Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 25

period in Jewish history that Bendavid diagnoses in his etiology of modern Jew-

ish character has a clear starting point in the loss of political sovereignty with

the destruction of the Second Temple, to which the elaboration of ritual obser-

vance, in Bendavid’s view, is a neurotic response.^29 For Bendavid the period

of Jewish history that opened in 70 CE likewise has—or should have—a clear

endpoint in the Enlightenment: Jews can now free themselves of their obsolete

slave mentality and at last become men and citizens.

Bendavid theorizes how submission to power eventually becomes morally

validated:

When it loses its freedom, every animal also loses its sense of freedom

[Sinn für Freyheit]; and the man who has become accustomed to subser-

vience [Frohndienste] requires but a small step in order voluntarily to ac-

cept the yoke of slavery. In the beginning, he still dares to make certain at-

tempts to regain his freedom—attempts that are inspired by despair and

thus seldom carried out with the intelligence and poise necessary for the vic-

tory of oppressed men, and that therefore generally fail, leaving in the heart

[Gemüt] of the poor people [des armen Volkes], which until now had still

been able to find in hope a slight comfort, nothing but a sense of remorse

over the errors it has committed, the wish to be able to return to the God of

its fathers, recognition of His Judgment [Anerkennung seines Strafgerichts],

and voluntary submission to the yoke of its oppressor, the executor of divine

will.^30

The eventual internalization and acceptance of one’s weakness entails the pro-

jection of a punishing God, who invests with meaning and purpose the inas-

similable experience of being dominated. Only after repeated attempts to re-

gain freedom have failed, and seem forever doomed to fail, does bad conscience

emerge in a defeated people, which begins to feel “remorse over the errors it

has committed.” Thus an essentially sick transvaluation of weakness occurs in

morality. As would Nietzsche a century later, Bendavid theorizes that the dom-

inated deduce a punishing divine will from the experience of subjugation in

order to imbue this bewildering experience with meaning.^31 Bendavid charac-

terizes this morality born of weakness—the rabbinic reinterpretation of Jewish

ritual—as a method, however deluded, of waging war.^32 All slaves (not only Jew-

ish ones) resent their masters.^33 Yet this

general source of envy... was accompanied among the Jews by another

that lent the original one a different direction and, of pitiable men, not infre-

quently made such creatures as could not help but draw [auspressen] tears of