Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 by Sven-Erik Rose (review)

With Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, Sven-Erik Rose has written an important study that does much to illuminate the ways in which German Jewish intellectuals from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century responded to German and European philosophy and especially to the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Spinoza. Rose begins by noting how, even as Jews increasingly took part in German cultural life, they continued before 1848 to find few “[tangible p]ossibilities [ . . . ] to participate in politics in German lands” (1). With political activity barred, philosophy entered the fray. Rose explores, that is, “how [ . . . ] the creative explosion of German philosophy provided resources”—the “conceptual tools”—that the thinkers considered here “drew upon to envision a place for Jews in the polity” and “to imagine the potential, terms, and consequences of [such] Jewish inclusion” (1). Rose focuses on the Kantian Lazarus Bendavid (1762–1832), Hegelian-oriented Jewish university students—Eduard Gans, Immanuel Wolf/Wohlwill, and Moses Moser—central to the short-lived Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (1819–1824), Karl Marx, the Spinozist liberal writer Berthold Auerbach, and the Spinozist early socialist and later proto-Zionist essayist Moses Hess.

In developing his argument, Rose departs from approaches by other scholars who argue either that anti-Semitism was only minor and incidental to German idealist philosophy or, conversely, constitutive of it. Rose focuses, rather, “primarily on Jewish intellectuals who tried to ‘think Jewish’ not only against, but also with, conceptual modes invented or reinvented during the classical age of German philosophy,” since the “German philosopher–Jewish Other binary” breaks down when such intellectuals try to “think through and intervene in the situation of Jews in political modernity” (3). Rose places Jewish subjectivity at the center of his study, approaching it not as “unself-conscious reflections, feelings, and behaviors” but “as explicit cultural discourse,” hence exploring the different ways that thinkers, Jewish and non-Jewish, reflected on and presented “Jewish subjects/subjectivity” (7). As inheritors of the Enlightenment, thinkers as different as Bendavid, Gans, Moser, Wolf, and Auerbach responded critically, at times even antagonistically, to the Jewish subjects/subjectivity they found in their world, but each addressed in his own way the question of how and under what conditions Jewish subjectivity could exist in harmony with the state or the national community; Marx and Hess eschew such “harmony,” the first seeking to “mobilize an image of Jewish subjectivity,” the second “an idiosyncratic interpretation of Jewish tradition,” each with the aim “to critique the liberal subject and the political states as harmful ideological illusions” (8).

Rose covers much material, ranging from Kant (especially the Second Critique) and Hegel (the Phenomenology, the philosophies of history, religion, and especially of Wissenschaft) to Eduard Gans on the Prussian State, the Jewish community, and again on Wissenschaft; from Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer to Marx’s development, by way of a pejorative notion of the Jew, of his materialist philosophy in Über die Judenfrage; and further on to the early works of Auerbach and Moses Hess, and the Spinoza who informed them. The arguments are too complex to do them justice in this review, but Rose frequently offers readings as incisive as they are counterintuitive, even as—unlike others in recent years—he opts not to stress German Jewry’s subversive aspects. This recent emphasis, as Jonathan Hess showed in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Stanford UP, 2010), neglects key aspects of German Jewish culture and thought. Rose, e.g., argues instead that even as he draws on Kantian ethics to advocate for both Jewish reform and emancipation, Bendavid resorts to a language of decapitation disturbingly akin to Fichte’s notorious anti-Semitism. For Bendavid, Judaism is a “hydra” whose heads must be definitively cut off; Fichte saw “no means” of giving civil rights to Jews “other than, in one night, to cut off all their heads and replace them with others containing not a single Jewish...