sm of Jewish theology.
But however critical we may be, we cannot get out of the theological
circle.

In France, in the constitutional State, the Jewish question is the
question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political
emancipation. As the semblance of a State religion is there preserved,
although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, in the
formula of a religion of the majority, the relationship of Jews to the
State retains the semblance of a religious and theological antagonism.

It is only in the North American Free States--at least in part of
them--that the Jewish question loses its theological significance and
becomes a really secular question. Only where the political State
exists in its completeness can the relation of the Jew, of the
religious man generally, to the political State, and therefore the
relation of religion to the State, be studied in its special features
and its purity. The criticism of this relationship ceases to be
theological criticism when the State ceases to adopt a theological
attitude towards religion, when its attitude towards religion becomes
purely political. The criticism then becomes criticism of the
political State. At this point, where the question ceases to be
theological, Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical. In the United
States there is neither a State religion nor a religion declared to be
that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another.
The State is alien to all cults. (_Marie ou l'esclavage aux
Etats-Unis_, etc., by G. Beaumont, Paris 1835, p. 214.) There are even
North American States where "the constitution does not impose
religious beliefs or the practice of a cult as a condition of
political privileges" (l. c. p. 225). Yet "nobody in the United States
believes that a man without religion might be an honest man" (l. c. p.
224). Yet North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity,
as Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamilton assure us with
one voice. Meanwhile, the North American States only serve us as an
example. The question is: What is the attitude of completed political
emancipation towards religion? If even in the country of completed
political emancipation we find religion not only existing, but in a
fresh and vital state, it proves that the existence of religion does
not contradict the completeness of the State. But as the existence of
religion indicates the presence of a defect, the source of this d