Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 23

A humble merchant by trade, he is honest by nature, yet he is driven to engage

in smuggling by the need to support his wife and six children. The conflict

between his responsibilities to his family and to the state erodes his self-esteem

and will to live: “He had to... do things that conflicted with his honesty, made

him despicable in his own eyes, and made the end of his life appear desirable.”

Bendavid presents a man who is fully conscious of the conflict by which he is

torn: “‘I am a harmful member of the state,’ he would often say to me [Ben-

david] with the deepest agitation. ‘The laws of the state are sacred to me, and

I transgress them, am forced to transgress them.’” The “Jewish” pathology is

not personal but rather the symptom of an irreconcilable contradiction between

Jews’ mutually antagonistic private and public responsibilities.^25 Marginalized

economically by his status as a Jew, the man nonetheless passionately affirms the

state’s laws in an impossible identification with the civic realm to which he is not

granted full inclusion.

In the second case study, “Sonderbare Art des Trübsinnes” (Peculiar type

of melancholy), Bendavid presents a Jewish “patient” who seems in many

ways to suffer from Jewishness itself. This study documents the case of E.

from H[amburg], who suffers a nervous breakdown while studying with Kant

in K[önigsberg]. E.’s friends in Königsberg send him back to Hamburg in the

hope that he will recover in the bosom of his family. Stopping in Berlin on the

way to Hamburg, E. comes under Bendavid’s care. Bendavid describes E.’s cu-

rious habit of standing naked for hours at a time before a mirror and regarding

himself with extreme satisfaction. Bendavid later discovers the reason for this in

E.’s delusion that he is the son of a famous prince: “You probably also believe

that the Jew in H. is my father? I am not of Jewish parents, at any rate not sired

by a Jew. I also don’t bear the mark of a Jew on my body, and that safeguards me

from L.—whom you know and who resembles me—being able to masquerade as

me, much as he would like to.”^26 E. insists that he is not circumcised and finds

his claim confirmed in his mirror image, thus rejecting his Jewish paternity on

the plane of fantasy.

Bendavid implies that the illness to which E. succumbs is intimately bound

up with his Jewishness. It is during his studies with Kant, the Enlightenment

philosopher par excellence, that E.’s pathology emerges. The Jewishness that

makes E. a failed student of the Enlightenment, a failed universal subject, has

both the social derivation that E. tries to overcome through a Freudian fam-

ily romance and a more private origin, to which E.’s psychosis equally attests.

These forces conspire to leave E. with a fractured and tormented identity.

One of Bendavid’s subjects takes his own life; the other takes leave of his

reason. Both men suffer from the incommensurability of their Jewish particular-