Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 19

Temple and failed attempts to regain their lost sovereignty, the Jews turned—as a

last resort—to a moral attack, hoping to regain their homeland not by might but

rather by moral improvement. Since the destruction of the Second Temple, to

further summarize Bendavid’s construction of post-Temple Jewish history, Jew-

ish biblical exegesis has been overdetermined by the needs of a “slave mental-

ity.” Bendavid traces a fateful displacement from robust action to impotent piety,

from praxis to superstitious belief. He erodes the theological underpinnings of

Jewish history and reduces Jewish piety to a powerless people’s neurotic and

delusional form of warfare. Bendavid not only psychologizes but also patholo-

gizes Jewish post-Temple existence and the entire rabbinic tradition. In Benda-

vid’s hands, Dohm’s Leidensgeschichte (lachrymose history) is transformed into

a Krankengeschichte (pathography): a diagnostic case history of what Bendavid

casts as an essentially pathological modern Jewish character.

In his attempt to reconcile Jews with Enlightenment reason and citizenship,

Bendavid’s historicization of the Jews is subtended by a normalizing univer-

salist anthropology—specifically, the Kantian moral subject. Bendavid relies on

the logic of Kantian morality in order both to construct and to dissolve his his-

tory of Jewish particularity as private pathology. Bendavid’s interest in Kantian

philosophy was far-reaching and provides the implicit, though never explicit,

conceptual framework of Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden. What a Chris-

tian theological bias had earlier cast as divine punishment of the Jews, Bendavid

recasts in terms of their own subjective moral weakness, a failure of will that it

has now become incumbent on them to redress through a leap out of the symp-

tomatology of Jewish history and into the suprahistorical realm of autonomous

Kantian moral subjectivity. This philosophical framework significantly contrib-

utes to the contradictions of Bendavid’s unsettling discourse, and it animates

the violent fantasy with which he tries to resolve these contradictions, a political

fantasy with deep philosophical affinities to Fichte’s. However, as I have already

noted, although Bendavid’s treatise owes its conceptual architecture to Kant -

ian moral philosophy, it is also rooted in the emergent discourse of popular

psychology.

Jews and the Emergent Discourse of Popular Psychology

In its psychologizing thrust, Bendavid’s treatise marks an emphatic departure

from a long history of early modern theologically invested ethnographies of

Jews written in German by baptized Jews such as Johann Pfefferkorn (Juden-

beicht [ Jews’ confession], 1508 ; and Osterbüchlein [Easter book], 1509 ) and

Antonius Margaritha (Der Gantz Jüdisch Glaub [The complete Jewish belief ],