r hand, he feels he is logical in interpreting the
political abolition of religion to mean the abolition of religion
altogether. The State, which presupposes religion, is as yet no true,
no real State. "At any rate the religious idea gives the State
guarantees. But what State? What kind of State?" p. 97.

At this point we are brought up against the one-sided conception of
the Jewish question.

It was by no means sufficient to inquire: Who shall emancipate? Who
shall be emancipated? Criticism had a third task to perform.

It had to ask: what kind of emancipation are we concerned with? Upon
what conditions is the desired emancipation based? The criticism of
political emancipation itself was only the eventual criticism of the
Jewish question and its true solution, in the "general question of the
time."

Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level he falls into
contradictions. He posits conditions which are not involved in the
nature of political emancipation itself. He suggests questions which
his problem does not imply, and he solves problems which leave his
questions unsettled. Whereas Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish
emancipation: "Their mistake was that they assumed the Christian State
to be the only real State, and did not subject it to the same
criticism that they applied to Judaism," we find Bauer's mistake to
consist in the fact that it is only the Christian State, and not the
"general State," that he subjects to criticism, that he does not
investigate the relation of political emancipation to human
emancipation, and consequently lays down conditions which are only
explicable from an uncritical confusion of political emancipation with
general human emancipation.

When Bauer asks Jews: Have you the right from your standpoint to crave
political emancipation? we would inquire on the contrary: Has the
standpoint of political emancipation the right to demand of Jews the
abolition of Judaism, or from men generally the abolition of
religion?

The complexion of the Jewish question changes according to the State
in which Jews find themselves. In Germany, where no political State,
no State as State exists, the Jewish question is a purely theological
question. The Jew finds himself in religious antagonism to the State,
which acknowledges Christianity as its basis. This State is theologian
_ex professo_. Here criticism is criticism of theology, is two-edged
criticism, criticism of Christian and critici