Fichte, Beitrag, 115. Anthony La Vopa aptly characterizes Fichte’s distinction between
the Jewish and the human community: “The language virtually equates the human with
the Christian. In the face of the Jewish presence, Fichte’s Kantian reverence for ‘human-
ity’ provides a new sanction for his ethnocentrism. The Jews, he implies, have no one but
themselves to blame for their pariah status; they have placed themselves beyond the pale of
human love. That implication stands oddly juxtaposed to his acknowledgment that the Jews,
though undeserving of ‘civil rights,’ cannot be deprived of ‘human rights’” (Fichte, 146 – 47 ).
La Vopa’s reconstruction of the historical, biographical, and discursive contexts of Fichte’s
antisemitic remarks is rich and nuanced (ibid., 131 – 49 ).
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, 54.
Bendavid, ECJ, 32 – 34 , and 56.
Ibid., 65. Even Bendavid’s sense of “natural religion” is thoroughly Kantian. Meyer
criticizes the fact that, in ECJ, “Bendavid had simply rejected what Mendelssohn had posited
as the differentiating element of Judaism—its ritual laws—while giving a Jewish coloring to
what Mendelssohn had determined were its universal components” (Response to Modernity,
21 ). Although Meyer is certainly right to point out the disingenuousness of Bendavid’s ap-
propriation of Mendelssohn, this disingenuousness may be even more comprehensive than
Meyer suggests. Given the implicit Kantian paradigm within which Bendavid is working, not
even the tenets of “natural religion” to which Bendavid would reduce Judaism are consis-
tent with the “universal components” of natural religion as Mendelssohn understood them.
Even though Bendavid clearly wishes to smooth over this fact in order to bring Mendelssohn
into his own camp, the tenets of his “natural religion” are in fact Kantian postulates. This is
clear not only from the general Kantian cast of Bendavid’s thought but also from the way in
which he describes the members of his fourth category of Jews, the “proponents of genuine
natural religion,” who “feel the necessity of the duty to believe” (Bendavid, ECJ, 51 ). These
select few enlightened Jews understand the tenets of natural religion not as objective and
demonstrable truths (as did the philosophical Wolffian Mendelssohn) but rather as Kantian
postulates, or as consequences of one’s subjective moral reason in which it is one’s subjective
duty to believe. When admonishing Jews to adopt the pure religion of Moses, Bendavid not
only recreates Moses, the biblical prophet, in the guise of Moses the Enlightenment philoso-
pher, but he also uses Mendelssohn as a Jewish stand-in for Kant.
It is apt that Bourel (“Eine Generation später,” 379 ) has pointed to the quasi- messianic
tone of Bendavid’s discourse. One suspects that this Ben David, this son of David, is (already
in ECJ) playing ironically off of his name, as he would do even more unmistakably three
decades later in the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums. In the first of his two
contributions to that journal, Bendavid tries to contest the centrality in Judaism of the belief
in a messiah, and he ends with the emphatic assertion that the only messiah the Jews require
is political emancipation (“Über den Glauben der Juden an einen künftigen Messias (Nach
Maimonides und den Kabbalisten)” [On the Jews’ belief in a future messiah (according to
Maimonides and the Cabbalists]).
Bendavid, EJC, 53 , 62 – 63 , and 63 – 64 , footnote. Thus, as many scholars have pointed
out (for example, Bourel, “ Eine Generation später,” 378 ; Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment,
310 ; Yovel, Dark Riddle, 20 ), Kant is mistaken when he claims in Streit der Fakultäten (IKW,
11 : 320 – 21 ) that his own suggestion that Jews publicly accept Christianity, as a step toward
purely rational religion, was first proposed by Bendavid. On the contrary, Bendavid’s argu-
