Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 27

the pious Jewish egotist seeks self-aggrandizement and pleasure through self-

abnegation and altruism.

A crucial structural contrast between history and a case history is that the lat-

ter ends, or should end, at some more or less definitive point. Bendavid frames

Jewish history as the evolution of a psychic pathology, a historically determined

deformation of the Jews’ moral will, and in his conception the pathology of Jew-

ish history moves always toward the moment of its ultimate resolution in su-

prahistorical Kantian moral autonomy. Bendavid’s case history thus opens up a

novel (if uncomfortable) radically secular way of looking at Jewish history, yet also

forecloses the legitimacy of secular Jewish history as an ongoing process. As we

will see, Kant’s conception of moral autonomy and his opposition between moral-

ity and history offer Bendavid tools to reconceive Jewish history in bold ways, yet

finally in order to make the Jew’s pathological history disappear like a symptom.

Kantian Moral Subjectivity and Ethical Alterity

Bendavid’s treatise occupies a singular position in the long and varied Jewish

reception of Kant.^36 As Christoph Schulte observes, the question of why there

was such a substantial engagement—at times bordering on identification—with

Kant among Jewish intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has

been “frequently and always differently answered.”^37 I agree with Schulte that,

given the range not only of prominent Jewish Kantian and neo-Kantian philoso-

phers but also and especially of both Liberal and Orthodox Jewish intellectuals

who appropriated Kant in philosophies of Judaism over the span of 150 years,

the question admits of no single, general answer. Friedrich Niewöhner provides

a thorough overview of both negative and positive factors contributing to the

attraction of Kant for Jewish thinkers.^38 Aside from unmistakably Christian con-

ceptual paradigms (Hegel) and antisemitic rhetoric (Fichte and Marx) that may

have made certain alternatives even more problematic than Kant for a philoso-

phy of Judaism, Kant was also the key figure of the German Enlightenment, with

which German Jews strongly identified. Kant was a towering figure in the bour-

geois institution of German Bildung, and one whose rationalism and commit-

ment to political Enlightenment resisted appropriation by romantic and nation-

alistic movements. In the course of the nineteenth century, and certainly by the

fin de siècle, the cultural capital and political culture that had become attached to

“Kant” inevitably encouraged Jewish thinkers’ perceptions of affinities between

their various versions of Judaism and their various versions of Kant.

Kant’s Jewish contemporaries, in contrast, tended to avoid explicit refer-

ences to the philosopher when they wrote on topics of Jewish concern. In a