Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 15

bridge leading Jews from the periphery to full integration and participation in

civic life. He draws on Kantian philosophy—which he was explicating in his lec-

tures in Vienna at the time—to diagnose modern Jews as morally deficient sub-

jects, the products of a pathologizing history of post-Temple Judaism. Though

a provocateur at the fringe of the Haskalah ( Jewish Enlightenment), Bendavid

devoted himself to Jewish institutions over the decades and opposed conversion

—in Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden and throughout his life. It is star-

tling that he should arrive at a fantasy of cutting off Jewish heads so strikingly

parallel to Fichte’s famously antisemitic conclusion—also from 1793 —that Jews

could be rendered fit for citizenship only through decapitation. The uncanny

similarities in Bendavid’s and Fichte’s rhetoric, I will argue, reach back to the

Kantian foundation of both thinkers’ conceptions of humanity and morality. Ap-

proaching the question of extending Jewish civil rights from the standpoint of

the normative Kantian moral subject, both Bendavid and Fichte come to the

conclusion that the only way to incorporate Jews into the civil sphere is, in fact,

through the paradoxical and gruesome means of symbolic decapitation. Both

Kantians come to view decapitation as the only possible cure, as it were, for

Jewish wrongheadedness.^1

I propose to read Bendavid’s deployment of Kant in his diagnosis of the

moral and psychic deficiencies of the modern Jew, and his vision of a cure for

the affliction of Jewishness thus understood, alongside the remarks Fichte makes

on a Jewish “state within a state” in Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des

Publikums über die französische Revolution (Contribution toward the correction

of the public’s assessment of the French Revolution), comments that marked

an important shift in anti-Jewish discourse from a theological to a purely philo-

sophical denigration of Jewishness.^2 By doing so I try to lay bare the double

bind in which the Jewish Kantian Bendavid found himself when he tried to ad-

vocate for civil emancipation for Jews from the normative foundation of Kantian

universalism.

The suprahistorical Kantian moral subject provides both the implicit stan-

dard—in terms of which Bendavid plots the deviant path of Jewish (psychic)

history in the diaspora—and the model for the curative dissolution of this his-

tory (or case history) of the Jews. As we know, however, the Enlightenment was

not the golden age at the end of history but rather the conceptual laboratory

in which many of the concepts later appropriated by nineteenth-century his-

torical thought were fabricated. Even as Bendavid wrote, the sort of emergent

nationalism we find in Fichte’s text was eroding Enlightenment universalism.^3

In the aggressiveness of his assimilationist demands, and especially in his char-

acterological understanding of the Jews, Bendavid comes very close indeed to