Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 221

must be [so gilt es] to demonstrate through the cases of particular individuals

how Jews everywhere strive to be able to pursue unimpeded, as here and there

it is already granted them to do in full measure, their yearning for the true and

the great; and how they strive, while retaining their independence of faith, to let

their particularities be resolved totally into the service of advancing the general

good.”^100 The new editorial preface announces the aim to portray not particular

Jewish individuals but to demonstrate, through the depiction of Jewish individ-

uals, the Jews’ will to universality. Jews everywhere wish completely to resolve

their Jewish particularity (Specialitäten) into the cause of the common weal.

Auerbach’s editorial vision was to make the Gallerie the swan song of Jewish

personality as an operative cultural category, to feature Jewish personality at its

vanishing point.

Auerbach contributed four essays to the Gallerie. He profiled Gabriel Riesser

in the fourth volume and wrote all three portraits in the fifth—on “Rothschild

and the Jews,” Gotthold Salomon, and Michael Beer.^101 The essay on Beer is

arguably the richest with regard to Auerbach’s uncoupling of Jewishness and

personality.^102 A playwright who in his short life ( 1800 – 1833 ) produced three

plays, Beer achieved greatest success with the one-act Der Paria ( 1823 ), a work

in indirect support of Jewish emancipation. Early in the essay Auerbach hails,

in Beer’s example, the advent in Jewish history of a certain normality in the

education process that will repay the losses it entails in “great personalities”

(großartige Persönlichkeiten) with what Auerbach characterizes (in a phrase he

would repeat in various contexts) as “an even temperature of education” (eine

gleichmäßige Temperatur der Bildung). Auerbach upholds such evenness as the

ultimate goal of intellectual endeavor:

It is gratifying finally to come upon, in the history of the Jews, an educa-

tional trajectory with the regularity and consistency that spares individuals

from having to work their way through a series of obstacles to [achieve] their

natural development. While this entails that far fewer great personalities

emerge, an even temperature of education radiates in all directions, and this

must indeed remain the aim of all intellectual striving [geistigen Strebens].

We mustn’t bewail the demise of Jewish poetry and philosophy in our age;

poetry and philosophy must rest upon a purely human foundation. When

built upon dogmas and confessional beliefs, they have always a merely subor-

dinate value, and only when they open onto universality do they attain their

true significance.^103

Regularity and an “even temperature” of education is preferable to the idio-

syncratic greatness of earlier autodidacts, who had to struggle mightily to gain