Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

12 } Introduction

wise teases dynamics of contestation and subversion out of an era of German-

Jewish discourse that was conventionally taken to exemplify a Jewish preoccu-

pation with assimilation to external norms and values. Such dynamics of Jewish

contestation also animate studies such as Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew

and Todd Presner’s Mobile Modernity. By any measure, the subversive paradigm

within German-Jewish studies has been analytically powerful and has enriched,

and at times dramatically altered, how we understand crucial currents within

German-Jewish culture. I too tease out instances of scrappy Jewish counter-

punching, for example in what I read as Immanuel Wolf ’s undoing of the secu-

larized Christian supercessionism that underpins the place that Hegel assigns

Spinoza in the development of Spirit. Yet to the extent that unearthing subver-

sive tendencies in the German-Jewish tradition allows us to identify with and, at

times, root for its misunderstood heroes, it should also give us pause. There is

much truth in the narratives of German-Jewish subversion, but such narratives

are also perhaps seductively satisfying. Although indispensable, the paradigm

of subversion is not without blind spots. As Hess has shown, the nineteenth-

century middlebrow German-Jewish literature that he unearths and analyzes

in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity resided in

one such blind spot, and doing justice to it required a change of critical perspec-

tive.^17 Heroicizing narratives that pit intellectual Davids against the Goliath of

the German intellectual tradition are apt to miss crucial questions that certain

Jewish thinkers pose regarding the terms of Jewish and German modernity by

trying to think, as Jews, not only against but also with some of the most power-

ful currents in the German philosophical tradition. What is significant about

Bendavid, for example, is not how he might be read to subvert Kant nor how he

might simply be marshaled to corroborate the verdict that Kant’s philosophy

is structurally antisemitic. In a more complicated picture, Bendavid highlights

dangers of Kant’s autonomy-heteronomy dualism even as he deploys the most

hazardous edge of Kantian thought to negotiate a place for Jews in the polity.

Similarly, I am not only (although I am certainly also) interested in the attempts

of the members of the Verein to think their way around Hegel, but also in their

attempts to think their way into Hegel’s state. What possibilities and dangers

did different philosophical paradigms afford Jewish intellectuals for thinking

a polity in which they would have a place? How did minority groups refract

and mobilize new theoretical paradigms that would eventually become founda-

tional to philosophical and political modernity? How do we reassess Kant and

Hegel in light of the philosophical politics that they inspired on the part of their

Jewish adherents? These are the questions that Bendavid’s and the Vereinler’s

projects pose, projects that render it difficult to cast their authors in the role of