Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 29

mobilizing a brand-new conceptual paradigm. Bendavid’s fidelity to Kantian

thought sets him apart from other notable interlocutors and disseminators

among Kant’s Jewish contemporaries. Marcus Herz—Kant’s student, corre-

spondent, and explicator in lectures in Berlin—by his own admission did not

keep up with Kant after his critical turn. The most brilliant and original Jewish

philosopher of his day, Solomon Maimon, who grasped Kant’s epistemology

with a subtlety that Kant acknowledged, also read it skeptically and raised fun-

damental challenges to it.^43 Saul Ascher likewise used conceptual tools from

various areas of Kantian philosophy to argue with Kant himself. In Eisenmenger

der Zweite (Eisenmenger the second), Ascher took Fichte (of Beitrag) and Kant

himself (of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 1793 ) to task for

their vehemently anti-Jewish appropriation of Kant’s ethics. Ascher argued that

Fichte’s was a possible but not a necessary use of Kant.^44 This is surely true,

and my claim is not that Bendavid’s tract shows Kant’s moral philosophy to be

inherently or ineluctably either good or bad for the Jews.

Still, in contrast to Maimon and Ascher, Bendavid remained the most duti-

fully Kantian of the philosopher’s contemporary Jewish interpreters,^45 and Ben-

david’s deployment of Kant in his intervention in Jewish politics can complicate

in productive ways how the corpus of Jewish Kantian philosophy has under-

stood itself. If the use he makes of Kantian ethics is by no means inevitable, it

nonetheless remains close to and issues from the dynamics of Kant’s own theory

of practical reason. Bendavid’s deployment of Kant is indeed gruesome; how-

ever, it is arguably less contrived than the many problematic appropriations of

Kant’s moral philosophy that circumvent its basic structure in order to proclaim

it harmonic with a purported essence of Judaism. “Apparently straightforward

but deeply perplexing” is how Gillian Rose aptly characterizes the culmina-

tion of this tradition, Hermann Cohen’s 1910 “Inner Relations between Kant’s

Philosophy and Judaism.”^46 By the same token, however, Bendavid’s mobiliza-

tion of Kant in the service of a Jewish political cause complicates assessments

of Kantian moral philosophy as inherently or structurally antisemitic—that is,

antisemitic at a deeper level than Kant’s explicit disparagements of Judaism.^47

Although Bendavid’s Kantian critique of Jews and Judaism is inexorably hostile

to traditional values and practice, Bendavid is still very much thinking with Kant

as a Jew about how to negotiate political modernity as a Jew.

Finding a space in the polity for Jews within a Kantian framework entailed

formidable challenges, and consequently Bendavid’s attempt to think Jewish

with Kant is highly fraught. Fichte’s philosophical antisemitism emanates from

the same conceptual sources that Bendavid mines in his ambivalent vision of

Jewish inclusion. The political binary of Jew versus Bürger is subtended in both