Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

38 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

diation with the absolute. Decapitation figures a form of noncoercive coercion.

The moral subject constructed by the absolute violence of decapitation is not

scarred, as it were, by this violence and can bear no witness to it, precisely be-

cause it is instantaneous and total. As Daniel Arasse writes in his study of the

guillotine, “by its instantaneous action, the guillotine sets before our eyes the

invisibility of death at the very instant of its occurrence, exact and indistinguish-

able.”^66 Just as the guillotine redefined death as a moment without history, nar-

rative, or self-awareness, moral decapitation inflicts no violence because it eradi-

cates the Other instantaneously. Simply put, there is no Jewish subject left who

could have suffered a morally unwarranted coercion.

Further, Bendavid’s metaphor engages two important oppositions: individual

autonomy versus collectivity, and humanity versus monstrosity. Traditionally

thought of as the key to Jewish survival, am yisrael (the Jewish people) now ap-

pears as a monster. It is still the key to survival; however, the survival in question

is no longer that of Jewish tradition but rather that of the pathology of collective

Jewishness. Unless utterly eradicated, the malignant Jewish hydra will only me-

tastasize: two heads will grow back for every one that is severed. Decapitation of

the many-headed hydra is not only a means of slaying the monster but also one

of fully individuating its insufficiently autonomous heads. Bendavid’s metaphor

is skillfully chosen indeed: the Jewish disease can be cured only if Jewish individu-

alization through decapitation is realized completely. The Jew’s head that remains

afflicted with Jewishness remains only semiautonomous and, therefore, from Ben-

david’s Kantian point of view, effectively only semihuman: latently and potentially

human, yes, but still connected to the nonhuman monster of the Jewish col-

lectivity. Bendavid castigates with particular vitriol the pathological vigilance (a

sign of denatured individuals) with which Jews observe public ritual, the col-

lective practices of the communal Jewish body that are patently irreducible to

religion defined as a sphere of strictly individual moral conscience. Just as the

morality of the Kantian human individual is universal, Jews must universally be

made moral individuals in order to leave the sphere of the deformed and mon-

strous and become fully human. If they will not choose to be morally free indi-

viduals, they must be coerced into becoming free. They must be severed from

the collective monster of the Jewish people by a force so absolute in its violence

that it paradoxically obliterates any traces of itself: decapitation.

The political intentions of Fichte’s assessment of the essential nonhumanity

of the Jew, often taken to be a salient moment in the construction of modern

philosophical antisemitism, are basically opposed to Bendavid’s, yet Fichte and

Bendavid are strikingly similar in rhetoric and, more importantly, in underlying

conception, as an examination of Fichte’s Kantian framework will show.