282 } Notes to Chapter 1
ECJ (see Bourel, “Eine Generation später,” 371 ). Three volumes of Bendavid’s (abridged)
lectures on the three Kantian critiques, one volume devoted to each, appeared in 1795 – 96.
Bendavid would remain philosophically a Kantian throughout his life. Heinrich Heine, who
met Bendavid in the early 1820 s, when they were both associated with the Verein für Cultur
und Wissenschaft der Juden in Berlin, described Bendavid, somewhat derisively and with
characteristic irony, as “ein eingefleischter Kantianer” (a Kantian to the bone; Historisch-
kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke [hereafter DHA], 14 (part 1 ): 268.
41. Niewöhner, “‘Primat der Ethik,’” 126.
42. Ibid., 136. Niewöhner discusses the Orthodox Kantian Isaac Breuer, who found in
Kant’s first critique a philosophical basis for understanding Torah as noumenal. In his chap-
ter on Breuer and other Orthodox Kantians, Ellenson does not include Niewöhner’s study
in a list of “six major articles on the relationship between Immanuel Kant and Judaism [that]
have appeared in the twentieth century” (“German Orthodoxy,” 15 ).
43. Solomon Maimon, Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie (Essay on Transcen-
dental Philosophy). On Maimon’s “Maimonidean interpretation” of Kant, see Abraham So-
cher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon, chapter 3.
44. Saul Ascher, Eisenmenger der Zweite, 36 , 80.
45. Significantly, in remarks on Kant’s ethics in his 1794 Versuch über das Vergnügen ( 236 –
48 ), Bendavid admits his confusion about the apparent absence of any norm underpinning
moral authority in Kant, a problem he illuminates but does not resolve via a comparison
with the political authority of the legislator (Gesetzgeber). Yet the problem of how to iden-
tify the boundary between political and moral authority—the crucial problem that animates
Bendavid’s ECJ—does not lead him to mount a serious challenge to Kant, and—in his 1796
Vorlesungen über die Critik der practischen Vernunft—he seems no longer perplexed and
faithfully explicates Kant’s theory.
46. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity, 122.
47. See, for example, Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, especially 34 – 41.
48. Both Bendavid and Fichte followed the events in France closely. As Fichte’s title sug-
gests, his Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution
(Contribution toward the correction of the public’s assessment of the French Revolution)
is a prolonged, if indirect, apology for the French Revolution. And Bendavid, together with
David Friedländer, quickly translated into German the petitions that had led to the French
National Assembly’s 1791 resolution to grant Jews full civil rights. See M. Graetz, “The Jew-
ish Enlightenment,” 1 : 344.
49. Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant Werkausgabe (hereafter IKW), 3 : 267 – 68.
50. For a more elaborate exploration of the problem of universalization and violence in
Kantian morality, see Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, chapter 7. Lang un-
derscores how, because Kant’s formal principle of universalization attains the status of sub-
stantive ethical content, his moral conception provides no guidance as to how to engage—
morally—with those who fall outside any given delineation of the universal domain: the
formal criteria for moral judgment “do not provide the substantive basis which judgment
requires in order to make the decision to exclude or include certain groups.... [A]n intrin-
sic opening is left for arbitrariness. The consequences of this opening reach their full force
when an individual or group is alleged to cross the boundary by which the universal domain
has been defined: the principles originally articulated within the sphere of the universalist