Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 223

roes [Ichsheroen] are long gone, along with the age whose capricious moods

they indulged and which thus coddled them.^107

The poets who are extravagantly concerned with their own subjectivity, the “Ichs-

heroen” to whom Auerbach strenuously opposes Beer, are capable of regarding

a phenomenon other than themselves at best only “through a critical lorgnette”

(mit kritischem Lorgnett), an image and phrase that evoke the “Frenchness”

and captiousness of Auerbach’s literary adversaries. In distancing Beer from

the overly critical and foreign subjectivity of the Ichspoeten, Auerbach seeks to

safeguard him from the same anti-Jewish stereotype conflating the unwelcome

Other within with the enemy across the Rhein that he had challenged in his

debut essay, in which he disputed the linkage between “la jeune Allemagne” and

Jewishness. Moreover, it eventually becomes clear that Auerbach is at pains to

defend Beer from the charge of extravagant subjectivity as a Jewish characteris-

tic: “It has rightly been noted that M. B. is an example that can serve to expose

the spuriousness of those allegations that aim to instill in the Jews a bad con-

science for all the extravagances of Christian authors, and that descry every free

expression of life by a Jewish author as an anti-Christian tendency.”^108 Echoing

his argument in “Das Judentum und die neueste Literatur,” Auerbach holds

Beer up as evidence of the spuriousness of Menzel’s and others’ attempt to de-

rive the “extravagances” of even Christian authors from a pernicious quality of

Jewishness.

Auerbach’s Biography of Spinoza

Much of Auerbach’s biography of Spinoza is metabiography. Auerbach reflects

at length on the relationship between Spinoza the person and Spinoza the

oeuvre. Auerbach’s meditations furthermore recall his engagement, in his edito-

rial introduction to the Gallerie some five years earlier, with the question of the

relationship between cultural history (Culturgeschichte) and the history of Wis-

senschaft, and the personalities who make contributions to them. He opens the

biography by distinguishing between the different ways that “heroes and states-

men” versus “poets and philosophers” are personally implicated in the actions

for which history remembers them. The acts these two categories of protagonist

perform can be dichotomized into the contingent historical Ta t (deed) and the

timeless Geistestat (intellectual or creative act). Although the person of the his-

torical hero is integral to an understanding of the deeds he or she performs, the

works of philosophers and poets possess an eternal truth of their own, indepen-

dent of their—frequently anonymous or indeed mythical—“authors.”^109