Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 41

for Kant, is what remains once the causal relations of the empirical world have

been transcended or stripped away, so true freedom is possible—according to

Bendavid—only through a leap beyond the causal relations of Jewish history. It

is incumbent on each Jew to “shake off ” his pathological history and thereby

enter the polity, a realm of idealized or intelligible political relations, as a uni-

versal (and German-speaking) Mensch and Bürger. The Jews’ particular history

should disappear like a symptom.

According to the Kantian view of the relationship between history and moral

will, history can unfold only as a narrative of the progressive liberation of a la-

tent, essentially suprahistorical, human moral freedom. History is necessary for

the realization of moral freedom, yet essentially extrinsic to it. Kant’s dualistic

vision of the subject as both inside yet essentially outside history is implicit

in his famous definition of Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-

incurred immaturity.”^73 History is the process of exiting history, understood as

one’s dependence on others. It is a progressive excavation and distillation of the

pure suprahistorical subject from the historical forces that the subject is guilty

of having suffered. A historically incurred pathology is self-incurred: to suffer

history is a moral weakness.

Bendavid identifies the arrival of Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment as the

promise of a new era in—or beyond—Jewish history, one that can only now be

fully realized.^74 Even as Bendavid ventriloquizes his message through Mendels-

sohn, however, the latter serves as a Jewish stand-in for Kant, notwithstanding

the incompatibility between the two philosophers’ positions on religious truth.

Bendavid disingenuously appropriates this modern Moses in order to admon-

ish his contemporary coreligionists to “return” to “the pure doctrine of Moses,

the doctrine of natural religion,” a “doctrine” that Bendavid understands, contra

Mendelssohn, according to Kantian postulates.^75 Self-styled prophet of Enlight-

enment or messiah of Menschheit, Bendavid states repeatedly in the final pages

of his tract that the time of Judaism is past. The moment of truth has arrived at

long last, and it is time to make the leap beyond Jewish history into the realm

of Menschheit and its political analogue, the state.^76 Bendavid’s Kantian frame-

work permits him, then, to trace a history (or pathogenesis) that he considers

constitutive of Jewish particularity while still positing a universalist human es-

sence that both precedes and, potentially, follows the historical aberration of

Judaism’s pathologizing rabbinic detour. Indeed, in asserting the competence

to diagnose the Jew as sick, as Mensch manqué, Bendavid takes up a position as

precisely this universal, post-Jewish Mensch.

Bendavid’s intervention is unsettlingly complex. Even in his advocacy of

slaying the communal monster, he understands himself to be acting in the ser-