In this paper I will present two interconnected critiques of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. Firstly, I will argue that Marx’s concept of human universality “species-being” is an essentially idealized and ahistorical response to the social and political crisis the “Jewish question” presented in its day. I will here develop the position that Marx’s notion of human emancipation in the universality of “species-being” is undesirable and historically unachievable, that Marx succumbed to a temptation for a final repose of tensions spiritual

and historical, universal and particular, in seeking out their philosophical reintegration in a "once and for all time" unity. In this way, Marx reduced the Jewish question to a merely philosophical one. Secondly, I will argue that Marx’s critique of Judaism’s inherent particularism does not stand up to critical analysis when looked at from outside the social evolutionary framework of his dialectic of human emancipation. Here I will briefly inquire into several ethical and historical aspects of Judaism which makes Judaism’s material and ideal forms inimical to Marx’s universalist notion of species-being. Through this consideration I will bring both Judaism’s and Marx’s conceptualizations of human universality into critical contrast. To begin, however, I will trace the development of Marx’s synthetic conceptualization of “species-being” out of Hegel’s historical dialectic. That is, I will present a sketch of the Hegelian trajectory from which Marx issues in order to highlight his deviation from the concrete issues which the “Jewish question” historically represented, and how he embarked upon his own project in terms of “human emancipation.”

Prior to Marx’s inspiring introduction to Engel’s work on capitalism, Marx was as yet theoretically situated on the periphery of the young Hegelian assault upon religion. What this group intended was the final overturning of the political power vested in the clergy by the Prussian state. The Jewish residents of Prussia called for civil rights and citizenship, but had been refused by the conservative Christian Prussian theocracy. The Jewish case became of central interest to the political and social thinkers of the Hegelian school as a kind of litmus test for liberalized social reform and the downsizing of church authority.

For Hegel, religion represented the idealized ethical substance which as yet hadn’t found its final expression in the form of the state. Through the state, Hegel argued, the inherent ethical ideals of religion were concretized into the form of political institutions which insured the stability and realization of those very ideals. This materialization of the fundamental ethical content of religion was not possible through religious means alone:  “on stopping at the form of religion, as opposed to the state, are acting like those logicians who think they are right if they continually stop at the essence and refuse to advance beyond that abstraction to existence... Now if, in relation to the state, we cling to this form of experience [i.e., religious] and make it the authority for the state and its essential determinant, the state must become a prey to weakness, insecurity, and disorder, because it is an organism in which firmly fixed distinct powers, laws, and institutions have been developed. In contrast with the form of religion, a form which draws a veil over everything determinate, and so comes to be purely subjective, the objective and universal element in the state, i.e. the laws, acquires a negative instead of a stable and authoritative character… it may turn instead to the outside world and assert its authority there, and then there is an outbreak of the religious fanaticism which, like fanaticism in politics, discards all government and legal order as barriers cramping the inner life of the

heart and incompatible with its infinity, and at the same time proscribes private property, marriage, the ties and work involved in civil society, as degrading to love and the freedom of feeling.” [1]

Hegel's ideal paradigm consigns religion to a place in civil society where religious communities and institutions are free to pursue their collective values without the potential to disrupt the critical functions of the state. He goes even so far as to suggest that it might suit the state to make religious membership mandatory. His reasoning here is that since the state is barred from direct influence over the private consciences of its citizens, religion may take up this relationship within civil society to instill “a sense of unity in the depths of men's minds.” [2]  

What we may discern from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, then, is that religion represents the insufficiently developed ethical forerunner to the state’s ethical authority. Once the state emerges as the historical realization of the abstract ethical ideas latent in religion, the institutional apparatus associated with religion is dismissed from its share in state power. Religion is subsequently relegated to the sphere of self-interest and subjectivity in civil society.  At this level it shares, contributes and supports the overall ethical interests of the state. For Hegel all these moments are integrated into the overall Sittlichkeit or ethical life which is itself grounded upon custom and their historical development in institutional forms. This is the essence of the realization of reason through the evolution of ideas which are gradually realized in the “march” towards the full realization of human freedom in the state.

Bruno Bauer’s treatment of the proper role of religion in society adopts Hegel’s essentially liberal conception of the division of the public and private spheres in the form of state and civil society. Proceeding from Hegel in this way, Bauer addresses the Jewish plea for citizenship and civil rights in 19^th Century Prussia in his The Jewish Question. For Bauer, the heart of the “Jewish question” was not the issue of how the Jew’s ought to have been legally regarded. Rather, it implicitly raised the question of the legitimacy of an antiquated theocratic state vis-à-vis the potential for the political emancipation of the Prussian state from religion. Marx here elaborates Bauer’s position: “Thus Bauer demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should renounce Judaism, and in general that man should renounce religion, in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, he considers, and this follows logically, that the political abolition of religion is the abolition of all religion. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true or actual state… The political emancipation of the Jew or the Christian- is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity and religion in general. The state emancipates itself from religion in its own particular way, in the mode which corresponds to its nature, by emancipating itself from the state religion; that is to say, by giving recognition to no religion and affirming itself purely and simply as a state.” [3]

Bauer’s understanding of the Jews as Jewish members of German society locates the problem of their political isolation in terms of the inappropriate theocratic form of the state. The Jews too, in order to improve this political situation, had to come to understand that their own social problem as Jews was analogous to the problem of all Germans. In this regard, the Christian state was not to be lobbied for rights but to be supplanted with a state dedicated to political issues on purely “rational,” secular terms. How were the Jews to be granted special privileges by a Christian state when as a group it undermined and challenged that state’s very religious identity? What Germany lacked, Bauer argued, was a concept of citizenship which would not only emancipate the Jews, but would emancipate all Germans. Before the Jews in Germany could be emancipated, Germany had itself to emancipate the state from the rule of religion. Bauer’s critical approach transformed the Jewish question to a call for the political emancipation of the state from all forms of theocratic influence.

It is at this point that Marx departs from Bauer's Hegelian analytical developments in regard to Jewish and, more generally, human emancipation and the role of the political.  Firstly, as we have examined, for both Bauer and Marx society as a whole had to emancipate itself from the rule of religion. Secondly, they also agree, it is only through this first step that all members of society, irregardless of religious identity, would be politically emancipated. The emergence of the independent sphere of civil society would accommodate religious specificity under a wholly secular state authority which secured rights for all.  Marx’s claim, however, is that Bauer fell short of a third step in his treatment of the Jewish dilemma. This third step, he argued, would have required an inquiry into the historical status and finality of political emancipation. Marx introduces his conceptualization of such a third stage. He does not limit his discussion to political emancipation as Bauer did, but extends it to include a further social development in terms of “human emancipation”: “When Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation that "Their error was simply to assume that the Christian state was the only true one, and not to subject it to the same criticism as Judaism” [4] , we see his own error in the fact that he subjects only the “Christian state”, and not be “state as such” to criticism, that he does not examine the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation, and that he, therefore, poses conditions which are only explicable by his lack of critical sense in confusing political emancipation and universal human emancipation.” [5]

Political emancipation, so conceived, is not the highest form of emancipation and still has not removed from itself all the elements of what Marx sees as its fundamental “presuppositions” in religion. The very nature of the way the problem is theoretically framed by Bauer leaves the state in a form which confuses its politically emancipatory role with the final form of human emancipation. The intermediation of the state between man and his ethical agency, and the

concomitant abolition of religion from the political but not the civil sphere, amounts to the mere substitution of human emancipation with a lesser form for Marx. In this way, the state continues to bear a “religious” relation to individuals insofar as through it alone do they achieve emancipation, much as religion served as the intermediary between heaven and earth. In Marx’s sense, politics becomes a “church-like” institution of man’s worldly salvation.

In the final analysis, Marx’s critique of Bauer’s critical limitations is Marx’s very departure with the way liberal theory envisions, constitutes and compartmentalizes social relations in light of the differentiation of powers amongst society’s civil and political institutions: “This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question reduces itself – the relation between the political state and its presuppositions, whether the latter are material elements, such as private property, etc., or spiritual elements, such as culture or religion, the conflict between the general interest and private interest, the schism between the political state and civil society -- these profane contradictions, Bauer leaves intact, while he directs his polemic against their religious expression.” [6]

Despite Bauer's political emancipation, there persists the problem of rife conflict between the polarized interests of man’s material and ethical needs, between his particularity in civil society and his universality in the state. The Jewish question is thus the question of the incessant conflict between the concrete private interests in civil society – of which Judaism is a sine qua non for Marx- and the abstract ethical life of the state which is wholly alien and negative in relation to the real agents it represents within the confines of civil society. Once the state is cleansed of the particularism of religion following the Hegelian model, civil society inherits the factious character of religion and divides human interests one against the other; it is the root of the war of all against all: “religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves, albeit in a specific and limited way in any particular sphere, as a species-being, in community with other men.  It has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of the wisdom and of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of differentiation. It has become what it was at the beginning, an expression of the fact that man is separated from the community, from himself and from other men.  The division of men into the public person and the private person, the displacement of religion from the state to civil society -- all this is not a stage in political emancipation but its consummation. Thus political emancipation does not abolish, and does not even strive to abolish, man's real religiosity.” [7]

In the light of Marx’s reworking of the Bauer's Hegelian form of political emancipation, we are brought to the first argument concerning Marx’s universalist claim; “species-being.” Marx’s response to the dilemma of Jewish, or more generally of religious, particularism is instructed by his teleological approach to history. Much as the state defined the final realization of human universality for Hegel, Marx’s evolutionary

idea of species-life is a guiding principal in his treatment of Judaism. In place of the liberal model which accommodates and enshrines Judaism’s specificity in civil society alongside the existence of the state, Marx’s “third step” calls for the “emptying out” of the contents of civil society and their reintegration into the species-life of the state: “human emancipation will only be completed when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates the social power from himself as political power…  at those times when the state's most aware of itself, clinical life seeks to stifle its own prerequisites -- civil society and its elements -- and to establish itself as the genuine and harmonious species-life of men.” [8]

Marx’s concept of species-being offers us his synthetic resolution of the classical liberal conception of individuals as both “man” and “citizen,” l’homme et le citoyen. Marx argues that such a resolution might be achieved through a revolution where civil society’s basis in private property and religion may be abolished through the use of violence. Yet where he differs, say from the French revolutionaries, is that the end of the revolution should not necessarily mean the return to the normal operation of the state/civil society bifurcation “just as war ends with peace.” No, this is not the temporary suspension of a liberal state of affairs to bring about the leveling of privilege only to re-institute a more liberal state of affairs. He is calling for the very abolition of the division between man and citizen, between freedoms positive and negative and so is operating beyond the classical liberal parameters. In this context, Marx’s concept of species-being implies a final reintegration of the spheres of society which were differentiated from an original unity through the process of historical evolution. In this way, Marx is presenting his own solution to the problem in classical Hegelian terms.

Marx’s prescriptive employment of the synthetic capacity of species-being is problematic for several reasons. First, Marx employs Hegelian logic to suggest a synthesis which would entail the abolition of both the civil and the political spheres through their synthetic realization in what he envisions as the “species-life.” Here the ethical universality of the state and the material interests of the civil sphere are integrated in the appropriate form which, for Marx, transforms these elements into a new social unity. In this context, the political sphere of the state ceases to exist in that it no longer functions as a negative force in relation to the civil.  Similarly, civil society’s marketplace of disparate needs and interests is also displaced and transformed. Yet, what is critically missing from Marx’s argument here is substantive argumentation moving beyond the rhetoric of his Hegelian dialectic. That is, the synthetic transformation of the limitations of the liberal conceptual split between civil society and the state into a higher order form in “species-being” is an

evolutionary necessity imposed on his argument by the logic of dialectic “sublation” (i.e., Hegel’s Aufhebung as the necessary third moment in the dialectic which resolves its antecedent parts into itself and synthetically realizes their inherent potentials in and through itself).  Thus, where he goes beyond Bauer's liberal critique of the Prussian theocracy, he leaves behind all historical precedent and momentum in favor of a purely theoretical logic which instructs his conceptual formulation not of Jews and Germany, but of an idealized particular and universal. In this way, his historical assessment of the Jewish-Prussian problematic is subordinated to philosophical method.

Second, and in tandem, his philosophical analytic offers precious little instruction as to how his human emancipation would come about and offers even less as to how it would function once it did (of course, Marx’s article is being published in a journal). This shortcoming displays the essentially philosophical nature of his approach to the dilemma. Marx’s descriptive analysis, following Bauer, goes sufficiently deep for him to come up with an analytic reformulation of the crisis that the Jewish plea for rights entailed. However, his logical method effectively fails to achieve anything further than to recapitulate what Bauer had already set forth in the form of the remedy of political emancipation. Once he arrives at the completion of Bauer's “second step,” Marx ceases to partake in the historical dialogue of his day and ventures to rectify it solely through reference to an idealized ethical logic of dialectic transformation; his third step implies a purely philosophical rather than historically immanent critique. That is, in taking the whole problem of Jewish and human emancipation out of the social and political context of its time, Marx’s prescriptive references to “species-life” appear as something less than the necessary final step in the logic of the evolution of humanity and more like the idealized resolution of the social aporias of modern society in an abstract form. Marx here fell prey to the very “narrow mindedness” which he attributes to Judaism as the one-dimensional and materially pragmatic spirit underlying civil society.

I will now turn to the second thesis argument as a critical reading of Marx’s historical rendering of the Judaism-civil society dialectic: “we will attempt to escape from the theological formulation of the question.  For us, the question concerning the capacity of the Jew for emancipation is transformed into another question: what specific social element is it necessary to overcome in order to abolish Judaism?  For the capacity of the present-day Jew to emancipate himself expresses the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the contemporary world. This relation results necessarily from the particular situation of Judaism in the present enslaved world… Christianity issued from Judaism.  It has now been re-absorbed into Judaism.” [9]

Marx’s deeply invidious comments on the essential “huckstering” character of Judaism aside,  his depiction of Judaism as a sine qua non epitomization of civil society’s alienation from the emancipatory potentials within ethical universality merits consideration. Insofar as Judaism represented the heterogeneous religious aspect

of its day in 19^th Century Europe, Marx saw in it a special particularism; not only was it a highly visible religion which successfully resisted absorption into the majority Christian state orthodoxy, but it also represented the antiquated forebear of that state orthodoxy. In this historical context, he viewed Judaism as the real impediment to the historical abrogation and overcoming of religion in the realization of the highest form of historical development: human emancipation.  Judaism was the “dead weight” of the past, a vestige of the evolution of secular society which was the main obstacle to the realization of that evolution’s highest ends. For Marx, Judaism presented the danger of overturning all the advances achieved in political emancipation in co-opting the ethical agency of the state to the ends of the merely egoistic interests of civil society; of taking the state’s ethical potential and degrading it into a “police agent” to protect the private interests of civil society.

At this point, I will turn to a brief consideration of several of Judaism’s core tenets. When the question is looked at from outside the frame of Marx’s evolutionary dialectic of human emancipation, as I will show, his claims about Judaism’s narrowness and particularism seem much less secure.  Moreover, this “shift” of perspective is precisely what Judaism demands in response to Marx’s delegitimizing claims. Despite Marx’s dismissal of Bauer’s theological inquiry into Judaism as an unnecessary indulgence of the essentially veiled economic and material character of the “real Jew,” the question yet merits inquiry: does Judaism express its special identity to the denial of a historical universality which could include and accommodate other identities?  Without superimposing Marx’s social-evolutionary values onto the question, I wish to inquire into Judaism’s status in regard to particularism and how this status impacts its relationship to universality.

In the Jewish Bible, Deuteronomy 6:4, states: “HEAR, O ISRAEL: HaShem OUR GOD, HaShem IS ONE.” [10]

Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) interprets this as “HaShem who is presently our God and not the God of the nations, will in the future be [recognized] as the One God.” [11]

And further in Psalms 22,28 and 29 we find: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto HaShem; and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Thee. For the kingdom is HaShem's; and He is the ruler over the nations.” [12]

In these passages from the Jewish Bible, a form of universality is articulated. This universality, understood as the very essence and meaning of “God,” distinguishes between Jewish universality and all others. As well, the universality of all other nations will in time be overturned and the God of the Jews – HaShem – will eventually be recognized as the one true universal and so will come to replace the deistic traditions of all other peoples. Here we find in Judaism explicit opposition to the notion that it should “surrender” its own specificity in order to reunite with the historical universality Marx envisions in “species-life,” or even a

In his discussion of the meaning and purpose of the Jewish people, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the 19^th Century Biblical scholar and theologian, comments on the historical calling of the Jews: “This must be a people, then, which acknowledges Hashem, “the ineffable Lord of Love,” as the sole Elokim [God - Hashem], Omnipotent Master and Judge; a people which recognizes God as the sole Founder, Guide and Mover of its thoughts, feelings, words and deeds; a people which knows that whatever it has, is received from Him, and which, with all its might, should live for Him and for Him alone… Such a mission imposed upon this people another duty, the duty of separation, of ethical and spiritual separateness.” [13]

What we are clearly confronted with is a deep theological validation of Marx’s claim that Judaism epitomizes and historically enforces particularism. Here Rabbi Hirsch expresses the core need for historical insulation and a continuous devotion to a deity which by its very nature excludes Jews from participation in many aspects of historical enterprise and international involvement. The Jew, in essence, derives his spiritual and ethical identity in his very self-imposed apartheid from other nations. In this sense, the Jewish identity is a “negative” one, and to this extent coheres with Marx’s analysis of the essentially oppositional “spirit” of Judaism which formed the historical basis for relations within civil society.  Marx’s “hard” form of teleological universality aside, even a “soft cosmopolitan” form seems problematic from the point of view of Judaism’s privileged historical “calling.” That is, there seems to be little support for a universality within Judaism which would permit the recognition of the validity of the universalist identity claims (i.e., religious or otherwise) of other nations and collectives.

However, when either the “soft cosmopolitan” or Marx’s “hard teleological” views are juxtaposed with the view of universality from within Judaism, we are faced with a problem; if Judaism’s claim to universality is true, than both Marx’s notion of a “species-life” and the various national/collective universalist claims are, in actuality, dead ends and invalid. On the other hand, if Judaism’s claim here is considered from “the outside” as an extreme form of ethnocentrism and is contextualized as a particular people’s universalist “moment” and experience within a larger history and variegated development of human universality, then Marx’s association of Judaism with extreme particularism is supported and the “hard” and “soft” forms of universality are sustained. The view from within Judaism insists that it is not less than universality itself.

From without, from a wholly secular point of view, its religious basis may simply (if not reductively) be understood as a historical formation which expresses the spiritual and mythical experiences of a particular people’s collective identity.  This perspectival shift thwarts the certainty of Marx’s argument: even if we accept Judaism’s own claim to ethical and historical insularity, this in no way dismisses its claim to a concomitant universality (in fact, as we have seen, they are understood as complimentary components of its identity). Marx addresses this difficulty, of the different perspectives from the inside and the outside of Judaism, if only from within the limits of his day and dialectical method: “It is because the essence of the Jew was universally realized and secularized in civil society, that civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence.” [14]

The conflictual views and “truth claims” from within and outside of Judaism present problems for certainty vis-à-vis the question of Judaism’s status. I find that it is where Marx claimed that he had gone beyond Bauer's merely “theological” treatment that he dismissed and transgressed the inner validity of Jewish perspective in favor of his teleological dialectics and conception of species-being. It is at this point that Marx was no longer engaged to the real exigencies and nuances of the “Jewish question” of his day as such. Rather, it is here that he distanced himself from the issue’s true character by imposing his “third step” of ascribing to Jews their “true” universal identity and potential. 

In this context, there emerges the task of considering a balance between the extreme form of civil society’s particularism which Marx admonishes on the one hand, and the extreme form of universality which Marx valorizes in his concept of species-being on the other. In conceiving of such a middle way, I will briefly consider the possibility to formulate a conception of universality which neither demands the subsumption of all particularity into itself (where Marx’s “species-life” and Judaism converge), nor loses its ethical potency to a relativism where universality is “diffused” into its alienated parts (what Marx chastises in liberalism’s civil-political dynamic).

The shortcomings we have found in both Judaism and Marx’s versions of universality bring about the need to reconsider universality itself. I here want to argue on behalf of a model of universality conceived along the lines of a “pluralism” which valorizes no one worldview above others, and embraces all as equally valid instantiations. I am here submitting that universality is just this formal accommodation of all views and is distinct from the particularity which is the substance and content of those views. Universality and particularity are thus understood to constitute an irreducible dualism insofar as they require each other as complementary social potentials; universality’s unpunctuated formalism permits the autonomy and individuation of its parts, and the parts form the substantial and material foundation of the matrix of complex relations which ground the emergent and implicate unity of the whole. As an ethical ideal for

historical application, I believe this kind of pluralist paradigm presents a more self-consistent conception of universality than either Marx’s or Judaism’s versions.  The universalist “views” from the “inside” and “outside” trade off in terms of substance and form; each carries truth validity in its respective sphere of influence. That is, the substantial claims to universality from “inside” the various identities do not undermine the formal claims to universality from the “outside” (i.e., in the form of a state, constitution, etc.), and vice versa.  In this way, for all intents and purposes, I am arguing on behalf of the very civil society and state, material and ethical, paradigm which Marx is so critical of. However, we may respond to Marx that what is needed to “emancipate” the ethically alienated and self-interested elements of civil society is not their complete subsumption in the ethical and political universality of the state, but rather their appropriate intermediation with it. That is, that the alienating polarity between the material self-interest of concrete individuals within civil society and the abstract ethical purpose of the state which Marx points to is not a static or ineluctable one. However, I will leave this consideration for another paper and conclude the development of the second argument at this point.

In conclusion, from this point of view the consistency of both Judaism's and Marx’s conceptualizations of universality seem problematic. In both cases, universality is formulated as an all encompassing view which subsumes particularity within itself. In Marx’s sense of universality, human emancipation is forced to exclude the value and legitimacy of the Jewish perspective precisely because of his conflation of particular and universal, substance and form, in an idealized “species-being.” In the case of Judaism’s concept of divine universality, all other forms of universal meaning and identity are made the false aspirations and world views of people who are alienated from the one true, Jewish, universality. In both cases, as we have found, neither is truly universal in the sense that neither can accommodate other views without requiring either their abolition (Marx) or transformation beyond recognition (Judaism). In so problematizing the issue of the potential for a historically accessible synthesis of part and whole, either through Jewish or Marxist doctrine, I find that universality is best understood as the pure and formal potential for the accommodation of particularity and not the actual resolution of that particularity.  In this light the Jew and the citizen, as forms of religious and national identity, are not irreconcilably opposed as Marx suggests they are. Yet, neither are they prone to a complete synthetic harmonization either through “species-being” or “God.” In this regard, Marx’s notion of species-being as the reintegration of all alienated human creativity back into man’s actual ethical life is historically problematic. His concept of human emancipation implicitly entails dangerously dehumanizing potentials: in its capacity to reductively “coerce” the dynamic interplay of the diversity of human material and ethical interests into conformity with the idealized ethical unity of “species-being,” Marx’s emancipatory project may well realize

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the resolution of the ideal historical dialectic but only at the cost of real historical development.

I would now like to turn to the current situation in the Middle East, and to refocus this paper’s insight on the loggerheads between two parties, though in a less academically rigorous way.  I would like to start by saying that I believe that the Jewish and Islamic roots of the two parties, ensconced as they are in nationalized forms, are highly significant foundations for understanding the cultural complex of the conflict. As we have examined, Judaism’s sense of universality sustains an element of oppositionality as part of its core identity. It is in this sense that Judaism’s stance towards otherness becomes self-defining. That is, in confronting otherness, Judaism itself is defined in the negative. This aspect of the negative constitution of Jewish identity I find replicated in its sibling Abrahamic religious form: Islam. Though chronology and precedent makes Judaism, in a significant sense at least, the parent and Islam the daughter, in the element of the dynamic interplay of interior legitimacy versus exterior distrust they are truly brother and sister.  I can not help but recall being among the orthodox Jews of Jerusalem and feeling myself, one of their own by birth, displaced to the dim periphery of their hierarchy of ritual, custom and fealty. It is precisely this insularity which has sustained the integrity of the Jews in their diaspora, and the Palestinians in the ebb and flow of their expulsions from a land which has witnessed more occupations and razings than Poland or Russia, Vietnam or Korea.  Yet, if it is this antiquated periphery of custom and normative immurement which has sustained these peoples, it is also this periphery which has survived into the modern world as a vestige of the long ages of struggle which has thwarted the chance for sustainable modern statehood.  Modernity thrusts to the center categories which make little sense for these “small” peoples who have been sustained on millennial diets of consanguine community and centralized theocracy in the midst of the clash of empires and civilizations. It can not go without saying that the moderate Israeli and Palestinian majorities have time and again suffered the sabotage of the peace process from the vantage of these peripheral heritages.  In the Palestinian case, this militant periphery has acted not merely as a foil, but as a social support network as well. Yet, time and again the potential for confluence between the moderate mainstreams of both sides has been extinguished in the polarizing effects of terror and counter terror.  And it is precisely at these moments that the moderate majority once again take stock in their legacy of persecution and exile, recognize the prudence of the periphery, and re-pledge themselves to the inevitability of polarization. This impassioned scenario has thoroughly formalized the inherently oppositional interests of the two peoples, and the international media spin has done no less than to propagate this seemingly impenetrable dualism.  The deep distrust which has brewed in the Jewish and the Palestinian diaspora has inculcated in both these peoples the lesson that only in ultimate faith to the spiritual foundations of the

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community is there survival, that only in the solidarity of universal theological absolutes is their sufficient grounds for opposition and repulsion of the alien threat. It is this very introjection of threat which contributed to the formation of these "peoples" as collective identities in the modern world to begin with. As Reicher and Hopkins have put it: “National identity is always a project, the success of which depends upon being seen as an essence” [15]. Thus the crisis for both Muslim and Jew, Palestinian and Israeli, is bedeviled by the intersecting and mutually reinforcing axes of historical experience and religious bond, the rigors of which permit no spiritual dissolution to secular contractualism, and no analytical reduction to the liberal terms of modern civil society. It is precisely in confrontation that each is strengthened, in mortal opposition that each is galvanized as a people. 

What then can be done? I would like to offer the position that the solution does not lie in the Manichean, dualized focus which the world has lent to the crisis. I hold that such violent reactions within modernity are only the loud gasps of tradition and normative life which still resonate from the past, though in a vastly “muffled” sense.  Despite itself, the modern world was set up pell-mell in the rapid revolt against its feudal forebear, and much that still defines us resides beyond reach on the other side of the divide between the modern and pre-modern worlds. The far ranging spiritual and normative vacuity which has come into being in the modern world, its “loneliness” as Hannah Arendt referred to it, has indeed reigned in and tamed much of the overtly barbaric. Contractualism and formal atomism has achieved much in the cause of diminishing domination, developing ethical rationality and in instituting a cultural climate conducive to autonomy.  Yet, what was thrown out in the making of the modern world was a sense of the unity in the universal which sustains the meaningfulness of community and the inherent purposefulness of mutuality. Hegel witnesses, in this transition into the modern, both gain and loss as he wrote: “Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures… The mind’s gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there… and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man’s mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.” [16]

That which is confounding for the modern world in the crisis of universalism which such conflicts as the Israeli-Palestinian have thrust to center of global debate, I believe, is to a great degree a reflection of its own loss of normative substance and perspective; its

own crisis of universality. Marx, who as a young scholar was steeped in theological texts, understood this crisis, and his notion of species-being was intended as a remedy. His species-being is meant as a synthesis, an attempt to bring together the pre-modern customary fabric of Hegel’s sittlichkeit, or ethical life, with the benefits of the perspective which had been achieved in the enlightenment recognition of the ethical universality of humanity. One might then see in Marx’s conception of species-being an attempt at a “universality of universalities”. Yet I think this is probably too generous to the young Marx. 

To conclude then, I believe that the discourse of modernity and its troubled social and political bonds in universality is traced through this debate.  On the one hand, the exacerbated conflicts of traditions openly vying with one another seem appalling and beyond reason to their modern witnesses; they represent antiquated, pre-modern moral abominations which spur our indignation and upset our liberal ethical mythology. Marx himself, a career defender of collective normative life, spares no vitriol in his condemnation of the excessive particularism and exclusivity of religious community. On the other hand, the modernity of the West and beyond has had little to say to the combatants and remains dumbfounded in the revelation of the impotence of its instrumental and economic rationalities to resolve these disputes from “above”. In short, the modern world has been unable to offer a suitable alternative to these traditional structures and their deep communal bonds, and in their conflagrations has proved equally impotent in comprehending the inner logic of their motivation. Marx’s Enlightenment offering, species-being, seems no less than to aspire to a form of universality which a Hegelian consideration recognizes as ultimately vacant of content; one which runs the terribly dangerous risk of sacking the historical grounds of social and political precedent in favor of allegiance to abstract and paradigmatic integrity.  While species-being is analogous to the all-encompassing unity of the Palestinian and Israeli identities at the level of the primacy of their religious forms of universality, it ought to be in no way suggested to represent an alternative; it simply lacks the fundamental dialectical power of negativity which forge these identities’ adherence to a politics of radical difference. 

Thus, beyond the prudence and proceduralism of a wholly instrumentally engineered peace from outside, one achieved through concrete barricades and international peace keepers, I wary the notion that these cultural fundaments will continue to upset organic aspirations to peace. Hope here lies, it seems to me, in divesting these bipartisan ideological hurricanes generated by the diplomacy of shrapnel and mortar fire with a larger civilizational reckoning. In the cultural cold war between the Muslim bloc states and the West there should be no doubt that Israelis and Palestinians are now playing out the role that Vietnam, Korea, Turkey, Germany and others played in America’s debut tug of war; they have become front line state proxies through which confrontation between hegemonic

interests is played out. In this assertion I tender that it is only in a larger, regional resuscitation of dialogue amongst the significant players that the Israeli-Palestinian “deflection” may be diffused. This is not to suggest that the conflict ought to be understood as little more than a dependent variable in a larger and perhaps more abstract arena of contest.  I believe that there is a very real  kernel of difference out of which this affair germinated.  However, I maintain that its current explosive dimension has been largely fueled by external impetus, and an interest based denial of consequentialism; a form of calculus which requires more than revelatory authority on the one hand, and financial instrumentality on the other, to strike out towards understanding. So long as these culturally grounded systems of conviction are unreflectively sustained behind the veil of contained and calculated “fronts of contestation,” there can be little hope for real progress in the terms of substantial and meaningful peace.  It is in this light, and as a final note of contextualization, that I believe the Middle-Eastern crisis represents a chapter in the current accelerated phase of global dedifferentiation which, to its benefit, has at times brought the universalist illumination of cosmopolitanism to longstanding local parochialisms, and to its deep dishonor has cornered venerable traditions and fixed them in struggles for their normative and material survival.

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