Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

20 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

1530 ) and by Christians like Martin Luther (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen [On

the Jews and Their Lies], 1543 ).^14 Johann Buxtorf the Elder’s expansive Juden

Schul [The Jewish synagogue] of 1603 would remain the authoritative repre-

sentative of this genre into the eighteenth century, when it would be eclipsed by

such works as Andreas Eisenmenger’s virulent Entdecktes Judenthum [ Jewry

revealed], which first appeared in 1700 , and Johann Jacob Schudt’s multivol-

ume Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten [ Jewish curiosities], 1714 – 17.^15 The thrust of

such catalogues was generally to trace Jewish behavior back to its basis in theo-

logical error. Jewish rebuttals—for example, by the seventeenth-century Italian

rabbi Leone Modena in Historia de’ riti hebraici (Account of Jewish rituals;

written in 1614 – 15 and published in two different editions in 1637 and 1638 ), or

the apologies for Jews and Jewish customs that the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh

ben Israel penned in the 1650 s in the context of the debate over the readmission

of Jews to Cromwellian England—generally emphasize the rationality of the

Jewish customs they catalogue as well as their rootedness in scripture.^16

Bendavid’s approach is radically secular. He abandons religious apologetics,

and although he does admonish Jews to cast off all vestiges of Jewish custom and

“return” to “the pure teaching of Moses,” the purportedly “Mosaic” doctrine to

which Bendavid would have Jews “return” amounts to nothing more than “the

doctrine of natural religion.”^17 Vis-à-vis earlier accounts of “characteristics” of

the Jews, Bendavid’s project marks a departure from theological ethnography

toward normative philosophical anthropology. He may take the critical narrative

—familiar from Christian theologians like Buxtorf—of rabbinic Judaism as a his-

tory of decline and perversion, yet he detheologizes, psychologizes, and indeed

pathologizes it. A temporalized and quasi-medical framework displaces the con-

cern with essentially timeless theological truth or error. What Bendavid traces is

the historical evolution of a psychic disturbance.

The temporalization of medicine and psychology that made Bendavid’s di-

agnosis possible was part of the paradigm shift in the human and natural sci-

ences at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, analyzed most in-

fluentially by Michel Foucault. Though several of Foucault’s particular claims

in The Birth of the Clinic have been contested from a range of perspectives, his

insistence on a shift in what we could call the temporality of pathology is gener-

ally accepted and finds corroboration in the work of historians of science such

as Wolf Lepenies.^18 Throughout the seventeenth century and most of the eigh-

teenth, Foucault argues, diseases were understood as timeless essences, whose

manifestation in any given patient entailed a kind of corruption. Subject to the

contingencies of time, manifest symptoms were viewed as altogether decep-

tive nosographical signs. Temporality, so problematic for classical medicine,