Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Introduction { 5

never became reconciled to the Verein’s Hegelian orientation, he contributed

two articles to its short-lived journal. Heinrich Heine—philosophically inter-

ested, politically discordant, and ostentatious in his staging of ironic subjectiv-

ity—haunts several moments of this study. Like Bendavid, Heine was a member

of the Verein and carried on correspondences during and after its demise with

several of his Verein colleagues, whom he once characterized as his fellow Wis-

senschaftsjuden ( Jews of science). Heine later became a friend of Marx and was

a positive and a negative inspiration in the early careers of Hess and Auerbach,

respectively. Hess and Marx were also close associates in the early 1840 s. Hess

wrote one of the most famous descriptions of the young Marx—then virtually

unknown—in a letter to Auerbach;^8 and Marx’s deployment of crude rhetoric

in “Zur Judenfrage” (“On the Jewish Question”) draws deeply, rhetorically

and conceptually, on Hess’s essay “Über das Geldwesen” (“The Essence of

Money”). The Jewish deployment of Spinoza in counterpoint to Hegel links

the Vereinler of the 1820 s with Auerbach and Hess in the 1830 s and 1840 s. In his

famous lead essay to the inaugural issue of the Verein’s journal, as I read it,

Immanuel Wolf appeals to Spinoza to subvert the Christian coordinates of

Hegel’s narrative of the development of Spirit, and Hess and Auerbach likewise

look to Spinoza in part as an alternative to Hegel.

The most salient broad trajectory to emerge from my analysis of these vari-

ously interconnected moments involves the shift from a Kantian to a Hegelian—

and then a Left Hegelian—paradigm. Within Bendavid’s Kantian conceptual

framework the obstacle to the integration of Jews into the wider polity was their

purported deficit of autonomous subjectivity. Given Hegel’s trenchant critique

of subjectivism in general, and the subjective limits of Kantian epistemology

and morality in particular, the danger that Hegel and his followers saw to an

integrated polity lay not in a deficit, but in a surfeit, of (intransigent) subjec-

tivity. Although Hegel at times depicted Jews as self-isolating and egoistic, the

main targets of his critique of subjectivism, both as an epistemological and an

ethical-political problem, lay elsewhere, above all with competing forms and

conceptualizations of Christianity. Hegel’s identification of subjectivity and its

moral correlatives as insufficient and potentially disruptive of ethical life set the

stage for the Young Hegelian assault on subjectivity as the linchpin of what they

considered reactionary and socially atomizing Restoration politics.^9 And while

Hegel did not generally privilege Jews as the embodiment of such corrosive sub-

jectivity, several Young Hegelians did—including Ludwig Feuerbach and, above

all, Bruno Bauer, to whom Marx responds in “Zur Judenfrage.” The Young

Hegelian figuration of the egoistic Jew provided the conceptual and rhetorical

context for Marx’s novel deployment of this stereotype. The Jew as embodi-