14

Chapter One

Off with Their Heads?

Lazarus Bendavid’s Vision of Kantian Subjects

at the End of Jewish History

But to give them [the Jews] civil rights—I at least see no means of

doing so other than, in one night, to cut off all their heads and

replace them with others containing not a single Jewish idea.

johann gottlieb fichte, Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Ur-

teile des Publikums über die französische Revolution

It [ Judaism] is the hydra, all of whose heads must be cut off at once

if two are not to grow back in place of every one severed.

lazarus bendavid, Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden

The year is 1793. While the Terror rages in Paris, two German proponents of the

new Kantian philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Lazarus Bendavid, theo-

rize the desirability, legitimacy, and possible means of incorporating Jews into

the state as citizens. This issue has different stakes for the two thinkers, yet each

envisions a scenario in which the very gesture that would integrate Jews into the

polity also seems to threaten their existence.

Bendavid ( 1762 – 1832 ) is little known today, although during his lifetime he

was an influential popularizer of Kant, whom he introduced to Vienna in well-

attended lectures during the mid- 1790 s, and whose philosophy he explicated

in a series of widely read books. Born in Berlin, Bendavid attended lectures at

Halle and Göttingen on a wide array of subjects including mathematics and phi-

losophy. He supported himself in a variety of occupations, including newspaper

editor and accountant, and from 1806 to 1825 he served without compensation

as the director of the Jewish Free School in Berlin. In addition to his publica-

tions on Kant, Bendavid wrote on mathematics and authored a number of texts

on Jewish topics, generally with a polemical edge. The most famous of his Jew-

ish writings is Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden (On Jewish characteristics)

of 1793.

Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden is Bendavid’s attempt to imagine a