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Concluding Remarks

Moses Hess’s Spinozan Jewish nationalism—his celebration of the monism of

Jewish life as opposed to the dualism and egoistic spiritualism of secularized

Christian thought and institutions—brings us full circle. Lazarus Bendavid

hoped to slay the monstrous collective Jewish body and awaken Kantian moral

will in postcollective Jewish individuals. Hess leans on Spinoza to insist that

there is such a thing as a Jewish national body at a time when secularization and

acculturation, liberalism and Reform had made this a questionable (and to many

German Jews, including Berthold Auerbach, an infuriating) proposition.

Hess’s 1862 Rome and Jerusalem takes us well beyond 1848 , which ushered

in a new political sensibility among German Jews as well as, however briefly,

highly prominent Jewish participation in German politics. (Auerbach, for ex-

ample, served in the Frankfurt Vorparlament, although he was not elected to the

National Assembly.) The events of 1848 – 49 did not ultimately advance the cause

of Jewish emancipation. Indeed they probably impeded that cause.^1 Yet 1848

did mark a significant change in German-Jewish political self-understanding.

The emergence of prominent Jewish politicians and activists, the nearly unani-

mous support among German liberals for Jewish emancipation, and the wide-

spread popular antisemitic violence that erupted in German lands in March

and April 1848 strongly consolidated the Jewish identification with liberalism

that leading Jewish political activists like Gabriel Riesser had been fostering

since the early 1830 s.^2 The liberal cause now won over even the members of the

old Orthodox community, among whom—up to the eve of the revolutionary

events—there could still be found significant resistance to the project of eman-

cipation and the denationalization of Jewish identity that it entailed.^3 Despite

the reactionary backlash of the immediate postrevolutionary years, this political

orientation proved resilient, and it grew stronger as liberalism found new energy

after 1858 and Jewish emancipation made significant gains in the course of the

1860 s. The Jewish community’s internal religious diversity notwithstanding,

the overwhelming majority of Jews in Germany had come to identify as German

Jews and to see their political hopes as thoroughly entwined and largely identi-

cal with those of their non-Jewish countrymen across the liberal spectrum.^4