Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

220 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

entire conception of a gallery of “outstanding Israelites,” which willy-nilly in-

scribes Jewishness as a characteristic of the great personalities it profiles. The

preface directly broaches its central contradiction, yet the attempted resolution

of this paradox only underscores its thorniness: “But what, then, is the point of

a Gallery of the Most Outstanding Israelites? Precisely because we hope, and

confidently work to bring about, that in the appraisal of a prominent personal-

ity one will nevermore inquire into the accident of a person’s birth within a

given religion—precisely therefore it is now the time to sketch the figures who

are still viewed under the aspect of this outlook.”^98 Auerbach’s contorted and

temporally vertiginous motivation for the continued need to feature the all stars

of Jewish history postulates the immanence of an era in which the question of a

person’s birth into a given religion will have been rendered moot. In this future,

the present approach to the Jewish past—which still sees Jewishness as a sig-

nificant component in a Jew’s biography—will seem so strange that it is worth

prolonging for the moment, if only to document it for posterity. Auerbach’s aim

is to deploy the Gallerie in such a way that its presentation of the great figures of

Jewish history will undo not only the rationale for including apostates, but the

very logic on which the Gallerie is founded.

As it continues, the preface displaces the focus on Jewish personalities into

the realms of culture and science, in which the contributions of Jews should

not be seen as related to their Jewishness. In looking back at the Jewish past,

Auerbach asserts, it is imperative to focus not on Jewish individuals per se but

on individuals only as vehicles of significant cultural achievement. Jewish cul-

tural history is destined to be appreciated merely as one component of universal

culture. Auerbach announces, furthermore, a shift from Culturgeschichte to Wis-

senschaftshistorie, which downplays not only the Jewishness of an individual

but the individual tout court. Although the realm of culture, as Auerbach and his

age understood it, remained inherently indebted to the categories of personality,

genius, and greatness, the correlation between individual personalities and their

contributions to the history of Wissenschaft is far more tenuous. Thus in anal-

ogy to how the history of science is obliged to “foreground persons whose great-

ness per se significantly pales in comparison to their work [Wirksamkeit],” the

new “scientific” editorial policy will give due attention to “apparent anomalies

in the developmental history of Jewry [Judenthum]”—that is, to achievements

by persons whose personality is unremarkable and irrelevant.^99

As Auerbach turns his attention from the past to the present, he continues

to sever the connection between Jewishness and personality by reducing Juda-

ism to a narrow question of faith, and to promote the resolution of Jewish partic-

ularity into cultural universality: “When we look around in the present, our aim