Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

206 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

ereign, as the highest being,’ the Left’s identification of theological and ‘secular’

liberal notions of personhood was essentially complete.”^25

In equivocal conjunction with their assault on Christian personalism and its

legacy in the egoism of modern society and the ideology of the sovereign liberal

self, Young Hegelian intellectuals also frequently pilloried Judaism as a particu-

larly narrow and basely material form of egoism. The problem Auerbach faced

had less to do with the German Left’s critique of Christian personalism than

with how to negotiate the partly overlapping discourse of egoism as a peculiarly

Jewish trait. The career of this anti-Jewish sentiment in German Idealism has

philosophical roots in Hegel’s construction of Judaism as a religion of sublimity

that bars mediation with the Absolute: infinitely removed from God, Hegel’s

Jews are unable to advance the dialectical progress of spirit as subject, and their

deficit of spiritual subjectivity manifests itself in a surfeit of brute materiality and

egoism. As I discussed in chapter 4 , the association of Judaism with narrow ego-

ism became pronounced in Left Hegelian works such as Feuerbach’s 1840 The

Essence of Christianity, Bruno Bauer’s 1843 Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Ques-

tion) and Marx’s critique of political liberalism by way of response to Bauer. Nor

was the protean discourse of Jewish egoism limited to Hegelian sophisticates: it

was deployed from both the Left and the Right in politicized literary and philo-

sophical discourse of different registers. In an overdrawn yet still illuminating

argument, Paul Rose maintains that egoism was not merely one among many

negative traits in the Vormärz image of the Jew but was widely seen, even by

progressives such as Karl Gutzkow, as the originary Jewish defect from which

all others issued.^26

Heine—the most popular, controversial, and flamboyantly subjective writer

of Jewish origin of the period (he had converted to Protestantism in 1825 )—

served as a lightning rod for attacks on base, deleterious, and indulgent subjec-

tivity, whether understood as liberal, Romantic, French, or (most commonly)

Jewish. As the privileged embodiment of problematic subjectivity, especially a

despised “Jewish” subjectivity, Heine haunted Auerbach’s early career as both

an explicit and implicit referent.^27

Politically opposed constructions of Heine’s subjectivity make clear how

similar images of Heine could be deployed in the service of divergent projects,

and how pervasive critiques of Heinean subjectivity were in the cultural land-

scape in which Auerbach began his literary career. In summer 1828 the Munich

circle around the ultraconservative Catholic journal Eos—which is to say, the

center of political Catholicism in southern Germany—made Heine a target in

its antiliberal campaign when the Catholic theologian Ignaz von Döllinger took

aim at him in an attack on the liberalism of Heine’s publisher, Johann Friedrich