Toleration in the Age of Projects: Cameralism, German Police Science, and the Jews

This essay offers an alternative genealogy of modern debates on Jews, focusing on the rise of new ideas about Jews’ role in society among eighteenth-century German technocratic thinkers. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies, it examines how major debates on Jews took place not only earlier than is usually assumed but also in disciplines—namely, cameralism and police science—that were despised by most of the humanistic enlighteners at the center of modern European Jewish historiography. Yet, it was in the so-called Age of Projects—and not merely in the Age of Enlightenment—that new visions of dealing with Jews emerged.