Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Introduction { 7

born in 1812 , were in their mid-twenties to early thirties in the later 1830 s and

early 1840 s. All of these figures were involved in processes of self-definition and

self-positioning as intellectuals or authors. The performative dimension in their

philosophical politics—the attempt to think at a threshold of political action,

even to think as a political act—went hand in hand with their self-invention in

and through novel intellectual and artistic postures.

Scott Spector has advocated a more profound engagement with German-

Jewish subjectivity as a way of accessing areas and complexities of the Ger-

man-Jewish past that have remained unexamined in the dominant strains of

German-Jewish historiography.^13 He has in mind in particular unselfconscious

reflections, feelings, and behaviors, which could reveal an irreducible imbrica-

tion of Germanness and Jewishness, and thus the inadequacy of thinking of

these terms as being in binary opposition, or even as part of an assimilated–

nonassimilated spectrum. Spector’s call for attention to subjectivity in German-

Jewish history and cultural studies is suggestive, yet the material I focus on com-

plicates his conception of subjectivity as interiority in contrast to rigid external

discourses.^14 The figures I examine theorized Jewish politics in the idioms

and contexts of philosophical and wider cultural debates in which subjectiv-

ity, self-consciousness, and related terms figured centrally; and it is indeed with

subjectivity as explicit cultural discourse, rather than as interior experience,

that this book is chiefly concerned. Bendavid’s project is to replace what he

calls the hydra of the traditional Jewish collectivity with so many autonomous

Kantian moral subjects. The Vereinler’s vision of Wissenschaft des Judentums

answers Hegel’s call for a Wissenschaft der Religion that would harmonize reli-

gious subjectivity with ethical life, rather than allowing religious subjectivity to

be defined in irrational affective terms and in opposition to the rational state.

Marx and Hess contribute differently to a Young Hegelian discourse that high-

lighted sovereign subjectivity as a theological, philosophical, and political prob-

lem. Auerbach, for his part, tries to negotiate a cultural discourse that—in large

part through attacks on Heine—identified indulgent, frivolous, and corrosively

ironic subjectivity with Jews and vice versa. In general, I do not seek out a level

of subjective experience opposed or prior to such external discourses, yet I do

try to unearth the heady experience of what it felt like to think Jewish politics in

a Kantian or Hegelian vein, for example, or how Hegel’s critique of subjectiv-

ity continued to inform the way erstwhile Vereinler Immanuel Wolf and Moses

Moser (call them recovering Hegelians) experienced and evaluated themselves

and each other in a correspondence spanning over a decade. For the group of

thinkers I treat in this study, boundaries between external discourses of subjec-

tivity and inner subjective experience were porous and equivocal.