Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

40 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

happen to be Jewish, but rather a collectivity bound by a Jewish reasoning that

seems fundamentally incommensurable with autonomous human moral reason.

Jews represent the possibility of moral alterity, of being moral outside of Kantian-

Fichtian ethical humanity. Fichte’s Jews hover—unbearably for him—at the

limit of the moral-human sphere, a limit that must exist absolutely or not at all.

It is the Jews’ purported misanthropy, and not even their lack of belief in

Jesus Christ, that makes them so ethically problematic: here it becomes clear

that Fichte’s Jews are not opposed to the Christian community—even if that is

understood in essentially secular, cultural terms—but rather to the human com-

munity:^71 “May the Jews indeed not believe in Jesus Christ, may they not even

believe in any God, if only they did not believe in two different moral laws and in

a misanthropic God. Human rights they must have, even if they do not grant us

the same; because they are human beings.”^72 The Jews’ misanthropy goes hand

in hand with their adherence to an additional, incommensurable Sittengesetz.

(Since the moral law is synonymous with ultimate respect for the freedom of all

human beings, misanthropy and adherence to a different moral law imply each

other mutually.) The curious italicization in the phrase “they are human beings”

(a final determination on a hard-to-decide question? a sign of perplexity?) aptly

testifies to the way the disparate Jewish Sittengesetz strains against the very limits

of the human as Fichte understands it. And, much as in Bendavid, the only pos-

sible mediation between the Mensch and the Jew, the only way to incorporate

the Jews into the sphere of the human whose limits they so vex, is through the

absolute violence of decapitation.

A Diagnostician at the End of Jewish History

A similar Kantian framework subtends the vision of the fringe maskil Bendavid

and the philosophical antisemitism of Fichte. Yet the two thinkers’ relationships

to the political status of the Jews are radically different. For Fichte, Jews and

Jewish ethics are a vexing obstacle to his politicized ethical project. Bendavid

faces the more poignant problem of how to take up a position in the polity as a

Jew. His attempt to show fellow Jews the way to become Menschen and Bürger

hinges on how successfully he can present himself before a German-language

Enlightenment reading public as a human being worthy of citizenship. Kant

provides Bendavid with the structural possibility, however problematic, both

of narrating a certain version of Jewish history as pathological and of ultimately

resolving this history into a suprahistorical model of the moral subject. Indeed,

in diagnosing the sick Jewish soul Bendavid lays claim to a locus of enunciation

beyond the pathologies engendered by Jewish history. Just as moral freedom,