Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Introduction { 9

aporetic cure, which would render Jews autonomous subjects and fit citizens

of an idealized state through metaphorical decapitation. Bendavid’s contribu-

tion, at its inception, to the corpus of Jewish Kantian thought productively high-

lights certain dangers in Kantian moral universalism that subsequent Jewish

Kantians tended to gloss over. Although the tradition of German-Jewish Kant-

ians culminating in Hermann Cohen recognized a profound affinity between

Kantian and Jewish thought, above all in the ethical thrust of each, Bendavid

stages the encounter between Kantian moral philosophy and Jewish history and

collective identity in terms both of political possibility and of normative violence.

Chapters 2 and 3 look anew at the origins of academic Jewish studies: the

attempt by first-generation university students in Berlin to construct a Wis-

senschaft des Judentums during the late 1810 s and early 1820 s. Hegelian theory

provided a way for these young intellectuals to theorize—and act out—a place

in “the state” (as theorized by Hegel) during precisely the pivotal years when

the Prussian state was closing the doors to Jewish participation, doors that had

seemed to be opening during the preceding era of reform. Against the dominant

critical trend, which views the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden

chiefly as the institutional framework out of which the new scholarly project

of academic Jewish studies emerged, my reading follows the Verein’s members

in understanding their association chiefly as a political experiment. Inspired

by Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right; 1821 ) and Vorlesungen

über die Philosophie der Religion (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; first

delivered in 1821 ), among other works, Eduard Gans, Immanuel Wolf, and their

fellow members of the Verein ascribed crucial political importance to their para-

academic pursuits. Hegel closely aligned the state with Wissenschaft and in-

sisted that rationality, not religious affiliation, was the true criterion on which

to base inclusion in the state. In making Jews both the subjects and objects of

science, the Verein’s members sought to reorganize Jews according to Hegel’s

conception of ethical community and to integrate them into the rational totality

of the Hegelian state. Feeling authorized by Hegelian theories of the state, reli-

gion, and the agency of rational discourse, they dressed up their modest society

in bureaucratic trappings in an attempt to embody the role of Jewish civil ser-

vants in the state as Hegel envisioned it. At times, too, the Hegelian intellec-

tuals of the Verein challenged aspects of the Hegelian script from which they

worked—in particular, the dominant role of secularized Christianity in Hegel’s

philosophy of history. Eventually the disparity between Hegelian theory and

Prussian realpolitik became too rude for the Vereinler to sustain such a politi-

cally contestatory, if finally illusory, lived Hegelianism. Yet the problem was not

that the Verein’s members were ultimately excluded from Hegel’s state, but that