Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

42 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

vice of Jewish commitments. Unlike Fichte, Bendavid is trying to conceive, with

Kant, of a universal polity that would have a place for Jews. The fact that this

vision of universality is predicated on potentially violent exclusion should be

clear enough from the foregoing analysis, yet Bendavid’s intellectual and rhe-

torical self-modeling constitutes an attempt to practice a Jewish (not merely an

anti-Jewish) Kantian politics. Bendavid proposes the Kantian moral will as the

gateway into the enlightened polity, a gateway very much in opposition to the

only existing option: conversion. He repeatedly cautions against conversion to

Christianity, as conversion without inner conviction would merely aggravate,

not overcome, the Jew’s lack of moral will.^77 Bendavid’s imperative is for the Jew

to become an autonomous Mensch, not merely to find a socially more viable way

to accommodate his lack of autonomy.

As critical as Bendavid was of traditional Jewish practices and as extreme—

especially in the heady year of 1793 —as may have been both his diagnosis of how

history had deformed the Jewish psyche and his vision of an Enlightenment

cure, he remained engaged in Jewish institutional life and in Jewish intellec-

tual pursuits throughout his life. In 1806 he became the director of the Jewish

Free School (Jüdische Freischule) that David Friedländer and Daniel Itzig had

founded in 1778 , a post he held until the school closed in 1825. He published a

handful of essays on Jewish subjects and refers repeatedly to a major work on

the Pentateuch, which, however, he probably never finished.^78

Bendavid was also one of the few members of his generation (David Friedlän-

der was another) to be invited to join the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft

der Juden (association for the culture and science of the Jews) in Berlin. In 1823

he contributed two articles to its epochal though short-lived journal, edited by

Leopold Zunz.

The Verein is the focus of the following chapter, and since it was in the con-

text of the Verein that the young Heinrich Heine, also briefly a member, met the

elder Bendavid, Heine’s—typically equivocal—appreciation of Bendavid can

serve as an apt bridge between the foregoing discussion of Bendavid’s Kantian

philosophical politics and the Jewish Hegelianism of the Vereinler. In a letter

to Zunz dated June 27 , 1823 , Heine writes wryly that he “would like to apply

roughly what you [Zunz] expressed at the publication of the first volumes of

Jost’s History when you refrained from all judgment, since it was after all pos-

sible that these were intentionally written so poorly so that subsequent volumes

would appear that much more brilliant; in the same way, I’d like to suspect that

you have arranged the essays of the Zeitschrift in such a way that one will some

day be able to demonstrate with precision in a series of annual volumes how

German style has gradually developed among us Wissenschaft Jews [Wissen-