Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

8 } Introduction

Each of this book’s six chapters explores an attempt to think through re-

lations between Jewish particularity and evolving conceptions of the modern

polity and state. Some thinkers attempt to harmonize Jewish subjects with the

state (Bendavid, and the Hegelian Vereinler) or with an idealized national Ger-

man community (Auerbach). Others mobilize an image of Jewish subjectivity

(Marx) or an idiosyncratic interpretation of a Jewish tradition (Hess) to critique

the liberal subject and the political state as harmful ideological illusions. All the

thinkers I study, however, elaborate their political visions in dialogue with pow-

erful philosophers, whose thought provides the idiom through or against which

they articulate their philosophical politics.

Proceeding chronologically, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789 –

1848 examines four paradigmatic moments in which my three key concerns—

philosophy, politics, and Jewish subjectivity—confront each other in changing

constellations. Chapter 1 explores Bendavid’s theorization of Jewish citizenship

in what I argue is a politicized appropriation of Kant’s moral philosophy in

the shadow of the French Revolution, which had both redefined citizenship

in France and extended it to Jews. I analyze how Bendavid’s attempt to con-

ceptualize a transformation of Jews into citizens in Etwas zur Charackteristick

der Juden leads him to a gruesome image of decapitation, which echoes an in-

famous scenario in a tract published by Johann Gottlieb Fichte the same year.

I analyze how this surprising convergence derives from the Kantian foundation

of each philosopher’s conception of humanity and morality. Approaching civil

rights for Jews from the standpoint of the normative Kantian moral subject, both

Bendavid and Fichte conclude that only the paradoxical means of (symbolic)

decapitation could fashion the new Jew fit for the civil sphere. Although Fichte’s

Kantian fantasy of Jewish decapitation is vehemently anti-Jewish and intended

to dismiss the possibility of Jews being included in the polity, Bendavid’s path to a

metaphorics of Jewish decapitation is more complex and ambivalent. His histori-

cal narrative of the Jews derives in part from his interest in the genre of the case

history as it was emerging in the inchoate field of popular psychology. Shortly

before the appearance of Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden in 1793 , Bendavid

published two case histories of Jewish patients in the first German-language psy-

chology journal, Gnothi Sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als

ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (Know yourself, or journal of empiri-

cal psychology: a reader for scholars and laymen), in which he engaged on an

individual level some of the same questions that would animate his collective

(case) history of the Jews, such as a Jew’s capacity to embrace Kantian reason

or to integrate productively into society. Bendavid finally leans on Kant both to

diagnose the pathologies of Jewish history and to overcome them through an