Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

4 } Introduction

and political agency so as to accord with, and contest, the terms of political

inclusion. Although both German intellectuals during this period and scholars

who have studied it since widely acknowledge that philosophy served as a major

arena for the negotiation of politics, few have focused on the political dimension

of Jewish engagements with philosophy in Germany during its most explosive

years between Kant and the Young Hegelians. This book takes this question as

its central concern.

It is the variable convergence of philosophy and activism that has determined

my selection of the figures and texts in this study. Criteria of inclusion are neces-

sarily criteria of exclusion, and my interest in the compelling nexus of politics,

philosophy, and negotiations of Jewish subjectivity in this period has drawn my

attention away from figures who would have to figure centrally in a study of any

single component of this nexus. Thus Gabriel Riesser, the most vigorous Jew-

ish political activist of the 1830 s and 1840 s, makes only a fleeting appearance in

the pages of this book simply because he did not imbue his political writings

with philosophy. Conversely, Salomon Maimon, the most brilliant Jewish philo-

sophical mind in the German cultural orbit in the last decades of the eighteenth

century, also receives scant mention since he never intervened in or meditated

in a sustained way on the political situation of Jews in Germany, despite the

existence of richly suggestive moments in various of his texts.^7

This book is informed by intellectual history but is not meant to be a his-

tory. The contextualized close readings that make up the backbone of this study

probe paradigmatic attempts to engage in (or, in Marx’s case, to disengage from)

philosophy as a displaced politics in Germany during the emancipation era.

My approach is indebted to my training in comparative literature and literary

theory, a field of inquiry defined less by a common canon or corpus than by a

commitment to careful reading across and at the intersections of different disci-

plines and modes of discourse. At the intersection of disciplines—Jewish stud-

ies, intellectual history, philosophy, and literary studies—Jewish Philosophical

Politics in Germany, 1789 – 1848 does not attempt, chiefly, to tell a story or trace

an evolution, but rather to examine how Jewish intellectuals negotiated an abid-

ing (if variable) constellation of concerns, aspirations, and predicaments with

conceptual and rhetorical tools made available by different philosophical frame-

works. Whatever stories my book tells emerge as a welcome by-product of this

aim. A number of stories and connections do emerge and are worth foreground-

ing here.

Numerous biographical and anecdotal linkages connect the various mo-

ments of this study. Lazarus Bendavid, who popularized Kantian philosophy in

the 1780 s and 1790 s, was a member of the Verein in the early 1820 s. Though he