Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
12 } Introduction
wise teases dynamics of contestation and subversion out of an era of German-
Jewish discourse that was conventionally taken to exemplify a Jewish preoccu-
pation with assimilation to external norms and values. Such dynamics of Jewish
contestation also animate studies such as Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew
and Todd Presner’s Mobile Modernity. By any measure, the subversive paradigm
within German-Jewish studies has been analytically powerful and has enriched,
and at times dramatically altered, how we understand crucial currents within
German-Jewish culture. I too tease out instances of scrappy Jewish counter-
punching, for example in what I read as Immanuel Wolf ’s undoing of the secu-
larized Christian supercessionism that underpins the place that Hegel assigns
Spinoza in the development of Spirit. Yet to the extent that unearthing subver-
sive tendencies in the German-Jewish tradition allows us to identify with and, at
times, root for its misunderstood heroes, it should also give us pause. There is
much truth in the narratives of German-Jewish subversion, but such narratives
are also perhaps seductively satisfying. Although indispensable, the paradigm
of subversion is not without blind spots. As Hess has shown, the nineteenth-
century middlebrow German-Jewish literature that he unearths and analyzes
in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity resided in
one such blind spot, and doing justice to it required a change of critical perspec-
tive.^17 Heroicizing narratives that pit intellectual Davids against the Goliath of
the German intellectual tradition are apt to miss crucial questions that certain
Jewish thinkers pose regarding the terms of Jewish and German modernity by
trying to think, as Jews, not only against but also with some of the most power-
ful currents in the German philosophical tradition. What is significant about
Bendavid, for example, is not how he might be read to subvert Kant nor how he
might simply be marshaled to corroborate the verdict that Kant’s philosophy
is structurally antisemitic. In a more complicated picture, Bendavid highlights
dangers of Kant’s autonomy-heteronomy dualism even as he deploys the most
hazardous edge of Kantian thought to negotiate a place for Jews in the polity.
Similarly, I am not only (although I am certainly also) interested in the attempts
of the members of the Verein to think their way around Hegel, but also in their
attempts to think their way into Hegel’s state. What possibilities and dangers
did different philosophical paradigms afford Jewish intellectuals for thinking
a polity in which they would have a place? How did minority groups refract
and mobilize new theoretical paradigms that would eventually become founda-
tional to philosophical and political modernity? How do we reassess Kant and
Hegel in light of the philosophical politics that they inspired on the part of their
Jewish adherents? These are the questions that Bendavid’s and the Vereinler’s
projects pose, projects that render it difficult to cast their authors in the role of