Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Introduction { 3
explores ways that Jewish thinkers have negotiated and contested German Ide-
alism’s purported antisemitism.^3 Paul Rose and Michael Mack have each argued
that antisemitism is neither a minor nor an incidental, but in fact a constitutive,
component of German Idealism.^4 For Rose, Kant and Fichte (as well as Herder)
laid the intellectual foundation for what Rose calls “revolutionary antisemitism,”
a secular form of Jew hatred that constructs Jews and Judaism as that from which
both the German nation and humanity at large must be redeemed. Mack makes
the similar argument that for Kant and Hegel, the Jews “embody all that which
hinders the construction of a perfect body politic in the here and now,” and that
in German Idealism’s quest to construct a “perfect, noncontingent world,” “the
Jews represented this detrimental difference of worldly contingency” and thus
“signified that which had to be overcome.”^5 This study departs from both the
traditional study of German Idealism’s image of Judaism and from Rose’s and
Mack’s critiques of antisemitism’s constitutive role in the German intellectual
tradition by focusing primarily on Jewish intellectuals who tried to “think Jew-
ish” not only against, but also with, conceptual models invented or reinvented
during the classical age of German philosophy.
When analyzing how German Idealism constructs Jewishness as its Other we
must be careful not to let our own analytic aperture complete the job. Privileging
the (real) anti-Jewish strains in Kant and Hegel leads almost ineluctably to an
impoverished reading of Jewish intellectuals who think in their wake as either
resistant or self-hating.^6 Yet the conceptual resources these master thinkers put
at their followers’ disposal were enormous, and Jewish intellectuals thinking
through Jewish modernity in the keys of German Idealism were not limited to
or necessarily dominated by its anti-Jewish strains. Indeed, once we let go of the
binary of German philosopher and Jewish Other, we discover that Jewish think-
ers from the classical age of German philosophy showed themselves to be quite
nimble in thinking with, not only against, the master thinkers—challenging
some aspects of their thought but skillfully appropriating and deploying others
in ways that allowed them to imagine a place for themselves in the philosophi-
cal community of German modernity. This book takes seriously such thinkers
who tend to explode the German philosopher–Jewish Other binary by using
the conceptual tools of German philosophy to think through and intervene in
the situation of Jews in political modernity. It should go without saying that this
is not tantamount to celebrating any of the specific postures that these thinkers
adopted or programs that they advocated. My aim, rather, is to illuminate the
complex, often ambivalent, and sometimes bewildering uses to which a range of
Jewish thinkers put the tools that German philosophy placed at their disposal
in the heady era of 1789 – 1848 in order to reimagine Jewish history, community,
