing with real nationalities. From the Christian standpoint the matter is regarded quite differently: there all real nationalities count as null and void, as mere chimeras, and the Jewish only as a particular chimera which counts just as little as every other nationality, since it, like all the rest, has a different root from the only nationality which Christianity knows and which is rooted solely in Christ Jesus. "Christianity wants no real nationalities, it also does not want this determinate chimera of nationality of which the Jews boast: it wants only one, only one wonderful nationality, namely that in which every real and every other chimerical one has perished."

242 "The Jews appeal to their morality, to the advances of culture and civilisation, but," Herr Fränkel gives them to consider, "Christianity values Christian love higher than all knowledge"; it can therefore also make the matter very easy for itself and need not investigate whether the morality of which the Jews boast is really morality, namely that which makes capable of state life: it need rather only from the outset bring love into collision with culture in order immediately to give it the victory.

243 "The Jews pretend to believe in God"; one has often expressed the opinion that faith in one and the same God must unite Jews and Christians, "but," remarks Herr Fränkel very correctly, "Christianity declares every spirit which does not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh to be the spirit of the Antichrist." The God of the Christians is another God than the God of the Jews. The Jews deny the God of Christians, and these may have no community with those who deny their highest being.

244 "The Jews," continues Herr Fränkel, "are charitable and grateful towards those of other faiths, but Christ says, he who is not with me is against me"; — i.e., Christian love is and remains exclusive, incorruptible, immovable, inexorable.

245 It therefore helps the Jews nothing, nothing at all, that they "approach the Christians in customs and usages, agree with the Christians in political views, in worldly literature, in art and science, stand in commercial reciprocity with them, yes even in common military service" — all this helps them nothing, for all these qualities, endeavours and attributes, "remarks Herr Fränkel, are merely of this world, and even if the world pays attention to them and indeed must pay attention to them, the Apostle Paul tells us how we are to regard and consider all this, when he warns very earnestly in Romans 12:2 against being conformed to this world."

246 The only correct relation in which Jews and Christians can stand to each other is therefore that of mutual exclusion. The Jews have previously behaved exclusively: what they did to the peoples, the Christians give back to them in full measure. In the conduct of the Christians they are struck by their own exclusiveness, which the Christians have inherited from them and only further perfected.

247 The Christian state can place Jews and Christians in no other relation than that which is commanded by their religious essence and confession.