Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

6 } Introduction

ment of deleterious subjectivity—in Young Hegelian as well as less philosophi-

cally rigorous discourse—was also a crucial context for Auerbach’s and Hess’s

different engagements with Spinoza as a thinker who was at once Jewish and

universal, and who seemed to point the way beyond the limitations and perils of

Jewish egoism, and of subjectivity tout court.

It is no coincidence that the thinkers I examine in this study were all marginal

figures, at least at the moments with which I am chiefly concerned. The belief

in the political efficacy of philosophical thought was the refuge of a new kind of

intellectual who socially, professionally, and institutionally was neither here nor

there. Contemporary observers during this period, as well as scholars of the his-

tory and sociology of intellectuals, have noted that the numbers of highly edu-

cated young men far outstripped the possibilities for their employment in the

late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^10 Young Hegelian intellectuals were

excluded from university positions (and, eventually, from careers in journalism)

due to their political radicalism, and they became further radicalized due to that

exclusion.^11 Their intense political investment in radical critique, articulated from

the social—as well as professional and institutional—periphery, not infrequently

took the form of a desperate faith in the quasi-messianic leap of thought into

action. Except for Marx, the intellectuals who are the focus of this study were

even more marginalized than their non-Jewish counterparts due to legal restric-

tions on professional opportunities. Moreover, they generally found themselves

on the fringes of mainstream Jewish communal, intellectual, and institutional

life as well. If their precarious social and professional positions were one factor

that encouraged these intellectuals to exaggerate the transformative power of

thought and to engage in philosophical politics, other factors were the sheer

power and novelty of the philosophical systems they took up—that is, their

unprecedented, unsettled, and therefore all the more urgent quality. This is es-

pecially true in the case of Kant’s thought as Bendavid deploys it in his 1793

pamphlet Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden (On Jewish characteristics) and

of Hegel’s ideas from which the Verein ( 1819 – 24 ) drew inspiration. Bendavid

was not only a Jewish Kantian but the first Jewish Kantian:^12 when he exam-

ined Jewish history, collectivity, and subjectivity through a Kantian lens in 1793 ,

Kant’s thought was still radically new, and its political implications were up for

grabs. The Hegelians in the Verein were likewise the first Jewish Hegelians.

They heard Hegel’s early Berlin lectures from 1818 through the early 1820 s,

before his thought achieved wide acceptance. Nearly all the figures I examine

here were young during the moments in question: Bendavid was thirty-one in

1793 ; the Hegelian Vereinler were in their twenties in the early 1820 s; Marx was

in his early to mid-twenties in the early 1840 s; and Hess and Auerbach, both