Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

270 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Creator?), the thrust of which is to install supra-individualism at the heart of the

Jewish nation. Well-known themes from Rome and Jerusalem such as Jewish

—particularly maternal—love, which is never exhausted in individual sexual

desire or romantic sentimentality but rather is profoundly oriented toward chil-

dren and the future; Hess’s praise of Jewish patriotism and trenchant critique

of Reform Judaism for reducing a national religion to a matter of individual

faith; his embrace of an ineluctable racial component in Judaism that ties even

apostates and their offspring to the Jewish totality and has sustained itself for

millennia—all these exemplify the supra-individuality that for Hess is the Jews’

defining characteristic, their genius.^96

When Hess holds up Jewish collective sensibilities and life practices, and

Spinoza, as the antidote to the ills of Christian dualism and the spiritual and

materialistic individualism it engenders, we recognize a variation on familiar

Hessian themes:^97

It is the Jewish conception of the family which gave rise to the vivid belief in

the continuity of the spirit in human history.... When modern dualism of

spirit and matter, the result of the separation of Christianity from Judaism,

had found its highest expression in the works of the last Christian philoso-

pher, Descartes, and had threatened to kill all unity of life, there arose again

out of Judaism the belief in the existence of one eternal force in Nature and

history. This belief acted as a bulwark against spiritual egoism, on the one

hand, and materialistic individualism on the other. Just as Christian dualism

received its mortal blow from the teachings of Spinoza, so does the existence

of the ancient Jewish people, with its model family life, act as an antidote

against this disease of dualism in practical life.^98

A confluence of factors—including the anthropology and biology that Hess de-

voted himself to in the late 1850 s, mid-nineteenth-century race discourse, and

the contemporary phenomenon of Italian nationalism—allowed Hess to see in

the Jewish race the promise of a living, monistic, human totality unencumbered

by the limitations of egoism and its attendant ills:^99 “Judaism does not allow

either spiritualistic or materialistic sects to exist in its midst. Jewish life, like its

divine ideal and goal, is undivided, and it is this Monism of Jewish life which is

only the reverse side of Christian spiritualism. I do not speak here of philosoph-

ical systems or of religious dogmas, or of life conceptions, but of life itself.”^100

Hess sent a copy of Rome and Jerusalem in advance of its publication to his

old friend Auerbach. If he hoped his book might mend the long-standing rift in

their friendship, he was mistaken. Auerbach put down Hess’s work in disgust

without having finished it.^101 Hess’s national and racial understanding of Juda-