Bendavid, ECJ, 12 – 13. See also Nietzsche’s remarks on the invention of the idea of free
moral will and the reinterpretation of defeat as Gehorsam (Jenseits von Gut und Böse; Zur
Genealogie der Moral, 280 – 81 ), on the derivation of “bad conscience” (ibid., 332 – 36 ), and on
how the ascetic ideal provides a meaning for suffering (ibid., 411 – 12 ).
See also Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse; Zur Genealogie der Moral, 281 – 83.
Similarly, Nietzsche sees morality as a form of “spiritual revenge” (“ein Akt der geisti-
gen Rache”) and “the most fundamental of all declarations of war” (“dies[e] grundsätzlichtst
[e] aller Kriegserklärungen”) (Jenseits von Gut und Böse; Zur Genealogie der Moral, 267 ). It
is this conception of the moral valorization of weakness as the last resort of the defeated, as a
displaced but still essentially martial strategy, that constitutes the substantive conceptual link
between Bendavid and Nietzsche. Bendavid’s characterization of traditional Judaism as the
“slave mentality of past centuries” (“Sklavensinn voriger Jahrhunderte”) is not novel rhetor-
ically (ECJ, 65 ). In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, for example, which ap-
peared on Easter 1793 , and thus virtually concurrently with Bendavid’s ECJ, Kant contrasts
the Greek spirit of freedom—and, especially, the new form of moral freedom ushered in with
Jesus’s advent—with the “slavish mind” (Sklavensinn) of the Jews (Religion and Rational
Theology [hereafter RRT], 119 ). Yet Kant defines the Jews’ slave mentality in terms of the
this-worldly orientation of Jewish law and ceremonial observance and the external compul-
sion with which it was enforced, in contrast to the pure autonomy of true morality. Unlike
Kant, Bendavid does not see the Jew’s Sklavensinn as inherent in the material and external
orientation of Jewish theocracy, but rather theorizes it as a psychological and moral response
to the loss of sovereignty. In this, Bendavid’s conception of Judaism as the “slave mentality of
past centuries” indeed anticipates Nietzsche’s memorable characterization in Beyond Good
and Evil of a Jewish “slave uprising in morality” (“Sklaven-Aufstand in der Moral”; Jenseits
von Gut und Böse; Zur Genealogie der Moral, 116 – 17 ).
Bendavid, ECJ, 14.
Ibid., 14 – 17. See also Nietzsche on ressentiment, Jenseits von Gut und Böse; Zur Ge-
nealogie der Morale, 270 – 74.
Bendavid, ECJ, 21 – 22.
For studies from the early twentieth century that posit strong affinities if not identity
between Judaism and Kantian moral philosophy, see Hermann Cohen, “Innere Beziehungen
der Kantischen Philosophie zum Judentum”; Julius Guttmann, “Kant und das Judentum”;
and David Neumark, “Historical and Systematic Relations of Judaism to Kant.” Heinz Mos-
che Graupe surveys the Jewish engagement with Kant as a “chapter in German and Jewish
intellectual history of the 150 years between 1780 and 1930 ” (“Kant und das Judentum,” 309 ).
For an analysis of fin de siècle appropriations of Kant by Orthodox Jewish thinkers, see David
Ellenson, “German Orthodoxy, Jewish Law, and the Uses of Kant.”
Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 170.
Friedrich Niewöhner, “‘Primat der Ethik’ oder ‘erkenntnistheoretische Begründung
der Ethik’?”
See the note by Andreas Kennecke, the editor and translator of this essay, in Isaak
Abraham Euchel, Vom Nutzen der Aufklärung, 32. For analyses of Euchel’s essay, see Ken-
necke, Isaac Euchel, chapter 9 ; Schulte, Die Jüdische Aufklärung, 162.
Schulte, Die Jüdische Aufklärung, 167. Bendavid was the first person to deliver public
lectures on Kant in Vienna (from 1794 to 1797 ), where he moved in 1791 and where he wrote
