Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

208 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Heine as well as of their readership, reviewers, epigones, and the character of

the age. Regarding Heine, Riesser wrote: “Work yourselves up as much as you

want over Heine’s flippancy and frivolity; but, in the devil’s name, leave the Jews

out of it.”^37

Auerbach’s first published essay, Das Judenthum und die neueste Litera-

tur, included a rebuttal to the influential literary critic Wolfgang Menzel, who

had recently concluded an essay called “Unmoralische Literatur” (Immoral

literature), in which he attacked the anti-Christian bent of the Young German

writers Karl Gutzkow and Ludolf Wienbarg, with the dark question of what

Jewry hoped to gain from such “literary lackies” in the struggle for emancipa-

tion, “since one hears everywhere that the so-called Young Germany is really

a ‘Young Palestine,’ and since public opinion already generally holds Judaism

responsible for all that is obnoxious in the boundless importunacy, the enthu-

siasm for the French [Franzosensucht], and the spiteful impotent hatred toward

Germans and Christians” that characterizes Young German propaganda.^38 As

Jeffrey Sammons aptly describes it, though, Auerbach’s point “is not to de-

fend Young Germany against association with Jewishness, but rather to defend

Jewishness from association with Young Germany.”^39 Auerbach seeks above all

to save Jewishness from association with Heine. He endorses the criticism of

Young Germany as promoting a “sensualist radicalism” that “threatened to poi-

son the healthy parts of German national life” and sees Heine as someone who,

having realized the insufficiency of the resources of his personality [Persönlich-

keit], has adopted the laughable [lächerlich] posture of a servent of a higher

idea—namely, the pseudo-principle of “uninspired sensualism.”^40 Auerbach

merely wishes to disassociate these tendencies from Jews and Judaism and,

clearly, from himself as an aspiring Jewish writer.^41 Auerbach is careful to point

out that Heine’s Saint-Simonian “réhabilitation de la chair,” his “new cult,” has

no use for either Christians or Jews.^42 In this essay Auerbach embraces a version

of Judaism consistent with early Reform and insists, repeatedly, that nothing in

Judaism in its current historical development is incompatible with belonging to

the German national community.

In a postscript Auerbach responds to two essays blaming the Jews for Young

Germany’s ills, both of which had appeared after he had completed Das Juden-

thum und die neueste Literatur. One was an anonymous pamphlet attacking

“Die jeune Allemagne in Deutschland,” which characterizes Jews as “homeless

hermaphrodites” (heimathscheuen Zwitter), “devoid of a fatherland” and un-

able “to denationalize themselves, no longer to be that which their history, their

religion, their innermost nature, their future demand—Jews.”^43 The author as-

serts an affinity between the Jews and the French, grounded in a shared negating