Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Introduction { 11

or artistic voice. Auerbach made his debut as a novelist in 1837 with Spinoza:

Ein historischer Roman (Spinoza: a historical novel) and in 1841 published a

German translation of Spinoza’s complete works, to accompany which he also

wrote a biography of Spinoza. Hess also made his debut in print in 1837 , with

Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit (The Holy History of Mankind), which

appeared anonymously “by a disciple of Spinoza,” and Spinoza’s thought con-

tinued to inspire Hess’s revolutionary socialist essays of the 1840 s and 1850 s as

well as his proto-Zionist 1862 Rom und Jerusalem (Rome and Jerusalem).

Spinoza had become the subject of keen interest in Germany during the pe-

riod that my book treats, and Auerbach and Hess drew on his thought variously

to critique the ethical and epistemological limitations of subjectivity against the

background of a wide-ranging debate about the role of subjectivity (and related

terms including egoism, individuality, and personality) in German culture and

politics. For Auerbach, Spinoza embodied a paradoxically Jewish way to tran-

scend Jewish subjectivity, which was frequently held up as the quintessence of

egoism. For Hess, Spinoza’s pantheism provided a universal—yet still Jewish—

framework from which to elaborate a communist critique of possessive indi-

vidualism. Although both Auerbach and Hess used Spinoza to engage with the

complex ramifications of debates about the relationship between discrete indi-

viduals and wider communities, their interpretations and investments followed

divergent paths. Auerbach would embrace a moderate liberal, national stance

that idealized the Volk as a universal ethical community, while Hess would em-

brace cosmopolitan communist humanism.

l

a prominent tendency in recent scholarship on German-Jewish intellectual

and cultural life, as Jonathan Hess has noted, is to celebrate a quasi-heroic Jew-

ish subversiveness vis-à-vis hegemonic German philosophical and cultural dis-

courses.^15 As examples of the tendency to underscore the contestatory thrust

of German-Jewish culture, Hess points to Susannah Heschel’s 1998 Abraham

Geiger and the Jewish Jesus and his own 2002 Germans, Jews, and the Claims

of Modernity, each a field-changing work. Heschel’s study explores how the

leading figure of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism was not—in contrast to

a long-lived and widespread stereotype—motivated by a rush to assimilate but

rather, in Heschel’s adaptation of postcolonial theory, “reversed the gaze” of

hegemonic Christian culture to establish a distinctly Jewish Jesus, with pro-

vocative consequences for how to assess Western culture and the place of Jews

within it.^16 Hess, in his analysis of German-Jewish thinkers of the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries like Moses Mendelssohn and Saul Ascher, like-