Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
xii } Acknowledgments
Biale on behalf of the Posen Foundation; Dan Diner, Simon Dubnow Institute,
Leipzig; and Sylvia Fried and Eugene Sheppard, Tauber Institute for the Study
of European Jewry, Brandeis University. I thank the audiences at these lectures
for their questions and remarks, as well as the audiences of panels on which I
presented aspects of this project at the Association for Jewish Studies, the Ger-
man Studies Association, and the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop.
My research was aided by the staffs of Hebrew Union College’s Klau Li-
brary in Cincinnati; the University of Cincinnati’s Langsam Library; Miami
University’s King Library; and the Shields Library at the University of Califor-
nia, Davis. Thanks go also to Katharina Erbe, who transcribed several handwrit-
ten documents of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden.
I am especially indebted to Eugene Sheppard for showing an interest in this
project well before it was fully formulated and for encouraging me to submit it
to be considered for publication in the Tauber Institute Series for the Study
of European Jewry. As associate director of the Tauber Institute, Eugene read
and most helpfully commented on the entire manuscript. Sylvia Fried, associate
editor of the Tauber Institute series, and Phyllis Deutsch, editor-in-chief at the
University Press of New England, have shared sage advice throughout the pro-
cess of making final revisions, for which I am greatly appreciative. I thank Jeanne
Ferris for the thoroughness with which she copy-edited my manuscript, and
Michael Taber for preparing the index. I am enormously grateful to Jonathan
Hess, who, as a reader for the press, could not have been more incisive in his
evaluation of my project, or more intellectually generous in his suggestions
for improving it. I also thank an anonymous reader for providing constructive
criticism. David Biale, who read the manuscript as a reader of my tenure file at
Miami University, likewise commented extensively on the project and made sug-
gestions that have greatly improved this book.
My new colleagues in the Department of German and Russian at the Uni-
versity of California, Davis—in particular, Gail Finney, Jaimey Fisher, Elisabeth
Krimmer, and Chunjie Zhang—have shown generous interest in my work and
warmly welcomed me to my new institutional home.
An earlier version of much of chapter 1 appeared as “Lazarus Bendavid’s and
J. G. Fichte’s Kantian Fantasies of Jewish Decapitation in 1793 ,” Jewish Social
Studies 13 , no. 3 ( 2007 ): 73 – 102 ; I am grateful to Indiana University Press for
permission to reprint material from that article here.
I could not have written this book without my family and friends. Leah Hoch-
man kept me on track during a critical half year or more by receiving, biweekly,
my latest pages and consistently encouraging me no matter how meager or rough
they were. Julia Scheffer shared her insights on a couple of particularly thorny
