Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

24 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

ity and a wider society to which they passionately wish to gain access. In Etwas

zur Charackteristick der Juden, Bendavid extends the case history of individual

Jews to a more grandly conceived collective subject and writes a case history of

the Jews, in which the ambivalent oscillation persists between a sociopolitical

and a purely private pathogenesis of Jewishness.

Bendavid’s Psychological History and the Genealogy of

Nietzschean Genealogy

The lasting significance of Bendavid’s treatise is frequently seen in the crude

sociology of contemporary Jewry it elaborates—the way it reflects (and reflects

on) the emerging stratification within German Jewry.^27 Less remarked on in

Bendavid’s treatise is his historical derivation of Jewish character. Bendavid’s

historical and psychological analysis anticipates Nietzsche’s acerbic diagnosis

of Jewish values in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886 )

and, especially, Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887 ).^28

As I argue in the second half of this chapter, Bendavid’s genealogy of Jewish

morals relies on a distinctly Kantian framework for both the normative standard

according to which it diagnoses the pathologies of Jewish history and for the

conception of moral will that it proffers as their cure. Yet Bendavid’s vehement,

adversarial deployment of historicization to undercut conventional ethical val-

ues and to call for a bold leap beyond the weakness and deformation of char-

acter they dissemble and valorize marks the moment when the sort of modern

critical diagnostics that would find its most famous articulation in Nietzschean

genealogy first becomes possible.

Notwithstanding Nietzsche’s bold claim to have been the first to interrogate

the value of moral values, Bendavid was in his own way positioned—socially,

historically, and philosophically—at a point when a radical critique of the value

of Jewish values became both possible and, to him, urgently necessary. Although

Bendavid’s and Nietzsche’s historical contexts, outlooks, and investments in

Jewish values are fundamentally different, the affinities between their arguments

are profound. Bendavid elaborates a historical and psychological understand-

ing of Judaism as an unhealthy reaction to the loss of power, as the convoluted

form of impotent revenge that Nietzsche would famously call ressentiment. Most

saliently, Bendavid analyzes Jewish morality as a reactive psychological product:

he traces the emergence of a Jewish value system as the vexed response to the

loss of power. Along related lines, he analyzes the formation of a Jewish moral

ego as a psychological internalization and inversion of external power relations,

which inevitably leads to a contradictory and illusory relation to the self. The