Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

138 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

in which Wohlwill taught, where Moser has Wohlwill lament “how parochial it

was for you in Hamb. and how difficult it was there to penetrate to the true cen-

ter of the soul.”^156 Moser would—hilariously, though surely not without some

sting—continue to exploit his distinction between the Wissenschaftler Wolf and

the self-indulgent Romantic Wohlwill in subsequent letters.^157

Wohlwill’s response (March 24 , 1824 ) to Moser’s satire is noteworthy for the

way Wohlwill links his emotional state, which Moser so ridicules, with the age in

general and with his relationship to Judaism in particular. Wohlwill says that he

is thankful for the satire but that he does not deserve scorn (Spott):

My entire flaw [Fehler] consists in the fact that feeling predominates in me

to a great degree. Many things have conspired to make this predominance of

feeling, to which I have a natural tendency, ever more oppressive. But I am

well aware of my condition—and isn’t the sickness of the age, the universal

epidemic, of the same kind? The most unfortunate thing is surely that the

sensitive nerves of the limb—called Judaism [Judentum]—, which was long

ago amputated yet still lives on, polyp-like, in a chronically ill partial exis-

tence, experience the suffering of the organism, as if the pain of a wound,

with doubled intensity.^158

Wohlwill links his emotional flaw to the age tout court: Romanticism is in, and

the epidemic of excessive sentiment has become universal. Yet his particular

emotional “condition” has everything to do with his embodiment of a violent

encounter between Judaism and modernity. Wohlwill makes his own person a

locus of this encounter by likening his exaggerated feeling to lingering ghost

pains from the amputated limb called Judaism. To remain within Wohlwill’s

metaphor, Judentum has “long ago” been cut off from “the organism,” though

he does not specify from what organism (world history? the state? Europe?).

Strikingly, in Wohlwill’s metaphor it is not the organism that feels ghost pains

for the lost limb, but the amputated limb—Judaism as it lives on in its polyp-like

partial existence—that doubly feels the pain of the suffering of the organism

from which it has been severed. On which side of this cut, then, does Wohlwill

locate himself? The answer is not simple. Insofar as he offers this metaphor as

an explanation of his Fehler of exaggerated affect, he locates himself on the side

of the excised Jewish limb that doubly feels the pain of the whole. Yet to diag-

nose Jews as sustaining an only partial existence is to distance oneself from the

isolated “polyp” of Judaism; it is indeed only from the perspective of the whole

that Judaism can appear to exist as such a severed and isolated entity. Wohlwill

would seem to occupy two places at once: he speaks from the point of view of

the amputated limb and of the whole from which it has been cut off, or, more