The Muslim Question: Reframing the Indian Muslim through the Lens of Marx’s German Jew

Marx critiques Bauer’s position that saw Jews as a different ‘nation’ despite the political reality of millennia of coexistence of both German Jews and Christians under and in the same state, territory and sovereign power (which was the Christian ‘Holy Roman Empire’). Rather than locate German nationalism as derived from linguistic identity, Bauer located Jews as a distinct nation by conflating linguistic identity with religious identity as he asks if the Jews sought political emancipation as equals in a ‘Christian  German state’ (Emberling 1998). Bauer saw the possibility of a German  state as exclusively Christian even as he articulated ideas of democratic nationhood.