Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

16 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Fichte’s equally aggressive and characterological understanding of the essen-

tial nonhumanity of Jews. Unlike Fichte, however, Bendavid politicizes Kantian

moral philosophy in order ultimately to gain access to the German polity for

himself and enlightened Jews like him. Although Bendavid’s tract throws into

relief the serious dangers inherent in Kantian universalism, it is vitally impor-

tant to appreciate that it does so precisely as an articulation of a Jewish Kantian

politics. What makes Bendavid’s work so richly fascinating and troubling—and

why it takes us beyond the mere question of whether Kant’s moral philosophy

is structurally antisemitic—is that Bendavid seeks to establish terms of equal

participation in the polity for Jews precisely by deploying Kantian thought’s

most perilous edge.

Although Bendavid’s implicit Kantianism guides his diagnosis of Judaism

as a pathology to be overcome via a leap into a model of suprahistorical moral

subjectivity, his work is also rooted in the psychological discourse that emerged

at the intersection of medicine and popular philosophy in the decade prior to

the publication of his treatise. To understand how Bendavid arrived at his vola-

tile, aporetic, and highly politicized diagnosis of Jewish history and subjectivity,

then, requires a threefold contextualization. In addition to the dynamics of Kant-

ian moral philosophy at play in Bendavid’s work—the crucial philosophical

context—his text responds to its historical and political context of the emanci-

pation debate in Germany during the 1780 s and early 1790 s. In addition, Ben-

david’s narrative of Jewish history emerges in dialogue with the phenomenon

of a new diachronic appreciation of the disease process and the concomitant

possibilities for narrating history as pathography that this temporalization of

medicine opened up. Bendavid’s approach to the history of the Jews grows out

of and extends his earlier foray into the emerging discourse of popular psychol-

ogy, which took the form of two case histories of individual Jews. In these case

histories, Bendavid dramatizes questions regarding the capacity of particular

Jews to embrace Kantian reason, or to reconcile their social and legal station

with productive and moral participation in society. While Kantian moral phi-

losophy figures the end of Bendavid’s narrative of Jewish history as the history

of a psychic pathology, it is in the genre of eighteenth-century popular psychol-

ogy that this narrative has one of its origins.

The Politicization of Jewish History

from Dohm to Bendavid

In Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the civil improvement of

the Jews), the Prussian civil servant Christian Wilhelm von Dohm elaborated an