Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

28 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

programmatic 1783 essay in Ha-measef titled “The Uses of Engagement with

Past Ages,” Isaak Euchel “smuggles” Kant (of the first critique) into an essay

on the importance of secular historical study even for the understanding of the

sacred tradition. Euchel avoided mentioning Kant’s name so as not to offend

traditionalists, whom he was still courting as readers of the recently launched

Haskalah journal.^39 As we will see Bendavid likewise smuggles Kant—poorly

disguised as Mendelssohn—into his more radical discourse, which still formally

addresses fellow Jews. Kant was a far more controversial figure in his day to both

Jewish and non-Jewish audiences than the philosopher that nineteenth-century

German cultural history would enshrine. It is worth noting that Bendavid, who

effectively brought Kant to Vienna—where he lectured and published on the

three critiques in the 1790 s—was escorted out of the city in 1797 by the po-

lice, who found the Protestant Prussian philosopher—and probably his Jewish

prophet—too revolutionary.^40

Significantly, the Kant that Bendavid brings unnamed into Etwas zur Char-

ackteristick der Juden is that of the second critique, not, as was the case with

Euchel, the first. Bendavid distinguishes himself in this treatise from the long

tradition of Jewish Kantians by working closely (if only implicitly) from Kant’s

moral philosophy. This claim will seem perverse to anyone who takes the Jew-

ish Kantian tradition on its own terms, for that tradition celebrates purported

elective affinities between Judaism and Kant above all in the area of ethics. As

Niewöhner provocatively argues, however, the chorus of claims about harmo-

nies between Kantian and Jewish ethics notwithstanding, Orthodox and Liberal

Jewish Kantian philosophers alike avoid Kant’s moral philosophy almost com-

pletely; and when they do, however briefly, take up Kant’s central writings on

ethics, they fundamentally criticize rather than concur with them.^41

Niewöhner makes the case that it is much more Kant’s epistemology than

his ethics that animates Jewish Kantian writing. He argues that it was above all

Kant’s method of positing the thing-in-itself that seemed to parallel critiques

of anthropomorphism by Jewish writers (especially Maimonides) and provided

a rational basis for conceptions of God or the Law as noumenal. In short, the

Jewish appropriation of Kant occurred “in the sphere of the epistemological

foundation [Begründung] for ethics, not in the area of ethics itself.”^42 Bendavid’s

argument is singular in the way it implicitly starts from Kantian moral philoso-

phy and gets caught in the aporias and violence to which even, and perhaps

especially, a faithful reading of Kant can lead.

Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden is the most significant attempt by a

Jewish contemporary of Kant to think the place of Jews in German politics with

Kant in real time—to intervene in a highly volatile contemporary moment by