Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 21 9

about the genre of Jewish biography, and his aims in undertaking these projects

indeed pull him in opposite directions. Even as he presents prominent Jewish

personalities, Auerbach tries to uncouple Jewishness from its associations with

the fraught image of egoistic and caustic personality that was the object of so

much contemporary criticism.

In June 1836 Auerbach and Naphtali Frankfurter assumed the coeditorship

of the Stuttgart-based Gallerie (Auerbach edited the fifth and last volume by

himself in 1838 ).^93 Under its prior editors, Gustav Schlesier and a certain Count

Breza, the first three issues of the Gallerie had featured a promiscuous mix-

ture of “outstanding Jews” from Moses to Spinoza to David Friedländer, and

from Maimonides to Heine to Rahel Varnhagen.^94 Auerbach and Frankfurter

changed the editorial orientation markedly.

The preface to the 1836 Gallerie is unsigned but, given its tone and content,

was almost certainly written by Auerbach.^95 He strains, not very successfully, to

reconcile the demands of a publication whose very title promises to profile the

most outstanding “Israelites” of all ages with his desire to dissociate Jewishness

from the vexed category of personality and, indeed, to downplay the role of he-

roic personalities in history altogether.

Auerbach vigorously rejects the approach earlier employed in the Gallerie,

which, in Auerbach’s description, had been to “portray, through the cases of

particular individuals, the undeniable existence of great human refinement in

the Jew—in order to demonstrate the duty of humanity... and of raison d’état...

to remove these obstacles and let those innate human capacities [menschlich(e)

Uranlagen] develop freely.” The changed appreciation of the convert encapsu-

lates the new editorial departure. It had made sense for the former editors to

include converts in the Gallerie, given their emphasis on the Jew’s innate capac-

ity for human refinement, “since surely no one would maintain in earnest that a

radical rebirth has taken place through the mere act of conversion.”^96 Auerbach

announces, however, that the new editors will be discontinuing this practice.

The new editorial point of departure is that Judaism—now defined narrowly

as a particular religion—harbors no impediment to human development and

is thus actually irrelevant in the calculus of personal greatness. Above all, Jew-

ishness must not be considered a character trait: “A dogmatic particularity as

such can never be regarded as a definite obstacle to the attainment of universal

human or civil purpose so long as the foundational elements contain no such

obstacle. The fact that Judaism harbors no such obstacle, even if not yet recog-

nized universally in theory, has, however, been demonstrated in actuality. The

attribute Israelite or Jew may no longer be considered a character trait [Charak-

teristicum] .”^97 The problem with this argument, of course, is that it erodes the