Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 209

character, and deploys further nasty anti-Jewish stereotypes to hold up Jews

as the insidious hucksters of the French culture that he believes is poisoning

the pure German Gemüth. The other was a subsequent essay that Menzel had

penned against Young Germany, “Die junge Literatur.” In it Menzel identifies

Heine and Heine’s Jewishness as the chief source of the ills of the Young Ger-

man movement.^44 Auerbach does not object to the warning that the essay sounds

about the perils of the French (above all, Saint-Simonian) ideas that jeune Alle-

magne was importing from across the Rhine.^45 What he objects to is the fact that

the essay pursues these serious issues only as a means of heaping anathema on

the Jews and “their supposed leader, the fashionable H. Heine.”^46 Combating

Menzel’s branding of Heine and Gutzkow as the “prototype of Judaism and

the Jews,” Auerbach asks: “Where is a stroke of Heine’s pen that can be at-

tributed to Jewishness per se [Judenthum an sich], where a single word that he

could not also have uttered as a born Christian?”^47 In a cri de coeur Auerbach

exclaims: “We [German Jews] respect and love German morality and German

heart [Herz] because it is also our morality, our heart. I am of the happy, confi-

dent conviction that I express the sentiments of the entire young generation of

Jews when I add: Test us in the crucible of danger [Feuerprobe der Gefahr], and

you will find us pure, pure of all dross [Schlacken] of egoism and cunning vice

[raffinierter Unsitte] .”^48

Although Spinoza makes only fleeting appearances in Auerbach’s debut

essay, the philosopher’s legacy is a significant subtext of the aspiring writer’s

vigorous dissociation of himself and Jewishness from Heinean self-indulgence.

One of the key texts with which Auerbach takes issue is Heine’s Zur Geschichte

der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the history of religion and

philosophy in Germany), which had appeared roughly a year earlier. Heine had

attempted, Auerbach writes, “a historical justification for his sensualistic re-

volts. As the encyclopedists did to church history in order to negate it, he, in his

opposition, has recast the history of philosophy as a chronique scandaleuse.”^49

Auerbach claimed that at the heart of Heine’s project was a desire to establish a

new religion, “so-called pantheism, i.e. [Heine and Co.] wish to make an idol of

the beloved ego [das liebe Ich], with all its dependencies and contingencies.”^50

Beyond the immediate problem of disputing the purportedly Jewish nature of

Heinean subjectivity, Auerbach is particularly exercised by what he considered

Heine’s egoistic perversion of pantheism: his subversive inscription of Spinoza

into the history of German philosophy with the aim of justifying wantonly sen-

sualist subjective pleasures.^51 Auerbach, who was beginning work on his novel-

istic portrayal of Spinoza as a transcendent figure, would have been distressed

indeed by what he saw as Heine’s deployment of Spinoza.^52 Heine famously