Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

34 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

which particular sorts of contractual arrangements, including the Bürgerver-

trag, can be freely entered into or refused.

Although Bendavid is not rigorously consistent, his most emphatic pro-

nouncements imply a view of the legitimate authority of the state that is nearly

the opposite of Fichte’s. Bendavid repeatedly charges that Jews suffer from a lack

of will,^57 and he closes his tract with this comment to his Jewish readers: “may

the Eternal One give you strength and courage to will.”^58 The will he evokes is

unmistakably the Kantian moral will, the self-founding moral gesture of the uni-

versal ethical subject. Bendavid formulates the “main thesis of this treatise” as

follows: “unless in the reforms that have been or are to be undertaken with them,

the Jews intervene by abolishing their pointless ceremonial law, which utterly

does not accord with the present times; unless they adopt a purer religion, one

more worthy of the divine father—the pure teaching of Moses—they will neces-

sarily remain, even after being baptized, indifferent and citizens harmful to the

state.”^59 Bendavid’s rhetoric minimizes the agency of the state in the reforms to

which he refers, and he locates the moral struggle within Jews instead of be-

tween Jews and the state. Jews must freely will the reform that is to be under-

taken with them. In order to be a good citizen, one must first reform one’s self;

it becomes the moral responsibility of each Jew to give up traditional Judaism in

favor of pure rational (Kantian) religion (disingenuously packaged here as “the

pure teaching of Moses”). Bendavid occults the violence that the state inflicts on

Jews in intervening in their value system and way of life by presenting the Jew’s

own moral and political will as paramount.

To be sure, Bendavid’s position in Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden on

the extent to which the state should intervene in the lives of Jews is at times

ambiguous and seemingly ambivalent. He certainly argues against the efficacy of

state coercion. On Joseph II’s project of enlightening the Jews, Bendavid com-

ments that “the influence of the prince, to the extent that it consists in anything

more than a removal of obstacles, effects nothing at all unless the people willingly

cooperates and does what no prince can order it to do: will to be enlightened!”^60

Were the state to force the Jews into “the rights of humanity,” their compliance

would be merely external and superficial, not heartfelt. Worse, since unenlight-

ened Jews erroneously link morality (a completely internal matter of good will)

with the outward observance of Jewish law, forcing them to desist from outward

observance would imperil whatever moral sensibility they possessed.^61

Bendavid’s dilemma is clear enough. Approaching the question of political

rights for Jews as he does from the standpoint of the Kantian moral subject,

he cannot—yet he simultaneously must—rely on the intervention of the state.

On the one hand, if the Jews are coerced into enlightening themselves, such