Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 17

early version of, to use Salo Baron’s famous term, the “lachrymose” theory of

Jewish history.^4 He attributed the sociocultural situation of European Jews to a

history of passive suffering: centuries of exile, persecution, and neglect. Dohm

argued that improving the Jews’ civil status would also improve the Jews them-

selves, rendering them fit citizens and a valuable resource for the state. Soon

after the publication of Dohm’s seminal treatise in September 1781 (the timing

was coincidental, not causal) came the first emancipation legislation in Austria.^5

In the dynamic discursive and political context of the 1780 s and early 1790 s,

the task of theorizing the relationship between history, Jewish tradition, and the

Jews’ place in the polity became central for a number of Jewish Enlightenment

intellectuals, or maskilim. David Sorkin notes “a subtle, albeit significant shift”

that took place in the years after the deaths of Moses Mendelssohn and Fred-

erick the Great in 1786. The early Haskalah project of cultural renewal became

politicized, and “the early Haskalah’s prescriptions for the intellectual renewal

of Judaism were now enlisted as remedies for the affliction of the Jews.”^6 The

possibility of emancipation engendered debate over what involvement in the

state could be extended to Jews, and to which Jews. The Enlightenment eman-

cipation debate thus not only reconfigured the relationship between Jews and

the broader society but also intensified and lent greater political stakes to differ-

ences among Jews.

Dohm’s “lachrymose” history of the Jews, which so powerfully influenced

the emancipation debate throughout the 1780 s and 1790 s, not only helped pre-

pare the ground for this eventual shift in the Haskalah from cultural revival to-

ward social and political issues, but also ensured that narratives of Jewish his-

tory would serve as an important medium through which Jews and non-Jews

alike would articulate competing positions on Jewish emancipation.^7 Politici-

zation and historicization went hand in hand: history, which had not been a

preoccupation for Jews as long as Jews maintained a high degree of autonomy,

quickly became an urgent issue as cultural and civic distinctions between Jews

and non-Jews grew blurred and contested.

Such is the heady context in which Bendavid elaborated Etwas zur Charack-

teristick der Juden, one of the most controversial and confounding texts of the

Jewish Enlightenment.^8 Dominique Bourel has pointed to the “quasi-messianic

ecstasy” with which German-Jewish intellectuals of the 1780 s and early 1790 s

believed in an imminent improvement in the civil status of Jews.^9 Bendavid’s

text appeared not only a decade after Joseph II’s Edicts of Toleration but also

shortly after the French National Assembly granted civil equality to the Jews in

1791 , and immediately after the first naturalization of Jews in Prussia and the first

admission of Jews to the Prussian civil service.^10