1

Introduction

From the late eighteenth century Jews gained increasing exposure to German

cultural life. Possibilities for Jews to participate in politics in German lands,

however, remained severely limited. Although a modest number of Jews served

in city administrations in the decades before 1848 , they were excluded from es-

tates’ assemblies at the state level. It was not until the tumultuous events of the

Revolution of 1848 – 49 that Jews (briefly) experienced something approaching

full political and civil rights and played a prominent role in German politics—

serving in the parliaments or constitutional assemblies of numerous German

states, in the Vorparlement (preliminary parliament) in Frankfurt, and later in

the National Assembly—as well as fighting and dying on the barricades along-

side their non-Jewish fellow revolutionaries.^1

Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789 – 1848 examines how, in the

absence of more tangible possibilities for political engagement in these years,

the creative explosion of German philosophy provided resources that certain

intellectuals drew on to envision a place for Jews in the polity. A passionate

Kantian, Lazarus Bendavid, in the early 1790 s (chapter 1 ); an association of first-

generation Jewish university students who organized themselves according to

Hegelian principles into the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (as-

sociation for the culture and science of the Jews) around 1820 (chapters 2 and 3 );

the young Karl Marx, trying to overcome philosophical and political abstraction

in the early 1840 s (chapter 4 ); the popular novelist Berthold Auerbach and his

friend Moses Hess, the visionary communist philosopher and political activist,

each finding in his divergent interpretation of Spinoza in the late 1830 s and early

1840 s a way to harmonize Jews with a wider community (chapters 5 and 6 )—all

the thinkers this book scrutinizes creatively deployed the conceptual tools made

available to them by different philosophical paradigms to imagine the potential,

terms, and consequences of Jewish inclusion in the polity.

In engaging in this sort of philosophical politics, these writers performed

a Jewish variation on a wider theme in German philosophical culture of the

period. Although the political turmoil in France—the Revolutions of 1789 and

1830 and the Napoleonic era in between—demonstrated the possibility of radi-

http://www.ebook3000.com