The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn: Aesthetics, Religion, And

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn

The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn: Aesthetics, Religion, and Morality in the Eighteenth Century examines the idea of ugliness through four angles: philosophical aesthetics, early anthropology, physiognomy, and portraiture in the eighteenth century. Highlighting a theory that describes the beneﬁt of encountering ugly objects in art and nature, eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn recasts ugliness as a positive force for moral education and social progress. According to his theory, ugly objects cause us to think more and thus exercise – and expand – our mental abilities. Known as ugly himself, he was nevertheless portrayed in portraits and in physiognomy as an image of wisdom, gentility, and tolerance. That seeming contradiction – an ugly object (Mendelssohn) made beautiful – illustrates his theory’s possibility: ugliness itself is a positive, even redeeming characteristic of great opportunity. Presenting a novel approach to eighteenth-century aesthetics, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the ﬁelds of Jewish studies, philosophy, and history.

Leah Hochman is Associate Professor of Jewish Thought at HUC-JIR, USA, and directs the Louchheim School for Judaic Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Boston University and teaches classes in Jewish philosophy, Jewish literature, American Judaism, and religion and food. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Routledge Jewish Studies Series Series Editor: Oliver Leaman, University of Kentucky

Studies, which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology, religion, as they relate to Jewish aﬀairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterised Jewish culture both in the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals.

MEDIEVAL JEWISH JUDAISM, PHILOSOPHY, PHILOSOPHY CULTURE An Introduction Selected Studies by E. I. J. Dan Cohn-Sherbok Rosenthal Erwin Rosenthal FACING THE OTHER The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas PHILOSOPHY OF THE Edited by Seán Hand TALMUD Hyam Maccoby MOSES MAIMONIDES Oliver Leaman FROM SYNAGOGUE TO CHURCH: THE TRADITIONAL A USER’S GUIDE TO FRANZ DESIGN ROSENZWEIG’S STAR OF Its Beginning, its Deﬁnition, REDEMPTION its End Norbert M. Samuelson John Wilkinson

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 ON LIBERTY HIDDEN PHILOSOPHY OF Jewish Philosophical HANNAH ARENDT Perspectives Margaret Betz Hull Edited by Daniel H. Frank DECONSTRUCTING THE REFERRING TO GOD BIBLE Jewish and Christian Philosophical Abraham ibn Ezra’s Introduction to and Theological Perspectives the Torah Edited by Paul Helm Irene Lancaster IMAGE OF THE BLACK IN JEWS AND INDIA JEWISH CULTURE History, Image, Perceptions A History of the Other Yulia Egorova Abraham Melamed JEWISH MYSTICISM AND FROM FALASHAS TO MAGIC ETHIOPIAN JEWS An Anthropological Perspective Daniel Summerﬁeld Maureen Bloom

PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF MAIMONIDES’ GUIDE TO THE CRISIS PERPLEXED: SILENCE AND Don Isaac Abravanel: Defender of SALVATION the Faith Donald McCallum Seymour Feldman MUSCULAR JUDAISM JEWS, MUSLIMS AND MASS The Jewish Body and the Politics of MEDIA Regeneration Mediating the ‘Other’ Todd Samuel Presner Edited by Tudor Parﬁtt with Yulia Egorova JEWISH CULTURAL NATIONALISM JEWS OF ETHIOPIA David Aberbach The Birth of an Elite Edited by Emanuela THE JEWISH–CHINESE Trevisan Semi and NEXUS Tudor Parﬁtt A Meeting of Civilizations Edited by M. Avrum Ehrlich ART IN ZION The Genesis of National Art in GERMAN–JEWISH POPULAR Jewish Palestine CULTURE BEFORE THE Dalia Manor HOLOCAUST Kafka’s Kitsch HEBREW LANGUAGE AND David Brenner JEWISH THOUGHT David Patterson THE JEWS AS A CHOSEN PEOPLE

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 CONTEMPORARY JEWISH Tradition and Transformation PHILOSOPHY S. Leyla Gürkan An Introduction Irene Kajon PHILOSOPHY AND RABBINIC CULTURE ANTISEMITISM AND Jewish Interpretation and MODERNITY Controversy in Medieval Innovation and Continuity Languedoc Hyam Maccoby Gregg Stern JEWISH BLOOD JESUS AMONG THE JEWS Reality and Metaphor in History, Representation and Thought Religion and Culture Edited by Neta Stahl Edited by Mitchell B. Hart GOD, JEWS AND THE MEDIA JEWISH EDUCATION AND Religion and Israel’s Media HISTORY Yoel Cohen Continuity, Crisis and Change Moshe Aberbach; RABBINIC THEOLOGY AND Edited and translated JEWISH INTELLECTUAL by David Aberbach HISTORY The Great Rabbi Loew JEWS AND JUDAISM IN of Prague MODERN CHINA Meir Seidler M. Avrum Ehrlich ISRAELI HOLOCAUST POLITICAL THEOLOGIES IN RESEARCH THE HOLY LAND Birth and Evolution Israeli Messianism and its Critics Boaz Cohen David Ohana MODERN GNOSIS AND COLLABORATION WITH THE ZIONISM NAZIS The Crisis of Culture, Life The Holocaust and After Philosophy and Jewish National Edited by Roni Stauber Thought Yotam Hotam THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS THE EUROPEAN JEWS, OF ZION PATRIOTISM AND THE A Century-Old Myth LIBERAL STATE 1789–1939 Edited by Esther Webman A Study of Literature and Social Psychology THE HOLOCAUST AND David Aberbach REPRESENTATIONS OF THE JEWS JEWISH WOMEN’S TORAH History and Identity in STUDY

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 the Museum Orthodox Religious Education K. Hannah Holtschneider and Modernity Ilan Fuchs WAR AND PEACE IN JEWISH TRADITION EMMANUEL LEVINAS From the Biblical World to the AND THE LIMITS TO Present ETHICS Edited by Yigal Levin and Amnon A Critique and a Re-Appropriation Shapira Aryeh Botwinick JUDAISM IN CONTEMPORARY THE UGLINESS OF MOSES THOUGHT MENDELSSOHN Traces and Inﬂuence Aesthetics, Religion, and Morality Agata Bielik-Robson and Adam in the Eighteenth Century Lipszyc Leah Hochman

JEWISH CRYPTOTHEOLOGIES OF LATE MODERNITY Philosophical Marranos Agata Bielik-Robson Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn Aesthetics, Religion, and Morality in the Eighteenth Century

Leah Hochman Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Leah Hochman The right of Leah Hochman to be identiﬁed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiﬁcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hochman, Leah, author. The ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn : aesthetics, religion & morality in the eighteenth century / Leah Hochman. pages; cm. – (Routledge Jewish studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Ugliness–History–18th century. 2. Aesthetics, European–18th century. 3. Aesthetics–Religious aspects. 4. Arts and religion. 5. Mendelsohn, Moses, 1782-1861–Portraits. I. Title. BH301.U5H63 2014 111’.85–dc23 2014015018

ISBN: 978-1-138-78177-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76961-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor and Francis Books Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 In memory of Edward Potter, z”l, and his strength, persistence, and integrity In Honor of Alice Potter, and her erudition, grace, and intelligence And to my father, Stanley Hochman, z”l, who would have been so proud Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Contents

List of ﬁgures xiii Acknowledgments xv List of abbreviations xvii

Introduction: the eyes of the beholders1 Aesthetic entanglements 10 Emancipatory claims 13 Visions of ugliness 19 Notes 21 Bibliography 26

1 Moral aesthetics: what is the Ugly? 30 The rise of the aesthetic 32 Secularizing the aesthetic 36 German rationalism: the marriage of Beauty and Goodness 39 Beauty’s opposite: on the Ugly 44 That which supersedes: on the Sublime 49 An aesthetics of Judaism 54 Notes 65 Bibliography 70

2 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness: physical descriptions Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 and moral implications 74 Climatic deformities 79 “Natural” history 81 On the Americans: de Pauw 90 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach 93 Immanuel Kant 97 Notes 98 Bibliography 102 xii Contents 3 Reading faces, reading souls: Johann Caspar Lavater’s new physiognomy 104 Early physiognomy 106 Lavater’s new physiognomy 111 The Physiognomical Fragments 116 Lavater’s theology 119 Lavater’s physiognomy: Jesus 122 Jewish faces: Pharisees, prophets, and sages 130 The importance of Lavater’s ugly 137 Notes 140 Bibliography 143

4 The Ugly made Beautiful: the meaning and appearance of Mendelssohn 145 The paradox 147 Mendelssohn as art 150 The portraits and their artists 153 Christian Rode and Anton Graﬀ 155 Daniel Chodowiecki 159 Adrian Zingg and Johann Frisch 163 Politics and reality 166 Notes 171 Bibliography 176

Conclusion 179

Index 184 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 List of ﬁgures

3.1 “Jesus,” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, I:82. Winterthur, 1774. 124 3.2 “Jesus,” as quoted from Holbein the Younger’s “Last Supper,” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, IV:443. Winterthur, 1778. 125 3.3 “Judas nach Holbein,” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, I:79. Winterthur, 1774. 126 3.4 “Jesus nach Werner,” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, I:91. Winterthur, 1774. 128 3.5 Excerpt from Ecce Homo, in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, I:85. Winterthur, 1774. 130 3.6 “Geiler Bok (Randy Goat),” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, I:78. Winterthur, 1774. 131 3.7 “Mendelssohn’s Silhouette,” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, I:240. Winterthur, 1774. 136

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 4.1 Christian Bernhard Rode, “Moses Mendelssohn,” 1768. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Handschriftenabteilung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. 157 4.2 Daniel Chodowiecki, “Moses Mendelssohn,” Red chalk on paper. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. 160 4.3 Daniel Chodowiecki, “Moses Mendelssohn.” Reproduced with the kind permission of the Mendelssohn-Archiv, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany. 162 xiv List of ﬁgures 4.4 “Moses Mendelssohn,” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, IV:443. Winterthur, 1778. 162 4.5 Adrian Zingg, “Moses Mendelssohn,” 1776. Reproduced with the kind permission of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. 163 4.6 Johann Christoph Frisch, “Moses Mendelssohn,” 1780. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Mendelssohn-Archiv, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany. 165 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Acknowledgments

This book has been a very long time in coming. Several opportune fellow- ships enriched this project as it developed. An early grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst introduced me to Berlin and opened new horizons of scholarly and personal opportunity. The University of Florida Humanities Enhancement Fund allowed me to return to Berlin to collect primary sources. Susan Neiman oﬀered an Einstein-Dubnow Fellowship, a collaboration between the Einstein Forum in Potsdam and the Simon-Dubnow Institut für Osteuropäische Kultur, Geschichte und Literatur in Leipzig. And, a Visiting Skirball Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies allowed me the time, space and magic to pull together that earlier research. Administrative support from the Department of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies and faculty support from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida facilitated this project in essential ways. In each place, I have met friends who continue to enrich my work and life with their intelligence, graciousness, and humor. In Germany, unending gratitude goes to Karin and Wolfram Bürger and Marie Hatterman who opened their hearts, homes, and lives to me, teaching me a rich idiomatic German. Christoph Schulte was the ﬁrst shepherd of this project. In England, many thanks are due to David Rechter, Peter Lewis, and Geraldine Billingham. I am particularly grateful to Peter Hawkins, who shared that same spectacular spring in Oxford, and to my cohort at OCHJS, Sergio Parussa, Ruthi Servi, Piero Capelli, and David Weinstein, in particular. Mentors and friends from Seattle, Claremont, Jerusalem, Boston, New York,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Berlin, Gainesville and Los Angeles have remained patient and forgiving. Michael Prince introduced me to aesthetics and sparked the idea that has become the current book. Words are not enough to express the depth of my gratitude and love to Joseph and Sharona Kanofsky, Stacia Deutsch, Jana and Victor Milhon-Martin, Abby and Kenn Elmore, Nancy Morrison, Jennifer Wilson, Cynthia and Chris Wilson-Gorton, Bari Walsh and David Weininger, Deborah Epstein, Erica Martin and Mark Rosenthal, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg, Christopher Ricks, Mark Swartz, Norbert Hintersteiner, Rollin Ramsaran, Shmuel and Chane Posner, Steve Jacobson, Lisa and xvi Acknowledgments Andrew Altow, Sven-Eric Rose and Claire Goldstein, Adam Rovner, Cass Fisher, Eugene Sheppard, Martin Kavka, Claire Katz, Ken Koltun-Fromm, Zachary Braiterman, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Jim Mueller, Ken Wald, Joanne and Edward Block, Luca Caminati, Roger Gathman, Trysh Travis, Mark Fenster, Nina Caputo, Mitchell Hart, Gwynn Kessler, Tamara Cohen, Eric Kligerman, Taal Hasak-Lowy, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Susan Bluck and Mike Sites, and especially to Judith and Bill Page, whose warmth and generosity made all these years in Florida an elegant example of friendship. My colleagues at HUC supported me as this project neared its end, thank you to them and especially Josh Holo, Sharon Gillerman, Reuven Firestone and Tamara Eskenazi. I am profoundly appreciative of the incisive and erudite honesty of Michael Zank. This work would not have been completed without his continual encouragement. I am indebted to him and to Miriam Shenitzer, Benny and Rachel. And, I would be remiss in not thanking the 2004 Red Sox, who, in winning the World Series proved that all things are possible. Sections of Chapter 4 appeared in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5:2 (2006): 137–161 as “The Ugly Made Beautiful.” Thank you to the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies and Taylor and Francis for allowing me to reprint the material here. I am grateful to Sarah Rapaport for help with obtaining per- missions. And I am so appreciative of Joe Whiting and Kathryn Rylance of Routledge for their editorial guidance, forbearance and assistance. And, ﬁnally, to my family, especially, I owe particular thanks. My parents, Linda and Stanley Hochman, remained steadfast supporters throughout the many years it took to bring this book to fruition. My brothers and sisters-in- law, Joseph and Angela Hochman and David and Sarah Hochman, who wanted me to be done almost as much as I did, showed depths of patience and love. And to my sweet Levi Alistair Caleb, who showed up at the end, I am grateful beyond measure. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 List of abbreviations

JubA Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe. 24 Volumes (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag Günther Holzboog GmbH & Co., 1929–97). PW Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jerusalem Jerusalem, Or on Religious Power and Jerusalem, trans. A. Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1983). Fragments Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe (Winterthur und Leipzig: Weidman, Erben, und Reich and Heinrich Steiner und Compagnie: 1774–78). Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Introduction The eyes of the beholders

One can cut through all the roots of antiquated prejudice, without depriving it wholly of nutriment. It will, if need be, suck it out of the air.1

It has been the Jews who have, with forbidding consistency, risked the reversal of the aristocratic value equation (good = distinguished = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) and have held on to it by the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of powerlessness).2

In the summer of 1777, Moses Mendelssohn went on a business trip. The 48-year-old Mendelssohn was already quite famous among Enlight- enment supporters in western Europe and particularly so in German-speaking countries. Influential in England and France with the Jewish Enlightenment elite, he had been in deep philosophical conversation with those British, Scottish, Irish, and French thinkers whose work dealt with questions of aesthetics, metaphysics, politics, and religious liberty for decades. In England, the publication of the translation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise” (1781) brought his name to the attention of a wider English-reading public.3 In France, Comte de Mirabeau’s biography Sur Moses Mendelssohn (1787) describes the translation of Mendelssohn’s Phaedon, or On the Immor- tality of the Soul (1764) into French in 1784.4 Across Europe, Mendelssohn captivated Enlightenment circles alternately as the (Enlightened) Jew who was scandalously victimized by the barbarous civil disadvantages erected by a slow-to-change ancien regime and as the eloquent proponent of a sweeping philosophical system that justified a rational approach to religious belief. His Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 fame reiterated a pattern of admiration and typecasting that had already unfolded in Prussia and German-speaking lands beginning in the 1750s. In mid-life, Mendelssohn’s reputation as a writer and thinker of note had been established by the originality of his thought, the charm of his prose, and his intense engagement with the most significant intellectuals throughout Europe. By the time of this business trip, then, Mendelssohn was a formidable figure. On both legs of his journey, he stopped in Königsberg to make and secure the acquaintance of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) with whom he established a 2 Introduction friendly relationship that lasted his lifetime. Much later, the writer and editor August Lewald (1792–1871) described Mendelssohn’s first visit in some detail:

Without paying much attention to those present but with anxious, light steps a small deformed Jew with a black goatee and a heavy hunchback came into the lecture hall and stood not far from the entrance. As usual, sneers and mockery began that immediately turned into a loud ruckus, but to general astonishment, the stranger stayed as if tied to his place; he took a chair and sat down with an icy silence in order to show his intention of waiting for the Professor. Someone went to and asked him; he answered curtly and courteously – he wanted to stay in order to make Kant’s acquaintance. Only [Kant’s] appearance ﬁnally quieted the uproar. His lecture directed the general attention to other matters and one was so captivated – so as to sink in the sea of new ideas – that one no longer thought about the appearance of the Jew. At the end of the lecture, with an intensity that contrasted strangely with his earlier composure, he pushed himself through the crowd in order to reach the lecturer. The students hardly noticed him, until again the mocking laughter rang out; it quickly turned to astonishment as Kant, after looking closely at the stranger for a moment and exchanging with him a few words, pressed his hand warmly and then embraced him. Like wildﬁre it went through the crowd – Moses Mendelssohn, it is the Jewish philosopher from Berlin! Deferentially, the students created a path as the two sages left the lecture hall hand in hand.5

It is a strange story. The students’ initial reactions – disparagement, malicious teasing, intentional mockery – change as soon as the trespassing “small deformed Jew with a black goatee” turns into the recognizable “Jewish philosopher from Berlin.” Though he is the central ﬁgure of the story, Mendelssohn remains largely silent. The drama unfolds around him, because of him, but he stays in his place “as if tied” to it, neither defending himself nor explicitly responding to the students’ harassment. In maintaining his composure he presents an alternative, even emblematic, model of behavior. Lewald’s scene – written almost 70 years after the event – contributes to and reinforces a hagiographic portrait of Mendelssohn as patient, forbearing, and gracious yet stubbornly willing to wait out prejudice to achieve his goal. Lewald cleverly

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 juxtaposes the students’ blatant rudeness to the unnamed, misshapen inter- loper with their teacher’s physical embrace of Mendelssohn’s person; only Kant can calm the disruption by properly identifying and solicitously acknowledging him. Mendelssohn remains quiet yet determined throughout the uproar; the “sea of ideas” settles the ugliness of the lecture hall. In the narration Mendelssohn – sage, Jew – epitomizes the grace against hostility with which nineteenth-century Jews themselves struggled. Kant’s own description of Mendelssohn’s visit is strikingly different. In a letter to his former student Markus Herz, who served as Mendelssohn’s doctor and Introduction 3 through whom Mendelssohn and Kant had become acquainted, Kant wrote that Mendelssohn “did him the honor … of attending two of my lectures, ala fortune du pot, one might say, when the table for such a notable guest has not been set.”6 Though well known and well respected Kant had not yet published the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); Mendelssohn was the senior scholar and far more esteemed figure in their encounter. But the later reversal of power is instructive; by 1844, when Lewald described the visit, Kant’s popularity, influence, and status was ferociously secured and Mendelssohn’s philosophical innovations had been relegated to the status of “popular philosophy.”7 As Lewald’s story intimates, Mendelssohn becomes “the” Jewish philosopher only through Kant’s recognition. Yet his singularity still resonates. Mendelssohn’s status as the eighteenth- century’s most important Jewish figure has been reinforced through art and literature. In 1856 the painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim produced an iconic engraving that re-imagines Mendelssohn’s famous and first antagonist, Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), “capturing” him at the moment of his attempt to convert Mendelssohn. In Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Men- delssohn, Lavater perches eagerly on a chair leaning aggressively toward Mendelssohn, whose pose suggests feigned yet polite interest; Lessing looks on disapprovingly while Mendelssohn’s wife, Fromet, carries in a tray of refreshments. At the center of the scene is a chessboard (a symbol of logic, reason, and social equality); Lavater ostensibly has interrupted Lessing and Mendelssohn in the middle of a match. Though Lavater’s attempt to convert Mendelssohn occurred solely through letters, Oppenheim affects a hagiography similar to Lewald’s story: the stoic Mendelssohn graciously withstands an assault while Lessing takes umbrage on his behalf. As Cyril Reade argues, “the presence of Lavater and Lessing in the painting represents two attitudes that Germans held towards the Jews.”8 Whereas Lessing’s figure supports the fight for religious toleration that Mendelssohn came to embody and serves as a witness to the animated exchange between the other two men, the disparate lighting of Lavater’s face and body casts Lavater “as a figure of darkness” and “the villainous challenger” who threatens the safe engagement of Jews and Christians in intellectual and social interaction.9 Lewald’s anecdote and Oppenheim’s painting echo the emblematic moments in Mendelssohn’s biography. The 14-year-old Mendelssohn, who had walked the 80 miles from Dessau to Berlin, comes to the Rosenthaler

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Gate (the only gate through which Jews – and cattle – could enter) and halt- ingly tells the gatekeeper “ich handle mit Vernunft!” (“I peddle in reason!”).10 The adult Mendelssohn, already well known in Prussia, is invited to Frederick the Great’s summer palace Sanssouci to meet visiting dignitary Baron Thomas von Fritsche; as he presents his papers to the (much taller) soldier guarding the entrance, the guard removes his helmet in deference.11 The accounts contain similar narrative schema: first, the unrecognized figure, marked as Jewish by way of a beard and a head covering, arrives at the entrance of a non- Jewish space; second, the figure makes an appeal – in symbol or action – to 4 Introduction the universality of Reason. These steps are followed by the triumphant entrance and recognition of Mendelssohn as a celebrity who is subsequently afforded the esteem he has already earned. Mendelssohn’s exceptionalism relies on the surprising co-existence of his reputation and his personage; both reveal his Jewishness while reinforcing his Enlightenment-secured humanity as the means of achieving tolerance. In her essay “Privileged Jews” (1946), Hannah Arendt uses Mendelssohn to argue that he epitomizes the very type of early modern Jew who succeeds the medieval court Jew. Unlike the Jews who remained beholden to the good graces of individual financial privilege and political savvy, Mendelssohn’s acceptance relies on the fact that any cultural privileges he enjoyed must eclipse the specificity of his Jewishness. She argues that,

[w]hereas the court Jews had proved to the state that Jews are useful, the ﬁrst western-educated Jews convinced society that Jews are human beings. … But just as the princes no longer considered their Hofjuden as Jews when they proved to be useful and, therefore, relieved them of dis- abilities in force against other Jews, so contemporary society admitted the educated Jews for the express reason that they no longer considered them to be Jews.12

The examples that Lewald and Oppenheim present suggest, however, that Mendelssohn’s success is diﬀerent for the very reason that his Jewishness is both an unrelenting feature of the enduring signiﬁcance of his fame and popularity. The anecdotes of Mendelssohn’s biography imply what Lewald’s story makes explicit: recognition and reputation can transform the unwanted and the unattractive into something desired and revered. Yet, one should take into account the multiple ways Mendelssohn’s successors smoothed over problems implicit in recognizing and transforming the unwanted and strange into something respected and appreciated. Tokenism and myth dog the ugly intruder even after he has been supposedly “assimilated.” To be assimilated is, of course, to be assailable. In this respect, Lewald’s narrative can be read as a sort of rebus, which distorts the past in the service of a present still being forged in order to support the cultural claims of German–Jewish desires three generations after Mendelssohn’s death. For instance, in granting Kant the sort

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 of notability and authority that, in reality, in 1777, was more properly given to Mendelssohn, who was certainly at the height of his fame, Lewald uses Kant to redeem Mendelssohn from a type of cultural oblivion. But in his own letter, Kant had no illusions about who was the “notable” and who was the unprepared host. This book looks at the ambivalence inherent in the religious and cultural agendas that redefine Mendelssohn into an icon. It describes and underscores Mendelssohn’s authoritative and unusual position among his peers – as a colleague, as an anomaly, as a small Jewish hunchback who pushed into Introduction 5 confined and exclusive intellectual and social spaces. It does so by evaluating and exploring the notion of ugliness, first in Mendelssohn’sinfluential aesthetics and then in the spheres of intellectual and popular knowledge with which his aesthetics intersected. The chapters that follow explore the ties between his image (the ugly Jewish sage) and his philosophy (“from Berlin”) at the moment that ugliness and its practical instantiation (ugly, often described as immoral, character) is taken up in modernity’s moral and aesthetic discourses. More specifically, I investigate eighteenth-century notions of ugliness, both theoretical and practical, in which Mendelssohn’s work played a major role, prefiguring to an extent the Romantic aesthetic in which the idea of the Ugly provoked questions about social acceptability, religious legitimacy, and descriptive authenticity. By looking at different ways in which ugliness was conceived, successfully and unsuccessfully, as a distinct intellectual and physical category of difference I pursue the shifts that occurred in Enlightenment understandings of physical appearance just as they are influenced by anthropological and physiognomic notions of ugliness and its spiritual correspondents. Although Mendelssohn’s life story and philosophical work have long attracted attention from philosophers and intellectual historians, this investigation of his image and aesthetics, by focusing on ugliness, provides a means through which to explore the multivalence of ugliness as an aesthetic and a social category. As this work shows, ugliness functions in several ways: it can justify social policing and exclusion by affirming racial and class hierarchies and it can provide opportunities to exercise cognitive ability which lead directly to the kind of moral improvement that serves to legitimate Enlightenment thinking. Why focus on ugliness? The perception of ugliness – in the eighteenth-century aesthetic fusion of beauty and ethics – serves to classify both what – and who – was unacceptable. In Enlightenment discourse, the ugly is not simply an absence of beauty (as it would be in a Platonic universe) but a positive and real quality expressed by the outward “form” of a deformed (or degenerate) character. In the early Enlightenment era, intellectuals tended to affirm the popular physiognomic opinion that body type indicated moral character. As the antithesis of the idea of kalokagathia (beautiful-and-good), ugliness might have represented an indictment of moral integrity in an episteme that was not structured to separate the aesthetic from the ethical. The popularity of portraiture, the rise of physiognomy (and its early association with Christian

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 theology), and the development of the field of anthropology at the end of the eighteenth century tended both to authorize those judgments and to impart specific images with presumptions about morality, immorality, probity, and dissipation. Toward the end of the century, however, Kant separated art and aesthetic experience from practical reason which, in essence, made moral edification autonomous from what became the pure work of art. After The Critique of Judgment (1790), nineteenth-century thought could accommodate an aesthetics that was “free” (that is, not related to improving the intellect or social behavior). Simultaneously, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy 6 Introduction employed aesthetic categories within anthropology that maintained an understanding of ugliness and its characteristics; that understanding moved along an axis of primitive to civilized and attached judgments to physical appearance, cultural behavior, and social potential. That standards used both for decoding appearance and appraising ethical and physical worth were often loose is made apparent in the very nature of the challenge inherent within the opening story. In emphasizing Mendels- sohn’s appearance as he intrudes into the space of Kant’s classroom and becomes the object of the hostility of Kant’s students, Lewald transforms the “small deformed Jew,” welcomed by Kant, into the “sage” and “philosopher.” By the mid-nineteenth century, Mendelssohn’s “ugliness” had become a representative trait in his life story; he was, according to contemporary portraits, short, dark haired, bearded, and hunchbacked. As Meyer Kayser- ling (1825–1905) later reported, Mendelssohn was a “small, weakly figure, unsightly and deformed.”13 In this book his appearance provides the fodder to unpack the definitional terms established and elaborated upon by modern aesthetics. The uneven intellectual boundaries between philosophy, anthropology, politics, and religion – utilized by both Mendelssohn and Kant in their writings – created an intellectual space for ongoing discussions of physical body types and the moral significance of size, shape, and skin color. Mendelssohn’s Jewishness – reiterated three times in Lewald’s short account – deepens the moral charge of otherness in eighteenth-century Europe and provides a glimpse into the differences between Enlightenment and Romantic notions of ugliness.14 That flexibility is captured in what Mendelssohn calls in his aesthetic writings the “mixed sentiment” which describes the complicated, contradictory responses that people have to misshapen or non-uniform objects in nature and in works of art. Mixed sentiments involve more than one emotion at a time and give a name to that experience people have when multiple, often oppositional sensations occur simultaneously and over a sustained period of time. For example, the pleasure invoked during a Shakespearean tragedy can bring together sadness, satisfaction, admiration, and compassion while also fostering an appreciation of the artistry of the writing, acting, and staging. (The same would go for a blooming flower – joy at its beauty, pleasure in its scent, sadness in its imminent decay – or for a victory at war – pride in the success, pity for the wounded, sorrow for the dead.) Such mixed sentiments provoke a heightened emotional response that must account for a complex set of reac-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 tions especially to imperfect, ugly, and unpleasant objects from nature and examples in art; in so doing they also represent the ambivalence and mixed response that operates as part of the eighteenth-century intellectual endeavor itself. Mendelssohn’s theory helps shape a conversation about the multiple ways Enlightenment thinkers across Europe approach the new political, religious, and societal agendas under construction and at work. His particular role in the innovation of the theory of the mixed sentiment provides the opportunity to discuss not just eighteenth-century aesthetics but also the shifting boundaries of society itself. Introduction 7 Seeking to privilege “Occidental” civilization while accounting for wide variations in the human body, Enlightenment thinkers sought to reform the rigidity that they saw encumbering the categories of beauty and ugliness inherited from a long humanistic and popular tradition. Although there were notable variations between the way notions of beauty, ugliness, and sublimity were construed, broadly, all schools agreed in the fact that aesthetic notions were coherent and interacted with notions of national character, behavior, looks, and religion. As aesthetics was theorized, it migrated from literary and art criticism to an autonomous field of study concerning the philosophical justification of judgments of taste and their correlation with morality. And aesthetic criteria were also being theorized in what one might broadly call philosophical anthropology: theories were formed about human origins and the origins of society, the nature of “race,” the development of culture, and religion as a rational universal phenomenon. As one of the great pre-Kantian theorists in the field of aesthetics in Germany, Mendelssohn worked within a perfectionist aesthetic founded on Leibniz’s rationalist theogony and he created startling insights into the ways of understanding beauty, perfection, and deformity. As a Jew, Mendelssohn was also exposed to the ambivalence and capriciousness of physical judgment and legal oppression; on numerous occasions, he defended Judaism against both older-styled Christian assaults and newly styled Enlightened contempt for “superstitious” religious ritual. One of the leading themes in this study is that Mendelssohn’s aesthetic, far from being merely a predecessor to Kant’s Critical philosophy, was a powerful reflection on the imperfect, which holds a place as both a test case and a central concern of aesthetics. The judgment of Mendelssohn’s work as solely a Kantian precursor, or as A. H. Friedlander described it, a philosophy that “was undermined and eventually pushed aside by the monumental teachings of Immanuel Kant,”15 has given way to an assessment of his work on its own merits.16 Indeed, my sense that his analysis of the aesthetic category of ugliness is not only historically important but brings together numerous strands of his Enlightened philosophical outlook – in religion, metaphysics, and politics – forms the root of this study. Ugliness in German is Hässlichkeit, a word the Grimm Brothers trace to the infinitive hassen, “to hate.”17 As William Hogarth showed so clearly in his art, ugliness has a behavioral dimension that invokes both a physical and a moral response; like beauty, it lies not in the eye of the single beholder but in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 the vision of the majority culture. Because ugliness can be applied to objects by the judgment of the individual and by cultural consensus, it is important to make clear that by the term “ugly” I mean the subjective assessment of negative features and manners that bring about a sense of disharmony or discord in the observer. The Ugly is less the absence of those qualities that define beauty – perfection, harmony, regularity, variety, and symmetry – and more the presence of their counterparts – irregularity, imbalance, discordance, deformity, and decay. Looking at the way the non-beautiful is described and utilized in any given time period exposes deep societal investments in that 8 Introduction which it values and that which it does not. Rather than read ugliness into eighteenth-century aesthetics, this book attempts to ferret out the usefulness of the Ugly as both a conceptual and a practical category of description and assessment. All of its correlates – the Imperfect, the Disgusting, the Immoral, the Stupid, the Corrupt, and, as Sander Gilman has shown, the Diseased18 – were invoked in the eighteenth century in order to create – and later defend – aesthetic privilege in European society. Shaftesbury, who is a significant influence on this theme, wrote, “in the very nature of things there must of necessity be the foundation of a right and wrong taste, as well in respect of inward characters and features as of outward person, behaviour and action.”19 By implication, outward ugliness corresponds to inward immorality and this correspondence has direct impact both on how one judges and how one is judged. Yet, at the same time, Shaftesbury’s contemporary Joseph Addison (1672–1719) could write in The Spectator that novelty “bestows charms on a monster, and makes even the imperfections of nature please us.”20 As this study shows, these two views are not contradictory but rather express two moments in an aesthetic that was fully theorized by Mendelssohn. The Ugly is related to but different from the Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Disgusting; it possesses a certain moral and aesthetic insecurity that, as Mendelssohn saw, fosters ambivalence about its true nature and illustrates a vacillation that lies at the very center of the aesthetic itself. Though the construction of theories about ugliness hint strongly at the connection between external appearance and internal worth, the conceptual tie breaks when applied to examples which mix seemingly discordant physical forms with positive moral content.21 Mendelssohn himself provides an unintentional exemplar of this kind of mixing of (inner) morality and (outer) negativity. But it would be a mistake to interpret this potential positively while ignoring the fact of Mendelssohn’s Jewishness and its recognition in his time. In Lewald’s story, Kant’s students react not just to the appearance of a stranger but to the physical characteristics that marked that stranger as a Jew. Mendelssohn’sphy- sical limitations and the political liabilities he suffered in pre-Emancipation Prussia clashed with the esteem generated by his reputation. A closer study of the specific mix of meanings held by the marker “Mendelssohn,” that is, his influence and his emblematic figure as an enlightened, ugly Jew, occupies the final two chapters of this book. Not surprisingly, this study of ugliness finds its place among several of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 unresolved issues of Enlightenment Europe. As European intellectuals generated theories about political, even democratic authority, individual agency, and religious toleration, a similar self-awareness was spreading among minority groups within and outside of Europe, from the Jews of Prussia to the Creoles of Mexico. Some of these groups were able to become much more critical of the reasons for their exclusion from the civil realms of society. The charge of ugliness – and the immorality that clung to it – indicted religious and ethnic minorities whose various proximities to Europe forced differing considerations. As suggested above, chief among those minorities were Jews, who constituted Introduction 9 a small religious community in Western Europe but received an inordinate amount of attention.22 Partly because physical and moral stereotypes of Judaism, Jews, and Jewish behavior in European thought and culture construed them as ugly and sinful, when the semantic meanings of the Ugly underwent change in the eighteenth century, cultural semantics that enclosed Jews also modified. Both were, of course, put into play by the new political configuration by which European (generally white and Christian) privilege tried to legitimize itself in the social order. In this adjustment, politically minded national and social identities of a different kind began to be articulated. In the sense that beauty was constructed as a universal idea, ugliness denoted a particularity – both in form and in action – that separated those who were ugly from those considered beautiful in the judgment of those who had cultural and institutional capital. A negative relationship between Chris- tian universalism and Jewish particularity was fostered and furthered by eighteenth-century authors interested in categories and the way different people fit into them. Because of the national and social ambiguity ascribed to them, Jews presented a challenge to Enlightenment ideals. Characterized as “Oriental,” Jews showed all the markings of 1700 years of European residency, even as they resisted dominant (i.e., Christian) forms of religious practice and belief. Eventually, though not inevitably, the negativity of ugliness, and responses to it, helped to discredit Judaism even at a time when the potential for humanistic tolerance and universalism might have seemed at its peak. In order to make clear the connections between ethnicity, aesthetics and society that I make here, I argue that ugliness figures in the European imagination in the late eighteenth century as something more than an assessment within the system of taste: rather, it has a political face. Ugliness was one of the means for framing judgments about minority participation in modern civil society based on the impression, made on and by educated observers, of exterior – and assumed internal – characteristics of people and behavior. In other words, the later modern rejection of the deformed and the traditional Christian rejection of the marginal Jew were rooted in the same instinct. The Ugly category implicates not just exterior traits but also projects negative, immoral, and unethical characteristics onto the object that bears those traits. But in the early eighteenth century, cracks begin to appear in this moral equation. The charms of the monster, discerned by Addison, warp our sense of the monstrous.23 Seen not as aesthetically rejected but as aesthetically

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 interesting, ugliness becomes aesthetically subversive and works both to destabilize and to undermine traditional, religious categories of “goodness” and “holiness.” As these contextual shifts occur, “ugliness” remains associated with the negative, unpleasant, and deformed. People – along with actions and objects – considered atypical, immoral, irregular, or “other” came to represent the range of possibilities between beauty and ugliness, morality and immorality. The second chapter of this book shows that the discourse of philosophical anthropology, engaged in identifying and classifying the differences among human beings, was interlocked with the theoretical discussions that 10 Introduction divided the domain of aesthetics; ugly people (and the beautiful people to whom they were always compared) were named, described, organized, and catalogued as though ugliness were an objective symbol of subjective dispositions. The judgments were neither innocent nor naïve; they fostered social hierarchies that provided “scientific” justification for tiered conceptions of intellectual, physical, political, and religious superiority. Mendelssohn’s insistence on the positive benefits of encountering and engaging with the non- perfect promoted an alternative theory that valorized mixed modes and valued ambivalence. As critical aesthetics moved towards understanding the positive role ugliness plays in artistic representation, it also became clearer that ugliness as a social category was at the nexus of an ideology that sought to naturalize a synthesis of religion, physical appearance, and moral conduct.

Aesthetic entanglements Recent scholarship has impugned the modernist aesthetic that begins in the eighteenth century for its responsibility in undermining moral and religious authority and its role in promoting racism.24 Two magisterial interpretations of the epoch, Mosse’s study of the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany and Gilman’s work on the overlapping links between physicality, moral judgment, racial prejudice, and religious discrimination, show that aesthetics touches on most if not all the major tropes of the time period.25 As both Mosse and Gilman show, in making the connections between the aesthetic hierarchy defined by the Beautiful and the Ugly and the ethical hierarchy defined by the virtuous and the bad, eighteenth-century aesthetics supplemented the rise of new articulations of racial, sexual, and ethnic exclusion. Given the highly theoretical nature of aesthetics one must negotiate a veritable minefield of different intentions and aspirations, for there is an unwitting tension linking the purpose of aesthetics (understanding our sensory reactions and their embodiment in canons of taste) and determining the importance of that purpose (judgments about human beings in the domain of social practice). Between interest in the objects of study (that which piques and fosters the aesthetic interest) and attention to the perception of those objects (that is, the philosophy of affective, sensory knowledge) dangles what Terry Eagleton has named “the peculiarity of aesthetic discourse”: “while preserving a root in this realm of everyday experience … [the aesthetic] also raises and elaborates

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 such supposedly natural, spontaneous expression to the status of an intricate intellectual discipline.”26 The “natural, spontaneous” reaction to a beautiful object or an ugly person is easily lost, or paradoxically, made distinctive solely by the heavy intellectualization that aesthetics – as a mental exercise – requires. In learning how to describe and evaluate sensory impressions, the authors who engineered the modern aesthetic created a scientificdiscoursethat simultaneously sought to describe certain qualities of sensory perception and judge the value of those qualities. Balancing the specific physical and mental positive benefits of an encounter with something – or someone – beautiful Introduction 11 against the universalizing appeal of theorizing about what the Beautiful means, eighteenth-century intellectuals expanded the usefulness of aesthetic experience and theory. Taking advantage of the work of English, Irish, and Scottish writers and building upon the religious positivism of the German tradition he inherited, Mendelssohn crafted an aesthetic that developed a new and potentially emancipatory understanding of philosophical categories of meaning. Arguing for the potential located in the faculty of imagination and outlining a theory in which ugliness showed greater advantage than beauty, Mendelssohn’s innovations – seemingly lost in later retrospective readings of the Enlightenment through a Kantian lens – attempted to make the particular universal. In discourse about eighteenth-century aesthetics, one can see the importance of balancing definitions; the subjects of the aesthetic enterprise – that which causes a response and those who respond – teeter between the overlapping pairings within the aesthetic – good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the moral and the immoral, reason and religion. Less evident but similar in this series of oppositions is the pairing of Christianity and Judaism. In medieval and early modern aesthetics, the Good and the Beautiful were not representations of but were synonymous with God. For Christianity, the body of Christ – as the divine in human form – exemplified both the physical manifestation of divine beauty and its most idealized form. Meanwhile, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, everywhere in Europe (except, to an extent, in the Netherlands), Jews were encumbered with innumerable legal restrictions which were still justified by the divine revelation of Christ. These restrictions followed Jews into modernity and seemed to isolate them and Judaism from the broad possibilities of modern aesthetics, which had opened horizons to non-religious forms of knowledge and ethics. Though natural religion critiqued and transformed premodern conceptions of divinity, revelation, ritual, and salvation, early Enlightenment aesthetics continued to use Christianity to construe ethical action and connect it to conceptions of taste. Judaism was an anomalous yet familiar religion whose adherents chose specifically not to participate in the moral code described by Christianity; their legal-based religion was understood as immune to a reason-based morality. Though toleration of Jews was defended by influential modern figures, such as John Locke in England and Baron de Montesquieu in France, tolerance was not the same as appreciation. Jewish religious forms, which had been disparaged for being anti-Christian, were

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 assessed by Enlightenment thinkers in different but similar terms: they were barbaric, superstitious, outmoded, and offensive to conventions that promoted and justified the universals of beauty and morality. As a history of the progress of the human spirit developed in the Enlightenment, the Christian epoch was supposed to have subsumed Judaism’s claims to authenticity and veracity by creating truly universal rules of conduct; Judaism’s continued existence and Jewish fealty to its rituals and practices were seen as anachronistic. Thus, to both the anti-clerical and legislative reformers of the Enlight- enment and the later counter-Enlightenment defenders of Christianity, 12 Introduction Judaism was a deformation. Taking Christianity (stripped of its superstitions) as the model for universal morality – which was interconnected to the universal of beauty – Judaism and its adherents were not only particular but also ugly in their particularity. In other words, Judaism appeared to represent everything an Enlightened Christianity – and Deism itself – left behind. Indeed, the vocabulary engendered by the aesthetic discourse lent itself to viewing Judaism as ethically corrupted by its partiality. By opting out of Christian theology, and especially the refinement of Christianity proffered by Enlightenment thought, Judaism remained cast as obscurantist and resistant to the universalism of natural religion. The terms by which Christian and Jew were opposed were re-configured, but the oppositions still remained: the “superstitions” of Jewish law were contrasted with the emancipation of Christian openness (i.e., salvation through belief and not through legislation) and further to rational religion (i.e., communal good of the whole). In this picture, Judaism figures as anti-modern and thereby destructive. Aesthetic judgments of Jews and Judaism – as neither good nor beautiful – succeeded in joining the politics of Emancipation with Enlightenment moral philosophy. This way is at least one in which Enlightenment politics played itself out. Of course, this politics was in dialectic with other currents in the Enlight- enment paradigm. Mendelssohn looms large for the fact that he was both enlightened and a defender of Jewish belief. While I do not mean to suggest that modern aesthetics identified Jews or Judaism as its main subject or target, there are many sources in the moral philosophy of early British rationalism and its later modification by German thinkers that pave a path toward an aesthetic reading of Judaism. As Enlightenment aesthetics absorbed the criticism of classical norms, it began to promote a more intimate, intellectual connection between ethical behavior and appearance that accom- modated sensibility and good taste, but avoided barbarism and excess. At this intersection, the perception of a Jewish “refusal” to accept the morals of modern (Christian) society engendered a similar perception that Jews and Judaism remained outside the moral possibilities of modernity even (or especially) as offered by modern aesthetics. Jews and Judaism were seen, at best, as viable candidates for improvement (as Christian Wilhelm von Dohm argued) and, at worst, as fundamentally contrary to a moral society based on (Enlightened) Christianity (as Johann David Michaelis and Christoph Meiners suggested). These judgments of Judaism are complicated by the juxtaposition

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 of a biblical “ideal” and the reality of actual Jews engaged in living Judaism. As this study shows, Mendelssohn’s image and work must be understood in the context of his attempt to defend both Enlightenment ideals and the legitimacy of Judaism as a religious system, which tactically shifted as new themes were introduced into German philosophical culture. Mendelssohn’s aesthetics rehearse ideas that are picked up in his more pointed defenses of Judaism as a religion based on truths that do not depend on non-rational revelation and that are perfectly consistent with universal liberty and the culture of improved taste. Introduction 13 Emancipatory claims When Mendelssohn walked from his childhood home in Dessau (Anhalt) to Berlin in 1743, he set into motion an unlikely drama of Enlightenment philosophy and politics. Though his arrival was unremarkable at the time, by the time of his death, Mendelssohn had become a social and religious icon.27 Like most Berlin Jews who were limited by heavy taxation, strict Prussian legislation, and residency limits, Mendelssohn depended on his sovereign’s good graces and his own financial solvency to remain in the city.28 In the latter half of eighteenth-century Prussia, Jews were considered subjects of the state but did not have citizenship.29 Continuing an economically advantageous program, Frederick II allowed Jews to settle as long as they paid taxes on their commercial affairs and investments or fulfilled basic community needs; peddlers, beggars, and the unemployed were not tolerated. With the exception of a few, very wealthy families, most Jews existing under the reigns of Frederick Wilhelm I and Frederick II lived in relative financial and resi- dential insecurity under tight strictures regarding how they could or could not provide their livelihood. Mendelssohn came to the city to further his studies with his teacher David Fraenkl who had been named the city’s rabbi. Under Fraenkl’s sponsorship and through other communal contacts, Mendelssohn made the acquaintance of several young, intellectual Jews and began to take upon himself a course of study that exposed him not only to a range of sources within Jewish literature but to a remarkable breadth of Enlightenment philosophy, ancient literature, and medieval science. Teaching himself German, Greek, Latin, English, and French (in addition to the Yiddish and Hebrew he learned as a child) Mendelssohn opened himself to a world of learning. As a young adult he met Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) with whom he shared a life-long friendship. In the 1750s Lessing surprised Men- delssohn by publishing his first philosophical treatise without Mendelssohn’s knowledge; he thereby launched an extremely successful literary career. Such exposure was almost unheard of for Jews at the time, and Mendelssohn’s clarity, gentility, and intellectual ability earned the high esteem of (as well as quite a bit of curiosity from) both Jews and non-Jews; for much of his life, his popularity contrasted starkly with the civil injustices he endured as a Jew in Prussia’s capital. As a scholar and a Jew, Mendelssohn illustrates the paradox of religious toleration: Mendelssohn was often stymied by an inescapable belief that he Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 could only be an enlightened person by giving up the inferior religion of Judaism. He was, in this sense, caught in the political repercussions of an unemancipated Jewry and different degrees of anti-Jewish sentiment. He translated this self-consciousness about his position into the philosophical gesture of elevating the notion of mixed sentiment into a positive rationalist thesis, thus promoting a radically different version of aesthetic and metaphysics within which German thinkers could work. His commitment to the equalizing ideals of the Enlightenment carried over into his conception of 14 Introduction Judaism and its compatibility with the tenets of the rationalism that made his aesthetics possible (most specifically and famously in his 1783 work Jer- usalem, Or On Ecclesiastical Authority and Judaism). Mendelssohn’s firm commitment to the universality of natural religion and the specificity of Jewish ritual observance made him seem a contradiction in terms: an Enlightened Jew. It was on Mendelssohn’s initiative that the politically ambitious civil servant Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820) published On the Civil Improvement of the Jews in 1781, sparking an emotional debate that would last almost 100 years.30 Although others had written on the topic before (the British philosophers Locke and John Toland had each addressed the question of Jewish civil liberties earlier and Aaron Salomon Gumperz had approached the subject in a little known treatise in German), Dohm advocated a full educational system that would teach Jews about German society and Ger- mans about Judaism. Even as he employed the same negative stereotypes of Jewish physicality and behavior as those who opposed his suggestions, Dohm’s treatise began the long, modern debate on the Judenfrage. Jonathan Hess’ precise and astute book Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity provides a crucial reading of the impact of Dohm’s argument. Hess argues that “Dohm was among the most radical of the ideologues of civic improvement, most of whom wanted Jews to first regenerate themselves and demonstrate their suitability for citizenship.”31 The detailing of the reactions to Dohm’s treatise makes it clear that social and religious prejudice against Jews and Judaism were powerfully challenged in the eighteenth century. As Hess shows, many European intellectuals were deeply committed to the removal of (religious) bias, the establishment of universal natural rights, and the exercise of free thinking. Yet, as a domestic, white, non-Christian minority, Jews in western Europe simply did not seem to fit in the Christian- centric social milieu even in its post-Christian form. Similarly, in his work Judaism and Enlightenment, Adam Sutcliffe has shown that Judaism was recalcitrant to the philosophical schemes put forward by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers. Indeed, the Enlightenment attraction to the philosophical and social ideals of tolerance clashed with the debate on the civil inclusion of the Jews. Describing Judaism as “profoundly ensnared in the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Christian worldview from and against which it emerged,” Sutcliffe explains that “the Enlightenment

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 vision of universal tolerance and emancipation stood uneasily alongside the definition of Judaism as so atavistically contrary to all emancipatory values and modes of thought.”32 If science provided the individual with a foothold from which to exercise intellectual “freedom” in the critique of religious guidelines and creeds, it was still the case that that the critique of Judaism employed the vernacular of an old anti-Jewish sentiment, thinly recast in secularized form. The repeated refrain of Jewish perfidiousness in theological and biblical interpretations was related to the perceptions of a Jewish para- sitic role in the European economy.33 The confusion of Christian anti- Introduction 15 Judaism and social anti-Jewry was further intertwined with new scholarship about the “truth” of the Hebrew Bible in which anti-Jewish scholarship conflated historical with contemporary Jews. New scholarly theories (for instance, the surmise, revived in the Enlightenment period, that the ancient Israelites were expelled from Egypt because they were leprous) and methodologies (as in Buffon’s massive work on natural history) helped create secular justifications for older religious prejudices. As medieval Christian hegemony lost its hold on societal structures, and the theological basis for anti-Judaism morphed into animosity against Jews as symbols of revealed religion, Jews became the issue around which the political dilemma of the ancien regime was most symbolically fraught: as humans, they deserved full liberty, as Jews, they were backward, particularistic, and legalistic. Of course, there is nothing revelatory about eighteenth-century animosity against Jews. Christian doctrine has long assessed Judaism as the necessary precursor to Christianity and the unrelenting rival to its truth claims. Labeled unavoidable but anathema, Judaism and Jews could not be made compatible with the social norms of a Christian-specific aesthetic sensibility except as outsiders and other; in their rejection of Christian doctrine, Jews seemed to remove themselves from the moral standards of the Catholic and Protestant nations in which they lived (even as they were held accountable to and falsely accused of abrogating those standards). The Enlightenment championed natural religion and its universal tenets of belief in God, God’s Providence, and the immortality of the soul; it seemed at once open to all believers and closed to those whose beliefs required specified practices of worship. Jewish refusal to accept the Protestant rendering of such universalism complicated modern attempts to reform religion and seemed to justify medieval assumptions about an essentialist Jewish particularism. Considered foreign even after living on the European continent for over a millennium, Jews had been and continued to be the interior others against which European intellectuals defined themselves. What was novel in the Enlightenment was the reading of Judaism’s “irregularity” as an awkward dissembling of the intellectual and social categories established by the aesthetic discourse. In his treatise advocating emancipation, Dohm’s rhetoric exposed ambivalent positions about the very nature of Jews. The argument that Hess puts forth – that Dohm “rooted his vision of emancipation in an explicit defense of the right and need of the modern state to ‘improve’ its Jews in the name of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 reason and progress”–identifies the vastly different ways that Jews and non- Jews approached Jewish civil liberties.34 By using descriptions of Jews as physically unpleasant and morally corrupt, Dohm expressed not just pity for Jews but presented a case for emancipation as humanitarian aid. The title of his piece spoke directly to the moral “improvement” (Verbesserung) of Jews – an improvement rejected by Mendelssohn who preferred to use the term “acceptance” (Annehmung).35 Reminding his readers that “the Jew is even more man than Jew,” Dohm touched on one of the most enduring aspects of the Emancipation debate: the humanity of Jews. Indeed, as early as 1754, 16 Introduction Mendelssohn felt the need to remind his readership that Jews are human.36 Dohm’s argument is that “improved” Jews were a resource that could profit the Prussian state; he certainly does not consider the integrity of Judaism in a modernized form. He argued for “the incorporation of Jews into a secular political order in which they would cease to be ‘Jews, properly speaking.’”37 Too foreign to be European, yet too European to be entirely alien, Jews and their claims to the self-evident rights inherent in all humanity presented an exemplary challenge of moral identification. The question was whether Jews as Jews were “good” enough to deserve citizenship. In an oft-quoted passage Dohm excused Jewish degeneracy on the basis of the “political conditions under which they now live”:

Let us concede that the Jews may be more morally corrupt than other nations; that they are guilty of a proportionately greater number of crimes than the Christians; that their character in general inclines more toward usury and fraud in commerce, that their religious prejudice is more antisocial and clannish; but I must add that this supposed greater moral corruption of the Jews is a necessary and natural consequence of the oppressed conditions in which they have been living for so many centuries.38

In seeking to justify Jews for their endemic corruption, Dohm’s concessionary phrase seems to admit the charge against them even more. Unlike in 1748 when Montesquieu ridiculed the notion that the Jews were criminals rather than the victims of crime, Dohm reiﬁes the “necessary and natural consequence” that makes Jews guilty of the very crimes he articulates: fraud, prejudice, clannishness, antisocial behavior. While not innately immoral, the Jewish “character”“inclines” toward such behavior a “greater moral corruption.” Responses were immediate. Hess argues that “Dohm’s work met with a level of public attention that was radically incommensurate with either the numbers or the prominence of Germany’s Jews.”39 That attention led Dohm to republish his essay two years later; the second edition includes several reviews and queries as well as both positive and negative responses. In most, Jews were categorized as a wholly separate “nation” against whom Germans deﬁned themselves, a rhetorical device that employs the assumptions of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 intellectual and anthropological aesthetic in the evaluation of Jewish worth, Jewish virtue, and Jewish corrosiveness. The response by Johann David Michaelis (1717–91), a well-respected, highly influential scholar of the ancient Near East, has received the most contemporary scholarly attention.40 As the author of the extremely popular Mosaisches Recht (1770–71), an extensive study of Israelite behavior, custom, and belief, Michaelis played a pivotal role in providing the reading public with negative imagery and sentiment of Judaism and Jews. That exposure was facilitated by Dohm’s inclusion of Michaelis’ review in the second edition. Introduction 17 Michaelis was an outspoken and influential advocate of the belief that Jews were non-improvable and that their historical depravity – as witnessed in the Hebrew Bible – bespoke their moral ineptitude. In response to Dohm, Michaelis offered a multi-layered critique that conflated contemporary Jews with ancient Israelites and incorporated early anthropological theories about the relationship between climate and physical aptitude. Both men agreed that Jews were “Asiatic,” and therefore not European, despite a sustained Jewish presence in Germanic lands from the third century CE, thus employing language appropriated from the anthropology and natural history of the era. In addition to the nascent racist language, which he used to mark Jews as bio- logically different from Germans, Michaelis invoked an elaborate mathematical equation that suggested Jews were 25 percent more likely to commit crimes than other members of the population.41 Positing “the Jews” against “we Germans,” Michaelis based his claim on an inherent social criminality.42 His reiteration of the first person plural “we” and “us” in such close proximity to the description of “the whole German people” disconnects German Jews both from the body politic and the national ethic. Blaming Jewish “national pride” on “their conception of themselves as God’s Chosen People,” Michaelis incriminates that pride for “preventing them from min- gling with other people.” Yet, those Jews who attempt to circumvent this otherness (“Jews only in name or in origin and who do not believe in the Jewish religion”) are equally as untrustworthy and dishonest. As he confesses, “[w]hen I see a Jew eating pork, in order no doubt to offend his religion, then I find it impossible to rely on his word, since I cannot understand his heart.”43 Michaelis ensnares Jews into a double bind; they are alternately separatists or chameleons. In any case, Jews should not be trusted. Yet Michaelis’ principle objection relates directly to bodily form: he rejects the idea that Jews might serve the state as soldiers for one cultural reason (he assumes dietary and religious restrictions would keep male Jews from integrating with Germans) and, even more, for one physiological reason – the physically weak Jews would be too fearful to fight bravely or even usefully. Berating Dohm for missing this point in his assurances that Jews could be successfully integrated into military service, Michaelis makes the following claim:

It is held that the conduct of modern warfare requires a speciﬁc minimum

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 height for the soldiers … this is the accepted practice in the two most militarily powerful German states. If this claim be true, very few Jews of the necessary height will be found who will be eligible for the army.44

Indeed, their inferior physical stature would harm the very state they sought to “protect.”45 Again Hess’ insight is instructive here. Unlike Dohm, Michaelis found it possible to separate the Jew from the human being. His discussion of height – a physical quality elaborated upon in eighteenth-century discussions 18 Introduction of body type and variation – exposes the implicit connection he makes between physical judgment and civil worth. Though Michaelis does not claim to be a physiologist or anthropologist, he borrows from the ethnographic data of his contemporaries in order to make geographical, religious, and moral claims that impose themselves on the proposal to incorporate Jews into the state. He argues that Jews originated in the southern hemisphere, that is, in ancient Palestine, and have retained the non-European characteristics of the Near East, seeking to solidify a connection between physical and moral otherness. For Michaelis, height – and its implicit corollary, physical strength – were products of Jewish environmental abnormality.46 Throughout their exile from their ancient land, their Orientalism remained “ungemischt”; they had not intermarried, therefore they had not cleansed their bloodlines of this warmer taint. As a “southern race,”47 Jews were and are a weaker lot, and did not have (indeed, could not develop “not in 10 generations”) the strength of the (tall, white, northern) Germans.48 Hess connects Michaelis’ concern about Jewish size to his suggestion that Jews serve as “internal coloni- zers,” a solution he suggests that would serve both the state (far more so than letting short Jews serve in the army) and Jews, who would be returned to a more acceptable climate (and thus, no longer threaten the social health of Germans).49 Michaelis’ description of the shortness of Jews provides his justification for denying them civil liberty. Simply put, Jewish bodily foreignness bespeaks a moral foreignness that renders them incapable of citizenship. The relationship between Jewish “origin” in the warm, southern climate of the Near Eastern Orient and their physical inabilities provides the link for Michaelis to determine why Jews could never be fit – bodily or morally – for “normal” citizenship. Taking advantage of the climate theory derived from the writing of Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), Michaelis reiterates Jewish environmental abnormalities as a way to employ the anthropological rendering of ugliness in his discourse against Jewish emancipation. It is a response constructed around what Susanne Zantop called “colonial fantasies.”50 As a measure of external looks and a gauge for internal morality, Michaelis’ judgment of Jewish appearance and the significance he attached to that judgment implicated Jews in a hierarchy of deviance that retained the white Christian German male as the highest form of perfection and served to exclude “ugly,”“weak,”“short” people from the liberties promised by human rights.51 Though he goes outside

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 his own disciplinary limits to formulate his judgment, Michaelis’ use of the argument represents the incipient racialist science that is codiﬁed both in pseudo-sciences, like Lavater’s physiognomy, and in mainstream science, like the natural history of George Louis le Clerk, Comte de Buﬀon (1708–88). Anthropological assessments of eighteenth-century Jews foster ambivalence about their historical and contemporary status; even when categorized as Caucasians (as they are by Kant), an element of Jewish religiosity or physicality is used to mark them as other. Such assessments, written concurrently with aesthetic discussions of beauty and ugliness and the debate on Jewish Introduction 19 Emancipation, establish categories by which to conjoin immorality, repulsive physicality, and corrupt social characteristics thereby establishing an agenda and providing fodder for the connection of Jews to ugliness.

Visions of ugliness The eighteenth century saw the rise both of a Newtonian emphasis on the grounding of scientific laws and explanations in material causes and of a number of human sciences that attempted to organize and codify folk psychological concepts on a scientific basis. This context provided the means to pursue the study of supra-natural phenomena such as mesmerism and the extremely popular “science of physiognomy.” The latter, revived by the Swiss theologian Lavater in the 1770s, took the moral implication of aesthetic judgments to the limit by claiming that facial features articulated human character and a “divine alphabet.”52 Lavater’sinfluence – and the overwhelming popularity of his four-volume Physiognomische Fragmente – made the classification of appearance a domestic, public enterprise. As Richard Gray has carefully articulated in About Face: From Lavater to Auschwitz, “Lavater unleashed an entirely new brand of physiognomics, pursued with disciplinary and methodological zeal throughout Enlightenment and post- Enlightenment Europe, but in particular in German-speaking regions.”53 Though I think Gray’s final conclusion that there is “a profound affinity – although certainly no necessity – that connects Lavater and his theories with the atrocities of Auschwitz” goes too far, his incisive analysis reveals much about Lavater’s project that has been lost since the beginning of its phenomenal popularity in the late eighteenth century.54 Like Gray, I argue that Lavater’s physiognomy “sought to establish narrow characterological and behavioral norms, while stigmatizing all the traits or behavioral patterns that fell outside this closely circumscribed taxonomy of the acceptable.”55 Melding aesthetics, anthropology, and theology, Lavater functionalized a synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual tendencies to justify and invigorate a new disciplinary paradigm for instituting social control, in which ugliness was explicitly turned into a state and a readable sign of inescapable immorality. Indeed, the overlapping spheres of those three disciplines – part and parcel of the same inquiry into the nature of human intelligence, behavior, and appearance – were developed by a number of Enlightenment figures who were

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 aware of the mounting corpus of information pouring in from the exploration of the non-European world and the increasingly precise ways developed to sort and understand it. John H. Zammito and Jeffrey Freedman have shown in their two very different but highly illuminating studies that intellectuals in German-speaking lands were particularly active in engaging each other (and their British and French colleagues) in discussion and debate through the use of print journals, private and public letters, scholarly reviews, and the ever increasing market of periodicals.56 Academics and philosophes were not just alert to each other’s speculative advances in science, research, and scholarship 20 Introduction but were vigorously at work reviewing new publications and creating new opportunities for proving (and publicizing) them. The cross-fertilization between different domains of research generated significant overlap, particularly in what has been called “popular philosophy,”57 which sits at the junc- ture of aesthetics and anthropology, especially concerning physical and moral beauty and ugliness. Just as the modern aesthetic emerged first from an interest in morality, then turned toward the psychological responses of that morality in individuals (and only later became oriented toward the study of art and artistic value), so the “study of man” developed out of a similar intellectual curiosity regarding the “essential” and “primordial” nature of humanity, encompassing the nascent fields of what we now call ethnography, history, psychology, literature, anthropology, and archaeology. In order, then, to present the semantic features and social effects of the concept of ugliness in the eighteenth century, and the ways it affected the intellectual and popular opportunities left open to Judaism and Jews, I will bring together these different domains. Thus, I look at the manipulation of ugliness as an aesthetic idea, anthropological judgment, theological statement, and pictorial assessment of moral worth and limitation. The first chapter focuses on aesthetic ugliness paying particular attention to Mendelssohn’s theory of ugliness and the intersection of his discovery of the use of ambivalence in his perfectionist aesthetics and his defense of Judaism as a legitimate, Enlightened religion. The second chapter sketches the anthropological categorization of non-Europeans as ugly by detailing theories of skin color, climate, height, and religious understanding as a means of exposing the long-range and wide influence of notions of beauty and ugliness. Significantly, the aesthetic and anthropological work of Immanuel Kant responds to Mendelssohn’s notion of ugliness by, in one sense, seeking to leave it behind entirely as pre- Critical, and, on the other hand, appropriating certain of Mendelssohn’s insights. Though Kant’s intellectual interest in anthropology begins with descriptions of national types of physical ugliness, his critical turn allows him to reformulate the ethical components of aesthetics and he shifts his attention to the significance of the theoretical Beautiful and Ugly. In doing so, he redefines beauty as an element of free will, in accordance with the insight, in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), that attempts to show the complete agreement of duty and freedom. Despite Mendelssohn’s attempt at a theoretical inoculation, Kantian ugliness – the inability or unwillingness to exercise one’s

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 reason – ensnares Judaism in a trap of obligation and assumption. Just as Mendelssohn’s philosophy tied together a very sophisticated perfectionist aesthetics and a defense of Judaism, his person came to represent an ugliness made beautiful. Thus, the third and fourth chapters treat the representation of his personage in the rise of modern physiognomy and contemporary portraits of Mendelssohn. Associative links between appearance and moral judgment are made explicit in the rejuvenation of physiognomy by Lavater in the 1770s. The manner in which he intertwined several of the common denominators of eighteenth-century European thought (theology, Introduction 21 metaphysics, psychology) made him the public spokesperson for the study of the face. His work was not without controversy even within the Enlight- enment, especially as his earnest brand of Christianity often alienated his contemporaries. Lavater regenerated a field that could easily be considered a patchwork of superstitious beliefs upon the cultured strata of Europe. He did so by infusing his discipline with an absolute, overt, and intricate Christological infrastructure that entangled divine creation with the choices of individual free will. His work captures Mendelssohn in a particular way; as a Jew, Mendelssohn does not fit Lavater’s religious schema but as Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher, he is read as a morally beautiful figure. A purposeful interpretation of Mendelssohn’s face as internally beautiful (even as it is externally discordant) provides the context for the final chapter which examines iconographic portraits of Mendelssohn painted during his lifetime. As the “archetypal” Jew Mendelssohn’s painted image helps expose the contradictions inherent in the confusion of “negative” appearance and “positive” attributes.58 The centrality of Mendelssohn’s contributions to the concurrent discussions about aesthetics, Jewishness, and Emancipation as well his personal renown make Mendelssohn particularly interesting as an example of the intersection of practical and theoretical understandings of ugliness, particularly in the manner in which artists chose to portray him. Because of his introduction of the crucial categories of this study, it is to his role in the development of eighteenth-century aesthetics to which we turn first.

Notes 1 “Vorrede” (Manasseh ben Israel, “Rettung der Juden,” JubA, VIII:10). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, I. 7 (1887). See the fascinating article by Jacqueline Scott, “On the Use and Abuse of Race in Philosophy: Nietzsche, Jews and Race” in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 53–73. 3 See David Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 275. 4 See Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, “Sur Moses Mendelssohn, sur la réforme politique des juifs, et en particulier, sur la révolution tentée, en leur faveur (en 1753) dans la grande Bretagne” (Paris, 1787; Paris: Éditions d’histoire

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 sociale, 1968). 5 August Lewald, Ein Menschenleben, Part I (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1844) p. 98. Quoted from Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des juedischen Volkes (Berlin: Juedischer Verlag 1929), Vol. X, pp. 24–25. See also a citation of Lewald’stextin JubA, XXII: 163–65 and “Moses Mendelssohn Visits the Seer of Koenigsberg,” translated by Paul Mendes-Flohr in Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz. Second Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 61. 6 Quoted from Meyer Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1862), p. 257. Also found in Kants 22 Introduction Gesammelte Schiften. Ausgabe der Preussichen, later Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, subsequently Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), 10:21. From here referred to as Ak. 7 See Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). 8 Cyril Reade, “Lavater and Lessing visit Moses Mendelssohn: Locating a Moment of Origin for the Modern German-Jewish Subject,” in Mendelssohn to Mendel- sohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (Oxford/Berlin/New York: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 70. 9 Ibid.,pp.78–79. 10 In his groundbreaking biography of Mendelssohn, Alexander Altmann cites Sigismund Stern as the original source of what he calls an “apocryphal” story. See Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Sketch (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973), p. 16 and pp. 1764–65, note 2. Stern’s Geschichte des Judentums von Mendelssohn bis auf die neuere Zeit was published in 1857. Altmann gives credit to Meyer Kayserling and Heinrich Graetz for further popularizing the tale. 11 See the painting by Johann Michael Siegfried Lowe (1756–1831), Moses Men- delssohn’s Exam at the Berlin Gate of Potsdam made from the engraving of Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801). The original invitation is reproduced in Bruno Strauss, Moses Mendelssohn in Potsdam am 30. September 1771. Eine kleine Aufklärung (Berlin: Soncino-Gesellschaft der Freunde des Jüdischen Buches, 1929) and Hermann Simon, Moses Mendelssohn: Gesetzestreuer Jude und Deutscher Aufklärer (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich und Centrum Judaicum, 2003), pp. 36–38. See also Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 276. 12 Hannah Arendt, “Privileged Jews,” Jewish Social Studies (Jan., 1946), 8:1, p. 14. Sander Gilman reiterates Arendt’s point in his chapter on Yiddish fiction in Inscribing the Other: “In the ebbing and flooding of the European Enlightenment, the figure of Mendelssohn became a living symbol for the movement of rationalism. That a Jew could transform himself into a European was undeniable proof of the universality of human nature.” (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 52. 13 Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 477. 14 As George Mosse argues in his seminal work Towards The Final Solution, both modern racism and anti-Judaism found inspiration in “a certain concept of beauty – white and classical” which was “exemplified through outward appearance. Most racists consequently endowed inferior races whether black or Jew with several identical properties such as lack of beauty, and charged them with the lack of those middle-class virtues, and finally with a lack of any metaphysical depth.” That “metaphysical” vacuity indicted Judaism as a religious system even as it redefined Jews and other minorities as oppositional to a Christian universalism that sought to steady the uncertainty wrought by new forms of global interaction and engagement. As a non-Christian, “dark” Other, Jews posed a particular challenge to notions of moral and bodily superiority largely because their familiarity bred contempt but not an unqualified or unquantifiable rejection. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 See George Mosse, Toward The Final Solution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), p. xxvi. 15 A. H. Friedlander, “Mendelssohn and the German Jewish Myth,” European Judaism, 19:2 (Winter/Summer 1985/1986), p. 47. 16 See for example, Reinier Munk, ed., Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aes- thetics: Studies in German Idealism, 13 (Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer, 2011), in particular, Paul Guyer, “Mendelssohn’s Theory of Mixed Sentiments,” pp. 259–78; Rachel Zuckert, “Kant’s Rationalist Aesthetics,” Kant-Studien, 98 (2007), pp. 443–63; Anne Pollok, Facette des Menschen: Zur Anthropologie Moses Mendelssohns (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2010); Anne Introduction 23 Pollok, ed., Moses Mendelssohn: Ästhetische Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner- Verlag, 2006); Zachary Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Micah Gottlieb, “Aesthetics and the Infinite: Moses Mendelssohn on the Poetics of Biblical Prophecy,” in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, eds., New Directions in Jewish Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 326–54. 17 “Häszlichkeit,” Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Historisches Wörterbuch. Vol. 10 (Leipzig: Verlag Von S. Hirzel, 1877), p. 553. See also “Hassen,” pp. 546–48 and “Hasz,” pp. 552–55. For the etymology of the English word, the Oxford English Dictionary points to an obsolete Old Norse root “ug,” which meant “to fear, dread, apprehend.” Dating back to the thirteenth century, “uglye” was used to describe the feeling of dread, loathing, or disgust. 18 See Sander Gilman, Health and Illness: Images of Difference (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), esp. pp. 51–66. In this work, and many others, Gilman exposes connections between ugliness, the body, language, stereotype, and prejudice. His work is crucial for this study, not only because of his careful attention to specific cultural and scientific contexts (especially within German speaking countries) but also in that he looks at the manifestations of the uglification of the Jews. His insights into the power of ugliness in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries help inform the idea of the Ugly as discussed in the current work as it comes into discursive and political play. The present study investigates the development and application of the Ugly in the Enlightenment period specifically. Gilman writes insightfully about Mendelssohn and the multiple roles his successors construct for him in Inscribing the Other. 19 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice To An Author,” Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl. Vol. I (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), p. 124. 20 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 412, June 25, 1712. 21 This ambiguity is made clear by Karl Rosenkranz, who wrote the first full-scale study of Ugliness as a philosophical category in 1853 (about 50 years after this range of this study ends), Ästhetik des Häßlichen. The book was reissued by Reclam Press in 1990. 22 Though most of world Jewry lived under the Ottoman Empire or in what became the Pale of Settlement and not in western Europe, surprisingly, Jews and Judaism constituted a large share of the Enlightenment imagination. See Adam Sutcliffe’s excellent study Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2003). Jews were not the only European minority categorized as “ugly”; certainly the Roma and the Sinti, as well as other peoples perceived to be nomadic, politically “unlanded,” and religiously non-Christian, challenged the majority culture by the (at best) ambivalence they provoked. 23 See Kirstin Breitenfelder and Charlotee Kohn-Ley, eds., Wie ein Monster entsteht: Zur Kunstruktion des anderen in Rassismus und Antisemistismus (Bodenheim: Philo Verlag, 2001). Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 24 For an eclectic range of critical studies into the rise and implementation of the modern aesthetic, please see Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1932); Michael McKeon, “Politics of Discourse and the Rise of the Aesthetic in Seventeenth-Century England,” The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (edited by K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999); Howard Eilberg- Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Ronald Paulson, The 24 Introduction Beautiful, Novel and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1996); Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); the collection of original documents in The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000); and Robert Bernasconi, editor, Race (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Pub- lishers, 2001). Included in this mix are post-colonial, analytical, and anthropological approaches to Enlightenment aesthetics. 25 See in particular, Sander Gilman, “The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8:4 (Summer 1975), pp. 373–91; Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); The Jew’s Body (NY: Routledge, 1991); Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 26 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), p. 2. 27 See Shmuel Feiner’s elegant biography Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 28 Mendelssohn was threatened with expulsion once, after a particularly scathing article against religion appeared in the Briefe der neusten Literatur, the journal he co-edited with Nicolai and Lessing. Nicolai was also investigated and permission to publish the journal was revoked. The article had been written by Lessing, who fled Berlin for Leipzig and remained curiously silent about the appearance of his friends before the magistrate. Please see M. K. Torbruegge, “On Lessing, Mendels- sohn, and the Ruling Powers,” Humanität und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht: Beiträge zum Internationalen Lessing-Mendelssohn-Symposium anlässlich des 250 Geburtstages von Lessing und Mendelssohn (ed. E. Bahr, E. Harris, L. Lyon). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982. On the relationship between Mendelssohn and Frederick the Great, see Gordon Craig, “Frederick the Great and Moses Mendelssohn: Thoughts on Jewish Emancipation,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 32 (1987), pp. 3–10. 29 See Craig, “Frederick the Great and Moses Mendelssohn.”“In eighteenth-century Prussia, the Jews were a small … under-privileged, over-taxed minority that was tolerated for its economic usefulness but was often an object of abuse and mistreatment. Their rights of residence and movement were, except in the case of a small elite of Generalprivilegierten, restricted, and they were subject to expulsion from their places of domicile at the caprice of local authorities. They were excluded from the public service; they could not belong to guilds; they were forbidden to engage in certain trades, to open barber shops, for example, to sell spirits, baked goods, meat and milk products; and they were taxed mercilessly … on every possible occasion, when traveling, when marrying, when buying a house, taxed for the right to remain in the city, taxed whenever they left it, taxed for the privilege of being excluded from the armed forces, and so forth,” pp. 6–7. Cf. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Frederick II, “The Charter Decree for the Jews of Prussia,” in The Jew in the Modern World,pp.20–25. 30 Prompted by a frantic plea for assistance from the beleaguered Jewish community in Alsace, under the threat of imminent exile, Mendelssohn broached the topic to Dohm, who readily agreed. Cf. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn,p.463ff. 31 Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 29. 32 Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment,p.6. 33 This view was not monolithic. Montesquieu took the other route, congratulating Jews for inventing bills of exchange and attributing to them the traits that certain Introduction 25 proto-capitalist writers, up to and including Adam Smith, celebrated. In his The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu writes, “In the meantime, commerce was seen to arise from the bosom of vexation and despair. The Jews, proscribed by turns from every country, found out the way of saving their effects. Thus they rendered their retreats for ever fixed; for though princes might have been willing to get rid of their persons, yet they did not choose to get rid of their money. The Jews invented letters of exchange; commerce, by this method, became capable of eluding violence, and of maintaining everywhere its ground; the richest merchant having none but invisible effects, which he could convey imperceptibly wherever he pleased. The Theologians were obliged to limit their principles; and commerce, which they had before connected by main force with knavery, reentered, if I may so express myself, the bosom of probity.” Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws,inComplete Works (1748) Vol. II, Book XXI, Chapter XX. Edition used: The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu (London: T. Evans, 1777). 34 Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity,p.30. 35 The term “Emancipation” did not come into use regarding the crusade for Jewish civil rights until 1828. Accordingly, the use of the term in this chapter is anachronistic, yet still useful. Cf. Jacob Katz, “The Term ‘Jewish Emancipation’: Its Origins and Historical Impact,” Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History, ed. A. Altmann. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 1–25. See also, David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German–Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook,35 (1990), pp. 17–33. 36 JubA, XI:3:11. In a passionate response to Johann David Michaelis’ review of Lessing’s play “The Jews,” in which Michaelis confesses that the portrait of the protagonist renders the Jewish traveler “too virtuous” to be believed, Mendels- sohn writes to Aaron Gumperz, “Die guten Leute, wird er bei sich denken, haben doch endlich die große Entdeckung gemacht, daß die Juden auch Menschen sind. So menschlich denkt ein Gemüth, das von Vorurtheilen gereinigt ist.” 37 Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity,p.31. 38 Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden 2 Volumes (Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973), I:34. 39 Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity,p.3. 40 See Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, particularly Chapter 2 which includes extensive notes on Michaelis’ scholarship. 41 “We can see, principally from reports of investigations of thieves, that the Jews are more harmful than at least we Germans are. Almost half of those belonging to gangs of thieves, at least those of whose existence is known to us, are Jews, while the Jews are scarcely 1/25th of the total population of Germany. If this 1/ 25th part supplies the same number of riff-raff as the whole German people, or even more, then one must conclude that at least in respect to thievery, which I consider to be the lowest of vices, the Jews are twenty-five times as harmful or more than the other inhabitants of Germany.” Johann David Michaelis, “Ueber Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden von Christian Wilhelm Dohm,” in Dohm, Verbesserung, II:34. (I use the standard English translation here, from L. Sachs, as published in Jew In the Modern World, p. 42.) 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., II:37. 44 Ibid., II:51. 45 Mendelssohn’s equally as well known response suggests that the Jews could (at the very least) fight the invading “Pygmies.” See Moses Mendelssohn, “Remarks On This Judgment,” in von Dohm, Verbesserung, II:77. Also in Jew In The Modern World, as translated by J. Hessing, p. 49. 26 Introduction 46 See Nicholas Hudson’s very informative article, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’:The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.3 (1996), pp. 247–64. 47 As quoted from Jonathan M. Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Anti-Semitism in Eighteenth- Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies, 6:2 (2000), p. 59. He cites Michaelis in von Dohm, Verbesserung, II:51. 48 Michaelis in von Dohm, Verbesserung, II:63. He suggests instead that they manage the sugar plantations in the Caribbean that the Germans should found as a means of providing state income. 49 Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity,pp.83–84. 50 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 51 See Gilman, “The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory.” 52 Fragments, I:5a. 53 Richard Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought From Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. xix. 54 Ibid., p. xxi. 55 Ibid.,pp.xx–xxi. 56 John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Jeffrey Freedman, A Poisoned Chalice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 57 Zammito has argued convincingly that the pejorative understanding of “Popu- larphilosophie” is a product of Kant’s turn toward his critical system and his disapproval of the popularist “scholarship” of the Göttingen School, and the subsequent Kant historiography that retained that (mostly) unjustified distrust and dismissal. 58 Alexander Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), pp. 17–31.

Bibliography Addison, Joseph, The Spectator, No. 412, June 25, 1712. Altmann, Alexander, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Sketch (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973). ——“Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg, ed. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), pp. 17–31. Arendt, Hannah, “Privileged Jews,” Jewish Social Studies, 8:1 (Jan., 1946), pp. 3–30. Beck, Lewis White, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Harvard University Press, 1969). Bernasconi, Robert and Tommy L. Lott, eds., TheIdeaofRace(Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000). Bernasconi, Robert, ed., Race (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Braiterman, Zachary, The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007). Breitenfelder, Kirstin and Charlotte Kohn-Ley, eds., Wie ein monster entsteht: Zur kunstruktion des anderen in rassismus und antisemistismus (Bodenheim: Philo Verlag, 2001). Cassirer, Ernst, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1932). Introduction 27

Chytry, Josef, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Craig, Gordon, “Frederick the Great and Moses Mendelssohn: Thoughts on Jewish Emancipation,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. 32 (1987), pp. 3–10. Dubnow, Simon, Weltgeschichte des juedischen Volkes (Berlin: Juedischer Verlag 1929). Friedlander, A. H., “Mendelssohn and the German Jewish Myth,” European Judaism, 19:2 (Winter/Summer 1985/1986), pp. 45–50. Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990). Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Feiner, Shmuel, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Freedman, Jeffrey, A Poisoned Chalice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Gilman, Sander, “The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 8:4 (Summer 1975), pp. 373–91. ——Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). ——Inscribing the Other (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). ——The Jew’s Body (NY: Routledge, 1991) ——Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). ——Health and Illness: Images of Difference (London: Reaktion Books, 1995). ——Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Gottlieb, Micah, “Aesthetics and the Infinite: Moses Mendelssohn on the Poetics of Biblical Prophecy,” New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 326–54. Gray, Richard, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought From Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, Historisches Wörterbuch. Vol. 10 (Leipzig: Verlag Von S. Hirzel, 1877). Guyer, Paul “Mendelssohn’s Theory of Mixed Sentiments,” Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics: Studies in German Idealism, Reinier Munk, ed. (Dordrecht/ Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer, 2011), pp. 259–78. Hess, Jonathan, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). ——“Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Anti-Semitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies, 6:2 (2000), pp. 56–101. ——Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Press, 2002). Hudson, Nicholas, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29:3 (1996), pp. 247–64. Katz, Jacob “The Term ‘Jewish Emancipation’: Its Origins and Historical Impact,” Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History, A. Altmann, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 1–25. Kayserling, Meyer, M. Mendelssohn: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1862). Lewald, August, Ein Menschenleben (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1844). 28 Introduction

McKeon, Michael, “Politics of Discourse and the Rise of the Aesthetic in Seventeenth- Century England,” The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 36–51. Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Michaelis, Johann David, “Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden von Christian Wilhelm Dohm,” Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, ed., 2 Volumes (Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973), pp. 31–71 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de, “Sur Moses Mendelssohn, sur la réforme politique des juifs, et en particulier, sur la révolution tentée, en leur faveur (en 1753) dans la grande Bretagne” (Paris, 1787; Paris: Éditions d’histoire sociale, 1968). Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de, The Spirit of the Laws,inCom- plete Works (1748) Vol. II, Book XXI, Chapter XX. Edition used: The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu (London: T. Evans, 1777). Mosse, George Towards The Final Solution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978). Munk, Reinier, ed., Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics: Studies in German Idealism (Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer, 2011). Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Paulson, Ronald, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore/ London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1996). Pollok, Anne, Facette des Menschen: Zur Anthropologie Moses Mendelssohns (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2010). ——ed., Moses Mendelssohn: Ästhetische Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner-Verlag, 2006). Reade, Cyril, “Lavater and Lessing visit Moses Mendelssohn: Locating a Moment of Origin for the Modern German-Jewish Subject,” Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (Oxford/Berlin/New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 67–96. Rosenkranz, Karl Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Leipzig: Reclam Press, 1990). Ruderman, David, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Scott, Jacqueline, “On the Use and Abuse of Race in Philosophy: Nietzsche, Jews and Race,” Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 53–73. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, “Soliloquy, or Advice To An Author,” Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times, Douglas den Uyl, ed., Vol. I (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), pp. 95–223. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Simon, Hermann, Moses Mendelssohn: Gesetzestreuer Jude und Deutscher Aufklärer (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich und Centrum Judaicum, 2003). Sorkin, David, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 35 (1990), pp. 17–33. Stern, Sigismund, Geschichte des Judentums von Mendelssohn bis auf die neuere Zeit: nebst einer einleitenden Überschau der älteren Religions- und Culturgeschichte (Breslau: Schletter, 1870). Strauss, Bruno, Moses Mendelssohn in Potsdam am 30. September 1771: Eine kleine Aufklärung (Berlin: Soncino-Gesellschaft der Freunde des Jüdischen Buches, 1929). Introduction 29

Sutcliﬀe, Adam, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Torbruegge, M. K., “On Lessing, Mendelssohn, and the Ruling Powers,” Humanität und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht: Beiträge zum Internationalen Lessing-Mendelssohn-Symposium anlässlich des 250 Geburtstages von Lessing und Mendelssohn, E. Bahr, E. Harris, L. Lyon, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), pp. 305–18. von Dohm, Christian Wilhelm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden,2 Volumes (Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973). Zammito, John H., Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Zantop, Susanne, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Zuckert, Rachel, “Kant’s Rationalist Aesthetics,” Kant-Studien, 98:4 (December 2007), pp. 443–63. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 1 Moral aesthetics What is the Ugly?

That rocky cliﬀ that juts high over the river rushing by is a terrifying sight. The dizzying heights, the swerving through the air, and the plunge that seems to threaten the curved area compel us more often to avert our confused gaze. Yet, after a brief recovery, we direct our eyes again to this dreadful object. The terrifying sight pleases. Whence this peculiar pleasure?1

When the 26-year-old Mendelssohn turned his attention explicitly to aesthetics, he was already deeply immersed in the study of classical literature, metaphysics, British empiricism, French rationalism, and German perfectionism. Unhappy with Hume’s skepticism and Rousseau’s pessimistic view of human endeavor and deeply influenced by the work of Locke and Shaftesbury, Mendelssohn brought together different strands of Enlightenment thinking and utilized them to create an innovative aesthetic that supplemented and significantly advanced the thought of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten. As a voracious reader he was inordinately attuned to the variances of language, literature, and the arts; his engagement with the field of belle lettres was intense, energetic, and thorough. Working together with friends Lessing and Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) he co-edited the highly influential literary journal Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (1757–59) and its successor Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759–65) both of which afforded Mendelssohn the opportunity to review the vast output of Enlightenment thinking published across Europe and an outlet for his opinion on its content and quality. As Frederick Beiser writes in his study of the rise and success of the aesthetic in the German context before Kant, Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 In metaphysics Mendelssohn is on par with Wolff and Baumgarten; but he far surpasses them in aesthetic sensitivity. In aesthetic sensitivity he is the equal of Lessing and Winckelmann; but he far exceeds their powers as metaphysicians. In short, Mendelssohn’s combination of philosophical depth and aesthetic sensitivity was unique and peerless.2

Mendelssohn put this combination of talents and skill to use in crafting the theory of “mixed sentiments” in which he articulated the complicated and Moral aesthetics 31 often contradictory range of human emotions – both pleasing and displeasing – provoked by natural phenomena and objects of art. He described the mixture of feelings that one feels when one encounters something beautiful but also disturbing in some way: seeing a character die on stage, for example, brings up several simultaneous emotions, one is sad at the death yet one feels admiration – or disdain – for the character if not also, separately, the actor. The conceptual flexibility required to maintain such a dissonance, Mendelssohn argued, leads to further cognitive improvement and refinement of intellectual acumen. The fact that objects are not always perfect in their most natural state does not preclude one’s enjoyment of them; such enjoyment is actually enhanced when imperfect or ugly objects are represented beautifully or when their significance brings to mind some meaning more than their mere appearance might suggest (a noble failure, for example, or the awe invoked by a natural disaster). In doing so, he proffers a theory that turns discord and disarray into a valuable commodity. This inclusion of ugliness and the unpleasant as potential sources of aesthetic pleasure and profit comes as early as the first of his aesthetic essays (1755) and remains a crucial part of his philosophy even as he developed it further in later essays and books. Among its other advantages, the theory of the mixed sentiment allowed him to craft a hermeneutic by which to integrate seemingly unwanted or disagreeable objects into a discourse that appeared to have little place for and less understanding of the worth (and potential value) of anything less than beautiful (understood, as he began writing on the topic, as a reflection or manifestation of perfection). In aesthetics, his discussions of the imperfect opened an avenue to initiate a conversation about the concept of the Sublime (different from both Beauty and Ugly) and gave him specific opportunity to reflect on the benefits of language and literature as particular exemplars of the most fruitful kind of aesthetic experience (and those most capable of expressing and gen- erating the joining of two or more emotions simultaneously). Mendelssohn used the literary arts to demonstrate the best forms of aesthetic achievement. These three aspects of Mendelssohn’s philosophy – the inclusion of ugliness by way of the mixed sentiment, an emphasis on the literary arts, and the introduction of the Sublime – remained a part of Mendelssohn’s philosophical agenda throughout his life. In his other work, these emphases bear fruit by becoming particularly important in his unique conception of Judaism as a literary, aesthetic-driven

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 language divinely created and humanly enacted. Toward the end of his career, when the rationality of Judaism as a religion and the veracity of his fealty to it were publicly questioned and challenged, Mendelssohn relied on his aesthetics and on the mixed sentiment to demonstrate the authenticity of both. The benefits of the mixed sentiment as he described them in his aesthetic writings – intellectual improvement, societal harmony, heightened taste – find their climax in his description of Judaism as an ethical, moral, lively, highly energetic (that is, not concrete or unyielding) “script” that epitomizes rational philosophy at its best. Mendelssohn used the mixed sentiment to argue 32 Moral aesthetics against the “ugliness” projected in the Enlightenment conception of Juda- ism – its rigidity, its maintenance of legalistic rituals, its irrationality – thereby justifying not only his continued adherence to Judaism but Judaism itself. The questions of social acceptability, religious legitimacy and moral authenticity that the aesthetic brings up are brought to bear – and answered – in Mendelssohn’s use of a theory of language and theory of religion made possible in his aesthetic theory. It is the context in and out of which he developed his ideas to which this study turns first.

The rise of the aesthetic The modern study of beauty and ugliness, and their echoes morality and immorality, begins well before the benchmark 1750 publication of Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetika to which Mendelssohn’s earliest essays responded.3 In queries about the relationship between moral behavior and human knowledge (especially as accessed by sensory input) early modern British philosophers, working within the broad program begun by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) of reducing abstraction to its foundation in the senses, redefined the origin of both, and in doing so exerted an immense influence on the philosophical project of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. As early as Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) defined morality as the result of the projection of private desires onto a common sphere of interest which generalized these desires as matters of the “good.” Although Hobbes’ assessment of human behavior as self-interested preservation (and the moral relativism it invoked) alternately fascinated and horrified those who came after him – Mendelssohn dedicated the first part of Jerusalem to proving him wrong – they still maintained a dialogue with his arguments and laid the groundwork for a moral philosophy that could accommodate a natural science founded on the senses (i.e., both sensory perception and sensations) and a more altruistic sense of the Good. Eventually, such studies branched out into a sustained study of the Good and its traditional associate, the Beautiful. As he writes in Leviathan,

The Latin tongue has two words whose signiﬁcations approach to those of good and evil; but are not precisely the same; and those are pulchrum and turpe. Whereof the former signiﬁes that, which by some apparent

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 signs promiseth good; and the latter, that which promiseth evil. But in our tongue we have not so general names to express them by. But for pulchrum we say in some things, fair; in others, beautiful,orhandsome,or gallant,orhonourable,orcomely,oramiable; and for turpe, foul, deformed, ugly, base, nauseous, and the like, as the subject shall require; all which words, in their proper places, signify nothing else but the mien, or countenance, that promiseth good and evil. So that of good there be three kinds; good in the promise, that is pulchrum; good in effect, as the end desired, which is called jucundum, delightful; and good as the means, Moral aesthetics 33 which is called utile, profitable; and as many of evil: for evil in promise, is that they call turpe;evilineffect, and end, is molestum, unpleasant, troublesome; and evil in the means, inutile, unprofitable, hurtful.4

Evil, as the opposite of the Good was still conceived by the British school, remained largely a category into which criminal and unethical actions fell. When John Locke (1632–1704) took up the challenge of supplying a foundation for natural philosophy in an epistemology that ultimately derives the content of knowledge from sensory perception, he showed how different means of categorization, refinement, and organization operate; he influenced an entire ethical attitude that attributes moral value to ideas as “coeval with sensation.”5 The formation of ideas is tied to the biological development of the human being who eventually reflects on the ideas generated by sensation, which then become what Locke calls “ideas of reflection.”6 Moral values are generated by such ideas of reflection, which are, in turn, based on the content of the impressions they represent; in that content they find a correspondence in the signs (i.e., words) that represent them both in language and the commerce of everyday life. Mendelssohn picked up on Locke’s theory in his own interpretation of the chain of ideas as they develop from sensory input to complex association. Locke’s student, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), who famously rejected his teacher’s empiricism, arguably played an even larger role than Locke, particularly in diffusing ideas relating to taste, sociability, and the role of art in Germany in general and for Mendelssohn especially. As Ernest Boyer wrote in his study of Shaftesbury’sinfluence on German thinkers, “the German Enlightenment as a whole was profoundly influenced by this philosopher long underappreciated in both England and America. Shaftesbury shaped eighteenth-century German thought to a degree that can now seem quite astonishing.”7 The essays and dialogues found in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711) enjoyed enormous popularity in France and Germany. His emphasis on the civilizing effect of art on the senses and the ability of art to represent philosophical ideals was taken, by German Enlighteners (Aufklärer), as an invitation to substitute an ethically based aesthetics for theology. Suggestions of a “moral sense,” along with further refinement of notions of taste, implied a hierarchized image of the intellect. That image corresponded to a presumed,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 class-based social hierarchy in which those at the top were distinguished by the capacity for providing appropriate judgment on symbols of divinity (and examples of humanity) in the material world: virtue, beauty, perfection, pleasure. An equally important figure in the line of the transmission of this premise was William Hogarth (1697–1794) whose prints attracted the commentary of many German thinkers including Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Georg Lichtenberg (1742–99). In Plastik: Some Observations On Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (1778), Herder took Hogarth’s prints 34 Moral aesthetics to be exemplary for their lack of charm and beauty, for they are mostly “ugly caricature, but full of character, passion, life, truth.”8 As Ronald Paulson has observed, Hogarth, the product of a dissenter Protestant background, went against the Shaftesburian conventions that seemed to impose a hierarchy on the value of class as the arbiter of virtue. Herder was not the only commentator who saw, in Hogarth’s work, a separation of truth and beauty; indeed, his work shows that truth aligns better with caricature and ugliness. Still, Hogarth’s work reiterates the connection between moral behavior and physical appearance. For Mendelssohn, these thinkers formed the infrastructure of what would become his assessment of the psychological and societal advantages presented by contemplating beauty, valuing truth, and acquiring taste. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the British school had separated the Beautiful and the Good as distinct objects requiring distinct modes of inquiry – different in kind from theology, metaphysics, and logic – and focused on the benefits of aesthetic perception and judgment. The articulation of those benefits – moral refinement, sharpened taste, and expansion in the exercise of freedom – exposed their opposites: immorality, vulgarity, and irrationality. Ideally, the illustration of morality as the consequence of beauty (in both word and form) could “help” (i.e., refine the taste of) those who could be helped (hence the proliferation of “moral weeklies” and the popularity of Hogarth’s didactic narratives in pictures). Identifying ugliness as a molestum, a real harm, provided a means to advance civility by protecting oneself – and one’s environs – from its negative influence. As the foil of the Beautiful, the Ugly defined the boundaries of beauty, intimated the dangers of immorality, and helped those who had developed their capacity for beauty to separate themselves from those who lacked taste. What began in the relationships that tied Beauty and the Good, and Ugliness and the Evil, developed into an area of inquiry that was riddled with issues related to moral percep- tivity, the psychology of impressions, and the improvement of the intellect (each of which was related to but not synonymous with each other). In this minefield the relationship of physical appearance to moral aptitude became associated with intellectual potential and receptivity. Thus, when Baumgarten gave name to the field of inquiry of aesthetics, he referenced a discourse that had already developed an internal vocabulary of words and signs recognized by Enlightenment intellectuals throughout Europe. As Mendelssohn’s innovations in it show, the field was by no means

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 homogenous and its canonical issues were still mixed up with political and theological critique. One of the many consequences of the religious strife in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the growth of a philosophical willingness to find the means to shift power away from religiously determined governments that jeopardized domestic and international welfare. In the aftermath of the English Civil War and the Revolution of 1688, Eng- lish, Scottish, and Irish thinkers had sought ways to manage a society divided between dissenting creeds and state-sponsored religions in order to achieve a stable political order. The intellectual outgrowth of this project was the search Moral aesthetics 35 for impartial truth claims that could make use of rational methods for further knowledge. The British were interested in the way individuals turned sensory input into complex ideas. As the field of inquiry grew to include subject–object relations and the reading of inherent meanings into certain shapes and forms, aesthetics provided a way to understand the world outside the boundaries of previously determined categories and assumptions; indeed, it presented, as Eagleton has argued, “an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to those dominant ideological forms. …”9 In this move away from truths of revelation, as derived from theology, two points of interest intersected in a number of emerging intellectual disciplines, including political philosophy and aesthetics: the universalizing of certain beliefs in the concept of natural religion and the focus on the relationship between different parts to a larger whole. The concept of the Beautiful was caught up in this intersection, which maintained a redemptive element and could identify a correspondence between perfection of inner harmony and external forms in both nature and artistic representation. As beauty was charged with this function, its opposite, ugliness, was construed in terms of discord and disorder and therefore exemplified the potential, if not the realization, of the immoral, that is, Hobbes’ turpe. In the framework of aesthetics, forms – natural and artful, Beautiful and Ugly – were used as metaphors for a larger political understanding of heterogeneity within a homogenizing society. In other words, by using beauty and ugliness as parameters for thought and representation, the new aesthetic provided a philosophical model for discussing how individuals participate in and constitute a larger polis. Thus, the question of how the parts of an artwork contributed to a whole was, on some level, working with the same conceptual issues that ran through the eighteenth-century political discussion of the state’s division of powers and the economic discussion of the division of labor. In creating concepts and a vocabulary for discussing beauty in art, the new aesthetic mixed equal parts of natural religion and rationalistic, free thinking. A formula emerged to govern the aesthetic discourse: the more internal variety an object possessed, the more sensory perception it engendered, the greater the pleasure it caused to the perceiving mind. Adam Smith wrote in his “Imitative Arts” in the 1780s on the structure of a concert and the variety of the parts that are essential for its success: Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 by the exact harmony or coincidence of all the different sounds which are heard at the same time, and by that happy variety of measure which regulates the succession of those which are heard at different times, presents an object so agreeable, so great, so various, and so interesting, that alone, and without suggesting any other object, either by imitation or otherwise, it can occupy, and as it were fill up, completely the whole capacity of the mind, so as to leave no part of its attention vacant for thinking of any thing else. In the contemplation of that immense variety 36 Moral aesthetics of agreeable and melodious sounds, arranged and digested, both in their coincidence and in their succession, into so complete and regular a system, the mind in reality enjoys not only a very great sensual, but a very high intellectual, pleasure, not unlike that which it derives from the contemplation of a great system in any other science.10

As Smith indicates, the greater a whole was conceived to be, the greater would be its capacity to impart pleasure. Focusing on shape and external form, an object was judged beautiful or ugly depending on the inner harmony and the success of the relationship between outer form and inner content. Using the same method to analyze empires and art forms, intellectuals identiﬁed the essentials of modern aesthetics: variety, balance, and morality. Asymmetry caused discord; disorder was toxic. Imperfection negated the collaboration of the internal parts towards organizing a harmonious whole. This intellectual development made the early aesthetic a proxy for a host of diﬀerent issues: political heterogeneity, religious toleration, philosophy of art, and universalistic patterns of human thought and action. The anxieties of the seventeenth century had been expressed in concerns about the standards of uniformity and regularity; by the eighteenth century, as Michael Prince has pointed out, the aesthetic provided a means through which “a mixed, increasingly heterogeneous audience could in theory be united through its shared responsiveness to select aesthetic phenomena.”11 The craftsman, artist or politician, working under the rules of symmetry and harmony, could represent and even constitute grace and, thus, create a microcosm of God’s Providence (an arena previously available only to clergy). It is by these means that morality was conjoined to physical attributes and that physicality could forecast the moral habits of an individual.

Secularizing the aesthetic Inherent in the early modern aesthetic discussion is an implicit critique of established religious theories of the relationship of the physical and the metaphysical. Ronald Paulson deﬁnes the polemic engendered by eighteenth- century aesthetics as “religion empirically challenged, belief turned into appreciation of beauty, good manners, superstition, a work of ﬁction, or some other provisional form.”12 The substitution Paulson suggests – aesthetic forms

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 for religious faith – describes the framework in which, for some thinkers, the modern aesthetic operated. The possibility of this exchange was important for Mendelssohn in that it allowed him, as a Jew, entry into a dialogue framed by Christian and Deist thinking (and provided him the means to proffer critique that did not endanger his residency permit). By establishing an analogy between the natural and divine realms, aesthetics subverted the monopoly on the higher interpretation of everyday life claimed by religion (and religious structures) and wrested away the meaning of beauty and ugliness from their association with (theologically defined) good and evil. Michael McKeon has Moral aesthetics 37 argued that religion lost its control and authority in the aesthetic collusion of physical form and theological truth. He explains that “Religion exercises its authority by way of a tacit dominion: to inquire closely into its relationship with other realms is automatically to question its claim to superintend and to suffuse them all.”13 McKeon links the secularization process to the rise of the aesthetic through an intentional analogy: the contemplation of the beautiful object (or person) that occurred on the small (i.e., human) scale provided a more empirical and trustworthy (“enlightened”) evaluation of the meaning which religion attempted to attribute to Beauty on the larger (i.e., theological) scale. Material perfection became an elaborate metaphor by which to understand and represent the divine; one could discuss a relationship between parts and their whole within the framework of the divine order in which humanity and nature are God’s creation. The institutional and legal expression of the hierarchy in the power vested by the authorization of a particular church was no longer a guarantee; the control of institutional religion to regulate such metaphors gave way to individual judgment. In a sense, the aesthetic served as an experiment in this larger and more profound shift as it privileged the individual’s ability to govern contemplation and analysis of the ultimate Good, God, without commitment to ritual, ideology or belief. Mendelssohn saw in such privileging the potential for greater intellectual engagement without the need to increase one’s reference to a specific religiosity; although deeply engaged in Jewish theology and ritual, he saw in a secularly defined aesthetic the opportunity for his own participation in it. Enlightenment aesthetics circumvented theologically controlled definitions of divinity by using a new vocabulary for understanding divine perfection and by promoting the ways in which human im/perfection were made manifest. It offered a competing organizational framework, one that supported the relationship between design and Designer through discourse on the elements and integrity of the design itself. McKeon argues that this shift dislodged the hold of religion as the determining category of society and represents the impact of secularism on societal structure: “At the beginning of the seventeenth-century the dominant categories for describing political conflict were by and large religious categories; by the end of the century, this was obviously no longer the case.”14 This shift towards the nation-state was in tandem with the lib- eration of metaphysics from its function as an apologetic, which in turn freed the early Enlightenment aesthetic to employ a set of concepts taken from

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 religion – goodness, perfection, wholeness, and beauty – to create an analogy for knowing God outside of orthodox belief. Critical for the argument was the idea that rational reflection could provide individuals access to all eternal, natural proofs, eliminating the need for revelatory experience or credal affir- mation. By presenting a means of understanding that was based not on liturgy, exegesis or faith but on direct (and individually derived) experience and analysis, modern aesthetics rivaled the assertion of religious authority that it provided the only true access to cosmological truths and set up an alternative that operated through one’s own sensory response and an ability 38 Moral aesthetics to frame that response intellectually. Thus, claims about the Beautiful became a means of dislodging the hold of religion on declarations of truth and privileged individual sensibility and analysis (an active mental engagement) over revealed knowledge (the passive reception of information). “Perfect” forms became models for the primacy of rational over revealed knowledge even in arenas of human experience that seemed particular or culturally relative (for example, the notion of “good” or “common” taste). This aesthetic assumed that beautiful forms were “beautiful” because they contained an interior, harmonious moral content that found expression in the equally moral exterior form which could be discerned by every rational, thinking individual. All products of human endeavor and sensibility were produced under this “universal” rule. But such a paradigm shift was not without its drawbacks, especially for Mendelssohn. From the Enlightened point of view, a religion beholden to revelation, like Judaism or Catholicism, appeared not just superstitious but incapable of creating and/or partaking in the perfection and morality engendered by a modern aesthetic, because it functioned with non-rationally derived (and thus suspect) “truths.” The (often covert) preference of the philosophe and Aufklärer for natural religion retained God as the highest Good and the greatest Perfection but refused to employ the divine to account for “religious” experiences. Revelatory religious systems were no longer valued or trusted as the means through which one could access either divine goodness or its perfection. In other words, the relationship between beauty and holiness that held up to the end of the seventeenth century largely gave way in the eighteenth to a new alliance between beauty and truth wherein truth became the subject of science. All discussions of perfection were modeled after the presumed perfection of God and the beauty of God’s ultimate art form, nature. In McKeon’s understanding of the deistic ramification of aesthetics, this re/production was infused with “unprecedented spiritual authority … because God was understood to have accomplished his most intimate internalization of the spirit within these apparently profane realms of the phenomenal.”15 Aesthetics facilitated an intellectual revolution that privileged reason over religion. For the Enlightenment intellectual, the benefits of this move seemed obvious: the individual was not thrust out into a disenchanted, Godless world but neither was one subject to the arbitrary power of superstition. In educating oneself in the discernment of perfect forms and forming a standard of taste, one filled one’s duty as a citizen of the nation and the world by producing or disseminating

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 other models for incorporating diversities into a harmonious whole. And by degrees, one learned manners, elevated conversation, and promoted peace. The process of divorcing beauty from its long association with revealed religion was consistent with the program of endowing morality and virtue with autonomous authority, thus promoting a “universalistic” pursuit of the Good. Through the use of reason – and making perception, sensation, sensory input, and reﬂection characteristic of human physicality – the aesthetic empowered individuals to analyze and judge beauty, perfection, and morality while at the same time making distinctions between educated and uneducated Moral aesthetics 39 sensibilities. Theoretically free of the “trappings” of subservience and revealed knowledge, the pursuit of the Good was achievable outside the frame of institutional religion and still was guided by the improving, reﬁning, and moralizing force of the Beautiful. In doing so, it opened the door of possibility for the intellectually eager Mendelssohn.

German rationalism: the marriage of Beauty and Goodness Aesthetic developments within British schools of philosophy were quickly picked up by other European thinkers. In Germany, the challenges of the English context were translated into the vocabulary of eighteenth-century Lutheranism. The use and emphasis of Christian tropes in the German Aufklärung intentionally united beauty and holiness, thereby promoting beauty and morality in terms of human judgment, divine grace, and an incipient national ethic. Based on the example of a morality grounded in revelation, the mix of Pietism and rationalism in German theology and philosophy emphasized God’s explicit engagement with morality. That combination allowed Mendelssohn to bring together the British emphasis on sensual knowledge with German notions of positive morality; the religiosity that laced German modifications of a British adherence to natural religion aided his philosophical optimism and abetted his firm rationalist belief in God. Throughout his work, the appeal to a universal morality outside the boundaries of organized religion remained in a defining dialogue with Protestantism. Mendelssohn’s philosophical culture was pervaded by the influence of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). For Leibniz, beauty was not only reflected by but also resided in moral knowledge, behavior, and education, a position that seemed remarkably close to Shaftesbury, especially in their respective emphases on moral sense. Leibniz read Shaftesbury’s Character- istics and noticed the similarity: he wrote to the friend who had suggested the work to him, “I was surprised to find a great number of thoughts which agree with my own principles.”16 Like Shaftesbury, Leibniz felt that goodness, as indicated by his use of the term virtue, should have no dependency on individual will or desire: “true virtue should be disinterested, that is, as I interpret it, that one should come to find pleasure in the practice of virtue, and disgust and repugnance in the exercise of vice, and that this should be the goal of education.”17 Yet they differed in their theologies: Leibniz held that it was

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 logically possible for a being to be the most perfect of all beings and that one could prove the existence of that being through rational proofs. Secure in the belief in an all-encompassing Godhead, he identified beauty as the mechanism by which one pursues the Good, connecting the Beautiful and the Moral in a necessary and beneficial relationship through their mutual origin in the divine order. Leibniz articulates in Monadology (1714) that, as the author of all possible worlds, God chose this one for its perfection. Like Shaftesbury, Leibniz maintained that the mental cognition of what is good furthered the development of virtue, which, in connection with the refinement of judgment, 40 Moral aesthetics led to the magnification of one’s sense of positive moral values and one’s capacity to incorporate them into one’s actions. Yet the German tradition starts not with the natural history of the moral agent, like the English empiricists, but instead with the “feelings” or sentiments of positive and negative perceptions. Before one can define “virtue” (“the habit of acting reasonably, is that which achieves the most that one could promise himself – a lasting pleasure”18), one must have a basis in which to ground the function of morality. Moral thought and action operate as the recognition and enhancement of the pleasure of (and in) positive moral behavior and an increasing disgust associated with immorality. In order to avoid the negative, one refines one’s feelings in order to “train” oneself to engage in further virtue and refrain from more vice, which is, in essence, an education attuned to sensibility. Because “pleasure” (which Leibniz defines as the “perception of perfection”) is the end result of moral action, the goal of education must be to create the greatest capacity for this kind of pleasure. That capacity is identified with the role of moral reflection. The optimal state of true pleasure – when the perception of perfection transcends the personal – is at its most disinterested (that is, when not seeking private gain). Similar to Shaftesbury’s understanding of taste – which entails the implicit ability to improve the one who exercises it – pleasure for Leibniz is the sentiment that represents the act of perception. As God makes the choice of the most perfect world, so, too, human beings can repeat, to their lesser ability, the choice of perfection in developing their taste. Seeing beautiful people or objects – and judging them as beautiful – can lead an individual to a pleasurable state of being and can encourage more pleasure through the lasting perception of that perfection. As Leibniz wrote in the Discours de Metaphysique (1686),

When I can recognize a thing among other things without being able to say in what the diﬀerences or properties exist, my knowledge is confused. It is thus that we know sometimes clearly without being in doubt in any fashion, if a poem is good or a painting is well or badly made, because there is a I-don’t-know-what that satisﬁes or shocks us.19

In contrast, ugliness performs the opposite function; by distracting or distancing an individual, that is, by causing displeasure or shock, ugliness subverts individual improvement and diminishes perfection. Ugliness both stunts

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 moral refinement and actively reverses the effects of prior education. And because in Leibniz’s vocabulary pleasure is both a moral sense and a physical response, ugliness causes a visceral, moral discomfort. As in British aesthetics, the rule for knowing perfection and imperfection is organized according to variety; the harmony or disharmony of elements within an object can heighten both the (intellectual) pleasure of perceiving them (and a unifying whole) and the (sensual) pleasure of their agreement. Leibniz emphasized the intellectual benefit of perfection over and against the sensual benefit, which he felt was momentary, superficial, and ultimately dissatisfying. From this idea, Moral aesthetics 41 one can deduce the moral valance of ugliness as registered in the depth of the discomfort it causes the perceiver and the amount of degeneracy it both represents and increases in the perceived. For Leibniz, positive characteristics of morality represent the best of human power and emotion (as well as the connection between sentiments and intellectual ideals); the opposite is the case for the Ugly. Yet, that ugliness exists is surely part of God’s design and, while humans only have limited access to the divine knowledge that might justify ugliness in the world, the exercise of good moral choices helps refine one’s ability to perfect one’s intellectual abilities. The idea of “perfection” dominates what is now known as the Leibnizian– Wolffian school and the Popularphilosophen who fostered it.20 Following Leibniz, Christian Wolff (1679–1754) understood God to be the most perfect being, possessing the highest degree of mutually compatible realities. He defined those realities as clear and distinct concepts that found their relevance and proof in mathematical formulations. Though neither Leibniz nor his student wrote on aesthetics specifically, it was Wolff who, veering away from Leibniz’s occasional references to the “I-don’t-know-what” of “beauty,” steered the topic back to the discourse on “perfection” and augmented the powerful Leibnizian notion that perfection incorporates both beauty and morality under one rubric. Perhaps as a product of a long and politically damaging dispute with his Pietist rivals, Wolff was more interested in the individual than Leibniz had been and promoted the idea that one was responsible for perfecting oneself, that is, that one should take an active, rather than passive role in creating the means for self-perfection. In a summary of Wolff’s moral principles, Robert Norton surmises that “the central maxim of his ethics consisted of one fairly simple injunction: do that which increases both your own perfection as well as that of your neighbor and refrain from the opposite.”21 This “golden rule” emphasized the potential of moral improvement in contemplating and perceiving perfection. Even more importantly, it underscored the psychological element implied though not fully explained by Leibniz: when one perceives something perfect, one can – with the right amount of knowledge and intellectual opportunity – perfect one’s self. (Wolff does not comment on whether, symmetrically, ignorance leads to ever greater imperfection.) Rather than wholly disinterested, the perfect under the Wolffian scheme is useful and the positive producer of ever more perfection; an individual’s goal is to increase both one’s own perfection

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 and that of one’s society. Wolff’s thoughts became encoded in the optimism of popular philosophy, summed up by a remark by Christian Garve (1742–98): “The course of all things, and particularly of human opinions, always runs, if one consults the history of all periods, uninterruptedly forwards.”22 The crucial differences between Wolff and his predecessors, as Norton has explained, are intention and hierarchy:

Unlike his colleagues in Britain who had placed the concept of beauty at the center of their ethical theories, Wolﬀ wanted to preserve a 42 Moral aesthetics metaphysical and moral hierarchy with God at the summit, and he thus relied solely on the intellectualistic concept of perfection to provide the structural support to his conception. Morality, for Wolﬀ, is mainly a matter of the right application of the understanding.23

And, one might add, is in the correct understanding of a preconceived metaphysics and a religious hierarchy “in which God is the pinnacle of Being and that from which everything else is derived.”24 The religious equation of the Good and the Beautiful became an uniquely German strain of moral aesthetics. Following Wolff’s argument that sensory perceptions were “clear but indistinct” ideas, Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) transformed the implicit equivalence between knowledge and moral authority into a full aesthetic system, built completely on the metaphysical theodicy of Leibniz and Wolff. Baumgarten’s theory articulated the sensory perception hinted at by both Leibniz and Wolff.25 He emphasized the cognitive perception of beauty by focusing his attention less on the sensory perception that produced pleasure and more on the perfect representation of an object and the perfect feeling that accompanied such a representation in the intellect. Baumgarten asserted that “aesthetic intuition bridges the gulf between the individual and the universal, the concrete and the abstract; its ‘truth’ is found within concrete qualities.”26 Baumgarten understood both the Beautiful and the Good ultimately as aspects of God; Lutheranism (more specifically the Pietism in which he had been raised, which had an explicit activist side) provided the forms by which one could best understand them. Other influences also abounded. Similar to the way that Shaftesbury posited a conflation of meaning between the Good and the Beautiful as a product of the beauty in the divine body and spirit, German interest in form paralleled an interest in morality and virtue. Johann Joachim Spalding (1714– 1804), a theologian and translator of Shaftesbury, expressed the emerging synthesis between rationality and morality in his enormously influential book, Thoughts on the Destiny of Man, two years before the appearance of the first volume of Baumgarten’s Aesthetika.27 Anticipating Baumgarten’s analysis of the pleasure generated by the contemplation of the Beautiful, Spalding described the positive sensations invoked in the soul while pursuing the Good and made clear the relationship between morality and happiness. If the Beautiful was an aspect of the Good (an aspect that made the good available

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 to the perception) – and the Good, from the psychological standpoint, consisted of pleasure – then it was possible to suppose that the Beautiful could augment one’s happiness; immorality and deformity, on the other hand, caused unhappiness and displeasure. As a theologian, Spalding made explicit the conflation of the divine and the moral good. By tracing beauty and its manifestations to their original source, God, Spalding assured the reader that one could delight continually in the pursuit of the supreme, universal perfection by acting morally. The implicit conflation of beauty and truth turns overtly theological in Spalding’s further fusion of beauty and morality as Moral aesthetics 43 derived, essentially, from the Christological understanding of grace and virtue. He argued that the destiny of humanity is to please one’s soul with physical manifestations of beauty and to reflect upon God, who is the “prototype of the perfections of an original beauty, or a first and general source of order.”28 While British moral theory functioned in a political space in which representation was a very pressing issue, the German tradition functioned in a wholly different space, in which Enlightenment was diffused by autocracy. Thus, perhaps it is not coincidence that God is retained as both the prototype and progenitor of the Beautiful, which necessarily (because of its origin) includes all the positive attributes of the Good. With a different history and context of inter- and intra-Christian dissent, German writers were more apt to retain their religious affiliations and integrate their theology into their philosophy with fewer qualms than in Britain (or in France, for that matter). God’s perfection manifests itself in morality (both in the abstract realm of values and in the practical realm of human behavior) and in intellectual contemplation. In a re-reading of the Lutheran theological commitment to “faith over works,” contemplation of beautiful objects and examples of positive moral behavior provided avenues through which individuals could encounter divinity. Indeed one could actually better oneself through the Beautiful, because the appreciation of beauty was connected at the root with the morality and one furthered the other: one’srefinement brought one’s happiness and one’s happiness was measured by one’s advance towards perfection. Unhappiness was associated with the opposites of such refinement: vulgarity, ignorance, powerlessness, vice and corruption. These issues spread across several fields of activity, from the arts themselves – painters and poets – to theologians, philosophers, and policy makers. What interested German Aufklärer was beauty’s inherent connection with positive moral positioning, that is, the self-improvement that was possible in the Beautiful. This cultivation of the self (both in terms of schooling and in terms of spiritual development) was an important theme for German thinkers well into the nineteenth century. If in the intentional encounter with beauty one could enjoy – and augment – the psychological advantages of beauty’s relationship to goodness then disgust and its moral correlate were strong incentives to avoid degenerate behavior. This redirection led to the rejection (or, severe modfication) of an old humanistic image of antiquity that emphasized Rome and the rediscovery of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 the artistic forms and tropes of ancient Greece, an act that Goethe, in his essay dedicated to Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), celebrated as the equivalent of Columbus’s discovery of the New World.29 Equally as important was the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), who, with a different approach to art and aesthetic theory and with separate emphasis and interest (Lessing’s famous interpretation of Laocoon was a challenge to Winckelmann’s reading of the statue), also took his point of departure from the understanding that the Greek ideal of Beauty organized harmonious parts into symmetrical, perfected forms. Both Winckelmann and Lessing used the 44 Moral aesthetics text of Greek history, as they interpreted it, as a new canon for establishing the proper function of art; that canon was as important in its way as the Bible’s account of divinity. For the Greeks, form articulated content; the harmonious appearance of Greek art was the expression of a corresponding concord of the spirit achieved by the free Greek citizen. Though Winckelmann preferred the plastic arts and Lessing favored literature, their respective inﬂu- ences on the German aesthetic tradition reinforced the notion that beautiful objects reﬂected positive moral sentiments. Because Greek ideals were ambiguously associated with both pre- and post-Christian thought, this relationship was supported by the rationalist adherence to a religion of reason that promoted a universalistic approach to natural religion.

Beauty’s opposite: on the Ugly Mendelssohn wrote a series of highly influential essays in the 1750s and 1760s that laid out a foundational hermeneutic of genius, imagination, and judgment.30 Mendelssohn’s importance in (and for) the field manifests in multiple ways. As Zammito argued in his study of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “Moses Mendelssohn looms as especially influential in mediating the foreign Enlightenment, and especially the British, for German philosophy, fusing the new English and French aesthetics with the work of Baumgarten and [Georg Friedrich] Meier [1742–77]. Mendelssohn helped naturalize into German discourse three crucial notions from abroad: feeling, genius, and the sublime.”31 In his influential work on Kant’s aesthetics, Paul Guyer agrees with Zammito’s position, naming Mendelssohn as “the most influential German philosophical writer on aesthetics between Baumgarten and Kant,” which puts him above such towering figures as Herder or Lessing.32 More recently, Guyer has argued that Mendelssohn’s theory of the mixed sentiment in particular was more complex than Baumgarten’s theory and deserves reassessment to unveil its innovative complexity.33 Like his predecessors, and Wolff in particular, Mendelssohn began by working under the influence of an aesthetic defined by perfection. Accord- ingly, he tried to construe the powerful sentiments produced by both beauty and ugliness in terms of perfecting the spectator’s soul as well as diffusing improvements on one’s environment. His articulation of the goals of beauty – especially in the literary arts, which he thought could provoke in the reader

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 far greater emotions than nature or the plastic arts – serve as a basis for his later metaphysical, political, and religious writing. Mendelssohn’s aesthetics are particularly important because he introduced and then refined the concept of the Ugly as an element of aesthetic discourse and provided a justification of a redemptive quality implicit in it. In one of his first aesthetic essays, “Briefe über die Empfindungen” (“Letters on Sentiments,” 1755), written at a time of intense engagement with literature and several collaborative writing projects with his friend Lessing, Mendelssohn distinguished three types of beauty – sensual, psychological, and cognitive – and Moral aesthetics 45 separated into distinct parts the intellectual function of beauty along with the effect of it proffered by Baumgarten. Baumgarten had suggested that one should avoid “the imperfection of sensuous cognition, which … is deformity.”34 Taking up an image inherited from Lucretius of a shipwreck being observed by an appreciative crowd Mendelssohn posed the question as to why an artist would choose to paint a ship as it sinks during a storm – an instance of terror and shock – instead of a peacefully sailing ship. Explaining that doing so allowed the artist to turn to the unusual sentiment of pity, Men- delssohn argued that the transformation of the pain of such an object (the sinking of the ship, the death of the sailors) into pleasure was effected through the exercise of sympathy (an emotion that is itself a combination of emotions). Two years later, when writing his first version of his more influential essay “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences” (1757), Mendelssohn went further and criticized the dogmatic assertion of the negativity of imperfection; instead of pairing imperfection and immorality, he argued that “representation by art can be sensuously perfect even if the object of the representation is neither good nor beautiful.”35 He located a value inherent in artistic renderings of ugliness which allowed him to redefine the objects of beauty through a theory of “mixed sentiments.” When one combines pleasure and displeasure, attraction and repulsion, into a single feeling, that feeling counts as a “mixed sentiment.”36 Such mixed feelings combine pleasant and unpleasant emotions and involve more complexity: sympathy, anger, grief (or more precisely, crying) and “the feeling of laughter.”37 A situation rendered into art can depict something pitiful or dangerous, fearful or horrid in a beautiful way. The representation of an object that is not beautiful in itself can be, tech- nically, perfectly represented and can call up within its viewer those mixed sentiments.38 By the 1750s, the school of Gothic poets and writers in England had begun to emerge, heralded by Alexander Pope’s appreciation of Gothic architecture and the “irregularity” of Shakespeare.39 Mendelssohn, who wrote an essay on Pope with Lessing (in which they defended Leibnizian optimism), was well aware of the new English appreciation for the irregular and the vulgar.40 Mendelssohn explains such aesthetic phenomena by focusing on the perfect representations of objects and actions that do not inspire “perfect” (that is, purely pleasurable) psychological and sensual effects. It was the need to explain the aesthetic effect of such representations that inspired Mendels- sohn’s account of “mixed sentiments” because they provoke both pleasure

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 and displeasure. In taking the Leibnizian principle of harmony seriously, Mendelssohn expected that mixed sentiments function to facilitate the active harmonization of the senses. That activity provides deeper and broader intellectual opportunities because imperfect objects can generate greater pleasure based on their internal variety and the potential of their representation to project beauty. The “imperfect, evil and deficient,” Mendelssohn writes, “always arouse a mixed feeling that is composed of an element of dissatisfaction with an object, or a person, or a situation mixed with satisfaction in the representation of it.”41 Representation thus provides a separate region 46 Moral aesthetics of sentiment – an object autonomous from what it represents – which has a definite effect on our aesthetic judgments. So a representation of something pleasant might be “enhanced by the beauties of the artistic imitation and transformed by the deception of the senses … into a sweet enchantment. On the other hand, the recollection, following quickly upon this, that we are viewing art and not nature conveys something unpleasant. …”However, when the representation is “of paradigms that in nature are unpleasant” it produces the mixed sentiments that, as it were, more perfectly realize the art of the representation: “the sensuous deception will also be pleasant here because it assures us of the perfection of the imitation.” And even when the “objective reality” of the unpleasant is brought “too much into relief … we have the benevolent recollection that we do not have the original image itself before our eyes. …”42 In one way or another, positive associations with – and recollections of – a representation deepen the appreciation that one has for the object that inspired it; in Mendelssohn’s view, the unpleasant object holds an advantage over the pleasant one because that representation can be appreciated for itself. The larger the distance between the deficiency of an object and the perfection of its depiction, the greater the satisfaction one receives from it. Indeed this appreciation is heightened when the original object is pitiful or dangerous or causes negative emotions like fear or grief because the accompanying sense of pleasure is a product of the mental agility required by the mixed sentiment itself; those mental acrobatics act as a positive moral influence on the observer.43 For example, though a decaying flower may be ugly in one’s real experience of it, a poem that captures the sentiments invoked by that dying flower can be achingly beautiful; one’s appreciation then leads to admiration for the poet and the poem, and reflects back onto the very object that inspired both. In other words, the poem produces a psychological benefit because one’s intellect is forced to reconcile the disparity between the imperfect, decaying object, with its smell, distortion, and dis- coloration, and the way in which its representation in the poem aspires to perfection. For Mendelssohn, mixed sentiments have “the peculiar property” of “penetrating deeper into the mind and appearing to sustain themselves longer.”44 A more complicated inspiration enacts a more powerful moral aesthetic because it affords the observer greater psychological and intellectual achievement through the increase in mental exercise and acuity. The beautiful description of the Ugly – the encounter with a matter that represents some

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 ugliness or pain – provokes more and better reflection and contemplation (that is, provokes the appraisal of intellectual beauty). Inasmuch as this encounter exercises one’s sentiments one can become beautified by the contemplation of art. The “sweet enchantment” that Mendelssohn attributes to the reception of the successful art object operates on multiple cognitive levels to “deceive” the senses through “the perfection of the imitation.”45 Yet, the independence accorded the art object is bound by the constitution of the sentiments of the spectator; those sentiments enjoy a pleasurable and beautiful object more than in its representation even as they also enjoy the representation of Moral aesthetics 47 something displeasing or disturbing more than the content represented itself. In other words, for the observer to delight in physical ugliness (an object as simple as a dead flower or with the magnitude of the destruction of an earthquake) and moral ugliness (like depravity or degeneracy) there must be an intentional balance between artistry and reality and between emotion and perception. Thus, Mendelssohn’s association of disparate parts into an organizing whole represents beauty in a theoretically more engaging way. Mendelssohn’s achievement, here, is to insert the Ugly firmly into the Leibnizian–Wolff tradition of perfection. Within Mendelssohn’s aesthetic discourse, he has generated a certain moral subversion. Unwilling to dismiss imperfect, deformed, and degraded objects as poor models for possible moral improvement, Mendelssohn arrests the logic of the opposition between perfection and imperfection, morality and immorality, virtue and vice as it has operated in the early Enlightenment aesthetic. Though he does not put himself into opposition to the Shaftesburian and Leibnizian orthodoxy that conflates beauty and truth, he redefines both terms in order to provide them with a greater range over possible aesthetic experiences. Mendelssohn’s argument is surprisingly practical: anything that helps improve one’s moral feeling must be including in the understanding of the Good. The Beautiful and the Ugly are, therefore, equally crucial for the aesthetic enterprise. Indeed Mendelssohn opens the possibility of the aesthetic far wider than his predecessors by arguing that “everything capable of being represented to the senses as a perfection could also present an object of beauty.”46 Theoretically, any object, regardless of its nature, is a possible source for beautiful representation; the process of reconciling the deformity of ugliness with the perfection of its description requires and cultivates refined mental acuity (in the spectator) and great skill (in the artist); the admiration of the skill used in rendering it promotes moral improvement via the benefits of cognitive beauty. By forcing the intellect to jump between seemingly disparate feelings, in fact, Mendelssohn’s aesthetic requires far more intellectualization because it necessitates a sophistication that can acknowledge the artistic distance between object and representation. Rather than a negative, regressive, demoralizing force, therefore, ugliness actually provides greater moral investment because of the need to reconcile it with the (positive) sentiments it can invoke. Mendelssohn uses an extreme example to illustrate how people can reconcile even the most distressing of events. Describing a public execution he

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 unpacks a complicated and multivalent dissonance between what one sees and what one feels:

Look at the crowd that in thick heaps swarms around someone condemned to die. They have all understood what things the scoundrel has perpetra- ted; they abhor his conduct and maybe even the man himself. Now he is dragged, disﬁgured and powerless, to the gruesome scaﬀold. People work their way through the throng, they stand on their tiptoes, they climb roofs in order to see the features of death distort his face. His judgment is 48 Moral aesthetics pronounced; the executioner approaches him; in an instant his fate will be decided. How longingly at that moment do all hearts wish that he were forgiven! This man? The object of their revulsion whom a moment ago they would themselves have condemned to death? By what means now does a ray of human love become alive in them once again? Is it not the approach of the punishment, the sight of the most gruesome physical evil, which somehow reconciles us even with someone wicked and purchases for him our love?47

The “love” that becomes “alive” (erwerben) in the face of the accused’s imminent death is the result of the complex layering of multiple, non-compatible emotions. Despite one’s expectations – and perhaps desires – the pity one feels for the condemned turns the spectacle into an aesthetic experience. This unexpected emotionality comes at a cost; the spectator may not have the psychic distance to intellectualize away the negative emotions. But the intensity of the experience requires its resolution in some feeling that is more positive than negative; that reconciliation results in a greater moral benefit. In Mendelssohn’s system, ugliness has a special importance. It is, as it were, the limit case of the perfectionist aesthetic. Mendelssohn’s insight shows that to the extent that the Ugly given to us in the artist’s work is perfectly represented, it is thereby beautified. The test is that the observer of the art object does not feel wholly disconnected from the repulsion of the Ugly in its original state but feels that the repulsion has been superseded; in effect, the spectator’s feelings at this point become mixed. In making a crucial distinction between object and subject, between something ugly and one’s perception of its ugliness, he requires one to take responsibility for one’s own response: “our disgust is not always directed at the representation but very often at the object of the representation. We do not always prefer not to have the representation, but in very many instances merely prefer instead for the object not to be.”48 This multi-level distinction – between the object, the emotions it arouses in the viewer, the represented object, and the emotions that representation produces – helps Mendelssohn multiply the beautifying power of one’s sentiments and expresses the value inherent in mixed sentiments. The Ugly in itself may be imperfect (what Mendelssohn defines as “a lack of a multiplicity of thing or its disharmony”49) but he refuses to conflate its representation (or even its perception) with vice, imperfection or evil. The pleasure one receives in recog-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 nizing an object as such, along with the ambivalence of that pleasure, actually serves to heighten the experience. The pleasurable (and psychologically bene- ﬁcial) mix of pleasantness and unpleasantness between the object and its recognition depends largely on the arousal of the moral sense. As Mendelssohn explains in “Rhapsody, Or Additions to the Letters on Sentiments,” just as

we cannot perceive a good action without approving it, without feeling inside a certain enjoyment of it, nor can we perceive an evil action without disapproving of the action itself and being disgusted by it. Yet recognizing Moral aesthetics 49 an evil action and disapproving of it are aﬃrmative features of the soul, expressions of the mental powers of knowing and desiring and elements of perfection which, in this connection, must be gratifying and enjoyable.50

We may witness something morally ugly (a crime, a lie, or an execution) which naturally stimulates “disgust” or “disapproval.” Yet in as much as one becomes aware that one perceives that ugliness, we are pleased by our sense of the perspicacity involved in its recognition and acknowledgment. Our ability to recognize its very ugliness carries a positive moral value both because of the sense it takes to distinguish virtue from vice and through the connection of truth to beauty. The moral value of the aesthetic representation of ugliness lies therefore not in reaﬃrming opposition to the object represented, but rather in appreciating the way in which there is a perfection even for non- beautiful objects or events in art. They become positive through portrayal and representation. They teach the lesson again that the perfection that governs our development of the discernment allows us to participate fully in the aesthetic experience. Thus the abnormal, misshapen, and imperfect subjects of all types of artwork participate in the perfectionist aesthetic as much as beautiful objects or more. Depending on one’s ability to actualize the positive sentiments made available by imperfection, ugliness can even inspire a positive moral beneﬁt on a higher level than other intellectual perfections of form.

That which supersedes: on the Sublime In reconstructing Mendelssohn’s theory of mixed sentiments thus far, we have seen that the aesthetic experiences we witness – the depiction of cruelty and ugliness, the attraction of executions, etc. – call for some account of our sentiments that explains how the painful could be pleasant and guide us in tracing the “obscure paths” taken by our psychology.51 Mendelssohn articulates this idea already in the Letters on the Sentiments, a dialogue modeled on Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, which contains an exchange of views between Euphranor, who takes a hedonistic stance towards aesthetics, and Theocles, who represents Mendelssohn’s perfectionist aesthetics. Euphranor’s strongest argument comes in pointing out that Theocles’ theory cannot account for certain common aesthetic experiences:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 That rocky cliﬀ which juts outward above the river rushing by presents a grisly sight. The vertigo-inducing heights, the deceptive fear of falling, and the plunge to the depths below that those pieces of rock hanging over the edge appear to threaten – all this often forces us to avert our agitated gaze from it. Yet, after a quick recovery, we direct our eyes again to this fearful object. The grisly sight pleases. Whence this peculiar satisfaction?52

Although not named explicitly, the “peculiar satisfaction” points toward the Sublime which moves beyond the boundaries of any and every ordinary 50 Moral aesthetics experience.53 After this first essay, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was published and provided Mendelssohn further fodder for reflection, which he included in his review of the piece in the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (Library of Fine Sciences and Free Arts).54 As Frederick Beiser has shown, Mendelssohn has Burke in mind while attempting his own theory of the extreme peculiarity of the Sublime.55 And like other Enlightenment thinkers Mendelssohn gave the Sublime a special place in aesthetics and, indeed, in the spiritual life of individuals. Tom Furniss aptly notes that by employing the Sublime as a separate referent category Mendelssohn takes his aesthetics beyond beauty and ugliness in order to test the limits of the mixed sentiment and the spiritual acuity that it engenders.56 Because of the density of the idea of the Sublime, Mendelssohn takes some care to unpack its many different elements in his 1758 essay Betrachtungen über das Erhabene und das Naïve in den schönen Wissenschaften (“Observa- tions on the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Arts”).57 He describes two kinds of sublimity – one that refers to objects outside of art and the other refers to sublimity within (or by way of) art – and defines the “sublime” object as that which “ceases to be sensuously beautiful and becomes gigantic or enormous in extension.” For Mendelssohn, discussing the Sublime offered both an occasion for aesthetic explanation and an opportunity to grasp more deeply the psychology of mixed sentiments. Fundamentally different from the ugly object (which has clearly defined borders and can be represented beautifully), the immensity of the sublime object is far too great (in size and in content) to be comprehended by the senses. By its size alone it cannot be called sensuously beautiful; instead, Mendelssohn characterizes it specifically as “strength in perfection”: “each thing that is or appears immense as far as the degree of its perfection is concerned is called sublime. God is called ‘the most sublime being.’”58 Mendelssohn does not want, as Beiser has pointed out, to surrender to Burke’s criticism of perfectionist aesthetics but rather attempts to incorporate the Sublime into his theory. Beiser argues that,

[a]lthough Burke did not convince Mendelssohn to drop the theory of perfection, he did persuade him that the feeling of the sublime is much more complex than he ﬁrst assumed. Under Burke’sinﬂuence, he now came to believe that the sublime is a mixed emotion, containing elements 59 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 of both pleasure and pain.

In order to identify the perfection in the quantitative diﬀerence of the sublime object, and anticipating Kant, Mendelssohn interprets two instances of sensation: on the one hand, the size itself pleases; on the other hand, the comparison between the grandeur of the object and the smallness of the person observing it gives pain. Beiser notes that the perfection of Mendelssohn’s Sublime is its immeasurability which was a quality that Mendelssohn had rejected in his ﬁrst essay on the Beautiful. In the 1758 essay, however, he Moral aesthetics 51 admits that quality and even glories in it.60 The Sublime has none of the regularity of the Beautiful; it can neither be controlled nor constructed purposefully. Indeed, the Sublime overwhelms the senses and undermines the intellect’s ability to ascertain information. In an encounter with the sublime object,

The senses, which perceive things insofar as they are homogeneous, begin to ramble in an eﬀort to comprehend the boundaries and end up losing themselves in what is immense. The result … is initially a trembling or shudder that comes over us and then something similar to dizziness that often forces us to divert our eyes from the object.61

A sensory overload occurs because the Sublime forces perceptions to tumble over one another; the physical response (a “trembling” or a “shudder”)is correlated to the intellect’s inability to discern the limits of the object by measuring one perception against another. Transcending “ordinary” experience, the Sublime is an exemplary case of mixed sentiment as it simultaneously produces admiration and undermines the powers of all five senses; in a sense the Sublime causes a glitch in the cognitive processing mechanism. Because of its enormity, the Sublime completely overpowers the entire body; one becomes “dizzy” and must “divert the eyes” in order to survive it. In the encounter with sublimity the body halts sensory input. What makes Mendelssohn’s account of the Sublime so compelling is his rejection of a single source for and single sensory expression of the divine (an important deviation from the Leibniz–Wolff tradition). Whereas ugliness and beauty are recognized as the dis/ordered harmony of different parts, sublimity is the very event of disarray – a disharmonious, “enormous,”“repugnant” occurrence that can not be corralled within the contemplative gaze, disrupts the pleasure of experience, and makes one dizzy with an information overload.62 This description would seem to be an extremely painful event and yet it is not. Given the disabling effect of the Sublime, descriptions of and/or encounters with it inspire mixed emotions because they are “quite alluring but in many cases upsetting.”63 The sublime moment of terror leads directly to the thought of that which is most immeasurable, God, whose existence is the most sublime knowledge, which is, by definition greater than any human perception could grasp. Working in the Leibnizian tradition, Mendelssohn

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 reasons that God is the culmination of all the aesthetic parts of perfection, variety, and morality. But breaking with the rationalist tradition, Mendelssohn takes the position that God and God’s multiplicity are impossible to encompass by any kind of human thought and are thus experienced in terms of an overwhelming, all-encompassing sensation of magnitude.64 In what could be a description of revelatory experience, Mendelssohn characterizes the encounter not by presence but by absence, that is, by an inability to see or hear or touch or feel anything because of the overwhelming experience of the Sublime itself. One turns away in order to survive. Therefore, it is only in the moment after 52 Moral aesthetics the Sublime that any part of the experience can be perceived or described genuinely. Fundamentally an-iconic, Mendelssohn’s description of the encounter with the divine sublime has none of the hallmarks of Christian experience that would resonate with his primarily German non-Jewish audience. Instead, he purposefully describes the sublime experience as nonvisible even as it involves a physical response: “The immensity arouses a sweet shudder that rushes through every fiber of our being, and the multiplicity prevents all satiation, giving wings to the imagination to press further and further without stopping.”65 Without form, the experience goes on and on; the enormity described here is an eternal, unceasing, an ever producing beingness that seems to draw on the scenario of the Sinaitic revelation (without form but with supernatural accompaniment to all the People Israel) than on the theology that finds its cardinal expression in the divine crucified and resurrected in the body of Christ.66 For Mendelssohn, the composite sentiment aroused by God’s magnitude, immensity, and multiplicity is something that simultaneously attracts the whole of the spectator’s attention and yet negatively overwhelms his sensual capacities; this combination of emotions constitutes the mixed sentiment of awe. Promoting his conception of an original formlessness, Mendelssohn explains that the awe inspired by God transcends even “what we can think of as perfect,” that is, it exceeds the borders of both the Beautiful and the Ugly. Indeed God surpasses “everything that we can conceive as enormous, perfect, or sublime.”67 Because God’s perfection is unimaginable it surpasses all the aesthetic categories available to human reason; God remains inexplicable because no human conception, being on a small scale, provides a satisfactory mechanism with which to describe God, whose very scale is beyond human measure or imagination. Indeed, “some things are so perfect, so sublime that they cannot be reached by any finite thought, cannot be adequately intimated by means of any sign, and cannot be represented as they are by any images. Among such things are God, the world, eternity, and so on.”68 The concepts inspired by God’s immensity (along with the enormity of “the world” and “eternity”) eclipse any of the preexisting descriptions that might try to portray what the divine inspires; all such attempts will be inadequate to the object. In using God as the ultimate test case of the two different extensions of sublimity – the object and the representation of the object – Mendelssohn proffers a theory that smuggles into the aesthetic a deistic, universal, and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 nondenominational religious premise. Religious conceptions of God serve only to trap into form that which cannot be described. Those very characteristics that constitute his sublime object seem to defy the perfectionist construction of moral beauty: irregularity, the impression given to the observer of the limit of human control and diminished power. Pity (Mitleid) – the central mixed feeling in Mendelssohn’s theory of beauty – gives way, in the Sublime, to admiration (Bewunderung). Sublime feelings have the ability to present the Sublime in a way that fosters the highly moral psychological benefit made possible by the awe-inspiring encounter. Mendelssohn’s Sublime Moral aesthetics 53 privileges the unknowable, unordered, and eternal nature of God above specific denominational claims. Unlike his contemporaries, he disconnects moral beauty from a specific religious worldview (e.g., by not invoking Christ as an element of and as the divine) and argues for a specifically supra-denominational (mixed sentiment) aesthetic. In the examples that populate his essay on the sublime, Mendelssohn culls quotes from Sophocles and Ovid, Virgil and Horace, Shakespeare and the Psalms, Cicero, Klopstock, Lessing, Haller, and Voltaire; he chooses denominationally neutral citations to illustrate the sentiments that are beyond the specific boundaries of one religiosity. He negotiates between beauty and ugliness, perfection and imperfection, largely because he utilizes a (religiously) egalitarian experience that finds its truth in natural religion and not limited religious truth claims. To sustain this universalism, Mendelssohn turns to Longinus, the pre-Christian source whose authority he quotes at length:

… Longinus is not only right about the fact that what everyone everywhere finds pleasing must actually be beautiful and sublime, but one can also invert the proposition if one is speaking of the first type of sublimity, and say that the sublime must be pleasing to everyone everywhere. The words of the Greek art critic that immediately follow also make it apparent that he is really speaking of the first type of the sublime when he says that it is pleasing to everyone everywhere, even though he does not explicitly present this essential distinction. He says: “If people with many different leanings, with dissimilar lifestyles, who are different in their sciences and in years, are nevertheless at the same time moved by something, then the union, as it were, of so many disunities provides the greater certainty that the very things that one thus admires must unmistakably contain something majestic.”69

By focusing on the sublime object (“the first type of sublimity”) Mendelssohn attempts to refine Longinus’ opinion to match an equanimity he would like to promote. This equality is latent in the very examples he uses of sublime art in the text, which range over a number of different religions and cultures. In its universality, Mendelssohn’s Sublime circumvents specific circumstances, or a preference of religious beliefs, in favor of an all inclusiveness that necessarily includes “everyone everywhere”; exclusion contradicts the logic of the sublime

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 object. The Sublime is the transcendent experience that the naïve and the sophisticated both undergo in the mixed sensations of either admiration or astonishment. These are sentiments that are shared by the common or educated, Christian or Jew, man or woman just as God is accessible through the rationality that determines natural religion. Although understood in “diﬀer- ent” ways, the “majesty” of the divine sublime can be (potentially) shared by all: “the union of so many disunities” is fostered by the centrality of union inspired by God. Thus, by de-emphasizing speciﬁcities, Mendelssohn very subtly critiques those delimiting religious systems that attempt to circumscribe 54 Moral aesthetics the universality of the divine through an imposed order. A theologically described God is necessarily limited to the vocabulary of each religion. An aesthetically rendered God is indescribable; the universal concept of God is beyond religious (i.e., human) conception. But in the subject of the Sublime, divine perfection, Mendelssohn sees the nurturing, moral potential of the German aesthetic enterprise in general:

True perfection is a living ﬂame, constantly fanning out and becoming stronger and stronger the more it is able to fan out. The inclination to communicate itself and reproduce that good that one enjoys is implanted in the soul as much as the instinct to preserve oneself.70

The “living flame” of “true” perfection empowers, rejuvenates, and regenerates; as it spreads out, it improves all who encounter it. Like the Ugly, the possibilities of the Sublime allow for a free and beneficial mixing of elements that improve and augment the individual’s perception of the Good outside of the sensual limits to which the Beautiful is confined. Even more so, in affecting both the body and the mind, it further exercises and tones one’s moral sentiments.

An aesthetics of Judaism For Mendelssohn, aesthetic dramas cannot be confined within the parameters of any one specific religion; indeed, they are fundamentally available to all who exercise reason in the pursuit of positive moral feeling. Given his firm and public belief in natural religion, Mendelssohn’s continued fealty to Juda- ism perplexed those who could not see how Mendelssohn could reconcile the seeming paradox of being an Enlightened Jew. His description of the formlessness of God seemed to contradict the restricted, legalistic, formalized God Christianity had ascribed to Judaism. Just over a decade after his seminal philosophical work in aesthetics, Mendelssohn responded to the public challenge lobbied by Lavater to justify his adherence to rabbinic Judaism. Thir- teen years later a second public challenge was issued which prompted him to write Jerusalem, Or On Ecclesiastical Power and Judaism (1783). His response was not simply a personal, or intellectual, exercise; as Shmuel Feiner has described Mendelssohn was involved, at the time, with the plea for full civil rights for Jews.71 Jerusalem serves as more than a personal apologetic or

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 polemic: in the articulation and defense of the rationality of Judaism Men- delssohn consciously, intentionally used arguments consistent with themes he had elaborated in his aesthetic works. The text operates on several levels to combat claims used to discredit and disenfranchise the legitimacy of Judaism and rabbinic thought. Though rich with examples of Enlightenment aesthetics and politics, it is in a well-known digression about language that Mendels- sohn’s aesthetics inform his thought. Indeed the universalism that he had made a criterion of the aesthetic becomes a crucial element of his justification of Judaism. Moral aesthetics 55 The first part of the work deals specifically with the social contract and the construction of authoritarian power. Invoking Hobbes, then Locke, Men- delssohn outlines a theory of social responsibility on individual, ecclesiastical, and governmental levels. Profoundly invested in the natural right of the human being to fashion and secure one’s own felicity, Mendelssohn negotiates between the evident benefit of order enforced by the state (which often involves one to “renounce certain of his rights for the general good”72) with his understanding of the duties of citizens: “If the inner felicity of society cannot be entirely preserved, let at least outward peace and security be obtained, if need be, through coercion.”73 What remains incoercible, Men- delssohn adamantly maintains, is belief. Whereas civil authority is bound to uphold the laws by which it maintains peace and order, religious authority can teach, suggest, implore but it can never force: “Here we see an essential difference between state and religion. The state give orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and beneficence.”74 This crucial distinction – a fundamental tenet of the Enlightenment tradition in all its manifestations – constitutes the essential element of Mendelssohn’s understanding of Judaism. It comprises his answer to critics – both contemporary and historical – who charged Judaism with legalism, coercive tactics, and a backwards (if not anachronistic) legislation. In it he rejects the accusations that the commandments are a legal code that preclude the possibility of Jewish inclusion in a temporal state and that they bind individuals to a behavioral code that contradicts reason. The second part of Jerusalem refutes the accusation that Judaism is a pre- Enlightenment religion. Mendelssohn shows instead that Judaism is not just commensurate with the claims of reason but it provides the only working model of a rational religion. To the Pauline accusation, which ran strongly through Lutheran doctrine, that Jews were beholden to an unrelenting sense of law from which Christ had freed humanity, he sets out the framework of his critique of ecclesiastical power, which he claims fundamentally contradicts “sound reason”: “If according to the principles of sound reason, the divinity of which we must all acknowledge, neither state nor church would be authorized to assume any right in matters of faith other than the right to teach, any power other than the power to persuade, any discipline other than the discipline of reason and principles.”75 Claiming an ecumenical foundation

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 (“of which we must all acknowledge”), Mendelssohn argues that authority teaches and leads but cannot force or compel belief.76 Nothing in Judaism contradicts that principle; indeed for Mendelssohn, it is the profound (and purposeful) misunderstanding of biblical and rabbinic Judaism as coercive and punishing that created the assumption of its oppressiveness. The “divine legislation” that Jews follow instructs them how to live but not how or what to believe. Jewish “laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life” do not include “doctrinal opinions,”“saving truths” or “universal propositions of reason” rather the latter are revealed to all human beings “through nature 56 Moral aesthetics and thing, but never through word and script.”77 In other words, the particularity of Jewish ritual behavior does not contravene the universality of God and God’s providence nor does it preclude Jewish participation in a reason- based world view promulgated by the tenets of the Enlightenment. Knowing that his readership disbelieves the possibility of a reasonable Judaism – he writes, “I fear that this may be astonishing, and again seem new and harsh to some readers”78 – Mendelssohn uses the occasion to re-educate them on the “true Judaism” in which he believes. He draws a picture of the ritual and theological system of ancient Israel that was “entrusted to living, spiritual instruction, which was able to keep pace with all changes of time and circumstance.”79 Only out of sheer necessity was this “living” instruction codified into writing; even as it seemed counterintuitive to preserve God’s gift of the oral Torah by destroying its most essential element (its orality), historical pressures forced Jewish leaders to transcribe the oral tradition, an event that occurred in tandem with the insti- tutionalization of certain prescribed ritual actions that supplemented and augmented the written text. That transition had both costs and benefits; though writing the oral teaching created a deliberative community, it ham- pered the flexibility and fluency of dynamic interaction. But, according to Mendelssohn, “the ceremonial law itself is a kind of living script, rousing the mind and heart, full of meaning, never ceasing to inspire contemplation and to provide the occasion for oral instruction.”80 In Mendelssohn’s construction, Jewish ritual is neither archaic holdover nor meaningless physical action, but rather it reinforces the constancy of the ceremonial law in an active way and necessitates an engagement that involves “mind and heart.” One cannot coerce that involvement; in providing specific actions, the “ceremonial script” leads directly to contemplation of God’s divinity because it connects both physical and mental intentionality. Mendelssohn’s “living script” turns Jewish ceremony into an idiolect in and of itself that, as such, participates directly in his aesthetic theory as the highest of art forms. The replacement of the fluidity of the oral tradition with the fluidity of ceremonial action creates a creative tension between the rigidity and regularity of the written and the spontaneity of the performed. His description implies the role of the individual in that emphasis; he writes “the mind and heart” in a singular, not plural construction. Judaism is a script to be read and interpreted, whose success is dependent on an individual’s use of the profound gift of reason. Judaism

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 avoids irrationality by way of the active, conscious, deliberate interaction with its code of rituals, which both maintains an active tension between ritual and worship and requires the constant reenactment of a dynamic based on active reflection on the divine. Although it may seem counterintuitive to define repetitive ritual as a dynamic process, for Mendelssohn, Jewish rituals serve as the empowering force by which Jews continue to recognize the divine as existing over and against the symbolic. As a “living” language, therefore, Judaism enacts a mixed sentiment built on reflection, creation, and – because stemming from a Moral aesthetics 57 revelation that Mendelssohn understands as “eternal”–sublimity. Like a representation, the continual reenactment of ritual offers the opportunity for moral perfection yet the intellectual reflection afforded by the action (ritual) and its purpose (contemplation of God) safeguard the individual from worshipping the form over the content. In Jerusalem Mendelssohn employs his aesthetic reading of language by mapping it onto his understanding of Judaism. Whereas art merely describes, Jewish ritual enacts, that is, Jewish ceremony represents an intentional action, fully equipped with the reason of a mature language. Judaism – understood as a living script and as communication between God and Jews – enacts the goals of reason: it is a fully conscious method of communication, directed toward God in a language that realizes it own potential through its continual renewal. Instigated by divinity, Jewish ceremonial practice combines the Beautiful and the Good, in which all its members participate. Judaism presents, in the language of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics, a perfection that carries within it a notion of its own perfection and is therefore, within the limits of the senses, necessarily beautiful; but inasmuch as it was given by the eternal – and derives from the divine – it also has an essential relationship to the sublime. In this way, the accusation that Judaism is primitive, or the accusation that it is enslaving, is turned around: Judaism is constructed according to the precepts of life along with its mixed sentiments – its balance of pleasure and pain, good and evil – Judaism is in fact the most modern and enlightened creed and connected to morality through its inherent connection to its divine creator. As Mendelssohn explains,

… (E)ach of these prescribed actions, each practice, each ceremony had its meaning, its valid signiﬁcance; each was closely related to the speculative knowledge of religion and the teaching of morality, and was an occasion for a man in search of truth to reﬂect on these sacred matters or to seek instruction from wise men.81

The continuation of those practices affords the same benefit. His argument functions on several levels. He justifies Judaism as both rational and relevant, making Jewish ritual action both inherently divine and a necessary part of the Jewish religion. He invokes the relationship of aesthetics to the Enlightenment concept of natural religion in order to show that

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Judaism is rational at the core and a bringer of Enlightenment. It operates as a perpetual caution against, on the one side, idolatry and superstition, and, on the other side, against speculation and abstraction. The revealed part of Jewish ritual is nevertheless rooted in reason both because it provides the opportunity for mental exercise and because it sanctions a constant means of contemplating the divine. The order of the ceremonial script – its grammar and vocabulary – bespeaks its beauty; indeed, wary of misperception, Men- delssohn protects Judaism by emphasizing the characteristics associated with beauty. Thus, he claims that Judaism adheres to the tenets of natural 58 Moral aesthetics theology – God, God’s Providence and the immortality of the soul – and is indeed a revealed and rational religion. But he is less interested in establishing the limits of reasonability of Judaism and more determined to express the limitlessness of the possibilities for moral improvement through Judaism. His argument accents neither the beauty nor the ugliness of Judaism but instead the sublimity of reason, especially as it is practiced in (his ideal definition of) Judaism. Whereas in aesthetic perception the mind is exercised by every encounter with perfection, religious perception exercises the soul in every encounter with essential truth. Judaism’s ability to circumvent the cognitive correspondent to the sublime moment – when the cognitive faculties break down and the eyes are averted – is a matter of adhering to the metaphysical elements that background biblical and rabbinic law. According to Mendelssohn, the accusation of primitivism or superstition hurled against Jewish ritual posits a false premise; Jewish ritual not only fosters but enacts a guarantee for the continuity of rational thinking in the history of humanity. By defining religion as a script, Mendelssohn attributes to language a theological function that is as crucial as the application of reason itself. As the window through which one is able to view society’s recognition, use, and refinement of true knowledge, the “language” of Judaism is the basis of the harmony between religion and reason and not its dissension. Mendelssohn’s image of Judaism was certainly noted by Kant, who picks up several of Mendelssohn’s themes in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). Kant’s work changes the conceptual understanding of religion generally; in doing so, he damaged the philosophical understanding of Judaism especially. Using religion as the measure and symbol of morality, Kant returns to the idea that Mendelssohn had rejected by representing Judaism, once again, as illustrative of a primitive mentality. Its childishness is revealed by its mistaken notions of obligation, society, and law. Calling Kant’s essay “arguabl(y) the single most influential philosophical essay on religion to have appeared in the last two centuries,” Arnold Eisen contends that Kant’s ethical framework alienated Judaism from the opportunities of ethics: “Christianity and Judaism were recast as a result of Kant’s insistence (echoed by many others) that the sole legitimate role of religion lay in the inculcation of morality, religion’s promise that virtue will be rewarded in a future lending support to the doing of ethical duty in this one.”82 Deriving his sense of reli-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 gion from his desire to preserve moral freedom, i.e., the autonomy of the individual, at any cost, Kant made the crucial distinction between the idea of duty and moral understanding, and separated (religious) obligation from (moral) sense, which put the onus of performing virtuous behavior not on a Godhead who requires it but on the individual who is capable of it:

The human being must make or have made himself into whatever he is or should become in a moral sense, good or evil. These two [characters] must be an eﬀect of his free power of choice, for otherwise they could not Moral aesthetics 59 be imputed to him and, consequently, he could be neither morally good nor evil. If it is said, The human being is created good, this can only mean nothing more than: He has been created for the good and the original predisposition in him is good; the human being is not thereby good as such, but he brings it about that he becomes good or evil, according as he either incorporates or does not incorporate into his maxims the incentives contained in that predisposition (and this must be left entirely to his free choice).83 (6:44)

Free choice is at the heart of ethical action. The freedom one has to choose colors the act by which one makes a choice and, to the extent that the choice is dependent on outside intervention, the quality of the act is amoral and cannot be taken seriously as a part of the human endeavor; instead, each individual is wholly responsible for making – and owning – one’s moral choices. One’s only obligation is to maximize the potential provided for in creation. Kant argues for a moral imperative that is as implicit as reason itself: “For in spite of that fall [from good to evil] the command that we ought to become better human beings still resounds unabated in our souls; consequently, we must also be capable of it, even if what we can do is of itself insufficient and, by virtue of it, we only make ourselves receptive to a higher assistance inscrutable to us” (6:46).84 The sound of the “command”–resilient despite “the fall”–serves as the impetus and the proof of human morality as well as – as Kant readily concedes – human vulnerability. Kant’s use of the term “ought” separates command from commandment: each individual should but cannot be compelled to act ethically. The Jewish adherence to legal obligations is, in this sense, an abridgement of human responsibility and prevents the actualization of the mature person. Indeed he defined Judaism as “only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state.”85 His division between true, reason-based religion and action-based religion, on the model of Mendelssohn’s Judaism yet despite Mendelssohn’s argument, meant reducing Judaism to an inflexible, morally offensive (because compulsory) legalism. Kant rejected Mendelssohn’s view of Jewish ritual action as a kind of mixture of all systems of communication (pictures, letters, sounds, and gestures) that, in essence, represents the mixed essence of rationality. Instead

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Kant returns to the charge that Judaism was simply a pre-Enlightenment system of coercion, based solely on an infrastructure of reward and punishment without any moral meaning.86 Unlike the only truly moral religion (Christianity), Judaism denies individuals the freedom of choice on which “true” moral action depends. As we will see in the next chapter, like those people dependent on the soil, for whom the actualization of free choice is compromised by an inability (or unwillingness) to tame their land, Jewish choices are tainted by the “irregular” eﬀects of their unrelenting refusal to give up the rituals of Judaism. Echoing the sentiment expressed by 60 Moral aesthetics Montesquieu, Buﬀon, Cornelius de Pauw (1739–99), and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) in early anthropology – none of whom used Jews as representatives of action – Kant turns the terms of an anthropological argument into an ethical condemnation:

The faith of a religion of service is … a slavish and mercenary faith (ﬁdes mercenaria, servilis) and cannot be considered as saving, because it is not moral. For moral faith must be a free faith, founded on pure disposition of the heart (ﬁdes ingenua). The one faith fancies to please God through actions (of cultus) which (though laborious) yet possess no moral worth in themselves, hence are actions extracted only through fear or hope, the kind which also an evil human being can perform, whereas for that the other faith presupposes as necessary a morally good disposition.87 (6:115–16:116)

Slavish religiosity has no rational value in itself; for Kant, Judaism is built on an obligatory system of observances in obedience not to the moral voice within but to fear of authority without; thus, it is a positive impediment to moral improvement. Though he values Judaism for providing the world with the conception of a single, moral divinity, he decries Judaism’s theocratic origins and denies it authentic morality because of the requirements inherent within it. Kant rejects all connections between Judaism and Christianity, largely because he views the speciﬁc obligatory nature of Judaism as an impossibly particularistic system of ritual codes. He makes this point explicit in a brief discussion of Mendelssohn’s Jer- usalem and the assertion there that Christianity and Judaism are inseparably linked. The typically mild-mannered Mendelssohn seemed incredulous over the constancy of the accusations against Judaism and the allegation that he was really a Christian in Jew’s clothing. Writing to his anonymous challenger, Mendelssohn lamented the position in which he was placed:

If it be true that the cornerstones of my house are dislodged, and the structure threatens to collapse, do I act wisely if I remove my belongings from the lower to the upper floor for safety? Am I more secure there? Now Christianity, as you know, is built upon Judaism, and if the latter falls, it must necessarily collapse with it into one heap of ruins. You say you offer me 88 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 the safety of your upper floor; must I not suppose that you mock me?

Mendelssohn claims that Christianity relies on Judaism’s substructure for its own self-understanding. Kant read this passage and interpreted it quite differently. In a note about early followers of Jesus, he describes what he takes as Mendelssohn’s “true” meaning:

[Mendelssohn] means to say: ﬁrst remove Judaism from your religion (though in the historical teaching of faith it may always remain as an Moral aesthetics 61 antiquity) and we shall be able to take your proposal under advisement. (In fact nothing would then be left over, except pure moral religion unencumbered by statues.)89

Entangled within a system of obligations that identify the Jews as a separate people is a sign, according to Kant, that Judaism rejects the universality oﬀered by moral freedom and, thus, operates on the level of a superstition. Kant argues that – in contrast to Judaism – Christianity, the religion of pure reason, achieves a morality that transcends earthly desire because it projects the potential (even capability) of individuals to know and achieve objective virtue by their own (reason-based) designs. For Kant, “true” religion requires the continual attempt to achieve the virtue made available (and manifest) through the moral law. Kant’s separation of religious obligation from morality was meant as a critique of religion. That they were separate domains is relevant to the anthropology of religion, as well as to the construction of aesthetics in Kant’s system. Whereas both the British school and perfectionist aesthetics ultimately subordinated art to ediﬁcation – one pursued beauty in order to be improved by it – Kant disassociated the didactic utility of beauty from the domain of moral freedom and separated the Beautiful from the Good. While conceding that the Beautiful could be symbolic of morality, he maintained that it could not be employed to achieve or actualize the Good without falling into the obligation of duty. Not quite a divorce – Kant conceded that art has a role in the moral education – this separation created a new understanding of the relationship between the Good and the Beautiful. As Paul Guyer explained:

First, Kant suggests direct connections between aesthetic judgment and the cultivation of moral feelings. Second, Kant suggests ways in which both aesthetic objects (especially works of ﬁne art) and aesthetic experience itself oﬀer sensible representation of moral ideas, and even of the structure of morality. Third, both aesthetic and teleological judgment serve to represent nothing less than the primacy of practical reason, that is, the unconditional superiority of the rational use of reason over all other forms of value.90

Guyer’s summary of Kant’s theory makes several points clear. Though not

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 serviceable in the pursuit or exercise of morality, beauty encourages intellectual reﬂection, which in turn, facilitates one’s ability to implement the freedom of choice required in Kant’s ethic. Representations of moral action become recognizable, in other words, and supply opportunities for familiarizing oneself with moral feeling. This trait is, however, always secondary to both aesthetics and morality because ultimately disinterestedness frames the art work and obedience to the categorical imperative alone frames the moral act. In Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant makes the distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime clear: 62 Moral aesthetics the intellectual, in itself purposive (moral) good, aesthetically judged, must be represented as sublime rather than beautiful, so that it rather awakens the feeling of respect (which disdains charm) than that of love and familiar inclination; for human nature does not attach itself to this good spontaneously, but only by the authority which reason exercises over sensibility.91

This analysis is strikingly similar to Mendelssohn’s reassessment of the potential of ugliness to aﬀect moral change as well as the thrust of Mendels- sohn’s retreat from an aesthetic of perfection found in the object and imitated in the artwork. Like Mendelssohn, Kant preferred the perfection found in the artwork itself, which arouses feelings of appreciation not only for the perfection of the artist but also facilitates a satisfaction in the viewer’s ability to recognize that perfection. Whereas the Beautiful speaks to the senses and has the positive (though not reasonable) association with common objects and feelings, the Sublime is both more respectable and closer to the moral good (because it is intentionally cerebral). To illustrate the positive potential in intellectual imagination, Kant chooses an example from Judaism:

Perhaps there is no sublimer passage in the Jewish law than the command “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything which is in heaven or in earth or under the earth,” etc. This command alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people in their moral period felt for their religion, when they compared themselves with other peoples, or explain the pride which Mahommedanism inspires. The same is true of the moral law and of the tendency to morality in us.92

Kant praises that which is non-representational (and in so doing, echoes Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem); the commandment against graven images (albeit misunderstood by Kant here) requires an intellectualization that promotes and justiﬁes an extreme sense of morality. Mendelssohn’s argument against the concretization of images as symbols is empowered by the morality of what he deemed the ceremonial script. But where Mendelssohn insists on the rationalist account of reason, which roots the necessary mental exercise of Judaism’s ritual relationship in relationship with the divine, Kant rejects the framework. Because Judaism cannot rely on sensual images, Kant seems to imply, during a “moral period” Jews exercised imagination in order to con-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 ceive of that which was greater than physical senses could experience. Thus the unfamiliarity of God was translated into a moral law that forbade the false and/or misleading representation of the divine; for Kant, that law is sublime. The Sublime is, in Kant’s words, “an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainablity of nature regarded as a presentation of ideas.”93 It is an argument that comes very close to Mendelssohn’s, in that both philosophers see in Judaism a non-representational element worthy of praise. Mendelssohn read ritual action as a “living script,” a divine art form that circumvented the potential idolatry of graven Moral aesthetics 63 images (that is, concrete forms) and which represented Judaism’s sublimity through the relationship between God and Jews fostered by that ritual. For Kant, the sublimity of the moral law is emblematized by the prohibition against formal representations, a proscription that requires the mental agility inherent in the exercise of critical judgment.94 Like Mendelssohn, Kant takes issue with the improper use and understanding of a sign. The fetishism of the sign is, for both, at the root of suppression. That cognitive skill allows one to develop and foster “taste” (i.e., the “judgment of taste”) – the combination of understanding (“the faculty of concepts”) and imagination (“the faculty of intuitions”) – through which one is able to identify what is beautiful and what is sublime. Taste allows one to see both natural and artistic beauty and enables one to distinguish the difference between them. Taste is the refinement of reason, the fruit of a culture that has progressed far beyond hand-to-mouth subsistence and allows for the time and distance to reflect on nature (rather than merely survive in relating to it). Art and nature are mutually constructed, reminds Kant: “Nature is beautiful because it looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature.”95 That consciousness requires sophistication; such capability is a product of a society that has taken advantage of its environment rather than been taken advantage by it. The idea of the idol is perhaps an important junction between the two and an important branching off point. Mendelssohn’s perfectionist aesthetic works for him because he can retain the perfection in the work of art while relegat- ing the object to the realm of the imperfect or even evil. In a sense, it is the inability to recognize the independent function of the representing object that is the problem with idolatry, too. Kant, however, does not have that option in mounting his aesthetics on the free play of the senses. Just as beautiful art can illustrate or represent a beautiful object, it “shows its superiority” to nature because it can do the same with an “ugly or displeasing” object.96 Yet, Kant does not unconditionally condone the ugly in art:

There is only one kind of ugliness which cannot be represented in accordance with nature without destroying all aesthetical satisfaction and consequently artiﬁcial beauty, viz. that which excites disgust. For in this singular sensation, which rests on mere imagination, the object is represented as [if] it were obtruding itself for our enjoyment, while we strive

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 against it with all our might. And the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and thus it is impossible that it can be regarded as beautiful.97

Kant limits the flexibility or redemptive quality of ugliness. When an object cannot be made to seem beautiful – if the representation is not allegorical or symbolic enough or the object itself too repulsive – the conflation of artistic and natural appearance is so complete that one is left solely with the disgust inspired by the original object. Though he does not dwell on this idea (he 64 Moral aesthetics moves on to those symbolic representations that serve to reinforce the analogy between the object and its representation rather than on its failure), his description of the “too ugly” is important. Kant’s philosophical supposition about the construction of experience through the subject makes it possible that the ugly object is possibly a projection of the artist. Unredeemable ugliness collapses the intellectualization of judgment. In causing one to “strive against it,” the representation reminds the unconscious (unthinking) mind of the original ugliness, making concrete what should have remained conceptual. Objects and emotions that could participate in the Beautiful instead are rejected, not only because they are “too real” to be understood as art, but also because they cause the imagination to dwell on the “singular sensation” of disgust, a negative and regressive emotion, and thus limit the imagination. Whereas the Beautiful is “the symbol of the morally good” and “pleases immediately” and “apart from any interest,”98 the Ugly feeds on its own negative energy. Though one may depict and view the Ugly under the aegis of disinterestedness, the displeasure associated with it – in both its natural and its disgusting forms – has the characteristic of violating our disinterested taboo. It produces a heteronomous moment in aesthetic contemplation. It cannot serve as a symbol (either potentially or theoretically) of the Good; indeed, in freezing the imagination, the Ugly subverts that good. It is neither morally free nor intellectually stimulating; the Ugly leaves one grounded in the concrete nature of failed representation. Beauty requires the harmonization of imagination and understanding; the Sublime involves the intentional understanding of that which is beyond the imagination. Both remain, however, constitutionally related to the moral good. But ugliness cannot participate in any such relationship unless it is first rendered different from what it is. Kantian ugliness limits imagination and is, in effect, the opposite of the Sublime. Taste reinforces that distinction because it juxtaposes the imagination with the skills of conceptual understanding:

Taste makes possible the transition, without any violent leap, from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest, as it represents the imagination in its freedom as capable of purposive determination for the understanding, and so teaches us to ﬁnd even in objects of sense a free satisfaction apart from any charm of sense.99

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Because ugliness limits that sense of freedom and threatens the exercise of imagination, taste is employed to identify and define that which is ugly. In Religion Within The Limits of Reason Alone, Kant limits the autonomy of the individual by describing systems in generalities; in The Critique of Judgment, the Ugly poses a threat to the free play of the imagination and, ultimately, to the autonomy of the aesthetic. Looking at them together, Judaism, in the former, parallels the Ugly in the latter. In a sense, nothing could be farther from Mendelssohn’s nuanced treatment of mixed sentiments than Kant’s logic of ethical and aesthetic autonomy. Mendelssohn took Moral aesthetics 65 ugliness as a type of case study within the perfectionist aesthetic of the ontological independence of the art work, whereas Kant, operating from a wholly other foundation in the Third Critique, is obviously ill at ease with it. Men- delssohn took Judaism to be exemplary as a religion due to its perfect integration of image, writing, and performance, and on this basis promoted its historical flexibility, emphasized its metaphoric capability, and defended its significance (indeed, he described it as an example of a truly moral religious system). Kant returned to an old thematic that firmly thrust Judaism into the historical niche of being merely the predecessor to Christianity, and – judging Judaism in the light of his sense of moral autonomy, found it to be slavish, legalistic, and anachronistic. Because Kant’s critical system became, in the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, central within the philosophical curriculum, his aesthetics and philosophy of religion overshadowed Mendelssohn and the work that flowed out of the Leibniz– Wolff school.100 Indeed Kant’s highly influential definition of Judaism created an intellectual evaluation of Judaism (and its adherents) that rendered it (and them) a prime example of irregularity and inflexibility, with a dangerous propensity for slavishness and, thus, immorality. Kant defined Judaism as an anachronistic (revelatory) understanding of divine authority that intentionally rejects moral freedom; its immorality is located directly in an ethical ugliness. In contrast to the freedom of Kant’s universal account of the exercise of morality and the accessibility of beauty within that universality, the constraints of Judaism are interpreted to be limiting and limited. Though left unmolested in Kant’s discussion of the physical manifestations of beauty, sublimity, and ugliness, Jews – those who maintain their fealty to the ritual actions of Judaism – do not escape the repercussions of Kant’s theoretical turn. Though innovative and original, Mendelssohn’s reading of Judaism was not followed by his contemporaries (neither Jewish nor Christian), and soon, the very (Leibnizian–Wolffian) theodicy on which it was founded was dismantled by the “all-crushing” Kant (as Mendelssohn deemed him). In his aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy of religion Kant reassessed the relationship of religious action to morality, thereby proffering an entirely different reading of Judaism. The following chapter turns to the practical applications of aesthetics in the growth of anthropological discourses in which Kant played an important role. We will look at the ramifications of disassociating the Ugly from the moral equation and what a “free” aesthetics implies next. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Notes 1 “On Sentiments,” JubA, I:73. The extremely useful English translation of Men- delssohn’s collected volume of 1771 was published by Daniel Dahlstrom in 1997; unless otherwise noted, I follow his translations here. 2 Frederick Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 196. 3ItwasinBaumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophcae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, written in 1735, that he first used the term “aesthetics” to mean “perception.” 66 Moral aesthetics But his monumental work Aesthetika, written and published between 1750 and 1758, put the term into philosophical parlance. 4 Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, Vol. 3 (London: Bohn, 1839), pp. 41–42. 5 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), in The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, Vol. I., 12th Edition (London: Rivington, 1824), Book II, Ch. 1, §23. 6 Ibid., Vol. I, Bk. II, Ch. 1, §24. 7 Ernest Boyer, “Schleiermacher, Shaftesbury, and the German Enlightenment,” Harvard Theological Review, 96:2 (April 2003), p. 182. 8 As quoted by Hans-Georg von Arburg, “Zwischen ‘dünner Schale’ und ‘ekelhafter Anatomie’: Versuch einer Paradigmatik des Hogarth-Bildes in Deutschland, 1750–1800,” Germanic Review, 75:4 (2000), p. 281. 9 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic,p.3. 10 Adam Smith, Of the Nature of that Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts/Of the Affinity Between Music, Dancing and Poetry in Essays on Philosophical Subjects: Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce, Vol. III (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 205 (II:30). 11 Michael B. Prince, “The Eighteenth-Century Beauty Contest,” Modern Language Quarterly, 55:3 (Sept. 1994), p. 255. 12 Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange,p.6. 13 McKeon, “Politics of Discourse,” p. 35. McKeon claims that the spread of secularization and corresponding decline of religious authority animated a movement to replace “religious by literary spirituality” by the end of the nineteenth century (cf.p.36ff.) 14 Ibid.,p.37. 15 Ibid.,p.41. 16 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy Loemker, Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 1022. 17 Leibniz, “Remarks on the Three Volumes Entitled Characteristics of Men, Man- ners, Opinions, Times, … 1711,” Philosophical Papers, p. 1024. Emphasis in the original. 18 Ibid., p. 1025. In a shorter, unpublished essay, Leibniz defines virtue as “the habit of acting in accordance with wisdom” and wisdom as “the science of happiness.” See “Happiness” (1694–98) in The Shorter Leibniz Texts: A Collection of New Translations, ed. Lloyd H. Strickland (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 169. 19 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, Henri Lestienne and André Robinet, ed. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1994), p. 69. Translation from Roger Gatham. 20 Norton explains that “The idea of perfection … resides at the center of Pietist, indeed of Christian, ethics. From its very beginnings – as in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus exhorted his listeners that they must be perfect, ‘as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48) – striving to attain perfection had been Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 adefining moment of Christian morality. This imperative appears repeatedly in Pietist moral and paedogogical works.” Robert Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 71. Lewis White Beck has shown that the Popularphilosophen, writers publishing in German at the height of the Berlin Aufklärung for a mostly public audience, contributed to the growth and importance of modern German thought. See Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) and Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 21 Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment,p.81. Moral aesthetics 67 22 As quoted by H. B. Nisbet in “Was ist Aufklärung?: The Concept of Enlight- enment in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of European Studies, 12:2 (June, 1982), p. 80. 23 Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment,p.82. 24 Ibid.,p.83. 25 Cf. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 131. See also Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI (Garden City, NJ: Image Books, 1985), p. 115. 26 Copleston, A History of Philosophy, p. 117. 27 Spalding’s Bestimmung des Menschen appears in Studien zur Geschichte des neuen Protestantismus,H.Hoffman and L. Zscharnack, eds. (Giessen: A Töpelmann, 1908). His book was originally published in 1748; by 1794, it had gone into 13 editions. As several of his contemporaries had, Spalding translated some of Shaftesbury’s writings into German. Cf. Beck, Early German Philosophy, p. 321, ftnt. 34. Spalding may have known of Baumgarten’s work already since the latter had begun writing about beauty in 1735. See Hans Reiss, “The ‘Natur- alization’ of the term ‘Aesthetik’ in Eighteenth-Century German: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and His Impact,” Modern Language Review, 89:3 (July, 1994), pp. 645–58. 28 Allan Arkush, Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 24. Cf. ftnt. 74, p. 34. 29 Quoted by Hinrich Seeba in “Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Zur Wirkungs- geschichte eines ‘unhistorischen’ Historikers zwischen Ästhetik und Geschichte,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 56: Sonderheft (Sept. 1982), p. 169. 30 Mendelssohn, as a philosopher and a Jew, did not have any of the benefits of formal education or institutional connections that his intellectual colleagues had, nor would he have been aware of a history of aesthetics in medieval Jewish philosophy. Though Maimonides – as well as Profiat Duran – have been shown to have an understanding of what would now be called aesthetics and write specifically on the contemplation of beautiful objects, and Mendelssohn was no doubt familiar with the Maimonidean writing, the study of the Beautiful as such does not have a parallel relevance in medieval Judaism as it did in medieval forms of Christian thought and theology. See Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). And though Mendelssohn credited Leibniz for “saving his soul,” it is unlikely that Leibniz had an observant bürgerlich Jew in mind when he wrote of refinement and education. Throughout his writings, however, Mendelssohn showed a special reverence for certain of his intellectual ancestors, among whom Leibnitz and Locke were constant references. 31 John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 23–24. 32 Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, p. 86. See also Paul Oskar Kristeller Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 who wrote that Mendelssohn was the first among the Germans “to formulate a system of the fine arts” and that, even more importantly, he called for an aesthetics that the fine arts and belles letters “should be reduced to some common principle better than imitation.” Paul Oskar Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, Vol. 3 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956–96), p. 602. 33 Paul Guyer, “Mendelssohn’s Theory of Mixed Sentiments,” in Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics, Reinier Munk, ed., Studies in German Idealism,13 (2011), pp. 259–78. 34 Alexander Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1750), Part I, Section I, Paragraph 14, p. 6. Translation in PW, p. xiv, footnote 6. 68 Moral aesthetics 35 “Ueber die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften” JubA, I:431. Originally published anonymously as “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften” in Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (Vol. 1, No. 2) in 1757, Mendels- sohn reissued the article (along with his other aesthetic pieces) in Philosophical Writings. I use the slightly revised essay here. The extremely useful English translation of Mendelssohn’s collected volume of 1771 was published by Daniel Dahlstrom in 1997; unless otherwise noted, I follow his translations here. PW,p.173. 36 “Rhapsodie, oder Zusätze zu den Briefen über die Empfindungen,” JubA,I:394–95. PW, pp. 141–42. “Rhapsody” appeared for the first time in 1771. 37 Ibid., JubA, I:395–403. PW, pp. 141–50. 38 “Hauptgrundsätze,” JubA, I:430. PW, pp. 172–73. 39 Alexander Pope, “Preface to Shakespeare,” The Works of Shakespeare, 6 Volumes (London: Jacob Tonson, 1725). 40 “Pope, Ein Metaphysiker,” JubA, II:47–80. 41 “Rhapsodie,” JubA, I:386. PW, p. 134. 42 “Hauptgrundsätze,” JubA, I:432. PW, p. 173. 43 For Mendelssohn, representations necessarily contain some element that identifies them as a depiction. He warns against representations that disregard the distance between the object and its audience: “If the object gets too close to us, if we regard it as a part of us or even as ourselves, the pleasant character of the representation completely disappears, and the relation to the subject immediately becomes an unpleasant relation to us since here subject and object collapse, as it were, into one another. The representation then has nothing pleasant about it but rather will be simply painful.” In other words, one wants to be reminded that the object is being portrayed. “Rhapsodie,” JubA, I:386. PW. p. 134. 44 Ibid., JubA, I:396. PW. p. 143. 45 “Hauptgrundsätze,” JubA, I:432. PW, p. 173. 46 Ibid., JubA, I:431. PW, p. 172. emphasis mine. 47 “Über die Empfindungen,” JubA, I:111. PW,p.75. 48 “Rhapsodie,” JubA, I:383. PW, p. 131. 49 Ibid., JubA, I:385. PW, p. 133. 50 Ibid., JubA, I:385–86. PW, pp. 133–34. 51 “Hauptgrundsätze,” JubA, I:428. PW, p. 169. As he explains, “Each rule of beauty is at the same time a psychological discovery.” 52 “Über die Empfindungen,” JubA, I:267. PW,p.36. 53 The Sublime has been an element of the modern aesthetic since Longinus’ essay On the Sublime appeared in a French translation in 1674. Cf. Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 21ff. 54 See “Rezensionartikel in ‘Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste’” (1765–1759) reprinted in JubA, IV:216–36 and “Anmerkungen über das englische Buch On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” JubA, III:235–53. 55 Beiser, Diotima’s Children, p. 211. See also Aaron Koller’s recent essay in which Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 he argues that Burke’s essay “induced” Mendelssohn to develop and articulate his theory of the sublime separately from those of Burke. Aaron Koller, “Men- delssohn’s Response to Burke On the Sublime,” in Reinier Munk, ed., Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics, Studies in German Idealism, 13 (2011), pp. 329–50. 56 Tom Furniss, “Our Neighbors Observe and We Explain: Moses Mendelssohn’s Critical Encounter with Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics,” The Eighteenth Century, 50:4 (Winter 2009). 57 “Ueber das Erhabene und Naive in den schönen Wissenschaften,” JubA, I:455. Originally published as “Betrachtungen über das Erhabene und das Naïve in den Moral aesthetics 69 schönen Wissenschaften” in the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (Vol. 2., No. 2) in 1758 and reissued in Philosophical Writings. See “On the Sublime and the Naïve,” in PW, p. 193. Emphasis, Dahlstrom. 58 “Ueber das Erhabane und Naive,” JubA, I:458. PW, p. 195. 59 Beiser, Diotima’s Children, p. 222. 60 Ibid. 61 “Ueber das Erhabane und Naive,” JubA, I:456. PW,p.193.Emphasis,Dahlstrom. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 The overwhelming of the sense and the intellect gives rise to the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness; by being overpowered, the intellect is not able to retain any preconceived notions. Cf. PW, p. xxii. 65 “Ueber das Erhabene und Naive,” JubA, I:458. PW, p. 195. 66 The description of revelation in Exodus, for example, has God explicitly telling Moses to “warn the people not to break through to the Lord to gaze, lest many of them perish” (Exodus 19:21) yet the physical experience includes trembling (Exodus 19:16). Indeed, in the account of Moses’ encounter with God, God expressly shields Moses from that immensity that would be too great for him to comprehend (Exodus 33:18–23). 67 “Ueber das Erhabene und Naive,” JubA, I:459. PW, pp. 196. 68 Ibid., JubA, I:465. PW, p. 202. 69 Ibid., JubA, I:481. PW, p. 218. Dahlstrom notes that the quote from Longinus appears in On the Sublime, Chapter 7, pp. 56–57. 70 “Rhapsodie,” JubA, I:406. PW, p. 152. 71 Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn. 72 Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum, JubA, VIII:110. I follow the translation by Allan Arkush in Jerusalem, Or On Religious Power and Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), p. 41. 73 Ibid., VIII:113. Arkush, Jerusalem, p. 44. 74 Ibid., JubA, VIII:114. Arkush, Jerusalem, p. 45. 75 Ibid., JubA, VIII:145. Arkush, Jerusalem, p. 77. 76 Ibid., JubA VIII:153. Arkush, Jerusalem, p. 85. 77 Ibid., JubA, VIII:157. Arkush, Jerusalem, pp. 90. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., JubA, VIII:168. Arkush, Jerusalem, p. 102. 80 Ibid., JubA, VIII:169. Arkush, Jerusalem, pp. 102–3. In one of the few articles to deal with Mendelssohn’s theory of language as portrayed in the middle of Jer- usalem, Arnold Eisen has used the phrase “ceremonial script” to describe what Mendelssohn means by Jewish ritual. See Arnold Eisen, “Divine Legislation as ‘Ceremonial Script’: Mendelssohn on the Commandments,” AJS Review, 15:2 (Fall 1990), pp. 239–68. 81 Jerusalem, JubA, VIII:184. Arkush, Jerusalem, pp. 119. 82 Eisen, “Divine Legislation as ‘Ceremonial Script,’” p. 23. 83 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Allen Wood and Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 George di Giovanni, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (Stan- dard edition: Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: German [Prussian] Academy of Sciences 1900–), p. 65. 84 Ibid.,p.66. 85 Ibid., p. 130 (6:125) my emphasis. 86 Ibid., p. 131 (6:126). 87 Ibid., pp. 122–23. 88 Jerusalem, JubA, VIII:154. Arkush, Jerusalem, p. 87. 89 Kant, Religion, pp. 162–63 (6:166) emphasis, his. 90 Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom,p.34. 70 Moral aesthetics 91 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (NY/London: Hafner Publishing Co., 1968), p. 112, paragraph 29. 92 Ibid., p. 115, paragraph 29. 93 Ibid., p. 108, paragraph 29. 94 In Kant’s Religion he responds directly to Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, though he seems to misrepresent Mendelssohn’s larger point and he does not remark at all on the idea of ritual action. Instead, as an aside to his point on the relationship between Judaism (a statutory religion) and Christianity (a moral religion), Kant refers to Mendelssohn’s argument on the essential shared background of the two religions: “Mendelssohn very ingeniously makes use of this weak point of the customary picture of Christianity to preempt any suggestion of religious conversion made to a son of Israel. For, as he said, since the faith of the Jews is, according to the admission of the Christians, the lower floor upon which Christianity rests as the floor above, any such suggestion would be tantamount to asking someone to demolish the ground floor in order to feel at home in the second. His true opinion, however, shines through quite clearly. He means to say: first remove Judaism from your religion (though in the historical teaching of faith it may always remain as an antiquity) and we shall be able to take your proposal under advisement. (In fact nothing would then be left over, except pure moral religion unencumbered by statutes.) Our burden will not be lightened in the least by throwing off the yoke of external observances, if another is imposed in its place, namely the yoke of a profession of faith in sacred history, which, for the conscientious, is an even more onerous burden.” Pp. 162–63 (6:166). 95 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 149, paragraph 45. 96 Ibid., p. 155, paragraph 48. 97 Ibid. There is quite a bit of scholarly discussion about Kant’s understanding, and even his “analytic” of the Ugly, particularly within the last 15 years. As a representative sample, please see Garrett Thomson, “Kant’s Problems with Ugliness,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50:2 (1992); Paul Guyer, “Thomson’s Problems with Kant: A Comment on ‘Kant’s Problems with Ugliness,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50:4 (1992); David Shier, “Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 38:4 (1998); Christian Wenzel, “Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?” British Journal of Aesthetics, 39:4 (1999); Paul Guyer, “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly,” Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sean McConnell, “How Kant Might Explain Ugliness,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48:2 (2008); James Phillips, “Placing Ugliness in Kant’s Third Critique: A Reply to Paul Guyer,” Kant-Studien, 102:3 (2011); and Mojca Kuplen, “Kant and the Problem of Pure Judgments of Ugliness,” Kant Studies Online 2013. 98 Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 198–99, paragraph 59. 99 Ibid., p. 200, paragraph 59. 100 In the history of philosophy, and certainly in the historiography of aesthetics, Kant’s critical system completely overshadows Mendelssohn’sWolffian contributions, as important as they were at the time, and rejects Mendelssohn’s projection Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 of a “redemption” of Judaism through philosophical means.

Bibliography Arkush, Allan, Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) Baumgarten, Alexander, Meditationes Philosophcae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Grvnertus: Halae Magdebvrgicae, 1735). Published in German as Philosophische Moral aesthetics 71

Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes: Lateinisch-Deutsch (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1983). ——Aesthetica (Frankfurt: Ioannis Christian Kleyb, 1750). Published in German as Aesthetica (Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1961). Beck, Lewis White, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). Beiser, Frederick, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (NY: Oxford University Press, 2009). ——The Fate of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Bland, Kalman, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Aﬃrmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Boyer, Ernest, “Schleiermacher, Shaftesbury, and the German Enlightenment,” Harvard Theological Review, 96:2 (April 2003), pp. 181–204. Copleston, Frederick, A History of Philosophy, Vol VI (Garden City, NJ: Image Books, 1985). Dahlstrom, Daniel, ed., Moses Mendelssohn’s Philosophical Writings (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), p. 2. Eisen, Arnold, “Divine Legislation as ‘Ceremonial Script’: Mendelssohn on the Commandments,” AJS Review, 15:2 (Fall 1990), pp. 239–68. Feiner, Shmuel, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Furniss, Tom, “Our Neighbors Observe and We Explain: Moses Mendelssohn’s Cri- tical Encounter with Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics,” The Eighteenth Century, 50:4 (Winter 2009), pp. 327–54. Guyer, Paul, “Thomson’s Problems with Kant: A Comment on ‘Kant’s Problems with Ugliness,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50:4 (1992), pp. 141–62. ——Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ——“Kant on the Purity of the Ugly, ” Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, Paul Guyer, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 317–19. ——“Mendelssohn’s Theory of Mixed Sentiments,” Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics, Reinier Munk, ed., Studies in German Idealism (Dordrecht/Heidelberg/ London/New York: Springer, 2011), pp. 259–78. Hazard, Paul, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century from Montesquieu to Lessing, trans. J. Lewis May (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954). Hobbes, Thomas, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, William Molesworth, ed., Vol. 3 (London: Bohn, 1839) Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (NY/London: Hafner Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Publishing Co., 1968). ——Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Standard edition: Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: German (Prussian) Academy of Sciences 1900–). Koller, Aaron, “Mendelssohn’s Response to Burke On the Sublime,” Moses Mendels- sohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics, Studies in German Idealism, Reinier Munk, ed. (Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer, 2011), pp. 329–50. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, Vol. 3 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956–96). 72 Moral aesthetics

Kuplen, Mojca, “Kant and the Problem of Pure Judgments of Ugliness,” Kant Studies Online, 2013. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy Loemker, Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). ——Discours de métaphysique, Henri Lestienne and André Robinet, ed. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1994). ——“Happiness” (1694–98), The Shorter Leibniz Texts: A Collection of New Translations, Lloyd H. Strickland, ed. (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 167–70. Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, 12th Edition (London: Rivington, 1824). McConnell, Sean, “How Kant Might Explain Ugliness,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48:2 (2008), pp. 205–28. McKeon, Michael, “Politics of Discourse and the Rise of the Aesthetic in Seventeenth- Century England,” The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 36–51. Mendelssohn, Moses, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, I:2 (1757). ——“Betrachtungen über das Erhabene und das Naïve in den schönen Wissenschaf- ten,” Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, II:2 (1758). ——Jerusalem, Or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1983). Monk, Samuel, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). Nisbet, H. B., “Was ist Aufklärung?: The Concept of Enlightenment in Eighteenth- Century Germany,” Journal of European Studies, 12:2 (June 1982), pp. 77–95. Norton, Robert, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Paulson, Ronald, The Beautiful, the Novel and the Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996). Phillips, James, “Placing Ugliness in Kant’s Third Critique: A Reply to Paul Guyer,” Kant-Studien, 102:3 (2011), pp. 385–95. Pope, Alexander, “Preface to Shakespeare,” The Works of Shakespeare, 6 Volumes (London: Jacob Tonson, 1725), pp. 297–314. Prince, Michael B., “The Eighteenth-Century Beauty Contest,” Modern Language Quarterly, 55: 3 (Sept. 1994), pp. 251–79. Reiss, Hans, “The ‘Naturalization’ of the term ‘Aesthetik’ in Eighteenth-Century German: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and His Impact,” Modern Language Review, 89:3 (July 1994), pp. 645–58. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Seeba, Hinrich, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Zur Wirkungsgeschichte eines ‘unhistorischen’ Historikers zwischen Ästhetik und Geschichte,” Deutsche Viertel- jahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 56:Sonderheft (Sept. 1982), pp. 168–201. Shier, David, “Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 38:4 (1998), pp. 412–18. Smith, Adam, Of the Nature of that Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts/Of the Aﬃnity Between Music, Dancing and Poetry, Essays on Philosophical Subjects: Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Moral aesthetics 73

Adam Smith, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, Vol. III (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982). Spalding, Johann Joachim, Bestimmung des Menschen appears in Studien zur Geschichte des neuen Protestantismus, edited by H. Hoﬀman and L. Zscharnack (Giessen: A Töpelmann, 1908). Thomson, Garrett, “Kant’s Problems with Ugliness,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50:2 (1992), pp. 107–15. von Arburg, Hans-Georg, “Zwischen ‘dünner Schale’ und ‘ekelhafter Anatomie’: Ver- such einer Paradigmatik des Hogarth-Bildes in Deutschland, 1750–1800,” Germanic Review, 75:4 (2000), pp. 280–95. Wenzel, Christian, “Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?” British Journal of Aesthetics, 39:4 (1999), pp. 416–22. Zammito, John, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 2 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness Physical descriptions and moral implications

Allein es ist klar, daß die Kenntniß der Naturdinge, wie sie jetzt sind, immer noch die Erkenntniß von demjenigen wünschen lasse, was sie ehedem gewesen sind, und durch welche Reihe von Veränderungen sie durchgegangen, um an jedem Orte in ihren gegenwärtigen Zustand zu gelangen.1

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. (Song of Songs 1:5)

In 1793, Göttingen professor of “world wisdom” (Weltweisheit) Christoph Meiners revised and published his 1785 Outline of the History of Humanity (Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit). Among the most notable of his editorial changes was his abandonment of the geographically specific “Mon- golian” and “Caucasian” in favor of the physically descriptive “dark-colored and ugly” and “white, or light-skinned and beautiful.”2 As Bruce David Baum notes, it was Meiners who “first gave the term Caucasian a racial meaning,” which makes his revision all the more significant.3 Meiners’ gesture bluntly transposes a mass of rich ethnographic material into a simple oppositional formula: dark is ugly and light is beautiful. That Meiners’ first classification of Mongolian and Caucasian actually made it into the attempt by late eighteenth-century intellectuals to organize the considerable anthropological material generated by explorers and savants into a science, rather than a gloss on certain biblical texts, indicates the power and influence of ethno-centric assumptions rooted in the moral aesthetic from the beginning. The substitution between racial and aesthetic descriptions unwittingly articu- Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 lates one of the great intellectual anxieties of the modern “study of man”: the significance of bodily difference. That bodies in various parts of the world looked different from one another did not overturn as much as underscore the eighteenth-century search for origins. That search had to resolve the apparent diversities in appearance of short, “white” Europeans, tall, “red” American Indians and medium-sized “black” Africans with the prevalent assumption of monogenesis: that all people descended from a single (Adamic) origin, as the biblical creation stories assert. That closely held belief and the contemporary Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 75 awareness of bodily differences naturally suggested the presumption of a primordial body type and skin color from which current human races diverged. This narrative, like the biblical one, assumed a corruption of the originally pure human type; by natural and/or supernatural means, the presumed white skin color of Adam and Eve was tainted. The European type, being white and “beautiful,” was closer to the perfect, original type. With the Europeans as models, one could measure the deviation of other peoples from the divinely created and physically perfect biblical norm. The (physical and moral) distinctions among body types gave the early anthropologist a key to their history (which would be, overall, one of corruption) and a way of cataloguing them in relation to Europeans (whose history was understood as one of progress). As an account of the diversity of bodies and colors, the Enlightenment theory of the descent of humanity created an empirical and rational explanation of world history, based on the biblical narrative of the exile from Eden. Authors like Buffon and Kant employed it to describe not just the manner in which disparate peoples were connected, but also how (civilized) society became dominant over (primitive) culture. The apparent progress of the “enlightened” world – scholarly achievement, political harmony, religious expression, geographic holding – seemed to justify the presumption that Eur- opeans were the direct heirs to those biblical and biological traditions. Meiners’ crass separation of humanity into the beautiful and the ugly brought to the forefront aesthetic assumptions of a discourse that transcended geography.4 Meiners and his contemporaries took advantage of the travel-related literature that flooded the late eighteenth-century European literary market to describe global variations in everything from body size to hair growth; their “data” traced the breadth of physical differences and aided an assessment of the (moral and physical) strengths and weaknesses of people around the world. This literature was often generated by state-sponsored expeditions and research projects; imperial powers sought to understand and control populations and the flow of goods through understanding customs and ethnic differences. These reports on different peoples – the data that supplied the budding science of Volkskunde (folk studies) – relied not only on information about the Americas, but also, significantly for German speakers, many expeditions to Siberia and Asian Russia that involved German scientists. Such studies were written up and studied by prominent philosopher historians including Herder, who posits in an early essay a “naturalist” reason for the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 association between ugliness and moral deficiency: “Certain people have no concept of beauty because they have no beauty itself. Kindly nature, in com- pensation for what it robbed from them, gave them in return insensitivity (Fuehlossigkeit). …”5 Catalogues of national and natural types (some scholarly, many impressionistic) helped foster an heuristic through which to process the enormous collection of information and hypotheses that reported regional dis/ similarities. Although in its infancy, statistics, as Ian Hacking has shown, became a popular method for contrasting human properties and behaviors, revealing 76 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness supposed patterns among people of different sizes, shapes, colors, ages, sexes, and geographic habitats, all of which seemed to lend scientific weight to older folk theories of the association between corporeal appearance and ethical behavior.6 In the Enlightenment, the role of climate was picked out as the chief factor in the creation of cultural difference; this theory was argued most influentially by Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu attributed a host of physical and moral differences between peoples to variations in heat, weather, and humidity. Debating the veracity of that surmise, yet finding the marriage of appearance, climate, and behavior compelling, early anthropologists connected weather and temperature to temperance and appearance. Just as eighteenth-century aesthetics wrestled with ugliness within the framework of a perfectionist metaphysics, the creators of the study of man wrestled with ugliness within the framework of a conjectural history of progress. They invested the category with connotations of impropriety, depravity, and corruption, reading into the exterior form a history of the interior spirit’s corruption. That connection was based on a sliding scale of “degenerate” action and attractiveness; ugliness provided an important compass by which to assess moral and physical distance from a European norm. After all, ugliness was a judgment about appearance and behavior made by a spectator who identified with the norms of a white, European and Christian society. Using aesthetics to generalize “national character” (that is, the character of non- European peoples) the pioneers of anthropology constructed a hierarchy grading the peoples of the world according to an assessment of peoples’ general intelligence, ability, and potential. At the top of the pyramid, for eighteenth- century German writers like Meiners, perched the bourgeois central European Christian male, whose very body prefigured superiority in morals. As the inheritors of the biblical tradition they were the elect of God, evidenced by their physique and by their works; their white skin and general beauty served as the proof of the truth of the redemption made possible through the “second Adam,” Jesus Christ. The description of human ugliness, implying corruption and degradation, was transposed from folk belief and theological metaphor to the pragmatic assessment of human difference, the science of which became anthropology. The following chapter shows that though originally measured by physical and intellectual strength, difference became located in and judged by social custom, religious belief, and by the perceived exercise of reason.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 While much of the attention was paid to the diversity illustrated by the look and culture of indigenous peoples of Scandinavia, Africa, and Asia, these seemingly strict categories were modified when they applied to peoples closer to “home.” The strange paradox of Jewish existence in Europe presented a difficult case study: conceived of as non-European (indeed, as Oriental) but religiously identifiable as biblical and monotheistic, Jews required a classification that identified their foreign origin even as it retained Judaism as the moral precursor to European Christianity. After all, Jews seemed even closer to an original type than Christians; their geographical Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 77 proximity rendered Jews part of ordinary European life and less alien than Africans, Indians, and Asians. A delicate balance of taxonomy required that Jews be cast as Near Eastern, an origin that diminished the visual evidence of their white skin color, and allowed the fact that Jewish rituals and customs were distinguished from the (higher, moral) faith of the enlightened Christian “West” to be explained within the anthropological aesthetic. Yet Jews were not different enough to have physical features that could be easily pinned to folk or scientific categories. Instead Jewish otherness was reconceived in ethical terms. Monogenesis forced its adherents to query the relationship of Judaism to Western Europe. Judaism had been seen in Christian Europe as the people of the old covenant – the people of the Old Testament – who bore collective guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus and their refusal to accept Jesus as the Son of God. As discussed earlier, some early Enlightenment intellectuals illustrated a trend towards tolerance in the matter of religious opinion, which embraced Christian denominations that dissented from the state-approved Church (whether Catholic or Protestant), Deists, and, for some, atheists. But old prejudices against Judaism remained even as the laws against Jews weakened. Thus, even as the Enlightenment narrative of civilization as a progress of reason departed from the Christian story that conceived the world in terms of a fall, a redemption, and an apocalyptic reckoning, the central role of the “Christian” cultures in world history was retained. And thus, in different terms, Judaism still had to be taken into account as the monotheistic progenitor of the civilized world, while at the same time it had to be thrust out of the story of progressive enlightenment. Montesquieu describes the French Enlightenment attitude towards Judaism in the 60th of his Persian Letters:

The religion of the Jews is an old trunk which hath produced two branches, which have covered all the earth, I mean Christianity and Mahometism: or rather, it is a mother who hath brought forth two daughters, who have covered her with a thousand wounds: for with respect to religion, its nearest friends are its greatest enemies. But ill as she hath been treated by these, she doth not cease to glory in having produced them; she serves herself of both to encompass the whole world, whilst on her own part, her venerable age embraces all ages. The Jews consider themselves as the source of all holiness, the origin of all religion: they on the other hand, look upon as heretics, who have changed the law, or rather as rebellious Jews.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 If the change had been gradually effected, they think they might have been easily seduced; but as it was suddenly changed, and in a violent manner, as they can point out the day and the hour of the birth of one and the other, they are offended at finding us reckoning our religion by ages, and therefore adhere firmly to a religion, not preceded in antiquity by even the world itself.7

Montesquieu’s Persian authors note that Christian Europe is beginning to understand the error of persecuting those whose beliefs “conflict with those of 78 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness the king.” Yet from an Enlightenment viewpoint, Montesquieu’s description is ambiguous. The ancient beliefs of the Jews could be just as easily described as inveterate superstitions and irrational rituals. In his private papers Mon- tesquieu alluded to the Jews as intolerant and superstitious. But he was not as interested in religion as he was in the role of Jews in the rise of commerce in Europe, and there he finds the key both to their place in the history of commerce and their constant targeting by their Christian neighbors. He exposes this theme in the 21st book of his The Spirit of Laws (1748), in which he accords Jews a major role as the bearers of an economic rationality that saved Europe.8 In his seminal book The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Israel Howard Eilberg-Schwartz argues eloquently that the paradox of the relationships between Judaism and Christianity and Jews and Europeans was embedded in early anthropological and natural history studies. Briefly stated, his thesis suggests that, as the progenitors of ethical monotheism, ancient Israelites could not be “savage,” that is, an “undeve- loped, simple people who had not yet advanced up the evolutionary ladder,”9 because they represented an important step in the development of western society. Yet in their rejection of the next (and necessary) developmental step, the advent and maturation of Christianity, rabbinic Jews represented a backward commitment to barbaric customs reminiscent of the heathen immorality of indigenous non-European peoples. In their “adoption” (or emulation) of European standards of society, contemporary Jews could not provide the same kind of bodily difference as people of color, yet their exoticism needed emphasis in order to diminish both their whiteness and any threat of their religious legitimacy. In the literature of Christian Europe, certain customs (like circumcision) and specific bodily characteristics (the male beard, for instance) continually marked the Jewish body as other; specific beliefs (e.g., the divine origin of the Torah) made Jewish theology “unreasonable.” In other words, as neither indigenous nor European, yet somehow original and essential, Jews were the introjected other. However, somewhat paradoxically, in the studies of natural history published in the late eighteenth century, Jews were not described as physically ugly or morally repulsive, instead, such judgments were reserved for peoples whose physical appearances did not at all resemble European standards of height, color, or shape. Considering the amount of scholarly attention Jews received in other intellectual realms (parti-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 cularly as related to debates on Jewish emancipation) the absence of discussion on Jews as a people and as a physical human type surprises. Enlightenment scientists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) classified Jews as Caucasian but of a degenerate type. And, as previously discussed, Jews were conceived of as short and thus unsuited to military service; this judgment formed one of the points in the dispute about Jewish civil Emancipation in Prussia. Maintaining Jewish “otherness” (that is, the conception of Jews as neither European nor Christian) produced, at a logical level, a subtle uncou- pling of the system of “human varieties” (to use Blumenbach’s term) in which Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 79 all the superiorities invested in Europe (including its climatic, environmental, religious, and cultural privileges) had to be defined in such a way as to diminish Jewish practice and belief. As Jonathan Hess has pointed out, only Jews in Blumenbach’s classificatory scheme retain features that are absolutely resistant to environmental change and thus create an exceptional case. The contrast between a body difference that is apparent only to the expert and a religious superiority that can be assumed by the Enlightenment intellectual elevates pragmatic ugliness to a different level – that of gesture, the look of the eye, pronunciation – before it can be matched against ethical ugliness. Physical contrasts between European Christians and others seemed clear; bodily distinctions between European Christians and European Jews needed to be manufactured. Jews were the ordinary strangers within, easily recognizable but evidently different in their moral code, dress, community, and ritual. Whereas premodern conceptions of Jews and Judaism placed Jews in an inferior position socially, religiously, and politically, when confronted with new kinds of otherness – the corporeal diversity of color and size – Jewish difference required an altogether separate definition.

Climatic deformities In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu theorized about differences in governmental forms and legal systems. As part of his study, he proffered a physiological diagnosis of the effect of air temperature on the blood and “the fibers” that transport it in the body. His understanding of human behavior relies on an explanation of the consequences of cool air on the circulatory system:

A cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of the body; this increases their elasticity, and favors the return of the blood from the extremities to the heart. It contracts those very fibres; consequently it increases also their force. On the contrary a warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremes of the fibres; of course it diminishes their force and elasticity.10

The sedative action of heat slows both bodily “ﬁbers” and the precious cargo they carry; consequently, people who live in warm climates are slower, more lethargic, and less intense in their mental and physical, even emotional exer-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 tions. He frames his understanding of in/activity through an analysis of the eﬀects of temperature:

People are therefore more vigorous in cold climates. Here the action of the heart and the reaction of the extremities of the fibres are better performed, the temperature of the humours is greater, the blood moves freer towards the heart, and reciprocally the heart has more power. This superiority of strength must produce a great many effects, for instance, a greater boldness, that is, more courage; a greater sense of superiority, that 80 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness is, less desire of revenge; a greater opinion of security, that is, more frankness, less suspicion, policy, and cunning. In short this must be productive of very different characters.11

Warmth and cold are the key determinants in understanding the industriousness of some people as compared to others’ laziness. Though Montesquieu does not ascribe all virtues to northern societies and all vices to southern societies, here he emphasizes the causal effects of temperature on blood flow in order to hypothesize that understanding the contraction and expansion of muscles and blood vessels can support generalizations about regional differences of habit and capability.12 In referencing the “vigor” of inhabitants of “cold climates” Montesquieu posits the success of northern European colonization in contradiction to the effects of warm weather on the first inhabitants: apathy, cowardice, lethargy, and timidity. Without cleverness or audacity, the people of warmer climes have slower cardiovascular systems that make them “naturally” inferior and insecure. These negative qualities (freer blood flow promotes “superiority of strength”) have wide ranging ramifications. Because they are less sensitive (the cold requires the nerves to “sink deeper into their sheaths”) people who live in cold climates have “few vices, many virtues” and “a great share of frankness and sincerity.”13 As temperatures rise so do “passions” and good qualities drop off to be replaced by “all manner of crimes, every one endeavoring to take what advantage he can over his neighbors, in order to encourage those passions.”14 Montesquieu’s theory is clear: climate is a “physical cause,” the effect of which is to condition the causes of the moral sense and intelligence. Cold weather leads to prudence, calculation, and courage; warm weather leads to a lesser degree of endurance, a greater degree of emotional expression, and a greater liability to servitude. A “laziness of mind” affects those whose blood travels slower and whose humors move sluggishly through the body. Indeed, “there are countries where the excess of heat enervates the body, and renders men so slothful and dispirited, that nothing but the fear of chas- tisement can oblige them to perform any laborious duty. …”15 It is in those regions where “slavery is … more reconcilable to reason. …”16 The “reason” to which Montesquieu refers provides the means to negotiate his moral qualms regarding slavery. In proffering this account, Montesquieu sidesteps the issue of political or moral relativism; slavery is not justified but explained through

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 a “reasonable,” scientific account of blood and humors. He makes a special point of disagreeing with Aristotle’s understanding of “natural slavery” and writes explicitly that “all men are born equal.”17 This rejection allows Mon- tesquieu to make climate a major factor in his generalizations yet not a determinate; his invocation of the dominance and superiority manufactured by those who live in cold weather climates establishes a hierarchy which is neither inflexible nor unilateral. His interest lies primarily with the “genius of the people,” thus, in his Essay on the Causes That May Affect Men’s Minds and Characters, he remarks that in India, the Canarins in Goa are “so Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 81 superior to the Portuguese that if put into school they make more progress in six months, no matter what the subject, than Europeans do in a year.”18 Yet he relies on the notion that people have long grown accustomed to the idio- syncrasies of the weather in which they live and on the enormous distinctions between those environments. In doing so, Montesquieu explicates enslavement:

We ought not then to be astonished that the eﬀeminacy of the people in hot climates, has almost always rendered them slaves; and that the bravery of those in cold climates has enabled them to maintain their liberties. This is an eﬀect which springs from natural cause.19

Using a phrase (“natural cause”) laden with theological undertones but without explicitly invoking religion, Montesquieu suggests how the dominance of one people over another may be defensible. In equating passivity with femininity, both of which have “almost always” contributed to slavery in regions south of Europe, he creates a series of unequal pairings: north/south, cold/heat, masculine/feminine, action/apathy, courage/cowardice, vigor/lethargy, liberty/enslavement. These unbalanced dynamics do more than invest “warm” environments with the fault of their own enslavement; they explain the “natural cause” of the domination of the south in terms of distinctions of bodily type. Mon- tesquieu endeavored to make politics a science by using the data from ethnographic and anatomical material. By doing so, he displaces the doctrine of sin and salvation that had previously grounded the seizure and colonization of the land and peoples outside Europe and forges another vocabulary, methodology, and other rules to explain and legitimate imperial enterprises. For good and for ill, his theory on the role of climate in moral and physical behavior opened a flood gate of hypotheses, defenses, justifications, and cor- roborations of white, northern European superiority over people of other countries in other parts of the globe. Though many subsequent political theorists disagreed with the cast of Montesquieu’s theory of environmental quasi- determinism, climate’s function soon wove its way into educated public opinion and became an inevitable reference in the discourse on national character. As the interest in human difference developed into a full-fledged discipline, climate (and its ramifications) became the leading explanatory cause of distinctions (called also deviations, deformities, and varieties) in physical appearance,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 manners, and customs.

“Natural” history One of Montesquieu’smostinfluential readers was Buffon. In his multi- volume Natural History, General and Particular (1749) Buffon produced a comprehensive and systematic study of all aspects of natural history from the viewpoint of the sciences of the eighteenth century; like the Encyclopedists after him, Buffon was fond of incorporating tables, illustrations, charts, and 82 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness graphs to substantiate and illustrate his far reaching explanations of the corporeal workings of the animal and human kingdoms and the earthly environments they inhabit. His treatment of human behavior and physiology appears in the second volume and he begins with a long analysis of the distinctions between humans and animals. Defending the almost universal privilege accorded to the human species in relation to the whole of the other worlds of fauna and flora, Buffon structures his data to highlight all the aspects of humanity that make it unique, carefully assembling a series of arguments that emphasize human agency and intelligence. He takes as his target the temptation to classify human beings as “animals”; dismissing the seeming resemblances in behavior and appearance, he goes to great lengths to show the fundamental, essential, and necessary dissimilarities between the human and animal worlds. Buffon wanted to show not only how humans are superior but also why. In order to dispel the notion that when stripped of the trappings of culture people are basically the same sorts of beasts as those found in the jungles of South America and the deserts of Africa, he separates humanity from animals completely, creating a (distinct) human genus that in various shapes and in varying measure share intelligence, consciousness, and reasonability – all those traits animals lack. Treating humans as a separate type is the framework for further categorizations of human types. How those types were produced in nature, and how they collectively differed one from the other, became a dominant question in anthropological writing for the rest of the century. Buffon bases the distinction between humans and animals on both a power dynamic (“The most stupid man, it will be admitted, is able to manage the most alert and sagacious animal: He governs it, and makes it subservient to his purposes”20) and speech ability (“The savage and civilized man have the same powers of utterance; both speak naturally, and are equally understood”21). A common Adamic heritage endows humans with these skills and justifies, despite potential evidence to the contrary, the interrelation of human beings across cultures and appearances. “Governance” and language (that is, authority and reasonability) represent what humans have and animals do not: consciousness and intentionality. For Buffon, the power of thought – which leads, in his construct, to the gift of language – illustrates a natural superiority of human beings. Tapping into an Enlightenment debate about the usefulness and origin of language, Buffon argues that the human ability to communicate demonstrates the reason that animals lack. As he explains: Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Language implies a train of thinking; and it is for this reason that brute animals are incapable of speech: For, though we should allow them to possess something similar to our first apprehensions, and to our most gross and mechanical sensations, it is certain that they are unable to form that association of ideas in which alone the essence of reflection and of thought consists. … They can neither think or speak, because they can neither join nor separate ideas; and, for the same reason, they neither invent nor bring any thing to perfection.22 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 83 Following Locke’s theory of sign recognition (which had rapidly become the mainstream theory) Buffon’s understanding of thought is firmly in the asso- ciationist empirical tradition. Thus, noise making and imitation are not evidence in themselves of communication even on a rudimentary level; instead, Buffon insists that the noises animals make (particularly those of the ape, which he admits most closely approximates a human being) are more instinct than reason. In lacking thought (or, at least, the overt signs of thought), animals can neither create, nor invent, nor reflect upon anything, and are therefore entirely without culture or sophistication. Language – and the sociability that language produces and fosters – is the key by which beings illustrate their reason. Human primacy, therefore, is the product of intentionality; the gift of reason supports both the human domination of animals and the language used to articulate it (as well as the science he founds to describe it). This commitment to a monogenetic opinion – all humanity is related despite physical variation – helps him construct a long continuum of human types and societies (from animalistic to civilized), illustrate the commonalities of humanity and set them over and against animals. The exercise of reason (as his own investigation demonstrates) represents the highest form of human achievement. When he turns his attention to body types and behavior, Buffon takes variety as his primary subject of investigation.23 He employs three factors to discuss and evaluate human beings: skin color, body size and shape, and character (“disposition”).24 Beginning with northern indigenous peoples, Buffon demonstrates their humanity while distinguishing them from Europeans:

In Lapland, and on the northern coasts of Tartary, we find a race of men of an uncouth figure, and small stature. These men, who appear to be a degenerated species, are very numerous, and occupy vast regions. … All these people have broad large faces, and flat noses. Their eyes are of a yellowish brown colour, inclining to black; their eye-lids extend towards the temples; their cheek-bones are very prominent; their mouths are large, and their lips thick and reflected; the under part of their face is narrow; they have a squeaking voice; the head is large, the hair black and smooth; and the skin is of a tawny or swarthy hue. Their size is diminutive; but, though meager, their form is squat. Most of them are only four feet high; and their tallest men exceed not four feet and a half. This race is so different from

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 all others, that it seems to constitute a diﬀerent species; for if there be among them any distinction, it arises only from a greater or less degree of deformity.25

Being a limit case of “degeneracy,” the Laplanders help Buffon demonstrate his theory that even stripped of normal European human appearances, Lap- landers, having families and social intercourse, have reason, which in turn cultivates manner and form. He evaluates their body stature and skin tone and assesses overall appearance in terms of general characteristics and 84 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness physical comportment. Adding these together help determine character. The Laplanders serve as the very antithesis of the (unarticulated but clearly implied) European ideal. They are “short,”“uncouth,” and “tawny”; they have big mouths, thick lips, and squeaky voices; their faces are “broad,” their noses are “flat,” and their eyes are dark. So stark is the difference between Laplanders and all others, and so great is their “deformity,” that Buffon speculates they could “constitute a different species,” that is, their intense deviation from the norm of taller, white Europeans makes them seem a distorted type of human being. Akin to the Laplanders are the Greenlanders, whose skin color is shaded slightly differently, but whose morals share a similar dark taint. In his discussion of their similarities, Buffon makes clear the parallel between body and moral character:

These people not only resemble each other in deformity, in smallness of stature, and in the colour of their eyes and hair, but also in their dispositions and manners: They are all equally gross, superstitious, and stupid. … They seem to have no idea of religion, or of a Supreme Being. They are mostly idolaters, and exceedingly superstitious. More gross than savages, they have neither courage, dignity, nor a sense of shame.26

Ugly in appearance and in character, Laplanders and Greenlanders also share cultural habits. Repulsed by their manners, which include public bathing and “offering their daughters to strangers,” and dismayed by their “stupidity,” Buffon judges these northern people as much for their looks as for their actions. Instructive here is Buffon’s conception of a “deformed” morality, which is expressed in stupidity, idolatry, and superstition (a charge so offensive he repeats it). In other words, Buffon attributes to the people of the polar north traits that more closely resemble an animalistic lack of reason and is repelled by their disregard of the distinctive human gift of intelligence. “More gross than savages,” the Laplanders and the Greenlanders barely satisfy Buf- fon’s criteria for distinguishing the human genus from animals; their bodies are stunted, their color is dark, and their intelligence is wasted. They eschew true morality because they neither exercise the forethought to acknowledge a higher divinity nor exercise their reason to worship that divinity well. Their ugliness is thus more complete; it joins the physical to the moral. Just as

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Michaelis later dismisses the idea that Jews could form part of the Prussian army, Buffon claims that Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus (1596–1632) tried and failed to raise an army of Laplanders. Their lack of moral integrity has bearing on the subject of civil emancipation: for those who cannot join the military of the state are always, to some extent, limited in the extent of their emancipation in that the army is a synecdoche for a society as a whole. The implied connection between morality and physical bearing continues throughout Buffon’s discussion of the people who inhabit north and south Asia (the mainland as well as the islands), India, Siberia, Mongolia, the Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 85 Balkans, eastern Europe, the Middle and Near East, and North Africa. The darker the skin, generally, the uglier Buffon labels a people, although skin color can be mitigated in this arbitrary aesthetic by a taller, slender frame and/or a culture with a refined set of morals. In discussing the “natives of the Maldiva islands,” for instance, Buffon intersperses scientific speculation with presupposition. They “are supposed to have descended from those of Ceylon, though there is no resemblance between them: For the natives of Ceylon are black and deformed; but those of the Maldiva islands are handsome, and, except their olive colour, differ little from the Europeans; besides, they are a people composed of all nations.” And further, “the women, notwithstanding their olive colour, are beautiful, and some of them are as fair as the Eur- opeans.”27 Juxtaposing the skin color of the Maldivans with their “black and deformed” neighbors, Buffon redeems their supposed Ceylonese descent by comparing them favorably with Europeans. Attractive “notwithstanding” their olive tone, they are beautiful, largely because – as Buffon reveals – they have a history of intermarriage with other (presumably lighter skinned) people. Such interracial mixing serves to “refine” darker skinned people, both in terms of their blood and their culture; their blood lines are “composed of all nations” which appears to relieve the original ugliness of being “black” and “deformed.” Most important for the current study is, of course, Buffon’s attempt to reconcile the data of the explorers with the ideology of a beautiful whiteness. Buffon seems to accept the positive ramifications of the intermixing of different types of humans. As an example of a people refined through integration and intermarriage, he turns to the Persians, whom he applauds for their cultural superiority and through whom he reveals the standards of his measure:

… the Persian blood is now highly reﬁned by frequent intermixtures with the Georgians and Circassians, two nations who surpass all the world in personal beauty. There is hardly a man of rank in Persia who is not born of a Georgian or Circassian mother; and even the King himself is com- monly sprung, on the female side, from one or other of these countries: As it is long since this mixture commenced, the Persian women have become very handsome and beautiful, though they do not rival the ladies of Georgia. The men are generally tall and erect; their complexion is ruddy and vigorous, and they have a graceful air, and an engaging

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 deportment. The mildness of the climate, joined to their temperance in living, have a great inﬂuence in improving their personal beauty.28

Lightened, or rather, polished in skin and manner by their “frequent intermixtures” with the two groups of people that Buffon finds the most beautiful in “all the world,” the Persians have developed their own kind of beauty that combines grace, height, and vigor. Encouraged by the mild temperature of Persia, their physical appearance has improved in tandem with their “temperance in living”;Buffon approves of both their moral code and their 86 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness manner of engaging with others. Indeed, in contrasting Persians with other people of the Orient, Buffon makes clear just how far above their neighbors the Persians have risen:

The Persians, the Turks, and the Moors, have acquired a degree of civilization: But the Arabs have generally continued in a state of lawless inde- pendency. Like the Tartars, they live without government, without law, and almost without society. Rape, theft, and robbery, are authorized by their chiefs. They glory in their vices, and have no regard to virtue; and they despise every human institution, except those only which produce superstition and fanaticism.29

Whereas the Persians earned the positive comparison with the superiority of European civilization largely through an increase of mutual intercourse, “the Arabs” live in anarchical, criminal society, improved neither by foreign exchange nor by strong public mores. Instead, personal proclivities take pre- cedence over collective security; in a vice-ridden culture with “no regard to virtue,” Buffon claims they have none of the societal institutions that determine civilization. Their susceptibility to “superstition,” a code word for irrationality and senselessness, is a product of their inability to create the civic institutions that Buffon defines as a cultivated society. And far worse, their proclivity to certain vices, “authorized” by those in charge, are not recognized as such. Like Montesquieu, Buffon is interested in extending the materialism that explains physics to the domain of social explanation and thus searches for material causes of the temperamental properties that he applies to whole peoples and races. And similar to Montesquieu, he turns to the topography and climate of the regions inhabited by different people in order to contextualize their development and degree of degeneration from the Adamic standard of beauty and morality. If there is degeneration, then one would expect it to be determined by deformations in the familial education of the human child. Along with the “nature of the food” and “manners, or the mode of living,” climatic variations impose certain preconditions on people purely because of the effect of the sun on the skin30 as he makes clear later in his treatise, “The Heat of the Climate is the Chief Cause of Blackness Among the Human Species.”31 He locates the pinnacle of his tall physiological pyramid of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 body types and moral beauties in the Caucasian mountains, which is far enough from the tropical region to promote lightness of skin and of character. Turning attention to “those who live under more temperate climates,” he writes,

we shall ﬁnd, that the natives of the northern parts of the Mogul and Persian Empires, the Armenians, the Turks, the Georgians, the Mingre- lians, the Circassians, the Greeks, and the people of Europe in general, are the fairest and most handsome men in the world; and that, however remote Cashmire may be from Spain, or Circassia from France, the Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 87 natives of these countries, which are nearly at an equal distance from the equator, have a striking resemblance to each other.32

Despite national and cultural boundaries, the people of Europe are “the fairest and most handsome.” Indeed, in Georgia, he continues, “not an ugly countenance is to be seen: And, with regard to the women, Nature has adorned them with a profusion of graces: They are tall, handsome, slender- waisted; and their faces are truly charming. The men are likewise very handsome.”33 As tall, thin, charming people, Europeans provide the measure of beauty; they represent the physical ideal in terms of stature and skin color. Yet they fall short on moral fortitude, for, as Buffon admits, “there is not, perhaps, a country in the universe where drunkenness and libertinism have arrived at so high a pitch as in Georgia.”34 Despite this flaw in their virtue, Buffon situates the European at the top of the heap of humanity, asserting the importance of temperance in climate and cultivation for the supremacy of their appearance. The exercise of reason exposes – even more than temperature and the sun – the propensity of a people towards beauty. Buffon argues that whereas a cultivated culture would institute civil legislation and worship in a properly reasonable way regardless of climate, non-sophisticated peoples will always succumb to their baser instincts:

Supposing two nations, thus diﬀerently circumstanced, to live under the same climate, it is reasonable to think, that the savage people would be more ugly, more tawny, more diminutive, and more wrinkled, than the nation that enjoyed the advantages of society and civilization. If the former had any superiority over the latter, it would consist in the strength, or rather in the hardiness, of their bodies. Among the savage people, there might likewise be fewer examples of lameness, and of other bodily impediments or deformities.35

Even more than physical degeneration therefore, immorality is represented in “savageness,” witnessed in the lack or misuse of reason. As the one common characteristic shared by all humans, reason – when exercised – creates not just “the advantages of society and civilization” but actually produces beauty. Privileging culture over physical strength and health (it seems only grudgingly

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 that he concedes “the savage people” would have “any superiority”), Buﬀon implies a natural hierarchy that supersedes climate. And yet,

… even among the same race of men, the different degrees of blackness depend, more or less, upon the heat of the climate. Many ages are, perhaps, necessary to change the white colour into perfect blackness; but it is probable, that, in a succession of generations, a white people, transported from the north to the Equator, would undergo this change, especially if they adopted the manners, and used the food, of the new country.36 88 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness In the same environment, uncultivated people will be uglier, darker, shorter, and rougher than a developed “nation,” but remain susceptible to the effects of climate on color and, one supposes, grace. His evidence illustrates his conception of depravity and degeneration (both moral and physical) which is perceived in darker-skinned people who live in increasingly extreme climates, thus providing him the means to articulate the theory that white is the primeval color, the most pure in moral virtue and physical characteristic, and both the symbol and representation of perfection in creation. With the same attention to detail as he used in separating humans from animals, Buffon separates white nations from those of every other possible color, even with the variables he has identified:

White, then, appears to be the primitive colour of Nature, which may be varied by climate, by food, and by manners, to yellow, brown, and black, and which, in certain circumstances, returns, but so greatly altered, that it has no resemblance to the original whiteness, because it has been adult- erated by the causes which have already been assigned. Upon the whole, the two extremes continually approach each other. Nature, in her most perfect exertions, made men white; and the same Nature, after suffering every possible change, still renders them white: But the natural or specific whiteness is very different from the individual or accidental.37

Because it is original, “whiteness” implies purity; the “perfect exertions” of nature do not just produce white flesh, but maintain it. Buffon clarifies that “natural” whiteness is “very different” from white skin produced by disease, deformity, disability or defect. As Buffon’s biographer Jacques Roger notes, Buffon’s theory here goes back to his experience with Albino Africans. The “White Negro,” seemed to prove that skin color could change.38 In order to account for black skin, and other “degenerative” colors, Buffon emphasizes four interrelated factors: geography, ancestry, climate, and anatomy. Anatomy reflects the effect of the climate on the body; ancestry unveils the role geography has played in the development of national characteristics. Using Africans as a point of absolute difference, Buffon justifies his analysis by way of a circular argument: Blacks live in hot climates; hot climates “create” blackness: “it appears that the existence of Negroes is confined to those parts of the earth, where all the necessary circumstances concur in producing a constant and 39 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 excessive heat.” Heat is essential both for the “production” and the “preservation of Negroes,” so much so that newborns are kept in “warm cham- bers” in order to protect them.40 The absence of cold, the effect of heat and air on the body, is the physical cause of the dark coloration of the skin.41 Yet Bu ffon remains convinced that darkness in skin tone can be “cor- rected.” Though he theorizes that children inherit their skin color from their parents regardless of their place or climate of birth, over time, subsequent generations will reflect the normal color of any given climate. This corrective is particularly true for Blacks, since Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 89 … there are many reasons for presuming, that, as this colour is originally the effect of a long continued heat, it will be gradually effaced by the temperature of a cold climate; and consequently, that, if a colony of Negroes were transplanted into a northern province, their descendants of the 8th, 10th, or 12th generation, would be much fairer, and perhaps as white as the natives of that climate.42

One group of people who illustrate this possibility are Jews, who allegedly “came originally from Syria and Palestine” but whose skin color reflects the climate to which they have adapted. As he explains, “the Jews of Portugal alone are tawny, because, by constantly marrying those of their own tribe, the children of these people always resemble their parents, and the tawny colour is thus perpetuated, with little diminution, even in the northern countries. The Jews of Germany, however, as those of Prague, for example, are not swarthier than the other inhabitants of that country.”43 Absent any issue of morality, Jews are exampled only insofar as their skin color reflects adaptability to different regions. Jews serve as Buffon’s thermometer of climatic and geographical change; as landless, demographically scattered people, Jews faciliate Buffon’s theory. The differences in Jewish skin tones reflect the physical appearance of those among whom Jews live. Buffon’s solution for affecting positive changes in skin tones is to live in the region that spawns and breeds the most beautiful people:

The most temperate climate lies between the 40th and 50th degree of latitude, and it produces the most handsome and beautiful men. It is from this climate that the ideas of the genuine colour of mankind, and of the various degrees of beauty, ought to be derived. The two extremes are equally remote from truth and from beauty. The civilized countries, situated under this zone, are Georgia, Circassia, the Ukraine, Turkey, in Europe, Hungary, the south of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, and the northern part of Spain. The natives of these territories are the most handsome and most beautiful people in the world.44

Combining civilization with “genuine color” and contrasting central Europe with the “extreme” climates in which the darkest Africans and the ugliest ﬀ

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Laplanders live, Bu on articulates a theory of ugliness that renders those outside the “40th and 50th degree of latitude” (i.e., most of Europe) farthest from the highest measure of “truth” and “beauty.” Climate determines physical appearance, which in turn is a symptom of a more social truth, the degeneration of the human moral character. Thus, appearance can be taken as a mostly reliable index to civility and sophistication (although with a number of exceptions, such as the Georgians). For Buffon, the primordial color of white indicates the highest refinement of physical and moral beauty. 90 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness On the Americans: de Pauw Interest in other types of whiteness – and other forms of body types and characters – was furthered by the 1768 work of Cornelius de Pauw (1739–99) a Dutch diplomat and scholar who was a constant presence in (and under the patronage of) the court of Frederick II.45 De Pauw published an ethnographic study that focused not on the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, or the far northern reaches of Europe, but rather on the native peoples of the Americas. As Roger points out, the Americas posed a problem for Buffon, in that the natives of the hot South American continent were not black nor were they different in type from the natives of North America. Buffon resolved this problem through the hypothesis that humans rather recently settled America. Continuing Buffon’s argument that the “new world” is a sphere of degeneration, de Pauw drew a distinctly negative portrait of the non-White inhabitants of the Americas and initiated a lengthy debate on the moral nature of the “savage.” Interestingly, de Pauw, like Buffon, did not have any experience of the Americas himself; he “never even set foot on the American continent.”46 Nonetheless, de Pauw wrote his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires intéressants pour server à l’Histoire de l’Espèce humaine by making use of travelers’ accounts to deduce, under Buffon’s theory of degeneration, the natural history of Americans. Instead of attributing the degeneration to the climate, as had both Montesquieu and Buffon, de Pauw focused on the soil:

[A]s for the natives of America, barrenness, not fruitfulness, is the distinction of the soil; sluggishness that of its inhabitants. Could a savage ﬁll his belly by stretching out his hand, he would become sedentary; have leisure to collect and communicate his ideas; he would rise to civilization. It is not a fertility of soil that conﬁnes man to savage life; it is, on the contrary, the want of subsistence that prevents his getting out of it; so that Montesquieu’s decision is false on its the face, and absurd in the inference.47

Though he understands the resulting susceptibility to domination by inhabitants of other climates similarly to both Montesquieu and Buﬀon, for de Pauw, the cause and its historical development are diﬀerent. His argument is subtle; rather than the noble savage imagined by Rousseau, de Pauw’s American is not a paragon of superior strength and physical grace, untouched by the Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 uglifying necessity to toil for his sustenance, but rather a victim of endemic ugliness. The native land causes people to be dumb and lazy; America is not the unredeemed Eden. De Pauw puts the very earth itself at the center of his argument:

In the countries temperate in climate, and rich in vegetables, society has been established inﬁnitely sooner than in the cold and barren. One sees it pass, and, as it were, travel from Asia into Egypt; thence into Greece, and Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 91 so in gradation into Italy, Gaul, and Germany, following the degrees of natural or cultivable advantages in each particular country.48

Progress and cultivation work in tandem; the aptitude of people for society is predicated on the arability of their soil and its consequent ability to be plowed and sown. Though heat and cold affect the human body, the influence of the land is far more pressing. Barrenness leads directly to human inefficiency; fertile soil, on the other hand, encourages the growth of civilization just as it does the generation of sustenance and nourishment. In other words, the superiority of the national temperament is based not on the temperature but rooted, instead, in the landscape. Lushness facilitates physical and intellectual development. For de Pauw the inverse illustrates the truth of his theory of how indifference and inferiority, stupidity and naiveté relate directly to the environment in which people live. As he explains:

The American, strictly speaking, is neither virtuous nor vicious. What motive has he to be either? The timidity of his soul, the weakness of his intellects, the necessity of providing for his subsistence, the powers of superstition, the inﬂuences of climate, all lead him far wide of the possibility of improvement; but he perceives it not; his happiness is, not to think; to remain in perfect inaction; to sleep a great deal; to wish for nothing, when his hunger is appeased; and to be concerned with nothing but the means of procuring food when hunger torments him. … In his understanding there is no gradation, he continues as an infant to the last hour of his life.49

De Pauw’s environmental determinism so trumps the moral causes that it dooms the native American, who is victim to “timidity,”“weakness,” and “superstition” without the consciousness to acknowledge or subvert the negative attributes sown into the land. Without any desires beyond the immediate, the American is inactive, slothful, and driven solely by the needs of the body; neither the intellect nor the soul responds to stimuli outside of physical need. Unexercised reason has left the American far from the possibility of improvement; de Pauw diminishes the native by using code words of an anthropological aesthetic: dark and dumb, the ugliness of the indigenous American is a product of degeneration, which is the movement of history

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 inscribed in their environment. The contrast, of course, is to the axis of progress inscribed in the landscape of the temperate zones of the Old World. The unconscious acceptance of an unsophisticated hand-to-mouth existence indicts the entire people. Like Buffon, de Pauw attempts to root his analysis in the progressions and effects of environmental change: “Europeans who pass into America degenerate, as do the animals,” a “fact” that he claims is “proof that the climate is unfavourable to the improvement of either man or animal.”50 The sustainability of superiority depends on constant contact; those who use infertile land lose the benefits of cultural arability. 92 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness Part of this concern about the degenerative effects of climate comes from real anxieties about colonization. The Spanish moment in the history of European conquest, which extended from 1492 to the late seventeenth century, was displaced by other colonial powers – notably, England and France – and as this change in power occurred, a new set of anxieties emerged among the educated sector about the effect on white(r) people of unfamiliar climates. Would the animal and human degeneration of the areas outside Europe affect those Europeans who entered these degenerate zones? After all, if human appearance is mobile enough that Blacks who move to colder climates become whiter, then surely the reverse could happen as well. De Pauw implies that colonizing Europeans would darken in color and morality.51 Dwelling on the potential to degenerate, de Pauw speculates on the nature of different peoples, each of whom provide examples of the influence of the land on size, shape, and form. In his description of Eskimos, for example, de Pauw intimates an intellectual flaw in the very choice of remaining in the barren polar regions:

Let us return to the Eskimaux [sic]. They are the most diminutive race of human kind, their stature in general not exceeding four feet. They have enormous heads, are extremely fat and corpulent, and much under- limbed. On examining the extremities of their limbs, one perceives that organization has been checked by the severity of that cold, which contracts and degrades all earthly productions. Man, however, resists this impression in higher degrees towards the Pole than trees or plants, since beyond the 68th degree neither tree nor shrub is to be found, while savages are met with 300 leagues beyond that elevation. These northern pigmies have, without exception, an olive complexion; they have, like the rest of the Americans, no beard, their face ﬂat, the mouth round, the nose small, the white of the eye yellowish, the iris black and dull, the lower jaw extends beyond the upper, its lip thick and ﬂeshy. Thus fashioned, though hideous to the eye of an European, they are perfectly beautiful in their own and distinguish all other men by a term which in their language is equivalent to barbarian.52

These short, fat, “under-limbed” humans are misshapen; despite being stunted in height, they have “enormous” heads. Living where “neither tree nor shrub” can live, these “northern pigmies” resemble other Americans in their

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 facial features and in their inability to grow facial hair, a characteristic that de Pauw relates directly to the paucity of environmental conditions necessary for “normal” physicality. Their appearance is off – with their “olive” skin tones, “flat” faces, “yellowish” eyes, “dull” irises, and heavy jaws – Eskimos are “hideous” by European standards. Though de Pauw suggests such a description is relative (for they find each other “perfectly beautiful”), he dismisses their choice to live where no vegetation can sustain them. He contrasts northern people with those who live in more productive and responsive natural environments: Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 93 Those who inhabit the extremity of the Temperate Zone have for the most part hair of a flaxen colour, blue eyes, the skin fair, are of a vigorous complexion, and tall of stature; they are bold, courageous, warlike, and restless; a kind of instinct hath ever urged them to expatriate and invade every quarter of the earth, which they consider as formed for them: they have extended their invasions even to Africa; all Europe, and a great part of Asia, are, to a certain degree, peopled by the descendants; nor is there a nation among us which is not allied in blood to some one of the tribes of the North.53

De Pauw describes the bold, brave, and fair peoples of the “Temperate Zone” (that is, northern Europe) both in terms of their coloring (“flaxen” hair, “blue eyes,” and “skin fair”) and complexion (not dull but “vigorous”) and their embodiment of a set of characteristics that determine physical, political, and cultural superiority. De Pauw uses the Eskimo to define the limits of humanity and contrasts their physicality to the strength of the Northerners. Whereas the Eskimo, who are “diminutive, tawny, weak” and “the refuse of human kind … seem to constitute a race the most worthless and contemptible, with an exception, it may be, of the natives of the Torrid Zone,”54 northern Eur- opeans are “bold,”“courageous,”“warlike,” and “restless.” Each of the adjectives employed by de Pauw reinforces the authority that de Pauw invests in the relationship of land to spirit; people are able to employ the advantages that their land provides them. In choosing to live so far north, Eskimos have stunted their own growth and potential. In contrast, European restlessness (read: activity) provides Europeans the intuitive ability to dominate others through invasion and war. In exercising their “instincts,” de Pauw implies, they have impregnated other people with their positive physical and moral qualities. Yet the end of their expatriation results in the weakening of the temperate races; as they settle different climates and environments they engender something more like an equilibrium enforced by the environment, which operates to distribute progress and degeneration according to regions of the earth. His theory suggests something unavoidable about one’s original land. Yet Europeans provided the seeds of their own spirit to the peoples they invaded. One might surmise that Jews are wanderers but have no purpose; they do not dominate (except through nefarious means) but are dominated. Those who have not been conquered, therefore, are the poorer because of their physical distance from arable land and productive people. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Out of the mix of aesthetics, political polemics, natural history, and the underlying controversies concerning religion, a framework for the establishment of the “science of man” emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, the synergy between various societies for the advancement of knowledge, universities, an expanded print media, and state and commercial interest was driving certain motives in the discourse about the management of 94 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness populations, one of which was certainly the classification of cultures and cultural temperaments. The standard histories of the human sciences recognize Blumenbach as one of the founders of comparative anthropology on the basis of his On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Like his predecessors (but unlike his contemporary Kant), Blumenbach attempted to classify humanity by region and sought differences in human types under the assumption of monogenesis. Within the framework of explaining the natural history of man’s descent, in various places and cultures, from the single Adamic ancestor, he sought broad features that separated humanity (as a whole) as distinct and superior to animals (as a whole), giving him a base to make judgments based on the degeneration or regeneration of some variant of the human race. Hearkening back to Buffon’s own stark distinction, Blumenbach (famous for having introduced the discoveries of comparative anatomy into the discourse of philosophical anthropology) took the traditional path of picking out reason as the most distinctive and defining human faculty:

Man then alone is destitute of what are called instincts, that is, certain congenital faculties for protecting himself from external injury, and/or seeking nutritious food, etc. All his instincts are artiﬁcial (kunst-triebe), and of the others there are only the smallest traces to be seen. Mankind therefore would be very wretched were it not preserved by the use of reason, of which other animals are plainly destitute. I am sure they are only endowed with innate or common and truly material sense (which is not wanting either to man), especially after comparing everything which I have read upon the rational mind of animals with their mode of life and actions, and what perhaps is the most important speculation, and demands most attention, with the phenomena of death, which are very much like both in animals and men. … Instinct always remains the same, and is not advanced by cultivation, nor is it smaller or weaker in the young animal than in the adult. Reason, on the contrary, may be compared to a developing germ, which in the process of time, and by the accession of a social life and other external circumstances, is as it were developed, formed, and cultivated.55

Distinguishing between instinct and reason, Blumenbach celebrates the capability of humanity to create rather than to defend; he highlights those skills

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 by which human beings have generated, produced, and cultivated what he calls modes of “life and actions.” Even those human beings who are less “cultivated” employ and take advantage of reason’s benefits and have manufactured intellectual responses to the challenges of life. Driven solely by instinct, animals are able to protect and feed themselves but, as their existence is completely tied to the tasks of preservation and reproduction, they are intellectually and culturally “destitute.” In contrast, reason has allowed humans to progress, to develop a “social life” and “other external circumstances,” and to become civilized. The stagnancy of the instinct-driven life is “wretched” Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 95 compared to the intellectual growth afforded by reason (Blumenbach’s “developing germ”). Though it may seem that animals and humans are related, such similarities are only superficial. Human superiority is located in the exercise of reason.56 Before launching into his discussion of the manifestations of reason, Blu- menbach first connects with the tradition of asserting physical causes that extends all the way back to the beginning of the Enlightenment. Once again, he classifies human types by the regions they inhabit (originally he split the world into four areas, in the third edition [1795] he added a fifth57). More openly than others, Blumenbach articulates his interest in origins and originals as he discusses primordial places, primeval colors, and original locales:

The first and most important to us (which is also the primitive one) is that of Europe, Asia this side of the Ganges, and all the country situated to the north of the Amoor, together with that part of North America, which is nearest both in position and character of the inhabitants. The second includes that part of Asia beyond the Ganges, and below the river Amoor, which looks towards the south, together with the islands, and the greater part of the those countries which are now called Australian. Men of dark colour, snub noses, with winking eyelids drawn outwards at the corners, scanty, and stiff hair. Africa makes up the third. There remains finally, for the fourth, the rest of America, except so much of the North as was included in the first variety.58

Though careful to define people by their global location, Blumenbach’s diachronic scheme still privileges Europe as the origin of the primal human type; from that central location people migrated and adapted to differing climates. The distinctive climates of these areas have marked their inhabitants with specific physical indicators. Following Montesquieu, he relates the effect of heat and cold directly to the functioning of the nervous and muscular system, noticing “[t]hat in hot countries bodies become drier and heavier; in cold and wet ones softer, more full of juice and spongy. …”59 This observation, which falls squarely within the materialism of the physiologists, puts humans on par with animal and plant life inasmuch as all are determined, in part, by the environments in which they find themselves: “Experience teaches that both plants and animals

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 are smaller in northern countries than in southern; why should not the same law hold good as to mankind?”60 Thus, if we ﬁnd that the transposing of plants or animals produces changes in the accidents of their appearance, the same should hold true for human beings. The privileged example is skin color, which endlessly fascinated the proto-anthropologists. Blumenbach notes that infants are born neither white nor black, but rather “red”:

All of us are born nearly red, and at last in progress of time the skin of the Ethiopian infants turns to black, and ours to white, whereas in the 96 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness American the primitive red colour remains, excepting so far as that by change of climate and the eﬀects of their mode of life those colours sensibly change, and as it were degenerate.61

Determined by the climatic context, black skin is a product of heat and humidity, just as white skin is the result of cool temperatures and arable soil. The “red skin” of Americans “degenerates” from its original shade because of the dearth of right conditions: climate, good soil, food, and “mode of life.” Far from being steadfast, skin color is conditioned largely by those external factors of environment and culture.62 All such derivations represent some sort of deviation from the primeval origin of humanity. In order to argue against static claims of racial diﬀerence that would tend to polygenesis and to assert the importance, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, of the climate, Blumenbach updates Montesquieu’s geographical relativism, shifts its focus, and reasons that the cause of diﬀerences of physical appearance between human types lies in the weather:

I am persuaded, myself, that climate is the principal cause of the racial face, on three grounds especially; 1st, we see the racial face so universal in some populations under a particular climate, and always exactly the same in men of different classes and modes of life, that it can scarcely be referred to any other cause. 2nd, Unless I am mistaken there are instances of peoples who after they have changed their localities and have migrated elsewhere, in process of time have changed also their original form of countenance for a new one, peculiar to the new climate. … 3rd, We see nations which are reputed to be but colonies of one and the same stock have contracted in different climates different racial faces. Thus the Hungarians are considered to be of the same primitive stock as the Laps.63

Color and shape are thus the products of regional environments through a long process of inherited acculturation and adaption and provide a set of visual clues that – through similarity of appearance – help determine origin and allow us to understand the diﬀusion of peoples throughout the world. Even for nomadic peoples, whose shifting circumstances have caused demographic relocation, physical diﬀerences operate as markers that leave a trail of migratory patterns. As proof, Blumenbach turns to the example he thinks best

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 makes his case: “…it will be enough to bring forward a few examples, of which the Jewish race presents the most notorious and least deceptive, which can easily be recognized everywhere by their eyes alone, which breathe of the East.”64 Though he offers no proof (that is, he uses no supporting data nor a secondary source), Blumenbach assumes his reader is familiar with the case of “the Jewish race” to determine that – although long-time residents of Europe – their eyes still “breathe” their foreignness. As the “most notorious” and “least deceptive” case study, Jews are assumed to be incapable of hiding their physical difference; though their bodies may not expose their “Eastern” Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 97 origin, their eyes give them away – but only to the trained observer. Such is not the case with others, however, as Blumenbach explains: “The matter is a little more difficult in some nations of the south, especially the west of Europe, who, it has been observed by some eminent men, from some reason or other, are cheerful and sanguine in youth, but, as manhood advances, become more and more morose, and inclined to be of a melancholy temperament.”65 Invoking an aesthetic awareness, Blumenbach assumes that purity comes with a superiority and that effort is required to maintain it. “[W]hite … we may fairly assume to have been the primitive colour of mankind, since, as we have shown above (s. 45), it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white. …”66 For Blumenbach, as for his predecessors, the primordial (and optimal67) skin color is always white, a claim he attempts to prove by turning to a discussion of the physiology of pigmentation.68 Its fragility increases both its desirability and its superiority.

Immanuel Kant Blumenbach may have been influenced in his work by one of Kant’spre-critical essays. In response to the questions of the nature of and differences among human beings raised by Montesquieu, Buffon, and de Pauw, Kant contributed the essay “On the Different Human Races” (Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen, 1775). He had mused on the various features, appearances and morality of different ethnic and national groups in his earlier Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Beobachtung über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, 1764) in which he posited a series of examples meant to explore the emotional quality of beauty and ugliness. Connecting intellectual, physical, and emotional attributes into a complicated network of physical and moral appearance, Kant offered an impressionistic rather than systematic account of the manifestations of beauty and sublimity. Distinguishing between the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant described a variety of physical and national types in order to organize the meaning of appearance:

the ﬁgure of persons who please by their outward appearance falls sometimes into one, sometimes into the other sort of feeling. … In fact,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 dark colouring and black eyes are more closely related to the sublime, blue eyes and blonde colouring to the beautiful.69

Such assessments pepper Kant’s prose; he compares men (sublime) with women (beautiful), sanguine temperaments (beautiful) with choleric (“that sort of sublime which one may call the splendid”70), and Italians (“fascinating, moving and slightly sublime”) with Englishmen (“noble”).71 In describing the Germans, Kant writes that the feeling they invoke “is properly a mixed feeling combining the beautiful and the sublime, in which each taken by itself is 98 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness colder, so that the mind is free enough by means of the combination to attend to examples, and in fact, it stands in need of the impulsion of such examples.”72 “The Arab,” Kant explains, is “the noblest man in the Orient” though “his feelings are always interwoven with some wonderful thing.”73 The essay seems interested in the collision of two aspects of human behavior: ethical comportment and human difference.74 Kant writes using the information he culled from the travel books he loved; although Königsberg as a port city may have played host to sailors from various parts of the world – and though Kant certainly became acquainted with a variety of Russian ethnic types when they occupied the city – he never moved far enough from Königsberg to have any experience of other climates and places. In “On the Different Human Races,” Kant moved toward a more scientific rendering and specifically used the term “race” as a rational category. Though others used the term before Kant, Robert Bernasconi has convincingly argued that Kant is the “one who gave the concept sufficient definition for subsequent users to believe that they were addressing something whose scientific status could at least be debated.”75 Following Buffon, Kant claims a common human origin from a single source that is traceable through reproductive ability (that is, that only creatures of a common type have the ability to reproduce with one another). He states that the original stock developed in the Mediterranean then reasons that deviations from the primordial human physical type were caused by environmental conditions that triggered predis- posed abilities that allowed them to survive in any region.76 In giving a name to distinctions that seemed identifiable in both physical appearance and moral comportment, Kant’s essay established a theoretical division between types of people based on their looks. Susanne Zantop calls it “the first theoretical milestone in the discussion of physical difference in Germany.”77 Kant’s discussions in both “Observations” and “On the Different Human Races” paid attention largely to the physical distinctions between nations; as his own work turned toward critical philosophy, his understanding of people reflected a different judgment of people based on their ethical conduct. In the following section the discussion turns to two examples of the application of the ideas articulated by philosophical and anthropological aesthetics. The connection of aesthetics and appearance becomes even clearer in the discussion of the revival of physiognomy in the late eighteenth century. And, by looking closely at portraits painted of Mendelssohn during his life, it is pos-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 sible to see the ways in which aesthetic theory manifests when an ugly object (Mendelssohn himself) is turned beautiful in artistic representation.

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen,” AA II, p. 434. The original, “Von der verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen,” was written in 1775, then revised and published in 1777. Jon Mark Mikkelsen translates this passage as: “However, it is obvious that knowledge of the things of nature as they Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 99 now are will always leave us wishing for knowledge of how they once were and by what series of changes they went through to come to their present place and condition.” See “Of the Different Human Races,” in The Idea of Race, Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott, eds. (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000), p. 13. 2 Christoph Meiners, Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo, 1785). Reprinted Meisenham/Glan: Hain-Druck GmbH (Scriptor, 1981), pp. 4–6. 3 Bruce David Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 84. 4 In the late 1780s and early 1790s, Meiners authored a series of articles that described the appearance and morality of various peoples based on their skin color, hair types, eating habits, and religious traditions. He sought to create what Zantop has called a codification of “a notion of racial difference that linked observations of the physical properties of specific peoples to conjectures about their intellectual, moral, and aesthetic value as compared to Europeans and, among Europeans, Germans.” See Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, p. 68. Meiners outlined a theory that maintained the tall, white Christian male from the northern, cold climate of central Europe as a type of default person; all other types of humans were deviations from him. The most perfect specimen of humanity, he was the measure against which others were assessed. Though the term race was still somewhat new in scholarly use (Kant uses it as such in the 1775 essay) Meiners’ definition by color illustrates an intellectual racism contingent on the aesthetic notion of ugliness. Though Meiners (and most of his sources) had never visited either the Americas or Africa, he detailed specific anatomically characteristics – height, hair, sexual organs – and particular customs which he argued affected appearance (e.g., dental decorations, clothing, sexual mores). Using “examples” of native customs to describe a “degenerate” morality of people with dark skin, Meiners grounded his theory entirely in a hierarchical moral aesthetic, explicitly proffering the notion that white was good and black was bad. 5 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Betrachtungen ueber das verschiedene Urteil von der menschliche Schoenheit,” Sämmtliche Werke, Bernhard Suphan et al., eds., Vol. 32 (Berlin: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung, 1877–1913), p. 15. 6 See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and his later book The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 7 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters by M. de Mon- tesquieu. Translated from the French. In two volumes. With Several New Letters and Notes, 6th Edition, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Alexander Donaldson, 1773), pp. 121–22. 8 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Nurse, 1750) (Reprinted Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), pp. 391–92. 9 Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism,p.1. 10 Montesquieu, Spirit, p. 242. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 11 Ibid., pp. 243–44. 12 Montesquieu emphasizes also that southern societies have a quicker penetration and a vivacity of perception, “an ease of receiving and communicating all sorts of impressions” lacking in northern societies. See his “Essay On The Causes That May Affect Men’s Minds and Characters,” in Political Theory, 4:2 (1976), p. 140. This essay – what Montesquieu considered a “working paper” for The Spirit of Laws – was written in the late 1740s, published in French in the late nineteenth century, and translated into English in 1974 by Melvin Richter. See Melvin Richter, “An Introduction to Montesquieu’s ‘Essay On The Causes That May Affect Men’s Minds and Characters’,” Political Theory, 4:2 (1976), p. 132–38. 100 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 13 Montesquieu, Spirit, p. 245. 14 Ibid., pp. 246–47. 15 Ibid., pp. 263–64. 16 Ibid., p. 264. 17 Ibid. 18 Montesquieu, “Essay on the Causes,” p. 143. 19 Montesquieu, Spirit, p. 276. 20 George Louis le Clerk, Count de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, tr. William Smellie, 3rd edition (9 Volumes) (London: A Strahan, and T. Cadell in the Strand, 1792), II:361. Volumes I, II, and III were published originally in 1749; the remaining volumes appeared in 1767. 21 Ibid., p. 360. 22 Ibid., p. 364. 23 Buffon has a certain knack for including the absurd and the fascinating. He discusses a range of topics from infant swaddling to dental hygiene; the sheer volume of material that Buffon collected provides a fascinating window into eighteenth-century questions about the body and its functions. For instance, in explaining infancy (the earliest stage of which he calls “a striking picture of weakness, of pain, and of misery”) (II:369), Buffon compares different habits of dealing with the bodily functions of infants: “In Virginia, they place the child naked upon a board covered with cotton, and provided with a hole for the passage of the excrement. The cold in this country is unfavourable to such a practice; but it is almost general in the east of Europe, and particularly Turkey” (II:383). But he cannot always provide an answer for every query or an explanation for quirks in the human body that he notices but cannot quite discern. In his long discussion of circumcision habits and the castration of Africans to make eunuchs, Buffon notes that “the people of the east have likewise longer eye-lids than the inhabitants of other nations. The skin of the eye-lids resembles that of prepuce. But what relation can take place between the growth of those distant parts?” (II:402.) The reader is not provided with an answer. 24 Ibid., III:57. 25 Ibid., III:57–59. 26 Ibid., III: 60–61. 27 Ibid., III:101–2. 28 Ibid., III:106. 29 Ibid., III:108. 30 Ibid., III:130. 31 Ibid., III:203. 32 Ibid., III:118. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., III:119. 35 Ibid., III:131. 36 Ibid., III:166. 37 Ibid., III:181–82. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 38 Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 125. See Maupertius’ 1744 essay “Dissertation physique l’occasion du nègre blanc” which influenced Buffon’s opinion about skin color. 39 Ibid., III:199. 40 Ibid. 41 In order to reinforce his conclusion (the effect of air and temperature is manifest in skin) Buffon looks to anatomical research. Citing a “M. Littre, who dissected a Negro in the year 1702,” Buffon describes the color variation discovered on the penis, which he uses to “prove” primordial whiteness: the penile skin that had been exposed to the air was black, while the area under the foreskin was Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 101 “perfectly white.”“This observation demonstrates, that the air is necessary to produce the blackness of Negroes.” Only the skin that had not been affected by exposure to climate or weather was white, therefore, air must be the cause of the “deformity” of color; environmental factors mark the skin with the indelible ink of racial classification. Ibid., III:201. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., III:124. 44 Ibid., III:205. 45 See Zantop, Colonial Fantasies,p.47. 46 Ibid. 47 Cornelius de Pauw, A General History of The Americans of Their Customs, Manners, and Colours. An History of the Patagonians, of the Blafards, and White Negroes. History of Peru. An History of the Manners, Customs, & c of the Chinese and Egyptians Selected from M. Pauw, ed. Daniel Webb (Rochdale: T. Wood, 1806), p. 12. 48 Ibid.,p.13. 49 Ibid.,p.15. 50 Ibid.,p.17. 51 This argument is articulated beautifully by Zantop in Colonial Fantasies. 52 Ibid.,pp.74–76. 53 Ibid.,pp.79–80 54 Ibid., p. 82. The “Torrid Zone” is defined by de Pauw as “the tenth degree or thereabouts from the Equator.” Ibid.,p.95. 55 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind,inThe Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Thomas Bend- yshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865), p. 82. This translation includes both the first (1775) and the third (1795) editions. 56 In addition to reason (and its product language), there are physical distinctions between animals and human beings. Humans are distinguished by their “level, round, smooth, and perfectly regular” teeth (which are meant as a means of chewing and communicating but not for attack) and by an extra “small bone which is covered by the lips,” which do not appear in any animals. In addition, women have two physical features that are not found in animals: “the hymen, which has been granted to woman-kind perhaps much more for moral reasons, than because it has any physical uses” and menstruation. In defining the physical traits that make humans human (through the female body), Blumenbach clarifies the distinction between humans and animals (ibid., pp. 88, 89, 90). Buffon had argued that apes also menstruated, but Blumenbach claimed that the irregularity of menses in apes (that is to say, irregularity as compared to human females) constituted a different bodily fluid. Neither man catches the irony of the central role of women to the definition of “human.” Largely ignored in terms of political, civil, and economic agency, women’s bodies become the central physical “proof” of animal and human difference. 57 In the third edition of his work, Blumenbach offered a fifth regional category Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 (“the new southern”) (p. 101), an amendment necessitated by recent explorations and colonial enterprises. Retaining region and color as the primary factors for determining human difference, Blumenbach organized people into one of five hues that correspond to each of the human species: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, Malay. “White colour holds the first place, such as is that of most European peoples”; “yellow, olive-tinge, a sort of colour half-way between grains of wheat and cooked oranges … very usual in the Mongolian nations”; “copper colour or dark orange, or a sort of iron, not unlike the bruised bark of cinnamon or tanner’s bark: peculiar almost to the Americans”; “tawny (Fr. brasané), midway between the colour of fresh mahogany and dried pinks or 102 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness chestnuts”; and “tawny-black, up to almost a pitchy blackness (jet-black), principally seen in some Ethiopian nations” (p. 209). These five species are supported by similar differences in hair type, eye color, facial type, and skull size. Less obvious than his predecessors, Blumenbach still codified a white European superiority into his anthropological assessment of types and figures. His partiality to white skin and his insistence that white was, without question, the primordial skin color, affected the hierarchy of human types. 58 Ibid.,p.99. 59 Ibid., p. 101. 60 Ibid., p. 103. 61 Ibid., p. 108. 62 Ibid., p. 110. 63 Ibid., pp. 229–31. 64 Ibid., p. 122. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., p. 269. 67 Ibid., p. 107. 68 “The skin of man and of most animals consists of three parts; the external epidermis, or cuticle; the reticulum mucosum, called from its discoverer the Mal- phigian; and lastly, the inner, or corium. The middle of these, which very much resembles the external, so that by many it is considered as another scale of it, is evidently more spongy, thick, and black in the Ethiopians; and in them, as in the rest of men, is the primary seat of the diversity of colour. For in all the corium is white, excepting where, here and there, it is slightly coloured by the adhering reticulum; but the epidermis seems to shade off into the same colour as the reticulum, yet still so, that being diaphanous like a plate of horn, it appears even in black men, if properly separated, to be scarcely grey; and therefore can have little if any influence on the diversity of the colour of men.” Ibid., pp. 105–6. 69 Immanuel Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960/2003). See Ak II:205–56. 70 Ibid.,p.68. 71 Ibid.,p.98. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., p. 109. 74 See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s reading of the relationship between Kant’s work in anthropology and the critical philosophy in “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, Katherine M. Faull, ed. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), pp. 200–241. 75 Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construct of Race,” Race, R. Bernasconi, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 9. 76 Kant, “Of the Different Races,” p. 14. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 77 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies,p.68.

Bibliography Baum, Bruce David, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Bernasconi, Robert and Tommy L. Lott, eds., TheIdeaofRace(Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000). Comeliness, glamour, ugliness 103

Bernasconi, Robert, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construct of Race,” Race, R. Bernasconi ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 11–36. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, On the Natural Variety of Mankind,inThe Anthro- pological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865). Buffon, George Louis le Clerk, Count de, Natural History, General and Particular,tr. William Smellie, 3rd edition (9 Volumes) (London: A Strahan, and T. Cadell in the Strand, 1792). Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Israel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, Katherine M. Faull, ed. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), pp. 200–241. Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ——The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Herder, Johann Gottfried, “Betrachtungen ueber das verschiedene Urteil von der menschliche Schoenheit,” Sämmtliche Werke, Bernhard Suphan et al., eds. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877–1913), pp. 15–18. Kant, Immanuel, “Von der verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen,” Kants Gesammelte Schiften. Ausgabe der Preussichen, later Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, subsequently Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), AA, pp. 427–43. ——“Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960/2003). Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, Dissertation physique à l’occasion du nègre blanc (Leyde, 1744). Meiners, Christoph, Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo, 1785). Reprinted Meisenham/Glan: Hain-Druck GmbH (Scriptor), 1981. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, Persian Letters by M. de Montesquieu. Translated from the French. In two volumes. With Several New Letters and Notes. 6th Edition (Edinburgh: Alexander Donaldson, 1773). ——“Essay On The Causes That May A ffect Men’s Minds and Characters,” Political Theory, 4:2 (1976), pp. 139–62. de Pauw, Cornelius, A General History of The Americans of Their Customs, Manners, and Colours. An History of the Patagonians, of the Blafards, and White Negroes. History of Peru. An History of the Manners, Customs, & c of the Chinese and Egyptians Selected from M. Pauw, ed. Daniel Webb (Rochdale: T. Wood, 1806). Richter, Melvin, “An Introduction to Montesquieu’s ‘Essay On The Causes That May Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Affect Men’s Minds and Characters,’” Political Theory, 4:2 (1976), p. 132–38. Roger, Jacques, Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Zantop, Susanne, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997). 3 Reading faces, reading souls Johann Caspar Lavater’s new physiognomy

Auf meinem Grabstein sollten die Worte stehen “Zu sehr gehaßt, zu sehr geliebt.”1

In 1774, to much fanfare and anticipation, the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater published the first volume of his Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe [Physiognomical Fragments for the Promotion of Human Understanding and Love of Human- ity]. Lavater was already quite famous for having tried unsuccessfully to convert Mendelssohn in 1769. He was a vibrant enthusiast with deep roots in the Zwinglian tradition and he had become well known throughout Europe. As the title of his opus indicates, Lavater’s guide to physiognomy, the study of facial characteristics and their representational meaning, was ambiguously systematic (a collection of fragments instead of a treatise) and meant to spread a message that would somehow be to the advantage of all humanity. The text amounted to four folio-sized volumes that traced the history of reading the face, its modern reinvention, and its application on a wide range of historical and contemporary faces, all with the intent to promote “understanding” and “love.” Lavater submitted the ancient practice to his readers as a thoroughly modern scientific enterprise. Almost instantly, he became the public face of physiognomy, regenerating a field whose assumptions had long been lodged in popular psychology but that had fallen victim to a certain extent to the general Enlightenment critique of superstition and non-scientific speculation.2 Lavater wanted to conjoin the intuitive reading of the signs of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 the body to the regularities of empirical science. He was a very interested member of the community of German intellectuals (like Herder, Goethe, and certain adherents of the Leibniz–Wolff school) who were eager to create a comprehensive qualitative “science of man,” under which various disciplines could be defined. As a companion to aesthetics, psychology, and anthropology, physiognomy was offered by Lavater as an equally potent, scientific, and independent disciplinary field that would provide a key to the science of character through a methodology that would standardize close readings of the face. Yet he infused his work with an overt Christological infrastructure – an influence Reading faces, reading souls 105 of his Zwinglian Protestantism – that entangled the determinants of the divine creation with the choices of individual free will. Sharing what he called his “gift” for physiognomy and pledging to make “legible some letters of this divine alphabet,”3 Lavater combined the assumption of the correspondence of appearance and comportment (and ugliness and immorality) with criteria based on theological expectation and essentialism; his religiously invested discipline butted against the deistic claims of Enlightenment rationalism and objectivity. All the same, the popularity of his work provided a venue for encoding a “facial” morality read in semi-hidden signs and invested ugliness with an immorality that seemed divinely decreed. Underlying Lavater’s thesis was his complete faith in the connection between outward appearance and internal character; the two are interconnected in ways that everyone can “see” but only the physiognomist can interpret.4 “Every state of mind, every sensory state of the soul has its expression on the face,”5 therefore facial features and expressions are morally infused idioms that expose what lays secret within the soul; the relationship between “moral and physical beauty” is witnessed in his belief that “the architect of all moral perfection pressed his highest satisfaction on it.”6 Though Lavater does not define either “beauty” or “ugliness” formally, his explanations of both are accompanied by hundreds of engravings and portraits, most of which he commissioned specifically for the Fragments and many of which did not satisfy his conception of how his subjects should appear. This dissatisfaction finds its pinnacle in the portrayal of Jesus whose face represents a center point of art and religious devotion. But that the proper portrayal of Jesus’ face has the potential to represent the highest form of moral beauty provides Lavater with his claim that his work has a cultural and even metaphysical legitimacy. Unsurprisingly his highly selective analysis focuses far more on imperfections than on idealized forms of beauty. As he admits, “it is certainly easier to uncover weakness, imperfection, error and corruption in other creations as beauty, perfection, symmetry and virtue.”7 Through seemingly painstaking explanations of different faces and heads, Lavater attempted to construct an hermeneutic for every facial feature, cranial angle, nonverbal glance, and unintentional movement he could imagine. He tried to show not only how a perfect specimen should appear, but also how all possible deviances could derive from that ideal, providing an exhaustive series of moral flaws which the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 wide range of facial imperfections represented. Shaping his readings to fit his expectations, Lavater maintained that his judgments were based on an objective standard; and yet, as his opponents pointed out, it nevertheless gave way under the evident, moralizing subjectivity of his judgments of character, physical beauty, and the “meaning” of ugliness. He postulated that inescapable features of the face – the shape and form of eyes, lips, foreheads, and chins – expressed the tendencies and predilections of each individual and that national characteristics (as shared by those who were identified to have them8) can be generalized to indicate common tendencies among people of a particular 106 Reading faces, reading souls place. In other words, one’s moral career was etched into one’s face as clearly as writing could be etched into a tablet. Providing what he considered a key that would unlock the code of facial good and evil, Lavater’s entire thesis rests on the veracity of the divine creative force. As God was truth, so were all the aspects of creation, including – and most tellingly – in facial features which one can neither hide nor disguise. Similar to early anthropology but more overtly religious in tone, Lavater’s physiognomy underscores the idea that God’s attention to every single detail of creation can be seen in the material world. Through the imperfections of the human face one can glimpse the genius of the original, creative force, which subsequently proves the argument of universal design. The intimate relationship between face, personality, and intellect illuminates the crafted, intentional, and unavoidable precision of God’s omniscience. Lavater translated God’s wisdom in the symbolic language of the unavoidable marks on a face; the physiognomist could read there one’s abilities and choices. Therefore, the human face is simultaneously particular and universal; in it, the divine creation is tangible as the material through which sentiment, intelligence, and behavior are indicated and predicted. That most faces fall short of their physiognomical potential is a symptom of poor religious and moral practice. Though Lavater does not presume to offer a comprehensive system (his work remains throughout the volumes “fragments”), he nonetheless presents a compelling argument that mixes the old humanistic semiotic of the body, the new sciences of natural history, and a religious enthusiasm that divides those who follow Christ in Lavater’s way and those who do not. With the moralist’s eye for the ways in which humans have failed the beauty invested in them by the creator, he revealed his profound belief in the tangibility of divine creation. And in tracing beauty and ugliness in the face as a partly systematic science of character, Lavater popularized the “scientific” association between ugliness (including deviations from a certain Northern European norm) and immorality in an unprecedented way. His pastoral habits and character led him to identify sin in order to root it out; as he invited people to examine their acquaintances in order to read their characters, he created a discourse that made it comfortable and even dutiful for his readers (the upper-class bourgeoisie, for the most part, but also artists, writers, and philosophers) to accept and reject people based on their looks. As a result, Lavater created a veritable and literal handbook for defining and identifying the Ugly. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Early physiognomy Lavater did not pretend to create physiognomy anew; he constructed both a lineage and a historical precedent carefully and very specifically. The literary tradition of physiognomy finds its sources in antiquity. Physiognomics, a text that was long attributed to Aristotle (though his authorship has been dis- proved through textual analysis of its tone and style9), provided the practice with a founding legitimacy and a set of presumptions that lasted throughout Reading faces, reading souls 107 the early modern period until, in the eighteenth century, they were recontex- tualized through the new sciences. Beginning with the observation that “mental character is not independent of and unaffected by bodily processes,” pseudo-Aristotle attempted to show the correlation between physiological and mental response by pointing to changes in one’s physique and personality during times of illness, high emotion, and intoxication.10 The mind/body connection expresses itself in the face, which acts as a mirror to the idiosyn- crasies of the soul. As a means of showing this synchronicity, pseudo-Aristotle traced a series of analogies between humans and animals, using external characteristics to explain and justify differences in comportment and personality. Given that “there never was an animal with the form of one kind and the mental character of another,” pseudo-Aristotle maintained, “the soul and body appropriate to the same kind always go together, and this shows that a specific body involved a specificmentalcharacter.”11 On this basis, such correlations provided not just a key to understanding human behavior but a metonymic system of signs that exposed the “true” character of every human being. In the first part of the treatise, pseudo-Aristotle cautioned that one should not oversimplify, rather,

we ought to select out signs from all animals that have mental aﬀection in common. For instance, when investigating the external marks of courage, we ought to collect all brave animals, and then to inquire what sort of aﬀections are natural to all of them but absent in all other animals.12

In setting up such criteria, the author explicates a method of syllogisms in nature (underwritten by both a folk symbology of animal types and the extension of Aristotle’s virtue ethics) by which to investigate physiognomic universals. Collecting data not from one, but from many animals, the ability to locate and isolate certain characteristics thereby has purchase in a rational explanation. The set of data points –“movements, gestures of the body, color, characteristic facial expression, the growth of hair, the smoothness of skin, the voice, the condition of ﬂesh, the parts of the body and the build of the body”13 – present a grammar of areas of speciﬁc interest, which, instantiated in particular combinations, provide a pragmatic plan for future physiognomists. After detailing several characteristics that model the excessive traits Aristotle outlines in Nicomachean Ethics (e.g., gluttony, cowardice, loquacity)

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 and their expressions in the face and body, pseudo-Aristotle extrapolated a causal and sympathetic link between the soul and body based on the effects of illnesses and their medicinal treatments. The psychobiological relationship empowers the correlation between body and mind, rooting the mental affec- tations of manner and being in physical response and allowing the author to segue into a discussion of specific examples from the animal world, which constitutes the second half of the treatise.14 A second, equally important narrative source out of antiquity, is the story of the meeting between the philosopher Socrates and the physiognomist 108 Reading faces, reading souls Zopyrus. Though the anecdote has been traced back to Phaedo, his text is no longer extant; instead Cicero’s description of their meeting in de Fato seems to be a recapitulation of Phaedo’s version.15 Cicero assumes that his reader knows that Socrates was both in/famously ugly and wise. Unaware of the name or reputation of his subject, Zopyrus determined Socrates to be “foolish, slow-witted and a womanizer.”16 His students reacted (both to the claim and the insult) but Socrates did not; instead he defended Zopyrus, explaining that he did have a natural propensity for those particular vices but, through reason, he had overcome the disadvantages lodged in his own face. The exchange – Socrates seems to accept Zopyrus’ judgment while rejecting its determinism – suggests philosophy is the antidote to ugliness; though Socrates’ face exposed natural (i.e., negative and immoral) predilections, his intelligence allowed him to “redeem” himself. Socrates’ famously ugly face pushes the limits of the claims of beauty, the potential of ugliness, the moral improvement of wisdom and the necessary connection between the three. In an elegant study of the philosophical investment in Socrates’ appearance, Daniel McLean has argued that the emblematic significance of Socrates’ looks enormously influenced the development of physiognomy in the early modern period, up to Lavater, who devoted a whole chapter in the Fragments to the Socratic case. Because of an investment in the meaning of Socrates’ ugliness, and his seeming reversal of the ancient claim of kalokagathia (beautiful-and-good), the interpretations of Zopyrus constitute less a disproof of the worth of physiognomy than a way of reconciling it with the idea of the freedom of the human will. Depending on the value attached to Socrates himself, his ugliness developed into an issue among those arguing for the relative usefulness or worthlessness of physiognomy. As McLean explains:

The encounter between the philosopher and the physiognomist maintained an enduring and important place in the history of physiognomic study, despite (or rather … because of) Socrates’ rejection of Zopyrus’ conclusions. The tension between Socrates’ inner goodness and outward ugliness posed a dilemma that generated a variety of resolutions corresponding to the interpreter’s hostility toward or approval of Socrates. Employed as an example of the success or failure of physiognomic analysis, or as a tool to pry open a space for the workings of human agency and divine grace, the Zopryus anecdote is repeated by most serious students of physiognomy 17 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 down to the eighteenth century.

The significance of Socrates’ ugliness either justifies or mocks the implicit correlation between appearance and morality; in either case, there is much more at stake than Socrates’ looks. Invested in the significance of his physicality is the relationship of Socrates’ philosophy to Christianity. As a symbol of the classical tradition, Socrates’ pre-Christian rationalism is at once a threat to the supremacy of Christ’s revelation and the necessary foreground upon which neo-Platonic Christian doctrine was built. Used as a symbol of Reading faces, reading souls 109 truth or a shameful promoter of profligacy, the veneration or rejection of Socrates reflects varying opinions of the intellectual and religious worthiness of a pre-Christian philosophical system. His ugliness can be as much a marker for the truth of his philosophy as for the truth of the Christian interpretation of his philosophical importance: either his mental agility and capability works from within to reverse the damage his outward appearance announces, or one concludes from his appearance that Socrates, the wisest of men, is condemned to bear the mark of his exclusion from Christian grace as a sign on his face. The tension between the Greek science of philosophy and the truths of Christian theology marked the discourse of physiognomy throughout the medieval period. As the Church rose in power and authority, pseudo-Aristotelian syllogisms and the Zopyrus story were joined by more explicit questions on the relationship between divine providence and individual free will. The pre- determination that seemed inherent in physiognomy set human physicality against the mercy of divine benevolence; in/advertently the benefits of repen- tance were set against the limits of the body. Reading the story about Socrates against itself, one could argue not that reason conquered all, but rather that Socrates’ pagan ugliness proved the beauty of the Christian message. On the other hand, Socrates’ successful battle against the destiny written in his face also opened “a space for the redemptive power of divine grace.”18 Along with the salvation offered by accepting medieval church doctrine on the power of God to redeem one’s sin, the “universal” original sin was forgiven (if not forgotten). Thus the mark of the saved had to be found in both behavior and appearance. The conscious acceptance of Christ’s salvation and the tension between active or passive human agency fostered disagreement on the meaning of Socrates’ face. McLean explains that

Socrates’ growth in self-control through philosophy’s therapeutic power ultimately emerges as one of the primary messages of the anecdote; but it also lies at the heart of an idealizing Christian reading that reads the philosopher as a model for the heroic struggle with one’s baser nature. It also conforms to an understanding of him as a “noble pagan,” a sinner who corrects himself so far as the unaided light of reason allows.19

Yet Socrates’ homosexuality, and his rebellion against authority in the pursuit of “truth,” certainly did not provide a model of human behavior that the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Church hoped others would emulate. His ugliness could be interpreted as an apparent sign of his own physical (and moral) corruption. In the sixteenth century, as part of the Counterreformation, the Catholic Church turned firmly against physiognomy in all its forms and lumped it together with other types of natural magic that promoted forms of determinism rejected by Church doctrine. All texts dealing with divination were put on the papal Index of 1559; papal bulls of 1585 and 1586 included physiognomy in their attack against fortune-telling. Despite these official prohibitions, the Italian natural scientist Giambattista della Porta (1538–1615) took up what 110 Reading faces, reading souls he saw as implicit connections of facial and behavioral characteristics between humans and animals. Taking his cue from Physiognomics, della Porta rel- eased Of Human Physiognomy (De humana physiognomonia, written in 1583 and published in 1586), which he illustrated with a series of woodcuts, suggested by the pseudo-Aristotle text, in order to demonstrate the resemblances between animals and human beings. As his biographer Louise George Clubb explains, the book reflects della Porta’s “belief in a system of signs whereby the unity of creation is manifest.”20 Taking advantage of the Renaissance interest in “the Doctrine of Signatures,” della Porta argued that “physical traits shared by animals and men are indices to the character.”21 Describing the representational meaning of those similarities and providing pseudo- Aristotle’s theses with pictorial “proof,” della Porta supported the pre- sumptive judgment of an innate connection between humans and beasts by singling out certain animals for their representational traits (taking his ethol- ogy from classical sources, like Pliny) and showing how certain of their features could be seen in human beings who exhibit the same traits. When della Porta’s book was submitted to the censors, they delayed its publication until he could justify his argument in light of Church restrictions. In Clubb’s account, “the reasoning behind the Church’s attack may be deduced from della Porta’s defense, which denied fixed destiny and reaffirmed individual responsibility. Divining human character was not far removed from sooth- saying, and to suppose that internal qualities depend on external features was tantamount to a denial of free will.”22 The Church’s concern with the mixture of humanistic discourse and natural magic – including the arts of fortune telling, astrology, and other forms of predicting the future – was that it would promote a non-Christian view of nature, in which fate ultimately governs all human activity. Like reading the lines on the palm, reading the face would unlock the secrets of one’s temperament. Doing so would not only give the physiognomist an unfair advantage, but it would damage the ethos of responsibility and deny the work of grace flowing from Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. In trying to avoid the charge of favoring determinism, della Porta explained in his preface that his method showed only human tendency toward certain behaviors and that one’s accountability for affirming or negating those tendencies was not absolved; this explanation would certainly prove useful to other physiognomists including Lavater.23 By the Enlightenment period the plausibility of physiognomy and other of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 the branches of divination by signs waned; as a theological supposition it was suspect because of its attachment to powers that contravened Christian doctrine, while the mechanical explanations of science, going through Descartes and Newton, rejected the resort to occult forces in favor of systematized and mathematizable ones. By the early part of the eighteenth century, physiognomy took its place on the list of other superstitions – like astrology – dis- missed by the proponents of reason as superstitious and impediments to the understanding of nature. In The Spectator, Joseph Addison introduced the Socrates story with an entirely diﬀerent interpretation. Explaining that Zopyrus Reading faces, reading souls 111 “pronounced [Socrates] the most lewd, libidinous, drunken old Fellow that he had ever met with in his whole Life,”24 Addison complained that anyone foolish enough to consider Socrates any of those characteristics could not be a serious servant of science. “I have seen many an amiable Piece of Deformity,” he wrote,

and have observed a certain Chearfulness in as bad a System of Features as ever was clap’d together, which hath appeared more lovely than all the blooming Charms of an insolent Beauty. There is a double Praise due to Virtue, when it is lodged in a Body that seems to have been prepared for the Reception of Vice: In many such Cases the Soul and the Body do not seem to be Fellows. But however Observations of this Nature may sometimes hold, a wise Man should be particularly cautious how he gives Credit to a Man’s outward Appearance. It is an irreparable Injustice we are guilty of towards one another, when we are prejudiced by the Looks and Features of those whom we do not know. How often do we conceive Hatred against a Person of Worth, or fancy a Man to be proud and ill- natured by his Aspect, whom we think we cannot esteem too much when we are acquainted with his real Character?25

The preconditions of the earlier version – that an ugly face indicates an ugly soul, especially without philosophy – seem entirely reversed here. The falsity of such claims about Socrates (who had become a heroically rational figure, dying for virtue, in contrast to the Christian Jesus) betrays the spuriousness of physiognomy. Addison warns that a truly “wise man” shows his wisdom through the discernment of expectation from reality. Had Socrates not wisdom enough for both Zopyrus and himself – not to mention all those who have read the story –“irreparable injustice” could have resulted. Blaming the physiognomist with a lack of erudition that bespoke a reliance on a science that could not account for divergences from its codes, Addison advocated the subversion of physiognomy by overtly negating any necessary connection between the significance of the body as an expression either of the soul or the intellect. His judgment against physiognomy reigned until the first volume of Lavater’s Fragments appeared.

Lavater’s new physiognomy The ﬁrst four fragments of the ﬁrst volume trace the history of physiognomy

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 and cast widely to situate it as a topic that has intrigued a variety of religious and philosophical figures throughout history. Offering a short intellectual biography of his own interest in the subject, which mentions his “limited” experience in the field, Lavater employs a narrative strategy that is meant to endear him to his reader through his scholarly integrity and professional modesty:

With my entire soul I despise (God and all who know me know) all charlatanry, all laughable pretension – and omniscience and infallibility, of which some writers allow glimpses and want to insinuate to their 112 Reading faces, reading souls readers in a thousand ways. Before everything therefore I say, what I have often said already, what I have said at every opportunity; though it remains concealed the same for all, who criticize me and my attempts, (my)self and others; “that I possess very little physiognomical knowledge; that I have erred countless times in my judgment, and still err daily.”26

Intimating a connection with his reader, he identifies himself as a neophyte and an amateur who “happened” to notice a unique “gift” he was granted even as he enumerates his own difficulties with early attempts at reading faces.27 In turning to the charges laid against physiognomy in the past, Lavater attempts to disassociate it from its traditional connection to nonscientific practices and arts of divination. He claims that people have “mixed up the truth of this science with irrational and superstitious charlatanism” and “confused the predictive meaning of the forehead with chiromancy or palm reading,” but he also points to the ordinary practice of businessmen, travelers, painters, or rulers who read faces and make judgments about people from their physiognomic “feeling.”28 Lavater explains the discredit into which physiognomy has fallen in the present age by referencing the history of many sciences; particular bodies of knowledge often go through periods of decline and disbelief; like religion, physiognomy was “mishandled” and “made idolatrous.”“How many thousands have absented themselves from belief in the evangelical truth because of [bad reasoning and bad counsel], because one defended this truth with the most deplorable reasons, that truth itself had been carried forth into a falsified light?”29 However, physiognomy itself is not at fault if physiognomists have misused it; just as Christianity was held captive by those who misapplied its truths for their own vanity and power, physiognomy, similarly, has been held captive by the ill-willed or the ignorant and submerged among superstition. Thus, Lavater uses the Protestant Reformation as a paradigm for the history of scientific discovery, in which certain truths that have been obscured by mishandling are restored to their original form and meaning. In the case of the Reformation, this recovery was facilitated by a renewed interest in the original texts of the revelation; in the case of physiognomy, similarly, the text of the facial expressions has been obscured under a cloud of false glosses. The parallel between physiognomy and theology in Lavater’s construct forms one of the constant motifs in the Fragments. From the beginning, Lavater links the divine truth – that humanity was created in God’s image –

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 and the secular truth – that the image of the human being contains the signs indicating one’s true character – in a powerful partnership that permits the extensive play between physiognomy and Protestant theology. Like Chris- tianity under Catholicism, physiognomy has been portrayed in a “falsified light.” The other potential drawbacks – the misuse of physiognomy by “ignorant and evil-hearted people,” the attention of those with “weak intelligence,” the immodest mistreatment of certain subjects for false ends – are explained away as mere annoyances in the pursuit of “truth”; they are, Lava- ter claimed, examples brought by people who themselves abhor the “light” Reading faces, reading souls 113 itself: “almost all bad people contest against it … because they secretly believe in it, because they feel, that they do not appear as if they would appear if they were good and had a happy, clear conscience.”30 The parallel he has set up between physiognomy and theology creates an argument that gains its force from outside the logic of scientific argument: just as the sinner resists grace, the critic of physiognomy resists its truth in order to hide the truth that is exposed in their faces. Although Lavater grants his opponents grounds, based in the history of physiognomy, for their disbelief, ultimately his argument comes down to a separation between two groups of readers: “us” and “them.” This classification creates an intimate feeling to the polemic he pursues, which is articulated in the language he employs; he uses the informal second person throughout the text, as though establishing a con- versational proximity to the reader – more appropriate to a Christian apologetic than a scientific work – that continues through all four volumes. It is a stylistic gesture that accounts, to an extent, for the popularity of Lavater’s work, since it personalizes the topic and captures the reader in an unusual web of reasoning that combines logical argument and apologetic exhortation. Though Lavater admits that each individual face is unique, he maintains nevertheless that physiognomy rests its conclusions not on “presumption” but on the “truth of the thing in nature” as determined by observation and experience.31 As a science, in his words, it is “as good as physics, because it is physics! As good as pharmacology, because it is a part of pharmacology! As good as theology because it is theology. As good as the belle lettres [schöne Wissenschaften], because it belongs to the belle lettres.”32 It is his steadfastness to this circular hypothesis – physiognomy is a science because it can claim a scientific methodology – that makes his claims both so interesting and so insidious. Rather than arguing for some mechanical, causal connection between the face and the psyche, Lavater argues instead that because the belief of some connection between the face and the psyche exists, it must be true. This surety leads to a survey of multidisciplinary instances from art and the sciences that seem to encompass all that Enlightenment science has to offer. Entirely aware of the educated, bourgeois audience he wants to intrigue, Lavater situates himself as both an au courant intellectual and a defender of the common opinion: “I take for granted,” he explains in his chapter on the “harmony between moral and physical beauty,”“what no moralist would be able to deny as well; that certain states of the soul, certain sentiments, sensi-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 tivities, biases, beauty, gracefulness, nobility are great, and intentionality, attention, love, joy are likewise wrung from every sensitive heart; whereas others, contrarily, are quite the opposite, and bring about ugliness, adversity, unpleasantness, discouragement [which] are disgusting!”33 Though he combines insights from the disparate fields of theology, psychology, natural history, and art criticism, Lavater returns continually to a physiognomic “feeling”; it is upon this feeling that he seeks to found a discipline. The science is rooted in impressions: subjective assessment and personal judgment are ineradicable parts of the physiognomist’s claim. 114 Reading faces, reading souls Hoping to find inspiration for his work in the long history of physiognomical writing, Lavater found only disappointment. As he explains, “I wanted to go through all the writers of physiognomy, began here and there to read, could not … hardly tolerate the hogwash of the most that advertised Aris- totle. Then I threw them immediately away again – and drew myself to, as before, pure nature and pictures. …”34 He details his own apprenticeship in refining his physiognomic sense, the mistakes he made (as well as enough successful “readings” to keep up his scientific spirits) and the many dis- appointments he experienced in attempting to find useful physiognomical sources out of which to ground the science that must support his feeling that his observations have some source in objective nature. Instead he encountered the many “wretched things” written about the topic: “nothing could be thought shallower, more groundless of all outrageous human understanding as what has been written [about physiognomy] since Aristotle’s time.”35 Nevertheless, Lavater adjures his readers to blame the messengers and not the message. Indeed, sifting through sacred and secular literature, Lavater finds quotations from a wide range of ancient and contemporary sources – from Solo- mon to Cicero, Pliny to Bacon, Hogarth, Montaigne, and Wolff – concerning the connection between temperament and the cast of the face, which justify treating physiognomy with more respect than it is accorded by skeptical Enlightenment thinkers. With these witnesses in hand, he defends its scientific relevance through an inductive method which operates “from outer to inner.”36 Lavater not only pursues the legitimation of physiognomy through quotations culled from the greats of the past, but he also, in a sense, “quotes” their physiognomies themselves. Thus, after referencing Aristotle in the first and second volumes of the Fragments, he reads Aristotle’s face in the third section. That, in fact, Aristotle’s face is unavailable to him – he relies on sculp- tures or images of Aristotle – is elided in his reading. Lavater’s methodology assumes that the artist, who is concerned with faces, can somehow intuit what an appearance should look like. In the ancient Greek’s features he sees a “manly, working thinker” with a “beautiful and good nose,” which is, however, not quite “sharp enough for such a great man.”37 Several pages later, Lavater responds to criticism of his highly selective history of physiognomy and turns his attention to the physiognomical text he thinks is Aristotle’s: “it seems to me the great Aristotle’s handling of physiognomy is extremely superficial and casual, and very often contradictory – especially his general

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 reasoning – however, here and there, he hits on a thought, that if pushed, might deserve something. …”38 He quotes pseudo-Aristotle at length (two full pages) but does so selectively; he strings together the general meaning of the ancient text and highlights the analogies that mediate the connection between body and soul by means of human–animal syllogisms. In a passage that was cruelly parodied by his contemporary (and opponent), Georg Lich- tenberg (1742–99), he digresses to discuss animals in general, spending ten pages on horse heads and ending with some remarks on the appearance of insects.39 Using Aristotelian science to distinguish the animal from the human Reading faces, reading souls 115 (in contradiction to the findings of eighteenth-century comparative anatomy, which was discovering an uncomfortable anatomic likeness between humans and other primates), Lavater is not unaware of the logical and scientificpro- blem in grounding physiognomic analogies into animal form and presumed temperaments (which are then projected onto human features). Thus, he mocks della Porta’s method, giving only an inch when it comes to parallels between human noses and bird beaks. He reproduced the woodcuts that appeared in della Porta’s On Human Physiognomy (IV: 57) as a means of proving his point. At stake is not the egoism of modern over medieval “science,” but rather the intentionality of the divine creator, who distinguished between the human and animal realms by endowing the former with rationality. Animals have tendencies toward certain behaviors and one can find those who maximize such tendencies with greater skill, such as the bees.40 But the distinction between humans and animals is far too great for Lavater to justify the parallelism that defined physiognomy for so long. Lavater devotes an entire chapter to Socrates in the first volume of the Fragments. Just as in the case with Aristotle, Lavater did not have access to a picture of Socrates but used instead a number of representations. Indeed, Lavater seems obsessed by Socrates’ face (there are 12 pictures of Socrates in the second volume).41 The Zopyrus anecdote is quoted and revised in Volume III. In the first account, Lavater readily admits the difficulty Socrates presents; he calls it a shame not “to speak” of Socrates just as it is a shame to do so because so much has already been written.42 Quoting an unnamed source, Lavater repeats both Zopyrus’ judgment (Socrates is “dumb, brutish, lasci- vious and a drunk”) and Socrates’ response (“that he had inherited all these wicked traits from nature and only through practice and concentration was he able to eliminate these affinities”).43 Pointing to the sheer number of times the story had been already told (“tausendmal”), Lavater feels that any defense of physiognomy must take place in a discussion of the case of Socrates. Con- ceding that Socrates creates a quandary for physiognomy, Lavater delineates all the points: Socrates was “the most incomparable, the wisest and the most honest person” and yet his ugliness cannot be denied. As a test case, Socrates presents an “inviolable argument against the reliability of physiognomy.”44 Or, his face seems to do so; Lavater develops a number of lines of argument to save physiognomy from discredit. In addition to the argument that Socrates’ face was ugly because people of his type – those with strongly

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 conﬂicting tendencies – are normally considered ugly, Lavater also argued that the common notion of beauty and ugliness is not synonymous with the physiognomic notion, which is more sophisticated. Socrates’ face is the product of the development from some combination of the accidents of nature and of nurture. In other words, Socrates is the very exception that proves the rule:

The deformity of Socrates, which almost all have considered, the something about him that is so remarkable, so striking, that it appears to all as a contradiction, as it were, as an anomaly of nature; that it could be seen 116 Reading faces, reading souls as an exception to the general rules, that would so little prove against the truth of physiognomy as a freak with twelve fingers [would disprove] the truth: “that people have five fingers on each hand.”45

The anomaly of Socrates’ ugliness is so meaningless, in fact, that Lavater likens it to misprints in printed material and hints that the “mistake” could even be linked to some sort of incident during his mother’s pregnancy. Even more so, “development, practice, and education (Bildung)” must be taken into account in such a situation for they help mitigate the disadvantages of one’s face at birth.46 Cautioning his reader to discern “true” deformity (that is, what is caused by moral corruption) from “apparent” disfigurement (as in the case of Socrates), Lavater uses the opportunity to digress briefly and discuss the consequence of one’s actions. “No one comes into the world wicked, and no one virtuous. All people are children first, and all newborn children are – not miscreants and not virtuous heroes – innocent.”47 Lavater takes the opportunity to underline the fact that the materialist principles underlying physiognomy, the distinction between fixity and mobility, constant and fleet- ing bodily characteristics, in no way endorse materialist determinism. Rather, each person is born with the ability to maximize his or her abilities in order to make the most out of one’s opportunities. With Socrates, whose face seemingly exposed him as a bawdy, lecherous drunk, the task is two-fold; not only must one be aware of how one can correct (within the sphere of one’s [physiognomically] engendered capability) but the physiognomist must be alert to the intricacies hidden within the face. Therefore the lesson of the anecdote is not Socrates’ ugliness, but rather Zopyrus’ mistake (and Socrates’ error in allowing him to make it). Not recognizing the “truth” of the features before him, Zopyrus was unable to read Socrates’ soul in his face (most likely, Lavater surmises, because of his own unrefined sense of intellect). Far from being the case that disproves the science, therefore, Lavater’s ability to read the interiority of Socrates’ intellect proves just how far physiognomy has developed and how significant his current project is for science generally. As McLean explains, “our astonishment at finding our expectations overthrown is precisely proof of physiognomy’s legitimacy. Our discomfort at seeing a body so distorted yet possessed of such a beautiful mind reflects the very natural and instinctive basis of the science.”48 Lavater takes advantage of the paradox he created, using Socrates to showcase not just the truth of physiognomy

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 but his own skill in employing it.

The Physiognomical Fragments The public reacted to Lavater’s fragments, analyses, and musings immediately. When the first volume appeared in 1774, it came lushly illustrated with a number of reproductions of portraits and drawings to which Lavater’s wordy, highly descriptive text referred. Like many of the Enlightened philosophe, Lavater proved to be incredibly clever at using his connections to market his Reading faces, reading souls 117 ideas and he made the publication both a spectacle and an event. He offered the first volume by subscription alone, fronting the expense of the illustrations and increasing public interest. And he solicited contributions of pictures and silhouettes from his wide range of correspondents and acquaintances. He sweetened the deal by promising each contributor a full analysis in the forthcoming work and assuring that people would subscribe in order to read about themselves and others. It became, as Siegfried Frey called it, “a physiognomical ‘Who’sWho’ of German society in the late eighteenth century – and thus a singular record of human vanity.”49 In his introduction, Lavater aimed his pitch directly at the social aspirations of his readers, including in his con- spiratorial admission that he had “not written this book for the great masses. It should not be read or bought by ordinary people.”50 To prove his belief in his claims and the value of the work, he addressed potentially dissatisfied readers in the following terms: “so say, how, and when, and where you want, that I have lied – either burn this work, or return it to me, and I will reimburse your cost.”51 Even as he takes his reader into his private confidence, sharing the inevitable path by which he has come to his conclusions, he provides an overwhelming amount of material that “shows” and “proves” the depth of his interest and commitment to physiognomical research. In doing so, Lavater did manage to launch a popularization of physiognomy on new terms that legitimated the enterprise for many (and split the opinion of the Enlightened community), while providing a storehouse of examples that would often be exploited by his successors. Modeling some of his chapters on the natural history studies of Buffon and Blumenbach and including several sections on the variances in animal skulls and features, Lavater appeared systematic in his approach toward his subject. As Frey notes, by counteracting “social pressure against physiognomics” he managed to “mobilize greater social pressure in its favor.”52 The complete set – published over the course of four years from 1774–78 – was purposely overpriced; at his suggestion (articulated in the first volume) people formed special book-buying clubs that enabled them both to pool their resources and to try out his “how-to” instructions on reading a face accu- rately. In the 30 years that followed the initial publication, Physiognomical Fragments went into at least 16 German editions, 15 French editions, 20 in English, two editions in Russian, one in Dutch, and two American versions.53 Over the next 100 years, Lavater’s text continued to be abridged, amended, and re-edited, appearing in folio- and pocket-sizes and making its way into

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Italian, Polish, and Hebrew. The success was more than just personal; Lavater became the legitimating reference for the practice of physiognomy and cast into the shadows the Renaissance and humanist traditions that had preceded him. Frey argues that

… after centuries in which social attitudes toward physiognomy had been utterly hostile, a society still sharply divided by diﬀerences in class, legal rights, and education suddenly seemed to have discovered a common language, one that would make it easy to understand each other, thanks 118 Reading faces, reading souls to the universality of physiognomic sentiment, which, like some invisible hand, drew together people of all kinds.54

So successful was his work that he also launched the modern fad of making silhouettes; indeed, he started a whole industry in the trading and “reading” of them, helping to popularize both his conclusions and his methods. In the second volume, published in 1775, Lavater included an illustration of a spe- cially designed chair that facilitated the drawing of an appropriate silhouette. Though he felt that “[t]he silhouette of the human body, or of the face only, is of all portraits the feeblest and the least ﬁnished,” part of the draw of the genre was the lack of expression. Yet as an outline of the hair, head, facial contours and neck, the silhouette oﬀered a subject that (theoretically) could not be contaminated by expression or prejudice

on the other hand, it is the most just and faithful, when the light has been placed at a proper distance, when the shade is drawn upon a perfectly smooth surface, and the face placed in a position perfectly parallel to that surface.55

One of the elements of Lavater’s physiognomy that makes the entire enterprise so interesting is the tension between his personal goal of achieving fame and his theological goal of creating a systematic and comprehensive scientific method for determining the impress of the human character in the divine language of the face. Lavater is a particularly interesting character because of the many contradictions he embodies; he was prolific and popular but he managed to lose the respect of many of the men he most admired, in part because he saw himself as crossing a number of natural boundaries that his contemporaries found oppositional. Attracted to the rationality of the Enlightenment, Lavater rejected the austerity of its claims in favor of the emotional veracity he found in the Sturm und Drang movement. Profoundly devout, Lavater could not reconcile the universalizing deistic tendencies of the Enlightenment with his deep and genuine belief in the redemptive salvation of Jesus Christ, even as he was attracted to the scientific impartiality on which rationality was based. Throughout his life, and certainly since his death, his zealotry undermined the seriousness of his endeavor; his flamboyant writing style perpetuated the perception of his religious enthusiasm. His sermons,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 correspondence, travel journals, and theological treatises are full of exclama- tion marks, dashes, italicized phrases, and bold print; that dramatic flair is mirrored in the over 1,400 pages of the Physiognomical Fragments. Lavater anticipated the acceptance of physiognomy as an academic science that would both balance the right mix of science and religion and also fuse Christianity with rational inquiry successfully. Though he was on friendly terms at one time or another with most of the major German writers and thinkers of the late 1700s, including Mendelssohn, he succeeded in creating a popular obsession that seemed more charlatanism than science to many writers. Reading faces, reading souls 119 Lavater’s theology Aside from the faddish popularity of Lavater’s physiognomy, and even beyond his attempt at redefining it as a science, Lavater set himself apart from his predecessors by way of the theological underpinnings of his theory. The epitaph to the original, which is retained in subsequent editions, summarizes his entire project: “And God said: Let us make man in our image.”56 For Lavater, both theology and physiognomy flowed from this truth. Lavater adopted the Zwinglian understanding of the power of redemptive grace and argued that one’s face did not predetermine one’s actions, but rather that God, in God’sinfinite wisdom, knew each person’s moral aptitude and left the signature of that aptitude on the face, among its constant and fixed features. In Lavater’s world view, the transcendent God was not just the imper- sonal creator of the Newtonian world, but the very interventionist designer of each and every face. With the intimate knowledge of potential and ability, God provides each individual with the opportunity to beautify oneself through acceptance of God’s redemption. Yet being saved is always a matter of spiritual struggle. Marked with imperfections of the soul, one must do the best one can with the dis/ablities lodged in one’s face. Appearance does not protect; instead, constant vigilance is required to maintain the goodness one does have. Well before the publication and release of the Physiognomical Fragments Lavater had distinguished himself as a theologian with an absolute faith in the power, majesty, and reality of the divine incarnation. His major theological work Vistas in Eternity (Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, 1768–78) describes the various manifestations of the Godhead and the promises of the deliverance of Christ in a millennial kingdom. Written as a series of letters, Lavater incorporated all the major themes of his intellectual life: the imminent coming of Christ, the truth inherent in divine design, the manifestation of that divinity in human consciousness, the divine script written in the countenances of humanity, and the role nonbelievers (especially Jews) play in the forthcoming redemption of the world. As Jeffrey Freedman has described in his study of the conflict of Lavater’s religion with the Enlightenment rationalism of his milieu:

To Lavater, God was not some distant and remote deity, the mere creator

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 of a universe built to operate according to natural laws. He was, on the contrary, a living, vibrant force whose presence in the world human beings could experience directly, and He was inseparable from Jesus Christ – Christ not as a mere teacher of morality, but as God become ﬂesh – who alone brought the divine within the range of human experience. Against the rationalist Aufklärung, therefore, Lavater deployed what amounted to a kind of religious empiricism: he appealed to sensory experience [Sinneserfahrung], to the direct enjoyment of God [Gottesgenuß], and above all to miracles [Wunder], which provided 120 Reading faces, reading souls tangible evidence of a divine force in the world. Nothing could have been more remote from Lavater’s religious vision than the tendency of the Aufklärung to regard miracles as mere disruptions of natural law and to relegate them to a distant past – to a Biblical epoch that had passed out of existence once and for all.57

Lavater’s belief system – with its sense of urgency and potency – infused Vistas with a near mystical appreciation of the gifts of the divine presence. The echo of the divine element in each human soul is manifested in the soul’s bodily form; those connections – the godliness of humanity (resulting from creation in God’s image) and the intricacy of the body and soul relation – are traced in the 16th letter in which Lavater writes explicitly about theological physiognomy.

Everything in nature, every fruit, the humblest leaf has its physiognomy, its natural language – which can be understood by every open eye; should only the living, reasonable, moral human, only the image of God not have it? Should there be no natural connection and accordance of the outer and the inner only in [human beings]? What absurd philosophy!58

Lavater’s presupposition – that God’s purposeful design is a kind of language, one in which nature and the sign are synthesized in every aspect of physical creation – necessarily includes human beings in the genius of the inner working of physiognomy; indeed, that even “the humblest leaf” has its own physiognomy makes it evident, for Lavater, that the human form of the divine image would necessitate at least the same divine attention. His surety that God’s intentional handiwork is identifiable in the physical world through signatures that are more than expressions and somewhat less than causes and the expectation of a glorious (and imminent) divine redemption infused all of Lavater’s published work (including the small pamphlet “On Physiognomy” [Von der Physiognomik, 1772], which was pre- liminary to the Fragments). Taking the topos of God’s creation of humanity in God’s image, he theorized that though the human race has suffered a degradation since the time of the Fall, still, impressions of moral goodness left over from that formation expose themselves bodily, the part of the body one is least able to hide from view. One’s soul testifies, therefore, not just in Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 the human language of faith, but in the natural language written in every cranial feature and facial expression, although the latter, as he emphasizes in the Fragments, can prove to be as much a means of obscuring the soul’s meanings as of revealing them. Modeled on the divine image itself, the face, properly read, is an infallible guide to the soul. Indeed, God’s expression, the truth of God’s creation and revelation – and ultimately, the surety of God’s redemption – are excruciatingly evident in the religiosity of the face. There is, frankly, no other way to understand creation or the body’s role in it. God is Reading faces, reading souls 121 the first cause, the originator of the cosmic plan, and therefore, is ultimately the founder of the language of nature. Emphasizing the relationship between cause and effect and mocking those who would believe in chance, Lavater explains, somewhat impatiently: “one cannot say it too often: arbitrariness is the philosophy of fools, the plague for healthy natural studies, philosophy, and religion. To ban this everywhere is the work of the true natural scientist, the true philosopher and the true theologian.”59 By means of this theologically invested quasi-determinism, Lavater could combat the determinism of the materialists. Recognizing the individuality within each face – another example of God’s hand in creation – does not undermine the physiognomical task. Rather, it is God’s plan that one exposes one’s sin – and one’s righteousness when Lavater remembers to mention it – in one’s face. Indeed in Lavater’s theology of physiognomy God created the human body in order to expose one’s inner character. By exposing the weaknesses of our mortal selves in faces that were open to the practiced physiognomic reader, the healing power of the divine mercy is still evident: one is both made aware, more concretely, of what lurks deeply within one’s constitution and, at the same time, offered the opportunity to correct it. Although it might seem one is locked into one’s dispositions and the face is merely a sort of code to the locking device, in reality, faces show dispositions and even the lowest and most vicious face does not completely lack signs of other, more innocent, tendencies. One is born with one’s looks; but one can and should be as good as one’s face allows. The importance of the Socrates’ example is precisely that faces can register struggles as well as set dispositions. Even if there is a form of determinism in the balance of the tendencies of the soul it does not ground the physiognomic reading; rather, physiognomy reads the determinants but not the outcome. Not redemption, therefore, but improvement is the goal of the physiognomical task.60 Wickedness, sin, depravity, corruption – even the littlest bit of envy or jealous fear – present themselves on the face to the properly trained physiognomist just as other qualities – honesty, modesty, righteousness, and virtue – do. As the perfect mirror of the inner soul, the human body tells no lies. Lavater sums it nicely: “the more moral, therefore more beautiful; the less moral, therefore uglier” [“Je moralisch besser; desto schöner. Je moralisch schlimmer; desto häßlicher”].61 Having one’s face read, therefore, makes one privy to much richer information and presents the opportunity to know one’s immor-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 tal soul. Yet a proper diagnosis can also aid one’s appearance, for, as Lavater mentions several times, “virtue beautifies, vice makes ugly.”62 A true physiognomist is a religious figure, therefore, because he must understand God’s principles in order to understand the soul-signs written on the face.63 Thus, physiognomy had a moral use that could help the preacher or the doctor in that outward signs would help identify inwardly vicious tendencies. The result of those tendencies would leave signs in God’s natural language which was as much a part of a person’s physical make up as one’s eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. 122 Reading faces, reading souls Lavater’s physiognomy: Jesus Lavater’s fascination with the religiously beautiful finds its locus in his attempt to conceive and describe the primary figure of his divine physiognomical ideal: Jesus. More than any other figure, Jesus naturally represents the highly idealized form of the revelation inherent in physiognomy; as a manifestation of the perfect elements of divinity and humanity, Jesus illustrates the height of Lavater’s fusion of theology and science. Once again, as in the case of Socrates and Aristotle, one is initially blocked by the fact that there is no portrait of Jesus in existence; there is a lack of even a rudimentary description of him in the biblical and aporcryphal texts. Instead, Lavater refers to portraits and paintings of Jesus which portray the European vision of Jesus from the Renaissance onward. In Christ Lavater located the perfect harmony between the body and the soul; his entire work is an attempt to situate Jesus as his meta/physical ideal. Lavater fetishizes the Christus image with 47 illustrations of Jesus, showing him in various poses including profiles, full bodies, silhouettes, on the cross, with others, and alone; the sheer number is more than triple the amount of pictorial attention paid to any other figure. Yet none presents a “perfect” representation of how Lavater absolutely feels how Jesus (should have) appeared; this knowledge is backed up by his physiognomic experience. Just how much his entire project is invested in the ultimate beauty and morality expressed by the figure of Jesus is evidenced in the introduction to the first volume. Made up almost entirely from a quote from Herder’s Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechtes (Oldest Record of Humanity, 1774) Lavater intones a voice whose intelligence, intellectualism, faith, and fervor he evidently thought matched his own. At that point, Herder was the kind of figure with whom Lavater wanted to ally himself. He found exactly the kind of theological description he needed and wanted to hear (and what he wanted his readers to see; Lavater adds two sentences but does little else to frame the four-page quotation). Throughout the cited text Herder used the phrase “God created humans in God’s image” as a stylistic refrain, dwelling on the creative power and artistry of the divine maker and enthu- siastically exclaiming the majesty of God’s genius through the splendor of creation:

Behold the most beautiful exemplar of accoutrement and beauty! – the human body! Unity in the diversity! Diversity in one! How he stands Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 there in his lofty singularity! Fine shape, proportion, symmetry in all forms and limbs! And what a manifold! Always one and always, so gently, so supplely varied. … Consider this divine soulful human countenance! Diversity and unity! Unity and diversity! The thoughts of this forehead, glance of the eyes, breath of the mouth, mien of the cheeks! How everything speaks, and harmonizes! … Humanity! Holy and desecrated image of God! Weakened and broken embodiment of all of creation! [The] Temple in and through which God Reading faces, reading souls 123 revealed first, and then, after miracles and prophets, last – through the Son! The reflection of the glory of God! The one and first born! Through him, and in him, the world was authored! The second Adam! Oh humanity! What should you be and what will you become!64

Herder’s rhapsody about God’s revelations – first, the creation of humanity and, second, the “second Adam” of Jesus’ birth – employ a Lutheran language to celebrate humanity. His style and sentiment – more typical of Sturm und Drang than Enlightenment rationalism – was consonant with the tone of Lavater’s work and intention, creating a theologically consistent understanding of God as the creator and Jesus as the perfect embodiment of God’s creation. Their evaluation of the artistry of the human body – designed at once as a reflection of the divine image and as the crown of divine glory – explodes into amazement at the harmony of the relationship of the body’s parts to its whole. Herder glances over the aspects of Jesus’ face, just as Lavater will throughout his Fragments, praising them as manifestations of the genius of the creator. Jesus’ unique position allows him to be part author and part product of the creation. Thus, Jesus’ face should provide the central model against and through which to make judgments of beauty in both its moral and physical forms, even as it, historically, lacks any painter or portraitist. Thus, his face has to be imagined. The figure of Jesus took up quite of bit of Lavater’s prepublication attention. In order to find an appropriate image that would illustrate the harmonious beautified body and spirit Lavater cast his net widely, calling upon his illustrators to draw Jesus exactly as he pictured him. In a 1773 letter to Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801), one of the late eighteenth century’s most preeminent and productive illustrators (who drew hundreds of images for Lavater’s Fragments), Lavater describes the face he wants:

The length of the head should show a man of six feet. The neck should be bare and every muscle visible, distinct, soft, manly. The face neither scrawny nor fat, not slack and not wrinkled; everything softened together yet each element striking – everything out of one piece and in unity, not disharmony. The face in three sections, from the hairline to the eyebrows, ﬁrst, to under the nose, second, and the third [from there] to under the chin. The eye in the middle between the crown [of the head] and the chin.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 It is as wide and long in profile as deep behind the contour – the upper, inner outline of the eye horizontal with the small arch between forehead and nose. The breadth and length of the eyes like the width or length of the mouth in profile. … The upper eyelid must protrude a quarter of the length of the profile of the eyes … The forehead completely smooth without furrows …–the nose as straight as it can be without severity, parallel to the forehead, not sharply point and not stubby, horizontal underneath. The chin somewhat further back [than the lips] – each hair of the beard noble, youthful, soft and distinct. … 65 124 Reading faces, reading souls

Figure 3.1 Never quite satisﬁed with his artists’ attempts, Lavater’s ideal Jesus ﬁgure was precisely described in a letter to Daniel Chodowiecki in 1773.

Lavater’s mental image – not imagined but determined by and through his deep belief in physiognomy – was ordered with an artistic precision down to the measurements, all derived from a physiological logic that derives from Christ. The length and width of the face, along with the size, shape, and proportion of the features, needed to conform to Lavater’s prefabricated conception of Jesus’ appearance based on his physiognomical principles. The ideal of Christ, whose physical and moral character demonstrates the highest harmony of moral and physical beauty was fabricated through the mediation of thousands of images of Christ. Out of these Lavater assembled his Jesus, whose divinity necessitated a perfectly symmetrical, wholly representative picture that embraced a range of Jesus ﬁgures as well as the masculine image

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Lavater desired. Unsurprisingly, Chodowiecki found it diﬃcult to draw an image that satisﬁed Lavater not only because every physical manifestation seemed to fall short of Lavater’s theo-physiognomical expectations but also because he found few models that accomplished what Lavater described (Figure 3.1).66 Even as Lavater sought pre-existing portrayals to have copied for his work (he includes images copied from Holbein, Rembrandt, Werner, Raphael, Poussin, Carravaggio, and others) he found that most of the Jesus pictures he commissioned could not do justice to the beauty and the truth he sought. He continued to look for a “truer” picture. Reading faces, reading souls 125

Contract Contract

Contract

Figure 3.2 “Jesus” as quoted from Holbein the Younger’s “Last Supper” in Lavater’s Fragments.

Lavater compensates for this lack in the ﬁrst volume by using Jesus as the “high ideal” that shows the immorality and physical ugliness of others.67 In a series of examples meant to illustrate the harmony of moral and physical beauty (the title of the fragment), Lavater analyzed both Judas and Jesus as depicted in Holbein the Younger’s “The Last Supper” (1524–25); he focuses solely on the faces (and not the picture as a whole) and uses them as the measure of the range of artistry. While Holbein’s Jesus is not as good as the Jesus depicted by Raphael (it does not have the “stroke of Raphael’s high sensibility”), nevertheless Lavater ﬁnds in him the “spirit of physiognomy” which indicates a truth that speaks more to internal character than physical appearance.68 This spirit is particu-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 larly well illustrated in the depiction of Judas (Figure 3.3), whose dark hair, long, hooked nose, thick lips, and pointy beard mark him as a “criminal”;in Lavater’s opinion “there is astonishingly much truth in it, but not sublimity. The true physiognomy of a miser; but not of a miserly apostle, of baseness – but not of a great soul, possessed with a powerful passion. …”Yet it privileges sentiment over appearance, an approach that has the drawback of over- emphasizing the truth of “feeling” over reality: “had Judas appeared so, as Holbein drew him, Christ would have certainly never chosen him for an apostle – such a face could not have endured a week in Christ’s company.”69 ContractContract

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Figure 3.3 “Judas nach Holbein” is the first picture to take up a full folio page in Lavater’s first volume. Reading faces, reading souls 127 Again, the natural language of the face can embrace subtle differences in the tendencies of a person that require an equally subtle intuition on the part of the reader. Though the immorality inherent in Holbein’s interpretation of Judas is more symbolic than actual, it warrants three pages of sermonizing in which Lavater details all the corruption, theft, betrayal, and greed that characterizes a traditional understanding of Judas’ character. Despite Holbein’s portrayal of the “traitor” and not the apostle, Lavater finds in it a useful example of one of his main principles: the effect of immorality on physical appearance. Mocking the idea that this face could be any other of the apostles, and dismissing the idea that Judas was naturally ugly, Lavater argues instead that Judas became ugly as a result of his greed and guilt. It is a repetition of his earlier lesson: vice uglifies. Lavater elevates Holbein’s Judas to one of the cardinal examples of the entire work; he discusses his example even before referring to Jesus, revealing a bias towards examplars of ugliness over beauty. He blames this imbalance partly on his material and bemoans that artists are often willing to settle for a startling effect or a laugh over truth. The full-page close up of Judas’ face he includes illuminates and exaggerates all the negative features that Lavater’s prose enunciates even as he reprimands the artist for its flaws. Every detail of the face is exaggerated in order to make explicit the distinction between Judas’ physical immorality and the beautiful goodness of Jesus. Whereas Judas looms large on his page, the head shot of Jesus is framed twice with an oval inside a square (Figure 3.2). The difference, Lavater notes, is striking: “Compare forehead and forehead, mouth and mouth, face and face. … Never- more would this forehead be so open, so furrowless, so fair and noble, when the uneasiness of the greedy meanness that so often loomed had set fretful wrinkles.”70 Though the figure’s eyes are half-closed (a pose that Lavater finds “the most fatal situation for beauty”71) Lavater sees in Holbein’s Jesus a splendor that is entirely absent in the other face. Jesus not only mirrors the divine grace within but prophecizes the betrayal that will bring him down. Lavater identifies a powerful sentiment (“goodness and honesty”72) in the mix of Jesus’ moral bravery and oncoming dread. Rather than dwell on the imperfections of Holbein’s art (as he did with the Judas example), Lavater provides his reader several more exemplars of other Jesus portraits (including Rembrandt’s “Ecce Homo”) and promises to take up a full analysis of Jesus’ face later. Inter- weaving theology and art criticism, he capitalizes on his readers’ familiarity

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 with Christ’s representations to invest various features with Christological import. There is nothing objective about his method which relies on a hermeneutic of assumptions gathered around the European pictorial repertoire of Christ images. But in place of locating the images historically – something that his contemporary, Winckelmann, had begun to do with Greek art – he elides the real image of Jesus and assumes an imaginary image as the measure against which to judge varying degrees of ugliness and immorality. In a sense, Lavater is never more the eighteenth-century ﬁgure than in imagining Jesus in terms of beauty; he seems utterly oblivious to (or blithely ignores) the 128 Reading faces, reading souls

Figure 3.4 Werner’s Jesus in Lavater’s Fragments.

Counterreformation and baroque image of Jesus as suﬀering and degraded. He ends the section with “an imperfect but nevertheless not totally empty and ignoble face of the savior” by Werner (Figure 3.4):

Such a nose, eyes and mouth you will certainly ﬁnd in no bad, ignoble person! Rely on it and ﬁnd someone whose face [looks] similar and rejoice, and seek out his friendship, and you will thank me in the next world, or, not me, rather the one through which all is done … .73

Though several pictures of Jesus appear in the second volume, and the ideal of the physiognomical harmony he witnesses is retained throughout Lavater’s discussions of national characteristics and comparative religions, it is not until 1778, in the fourth volume, that Lavater returns to his promise to analyze Jesus’ face directly. Unable to ﬁnd a picture that accomplished what he wanted, he begins his “analysis” by admitting his disappointment in the exemplars he assembled and blaming his dissatisfaction on the inability of human artistry to manufacture any sort of likeness that could be compared to the work of the divine artist. “Perhaps no mortal should dare to draw a picture of Christ,” he surmised.

Certainly none can draw a worthy one. … To be able to conceptualize an ideal of him – we can say with certainty: of all the available heads of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Christ none is worthy of the great character. All, at least that I have seen, are … either too human or too little so, without, however, being divine.74

The precarious balance Lavater requires in portrayals of Christ also necessitates the contrasting of opposites: human and divine, “Israelite” and “messianic”;75 Lavater explains that these distinctions must be maintained in order both to represent Jesus as he was and to intimate the fulﬁllment and expectation of his redemptive grace. Blaming art rather than physiognomy, Lavater argued that Jesus’ face is far greater than the meager outlines presented in his Reading faces, reading souls 129 book; had one of his artists actually seen him, the resulting (artistic) face would have conveyed Jesus’ greatness, glory, and moral beauty. In Jesus, Lavater “sees” not just the strength of Jesus as the force of holiness, but also the possibility of physiognomically inspired art to intimate that potency:

The power to act and to suﬀer – to topple to the ﬂoor, and Father for- give – to stand – Remove yourself Satan [Hebe Dich Satan] – and I have come to seek and bless the lost – a power to express this same [power] through simple approximate and unbroken lines – there is the trouble, there is the toil!76

Lavater’s belief in physiognomy – and its exposure of the power of the face to express the soul – enables him to reduce Christ’s salvation to artistic, anticipatory lines; (when done properly) physiognomical art can convey the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, between damnation and deliverance. Contrasting humanity with divinity, Christ’s religious background with his religious promise, Lavater invests Jesus’ face with the power to manifest religious truth and redemption even as he denies the ability of mere humanity to depict both. The (human) limitations of art (and equally as importantly, of spirit) prevent the highest form of physiognomy to realize itself; humanity must contend with approximations of Christ’s beauty. Thus, for Lavater, faith – in physiognomy, in Christian salvation – remains the crucial ingredient in the success of any artistic rendering and reading of Jesus; that success is tied, historically, to the ﬂourishing or decay of the physiognomic sense. Equating belief with skill, Lavater maintains that

the better the face of Christ, the bigger the belief in Christ. A beautiful face of Christ aﬀects belief in Christ. The Father can draw the Son through everything. Everything is a witness to Christ. … Whoever recognized Christ’s living face, saw in him the image of the Father, he believed and had sense for all truth and divinity. It was only lack of physiognomical sense that one did not believe in Christ.77

Blaming not just the cruciﬁxion but also blasphemy and the denial of Christ on this lack of physiognomical sensibility (he explains that those who did and do not believe were unable to see the divinity lodged in all the elements of his

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 expression, bone structure, and features), Lavater conflates Christianity with physiognomy. For him, the two are linked inextricably; in denying one, one denies the other: “with the rise and fall of Christianity rises and falls the physiognomical sense. With the rise and fall of Christianity rise and falls the beauty of paintings of Christ.”78 Depictions of Jesus highlight not just his divinity but the divine wisdom that separates humans from God and which granted humanity the ability to discern the difference. Marrying his Christo- logy with his science, Lavater throws his own lot in with Jesus so that physiognomy becomes as Christian a belief as faith in resurrection and 130 Reading faces, reading souls redemption. In the 35 different pictures of Jesus that follow, Lavater “proved” just how much belief affects the painting and the viewing of Jesus’ face. As he dwells on and judges the features of each example (“soulless eyebrows,” “lamb’sface,”79 “virginal frailty,”80 “unmanly nostrils,”81 “salacious eyes,”82 “common” upperlip,83 “visible Judaism,”84 “timid posture”85), Lavater peppers his text with theological certainties, using every occasion to reinforce the salvation (“eternal life”) that comes with belief in Jesus.86 The conjoining of physiognomy and Christianity requires faith in both; to disbelieve either is to betray one’s faithlessness in both.

Jewish faces: Pharisees, prophets, and sages Lavater’s union of Christianity and physiognomy naturally had negative implications for non-Christians and Christians who do not share his Protes- tant views. Physiognomy as he interpreted it was particularly unkind to Jews; as he contrasts Jesus’ sublimity with exemplars of immorality, Lavater draws upon a vocabulary that equates the wickedness of the traditional “enemies” of Christ with the ugly physical features the Church’s iconography endowed them. Similar to his homily against Judas, other biblical and historical Jewish ﬁgures who ignored or betrayed Jesus receive harsh physiognomical treatment; images of non-Christians are displayed and read with a noticeable lack Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016

Figure 3.5 Lavater lambasts the Pharisees and Sadducees of Remrandt’s Ecce Homo for their multitude of facial irregularities. Reading faces, reading souls 131 of sympathy and barely contained revulsion. In his reading of “Ecce Homo,” for instance, Lavater finds Rembrandt’s Pharisees and Sadducees “godless and wicked” and locates their immorality in the cast of their features and facial expressions (Figure 3.5): “which [face] is not depraved? Which would you not suppose to be physically ugly to the same degree as the moral ugliness of his character? Or, in other words, from which would you not assume the corruption of his heart from the degree of his ugliness?”87 Focusing on each face in turn, Lavater conflates physical feature with immoral conduct, reinforcing his thesis that the rejection of Jesus informs physical appearance as much as it affects moral comportment. One by one the figures are “base,”“despicable,” “envious,”“effeminate,”“rank,”“fat,”“unfeeling,”“adulterous,”“mockingly contemptuous,”“deplorable,”“wistful,” and “scoundrelous.”88 They outdo one another in their representational corruption: one has “perverse, false eyes and [an] open mouth,” his neighbor is called the “incendiary Pharisee” who could “inspire Satan,”89 his neighbor has “soulless hands” and is “full of cruel, tenacious, leathern stupidity.”90 Lavater seems almost at a loss to define all the corruption he finds in Rembrandt’s portrayal; at one point he asks rhet- orically “who wants to find the words to draw all the horror of the mal- iciousness?”91 Throughout his homily against these figures Lavater reminds his readers several times that they are Pharisees and Sadduccees, reinforcing the negative connection between immorality and ancient Jews and making clear a disconnect between Jesus and the Judaism of his time. This dis/con- nectedness evokes not just Lavater’s religious sentiments but the unspoken connection between New Testament opponents of Jesus and contemporary Jewish figures. As a collection of anti-Jewish caricatures and images, Lavater’s Fragments serve as an odd repository; he layers on the negative imagery and uses specific pictures that reinforce visual stereotypes (the face of a man he names a “randy goat” resembles Holbein’s Judas) (Figure 3.6). Yet his accompanying text often veers away from a full analysis, leaving instead an unexamined image to speak for itself (the word for “goat” in German [Bock] carries with it the connotation of stubbornness, Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016

Figure 3.6 Lavater’s “randy goat” shares similarities with Judas. 132 Reading faces, reading souls untrustworthiness and thievery).92 Lavater’s attitude towards Jews is seen perhaps more clearly in the range of pictures – the images he chooses and their setting within the volumes – in which known Jews are treated not necessarily as stock villains but rather as fundamentally flawed creatures who could not rise above the moral inconsistencies inherent in their faces. In the single portrait of the biblical Moses, which Lavater tucked into a discussion of the importance of the forehead as the “most unimaginable, safest monument of the fortress, residence and boundaries of the human spirit,”93 the biblical prophet appears with horns, a notable facial “feature” upon which Lavater does not remark. Although he appears with seven other figures, identified as “prophets, apostles, and saviors,” only Moses is named and Lavater finds the profile he chose wanting: “the long, and otherwise ordinary beard, [and] generally this … forehead are very common, the nose without any great character, the eye is bad, and the eyebrows are deplorable.”94 The “analysis” affects innocence; he employs the trick of distancing the author from his examples while allowing the negative imagery to speak for itself. Singling out Moses and including a depiction with horns without explaining, contextualizing, or historicizing either the model or the artist Lavater leaves his reader to make an overall judgment alone. Though he does not approve of the portrait, he neither supplies a more appropriate Moses example nor comments on the positive traits of his original figure (which he does for a myriad other figures throughout the four volumes). Instead, he intimates negativity through visual representation and distances himself from it in the text, thereby retaining a semblance of objectivity. Other unnamed characters who are alternately overtly or subtly identified as Jews are more explicitly negative, lending themselves to the conceptualization of stupidity, brutality, corruption, and betrayal. Lavater’s interest in Jews and Judaism – and the importance of both for his millenarian hopes and expectations – occupied much of the early part of his intellectual life. Even before the first volume of his Fragments came out in 1774, Lavater was already famous for his controversial conversion attempt aimed at Mendelssohn. Lavater had met Mendelssohn in the early 1760s, when he and his friend, the painter Henry Fuseli (Heinrich Füssli), were told it would be prudent for them to leave Zurich for a little while after they denounced a leading cleric for financial impropriety. In his travels through Europe, he stopped in Berlin twice, having at least three conversations with Mendelssohn.95 During the last of those conversations, in 1764, Lavater

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 pressed Mendelssohn to share with him his opinion of Christianity. Though it was a private conversation, its details were made public six years later. Lavater described the encounter in the preface to his German translation of a theological defense of Christianity by Charles Bonnet which he dedicated to Mendelssohn. Invoking their discussion, Lavater sought to convey a sense of intimacy in order to provide Mendelssohn the opportunity to fulfill what he thought was a mutual desire. Calling him “an Israelite in which there is nothing false” (an allusion to John 1:47), Lavater complimented Mendelssohn on his “deep insight,”“steadfast love of truth,”“uncompromising impartiality,” Reading faces, reading souls 133 and “conscientious attention to philosophy in general.” He begged Mendelssohn to read his translation of Bonnet’s text and judge it for himself. He adjured him to remember the “philosophical admiration” Mendelssohn (said he) had for the “moral character” of Jesus – told during “the happiest hour of my life,” Lavater exclaimed. He commanded Mendelssohn to “do what intelligence, love of truth, and honesty” require, indeed, to do “what Socrates would have done” and either accept the truth of Christianity or refute its contents.96 As other scholars of Lavater and Mendelssohn have noted, issuing a public challenge to the senior Mendelssohn to disprove Christianity or convert was both reckless and imprudent and typical of Lavater’s curious egotism, as it meant casting himself as, potentially, the man who converted the most famous Jew in Europe. Not only was Mendelssohn in a particularly vulner- able position in a society that left him entirely dependent on the mercy of the king for the privilege of residence – but also to propose to a Jew in the eighteenth century to denounce Christianity publicly was a major rupture of the religious tolerance that was part of the Enlightenment agenda. Instead it sounded suspiciously like the disputations of the Middle Ages. It seemed a choiceless choice either to insult Christianity or to repudiate Judaism; as a Jew and a rationalist, Mendelssohn wanted to do neither. Lavater’s challenge precipitated a crisis that signaled just how much Men- delssohn was an exception to the rule of the Christian majority in Germany at the time. In Alexander Altmann’s analysis of what has become “the Lava- ter Affair,” he describes Mendelssohn as something of a “thorn” in the side of Protestant theologians, largely because he represented what should have been an absolute impossibility: an Enlightened Jew. As noted earlier, Mendelssohn’s career and defense of Judaism evoked in response criticism from Christian and Deist figures, who cast Judaism as a religion that was legalistic, particular, unrelentingly backwards, superstitious, and unemancipated in regard to its founding biblical texts. Structurally, according to this line of thought, Judaism did not accommodate progress and rational criticism. Given the improbability of a Jewish rationalism, one had to ask about Mendelssohn’s “true” adherence to it: was his a merely polite hypocrisy behind which he was hiding his “real” identity as an “enlightened Christian” or agnostic? At the very least, many of Mendelssohn’s more religious colleagues thought he could – and should – be persuaded to accept a Unitarian Christianity. Alt- mann describes the prevailing Christian sentiment towards Mendelssohn as

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 though he had not yet seized the opportunity they had provided: “Should it not then be possible to alert him to the need to see the light? Did they not teach a purified understanding of Christianity that the enlightened philosopher Mendelssohn was bound to accept? Not having recognized Christianity as yet, he was, in their view, a mere deist. Yet he professed Judaism, and while they could have condoned his deism, his continued and pronounced Jewishness was a thorn in their flesh.”97 As Altmann has shown, Lavater’s challenge had not come completely out of the blue. Even so, it put Mendelssohn in the extremely uncomfortable 134 Reading faces, reading souls position of having to reject Christianity, which is why, before he replied, he consulted the Prussian government on whether his response would be censored.98 Lavater’s public challenge threatened to disrupt the delicate balance between an ambivalent tolerance of Mendelssohn’s Jewishness and disbelief in its genuineness. Though Mendelssohn understood all that was at stake, he also knew that Lavater’s dedication was motivated by a profound sense of urgency regarding Jews in general. A year before the dedication, Lavater published the first volume of Vistas of Eternity, in which he discussed not just the divinity of the physiognomical task but the inevitable role a conversion of the Jews would play in initiating the millennial kingdom of Christ. Utilizing the well-known trope from Revelations, Lavater expatiated on the glory of the next life, crowned by Christ’s return. In fact, this return would lead to the return of a theocratic state (revealing another tension between Lavater’s evangelism and the Enlightenment agenda) and satisfy Jewish messianic desire as well. In converting Mendelssohn, he expected that he would launch a full-scale conversion of all Jews. For Lavater the time felt ripe; in asking Mendelssohn to convert, thereby launching Jewish conversion en masse, Lavater would help facilitate both the Second Coming and the redemption of the world. Just as physiognomy was made synonymous with Christianity, so too Lavater’s act would prelude the second coming of Christ; both conveniently located Lavater near the center of universal history. As the necessary partner to that redemption, Mendelssohn was afforded a very specific and honored place – a place that Mendelssohn explicitly rejected. In the correspondence between the two men, it became excruciatingly clear that all of Lavater’s actions were meant as a means of furthering his understanding of God’s ultimate universal plan. Indeed, Lavater’s absolute obsession with God’s plan was one of the most enduring, and identifiable, aspects of his personality. The reputation most threatened by this exchange at first was Lavater’s; Bonnet himself attacked Lavater for his tactlessness. Yet, as Mendelssohn was shocked to learn, many of his enlightened Christian friends – and Bonnet himself – possessed a very atavistic Christian attitude towards Jews. After the intervention of quite a few mutual friends, a series of private letters, and several published responses to each other, the crisis was managed. Lavater apol- ogized, Mendelssohn avoided responding to the fundamental religious question of the truth of Christianity, and Lavater’s hope of a millennial conversion

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 was postponed. Lessing summed up the affair in a letter to his and Mendels- sohn’s mutual friend, Nicolai: “Lavater is an enthusiast, of the type that is worthy of a madhouse. He no longer makes a secret of the fact that he can perform miracles, in consequence of his opinion, that the gift of miracles is a mark of a true Christian.”99 But one year later, in the late fall of 1770, two young Jewish men who had been studying in Berlin wrote to Lavater, expressing their desire to study Christianity with him in particular and explaining their intention to visit Zurich. They required special permission to be there, which Lavater helped facilitate, since Zurich had expelled its last Reading faces, reading souls 135 Jews in 1634 (and would not allow any to live there until 1863). Over the course of the winter, the two met with him and finally decided to convert before Easter in 1771. In their initial letter, the two wrote that they sought him out not the least because of his “true and noble love for Christianity” but also because he had shown so much effort in proving the truth of Christianity to Jews. Suggesting that he was a gardener of good faith, they appealed to him to help them findthetruepath.“God who rewards all virtues,” they wrote, “will certainly not let this go unrewarded; for what virtue can be greater than to protect young plants that promise to bear good fruit but are unable to blossom because they are threatened by a hailstorm.”100 They were neither naïve nor apolitical; Lavater’s fame had received a major boost after the Mendelssohn affair. These two men gave Lavater hope that he had acted too quickly but not improperly. In January of 1771, Lavater wrote to Bonnet about the two, reporting that “they tell me, that if Moses were a Christian, some thousand Jews would follow him. Oh, one cannot hope for it. But God! For all those who believe, all things are possible.”101 Both Jews took the baptismal name “Johann” in honor of their mentor. Following their conversion, Lavater preached a particularly powerful and long sermon to his congregation. Praising God that “two young men out of the descendents of your servants and friends of Abraham, two out of so many thousand lost flocks of the house of Israel” had been taken into God’s “ranks through holy baptism and the power of the living Spirit that is Jesus Christ,” Lavater prayed that the two would set an example for other “Israelites” who were still unfortunately and unhappily ignorant of the loving embrace of Christianity.102 He exhorted his congregation to “celebrate the two, like the angels celebrate you in heaven.”103 Afterwards he sketched out what he called a “Plan for the Education/Teaching of Jewish Proselytes.”104 It is characteristic of Lavater’s mixture of missionary zeal and his purely theological rendering of physiognomy that he was able to maintain a cordial relationship with Mendelssohn, even as the intellectual divide broadened between them. In 1774, when the Jewish communities in Endingen and Lengnau (the only two communities permitted in Swiss territory) were threatened, Mendelssohn convinced Lavater to help thwart the expulsion order. The admiration Lavater had for Mendelssohn did not wane; indeed, he celebrates it exuberantly in the first volume of the Fragments. In the seventeenth fragment, entitled “Physiognomical Exercises for the Testing of the Physiog-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 nomical Spirit,” Lavater presents a series of faces grouped by intellectual and moral type. Displaying silhouettes of four “admirable” men, Lavater identiﬁes only Mendelssohn, about whose face he turns almost rhapsodic:

Can you guess this silhouette? I can hardly conceal it from you! It is far too precious to me! Far too pronounced! Can you say, can you hesitate a moment, whether you want to say “perhaps a dummy [Dummkopf]! A raw, tasteless soul!” Whomever could say so, could bear it that another said so, should close my book, throw it from you – and allow me to 136 Reading faces, reading souls

Figure 3.7 “Mendelssohn’s Silhouette” in Lavater’s Fragments.

refuse my thoughts that I do not make judgments against you. I feast my eyes on this outline! My glance dances down from this glorious arch of forehead to the sharp bones of the eyes. In this depth of eye sits a Socratic soul! The determination of the nose, the glorious transition from the nose to the upper lip – the height of both lips, without that one or the other hangs over, oh how all this harmonizes together, makes the divine truth of physiognomy itself meaningful and graphic to me. Yes, I see him, the son of Abraham, who will one day recognize and worship along with Plato and Moses – the cruciﬁed master of glory!105

Lavater’s pleasure, and his admiration, are clear; so profound is his love for Mendelssohn that he hyperbolically risks his entire thesis on the premise of Mendelssohn’s physiognomical silhouette and threatens those readers who do not see what he sees: Mendelssohn’s intelligence, his refinement, his “Socratic soul.” As the proof text of Lavater’s theory, Mendelssohn’s face is glorified; he is compared to Socrates, Plato, and Moses. Yet he references none of the deformities that we know Mendelssohn had. Instead Mendelssohn’s forehead, nose, lips, and eye sockets are described as attractive. Lavater blends moral and physical beauty and projects it onto an otherwise unremarkable silhouette. In beautifying Mendelssohn, Lavater reads into his face the same feeling he has for Jesus and Mendelssohn’s face proves the “divine truth of physiognomy” in much the same way as Socrates’ face did. Lavater’s beautification allows him to read into Mendelssohn’s face the attributes he thinks he has.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Tellingly, any mention of Mendelssohn’s Jewishness is absent despite being a topic that seemed so present in much of Lavater’s other writing. Through- out the four volumes – Lavater includes a different picture of Mendelssohn in the fourth – Lavater does little to call attention to Mendelssohn’s specific religiosity. In terms of his understanding of Mendelssohn, the Jew who did not convert, Lavater treats him to intellectual and social grace that his face would not necessarily suggest upon first glance. Lavater has only praise for Mendelssohn: “[Who sees] in Mendelssohn, in no way born to athletics, his luminous understanding [and] fully incorruptible polish?”106 Reading faces, reading souls 137 The importance of Lavater’s ugly The enthusiasm with which Lavater praises Mendelssohn does not extend to Jews generally nor does Lavater make any positive comments about Men- delssohn’s religious conviction or background. Instead, given Lavater’s synthesis of Christianity and physiognomy, it was inevitable that the judgment of physical appearance caught within the poles of the Beautiful and the Ugly would result in a form of religious discrimination, coded in the visual appa- ratus of his book. In his discussion of other religions, Lavater remains fairly neutral about Judaism, defining it as “belief in Israel’s God” and “Old Tes- tament law.”107 But that description is preceded by an uncited quotation from one of Lavater’s “correspondents.” Employing the same method as he did in his introduction, Lavater quotes his source without context and provides no commentary, argumentation, or facilitation, allowing them instead to speak “directly” to his readers.

It seems peculiar to me that the Jews have carried the symbol of their fatherland, the Orient, in all the four corners of the world; I mean the short, dark, crimped hair and the brown facial color. The quick speech, brisk and hurried in all their dealings. I believe that the Jews have more bile over all than other people.108

The writer is Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–92) with whom Lavater was very close; in the fourth volume, Lavater includes the same quote, identifying its author and adding an extra line: “to the national character of the Jewish faces I reckon sharp chins and big lips with determinedly drawn middle line.”109 In his discussion of “national characteristics,” Lavater includes a long footnote about national “smells,” which he attributes to “nutrition, manner, blood and the nature of sweat glands.”“It is well known that Moors, Calmucks and Jews, even those who are kept most cleanly, have a certain peculiar national smell.”110 Most Jews – and Lavater portrays only male Jews – are shown in faces encased in full beards, the defining distinction of male Jews in the eighteenth century. Required by both Jewish and civil law the beard was a legal hot button for defining difference.111 For example, in 1748, Frederick II of Prussia (1712–86) issued a decree forbidding Jewish men from shaving their beards lest they be indistinguishable from the general populace, part of his settlement Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 of a dispute within the Jewish community.112 Lavater’s eighteenth-century audience would have immediately picked up on the cultural reference of the beard. An otherwise innocuous picture of a male Jew in Renaissance costume is identified as a “tough-minded rabbi” but it is sandwiched between an Indian “philosopher” who is “tranquil and superstitious,” a young “soft- minded” Turk, and an Indian woman with a “phlegmatic sensuality.”113 Throughout all the volumes Lavater – consciously but covertly – uses a vocabulary of the temperaments to make his opinions very evident. Costumes 138 Reading faces, reading souls of those illustrated go without mention but clearly make up a context which Lavater’s readers would not fail to recognize. Negative images of Jews, Turks, and Arabs are used without specific comment, but they are manipulated to create a constant refrain of negative reinforcement against the Northern European norms into which Lavater translates the “natural language” of God. Lavater either assumes his audience will know his covert meaning or is unwittingly passing on his own assumptions of cultural and religious depravity. Because Lavater’s book spawned a mania for physiognomy, these stereotypes were spread among the educated population and became a sort of encyclopedia to which novelists, essayists, and artists referred. At every sale, every book club meeting, and every social gathering the prejudices that Lavater encased spread like wildfire. He encoded in the pictures an entire system of nonverbal prejudice, a way of portraying specific faces negatively and of setting up a hierarchy of “moral” qualities based on his understanding of people’s looks. And because physiognomy was so terribly compelling, Lavater’s mixture of sheer subjective impression and precision – the mention, for instance, of the “middle line” of those big Jewish lips, seemingly deriving from the kind of acute and extensive observation that a botanist would put into the description of the flower of a particular species – was drawn upon, consciously or indirectly, to justify a host of bigotries. One could look at the differences between two translations of Lavater’s original description of Judas to prove the point. The first we encountered above in the first edition of the German text: “had Judas appeared so, as Holbein drew him, Christ would have certainly never chosen him for an apostle – such a face could not have endured a week in Christ’s company.”114 The second comes from the popular English translation by Reverend C. Moore that appeared in 1797 (Moore translated it from the first French edition, which appeared in 1781–1873):

Had we never been told that this is the portrait of Judas Iscariot, after Holbein, had we never seen a face that bore the least resemblance to it, a primitive feeling would warn us at once to expect from it neither goodness, generosity, tenderness, or elevation of mind. The sordid Jew would excite our aversion, though we were able neither to compare him with any other, nor to give him a name.115

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 The movement – from criticism of Holbein’s art (for not capturing what was holy, i.e., “apostle-like” in Judas) to condemnation of the figure itself (“sordid Jew”) – exposes the ways in which Lavater’s physiognomy was used – in ways he may or may not have intended – to codify negative assessments of physical appearance. Holbein’s Judas was rejected by Lavater but the sentiment he affected was retained and highlighted by Moore. In providing the tools for creating a system that encodes moral depravity into beards, chins, noses, and eyes, Lavater set loose a monster that he could not control. It was not Lavater’s description, but his depictions that caused the most potential harm. Reading faces, reading souls 139 He had many critics, most of whom agreed that physiognomy had some merit but all of whom refused to accept the unrelenting rigidity of personal judgment. Lichtenberg, who was – like Mendelssohn – short and hunchbacked, is the most well-known respondent to Lavater’s work, though Lavater was also severely criticized in many reviews and in many private letters, including by Nicolai and Mendelssohn. What concerned Lichtenberg was not Lavater himself, but the massive potential of physiognomy to cause serious and irreparable harm. While it is certainly not fair to attribute to Lavater any hint of the racially based physiognomy that would later rage in Europe, and it is equally as unfair to suggest that he could anticipate how physiognomy would be used so perversely against those he does not even mention, he cannot be excused entirely. Like other Enlightenment figures who mixed science and desire, Lavater turned physiognomy into a socio-theological sport that encouraged everyone to bare their souls – and – much more insidiously – gave the bigotry of first impressions and cultural prejudices a vocabulary of pseudo- precision, thus introducing natural “inequalities” into an Enlightenment discourse that had been originally engaged in a massive critique of social inequality. Such was his commitment to his principle that he suggested the idea of separating out the ugly children of ugly parents, in order to educate them separately from the rest of the population and to make sure that they intermarried.

In the fifth, sixth generation, you will have more and more beautiful people (if no special incident pushes in between) not only in their facial features, in the firmness of the bone formation of their faces, in the whole body, in everything! Then truly in society of other virtues and placidity, proper industriousness, temperance, cleanliness; – and some concern for these things in upbringing – true beauty of the flesh, color, shapeliness, freedom, cheer will accrue – and the ugliness, illness, sickliness, etc., must certainly also abate, because all of these virtues bring with them and promote health and free growth of limbs.116

The horror of Lavater’s beauty eugenics was not lost on Lichtenberg, who mocked that Lavater’s plan would encourage society to hang ugly children even before they had a chance to commit whatever sin they wore on their faces. Even Lichtenberg, however, never imagined that 150 years later, a civilized European nation would hang children precisely for bearing the wrong

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 ethnic facial features. It is usually in this vein that scholars tend to connect Lavater to the nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences, in which physiognomy figures at every turn in anthropology, biology, criminology, and aesthetics to make concrete the correlation between facial features, national characteristics, and moral potential. This turn represents a darker, more ominous redefinition of Ugliness. But Lavater was only one voice and before physiognomy gained the popular purchase it did, it shared popular space with an equally influential form of representation in portraiture. As Mendelssohn became the test case for Lavater’s theory, he also served as a frequent model to some of 140 Reading faces, reading souls the most prolific and important portrait artists of the German Enlightenment. Thus he becomes a very useful case study for the exploration of a more positive application of aesthetic principles. It is to artistic renderings of Mendelssohn that we now turn our attention.

Notes 1 Johann Kaspar Lavater, Letter to Jakob Ludwig Passavant (1751–1827) written on May 10–11, 1783, in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, FA Lavater Manuscript 577, No. 40. 2 For an interesting and carefully detailed history of physiognomy see Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3 Fragments, I:5a. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 4 Ibid., I:33. 5 Ibid., I:59. 6 Ibid., I:57. 7 Ibid., I:39. 8 Ibid., I:59. 9 See T. Loveday and E. S. Forster “Preface,” to “Physiognomica,” The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, Vol. VI (London: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 52. 10 Aristotle, “Physiognomics,” trans. T. Loveday and E. S. Forster, The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. I, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 805a18–805a19, p. 1237. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 806a8–806a12, p. 1238. 13 Ibid., 806b4–806b5, p. 1239. 14 Based on comparisons between humans and animals, the author diﬀerentiated between the genders as well as between domesticated and wild species. The lion, for instance, is male (because of its mouth and body size, not to mention its “generous” and “liberal” soul) whereas the leopard is “more” female (because it is small and brave, although its soul is “mean and thievish”). Ibid., 809b37–810a8 and 810a9–810a13, p. 1244. 15 See Daniel McLean, “The Socratic Corpus: Socrates and Physiognomy,” Socrates from Antiquity to Enlightenment, M. Trapp, ed. (NY: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), p. 67. 16 Quoted from McLean, “The Socratic Corpus.” Zopyrus’ comment is originally found in Cicero, de Fato. The phrase is “stupidum … et bardum … [et] mulierosum,” p. 67. 17 Ibid.,p.68. 18 Ibid.,p.71. 19 Ibid.,p.72. 20 Louise George Clubb, Giambattista Della Porta, Dramatist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 University Press, 1965), p. 24. 21 Ibid.,p.25. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 26. Della Porta’s preface may have been lip service paid primarily to get his text out of the hands of the censors (who held it for three years before allowing it to be published). In a later text, Clubb explains, della Porta continued to attest to this theory that humans are “directed not by astral influences but by elements which compose [the] body and which also determine the various characters of plants and stars. Human beings and heavenly bodies are all part of a vast system of signatures. By reading the natural signs, an expert can foretell the Reading faces, reading souls 141 future to which the indicated tendencies will lead, provided that they are not overruled by free will,” p. 36. Della Porta’s book influenced a generation of physiognomists, including the English physician Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), who made popular the theory that people’s faces indicated a set of “signs” or “characters” that exposed the inner self. It was Browne who coined the term “caricature,” taking it from the Italian caricare “to load” (as in to load a picture within hidden meaning) and used it to provide physiognomy with a scientific rather than religious vocabulary. See Lavater’s discussion of the tendencies of the human character in Fragments, I:150–52. 24 Addison, The Spectator, No. 86. Friday, June 8, 1711. 25 Ibid. 26 Fragments, I:7. Emphasis his. 27 Ibid., I:11. 28 Ibid., I:17. 29 Ibid., I:18. 30 Ibid., I:18–19. 31 Ibid., I:58. 32 Ibid., I:52. 33 Ibid., I:59. 34 Ibid., I:11. 35 Ibid., I:17. 36 Ibid., I:15. 37 Ibid., III:51. 38 Ibid., III:63. 39 Ibid., III:65–83. See Lichtenberg, “On dog’s tails.” 40 Ibid., IV:59. 41 Ibid., II:64,70,75,77. 42 Ibid., II:64. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., II:65. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., II:66. 48 McLean, “The Socratic Corpus,” p. 73. 49 Siegfried Frey, “Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face,” in The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. Ellis Shookman (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), p. 73. 50 Fragments, I:a2.5. 51 Ibid., I:a3.5. 52 Frey, “Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face,” pp. 72–73. 53 John Graham, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas (Berne/Frankfurt/Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1979), p. 62. See also Ellis Shookman, “Pseudo-Science, Social Fad, Literary Wonder: Johann Caspar Lavater and the Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Art of Physiognomy,” The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, Ellis Shookman, ed. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), p. 2. 54 Frey, “Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face,” p. 88. 55 Fragments, II:161. 56 Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. from last Paris edition, Rev. C. Moore (London: Symonds, 1797), 3 volumes. I:3. 57 Freedman, A Poisoned Chalice, p. 96. 58 Johann Caspar Lavater, Aussichten der Ewigkeit (Zurich: bey Orel, Geßner, Füe- slin und Comp., 1773) reprinted in Johann Caspar Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke in 142 Reading faces, reading souls historisch-kritischer Ausgabe I, Ursula Caflisch-Schnetzler, ed. (Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2001), II:453. 59 Fragments, I:47. 60 Thus Lavater capitalizes on Spalding’s idea of Menschenbestimmung and the self- improvement allowed by the eighteenth-century aesthetic tradition and rejects Mendelssohn’s idea of redeeming the Ugly by perfect representation. 61 Fragments, I:63. 62 Ibid., I:64. 63 Although the audience that took up the fad of physiognomy included many women, for Lavater, the physiognomist is clearly a male. 64 Fragments, I:5–6. 65 Johann Casper Lavater to Daniel Chodowiecki, 11. Juli 1773; Chodowiecki Briefwechsel (Anm. 2), S. 59f. quoted by Thomas Kirchner in “Chodowiecki, Lavater und die Physiognomiedebatte in Berlin,” Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801): Kupferstecher, Illustrator, Kaufmann, Ernst Hinrichs and Klaus Zernack, eds. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, XX:107. 66 Daniel Chodowiecki on Johann Caspar Lavater, September 1773, in Kirchner, “Chodowiecki, Lavater und die Physiognomiedebatte in Berlin,” p. 62f. 67 Fragments, I:79. 68 Ibid., I:80. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., I:83. 71 Ibid., I:84. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., I:91. 74 Ibid., IV:433. 75 Ibid., IV:434. 76 Ibid. The final phrase of Lavater’s sentence –“hoc opus, hic labor”–comes from the Aeneid, Book 6, Verse 190, as a part of the Sybil’s instructions to Aeneas. Emphasis, his. 77 Ibid., IV:435. 78 Ibid., IV:437. 79 Ibid., IV:439. 80 Ibid., IV:440. 81 Ibid., IV:441. 82 Ibid., IV:442. 83 Ibid., IV: 443. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., IV:444. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., I:86. 88 Ibid., I:87. 89 Ibid., I:88. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 90 Ibid., I:89. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., I:78. The phrase is “[e]in geiler Bock!” While bockig means stubborn, the connection with libido (with the use of the word geil) evokes the figure of the faun, a symbol associated with satanic lasciviousness. 93 Ibid., I:124. 94 Ibid. 95 See E. J. Engel, “Lavater, Mendelssohn, Lichtenberg,” Affinities: Essays in German and English Literature: Dedicated to the Memory of Oswald Wolff (1897–1968), R. W. Last, ed. (London: Oswald Wolff, 1971), p. 188. Reading faces, reading souls 143 96 Lavater to Mendelssohn, “Zuschrift der Bonnetischen Untersuchung der Beweise für das Christenthum an Herrn Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin,” quoted in Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke in historisch-kritischer Ausgabe, Martin E. Hirzel, ed. (Zurich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung), II:231–34. 97 Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 203. 98 Rolf-Bernhard Essig, Der offene Brief: Geschichte und Funktion einer publizistischen Form von Isokrates bis Günter Grass (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000), p. 125. 99 Quoted in Karl Pestalozzi and Horst Wiegelt, Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen: Zugänge zu Johann Kaspar Lavater (Gottingen: Vandenhoeckund Ruprecht, 1994), p. 248. 100 Levi Pinkus Sachs and A. B. E. Fränkel to Lavater on November 18, 1770. Quoted in Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke, II:187–88. 101 Johann Caspar Lavater to Charles Bonnet, Luginbühl-Weber, January 31, 1771, I, pp. 105–6. Quoted in Johann Caspar Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke, II:188–89. Emphasis, his. 102 Johann Caspar Lavater, “Predigt bey der Taufe zweyer Israeliten,” in Sämtliche kleinere prosaische Schriften vom Jahr 1763–1783 (Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1987). Originally published in Gelegenheits Predigt (Winterthur: Heinrich Steiner und Comp., 1784), II:113–14. 103 Lavater, “Predigt bey der Taufe zweyer Israeliten,” p. 157. 104 See Lavater’s Ausgewählte Werke, III:188. The Plan zum Unterricht der Jüdischen Proselÿten [Proslyten] was found in manuscript form in a private collection in Zurich after Lavater’s death. 105 Fragments, I:243–44. Emphasis his. 106 Ibid., II:53. 107 Ibid., III:231. 108 Ibid., III: 98. 109 Ibid., IV:274. 110 Ibid., IV:268. 111 Elliott Horowitz, “The New World and the Changing Face of Europe,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 28:4 (1997), p. 1182ff. See also, Elliott Horowitz, “The Early Eighteenth Century Confronts the Beard: Kabbalah and Jewish Self-Fashioning, Jewish History, 8:1–2 (1994), pp. 95–115. 112 See “Prussia” in Encyclopedia Judaica, Volume 13 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972ff) and the account in Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 97 and footnotes 32 and 33, p. 777. 113 Fragments, IV:306–8. 114 Ibid., I:80. 115 Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. from last Paris edition, Rev. C. Moore (London: Symonds, 1797), I:168–69. 116 Fragments, I:75–76.

Bibliography Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Addison, Joseph, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Altmann, Alexander, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1973). Aristotle, “Physiognomics,” trans. T. Loveday and E. S. Forster, The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. I, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Clubb, Louise George, Giambattista Della Porta, Dramatist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). 144 Reading faces, reading souls

Engel, E. J. “Lavater, Mendelssohn, Lichtenberg,” Affinities: Essays in German and English Literature: Dedicated to the Memory of Oswald Wolff (1897–1968),R.W. Last, ed. (London: Oswald Wolff, 1971), pp. 187–205. Essig, Rolf-Bernhard, Der offene Brief: Geschichte und Funktion einer publizistischen Form von Isokrates bis Günter Grass (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000). Freedman, Jeffrey, A Poisoned Chalice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Frey, Siegfried, “Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face,” The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, Ellis Shookman, ed. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), pp. 64–103. Graham, John, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas (Berne/Frankfurt/Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1979). Hirzel, Martin, ed., Johann Caspar Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke in historisch-kritischer Ausgabe, Vol. III (Zurich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, n.d.). Horowitz, Elliott, “The Early Eighteenth Century Confronts the Beard: Kabbalah and Jewish Self-Fashioning, Jewish History, 8:1–2 (1994), pp. 95–115. ——“The New World and the Changing Face of Europe,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 28:4 (1997), pp. 1181–1201. Kirchner, Thomas, “Chodowiecki, Lavater und die Physiognomiedebatte in Berlin,” Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801): Kupferstecher, Illustrator, Kaufmann, Ernst Hinrichs and Klaus Zernack, eds. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, Vol. 22, pp. 101–42. Lavater, Johann Caspar, Aussichten der Ewigkeit (Zurich: bey Orel, Geßner, Füeslin und Comp., 1773). ——Gelegenheits Predigt (Winterthur: Heinrich Steiner und Comp., 1784). ——Essays on Physiognomy, trans. from last Paris edition, Rev. C. Moore (London: Symonds, 1797), 3 volumes. ——“Predigt bey der Taufe zweyer Israeliten,” Sämtliche kleinere prosaische Schriften vom Jahr 1763–1783 (Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1987), pp. 107–64. ——Ausgewählte Werke in historisch-kritischer Ausgabe,ed.UrsulaCaflisch-Schnetzler (Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2001). Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, “Fragment von Schwänzen” (1777). Loveday, T. and E. S. Forster, “Preface,” to “Physiognomica,” The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, Vol. VI (London: Clarendon Press, 1913). McLean, Daniel, “The Socratic Corpus: Socrates and Physiognomy,” Socrates from Antiquity to Enlightenment, M. Trapp, ed. (NY: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), pp. 65–88. Pestalozzi, Karl and Horst Wiegelt, Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen: Zugänge zu Johann Kaspar Lavater (Gottingen: Vandenhoeckund Ruprecht, 1994). Porter, Martin, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). “Prussia,” Encyclopedia Judaica, Volume 13 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972ff), Lavater, IV: 306–8. Shookman, Ellis, “Pseudo-Science, Social Fad, Literary Wonder: Johann Caspar Lavater and the Art of Physiognomy,” The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, Ellis Shookman, ed. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), pp. 1–24. Weigelt, Horst, Johann Kaspar Lavater: Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991). 4 The Ugly made Beautiful The meaning and appearance of Mendelssohn

I observed some fewe of those Jewes especially some of the Levantines to bee such goodly and proper men, that then I said to my selfe our English proverbe: To looke like a Jewe (whereby is meant sometimes a weather beaten warp- faced fellow, sometimes a phreneticke and lunaticke person, sometimes one discontented) is not true. For indeed I noted some of them to be most elegant and sweete featured persons, which gave me occasion the more to lament their religion.1

Eine ganze Esopische Gestalt hat der Jude, Schriftsteller und Kaufmann Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin der so tief als Leibnitz sieht, so gross als Plato denkt, so witzig als Pope redet, so schön als Addison schreibt, so fromm als Boerhave lebt.2

One of the peculiarities of Lavater’s book is the trust he put in pictorial representation. In the Fragments, images formed a data set that provided a background for the readings of faces. Even at the time, contemporaries like Lichtenberg noticed the methodological eccentricity of operating from a basis of faces that were idealized in a certain pose by the painter or sculptor, and which, further, created a self-enclosed system of reference that depended on paintings and drawings of ﬁgures like Socrates or Jesus from a corpus of visual images made over 1,000 years after their deaths. And yet, the use of visual images to represent types does have a kernel of truth: it does represent cultural norms. In this respect, Lavater can be seen to have done something diﬀerent than what he thought he was doing: he showed how visual images and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 their interpretation demonstrate the projection of societal expectations upon bodies, faces, and peoples from a culturally determined viewpoint. This chapter takes up that thread and continues to examine the complex associations between visual and social mores forged (or at least reconfigured) in the eighteenth-century association of appearance and morality. That connection comes together iconically in the specific case of representations of Moses Mendelssohn, who embodied – literally and figuratively – the ambiguities inherent in the late eighteenth-century understanding of ugliness. 146 The Ugly made Beautiful During Mendelssohn’s life, he was acclaimed as a German Socrates, even by Lavater, who first embarrassed Mendelssohn by trying to convert him publicly, and then again by praising him excessively in his Fragments. Yet, Mendelssohn was famous not only for being a wise Jew, but an ugly one; as a hunchback, his body was stunted and short, and he had a prominent nose and thick lips. Indeed much of Mendelssohn historiography purposefully draws attention to his “ugliness.” As noted earlier, in his 1862 biography of Mendelssohn, Meyer Kayserling described him as a

small, weakly ﬁgure, unsightly and deformed. In contrast to the rest of his body, his head was very well-formed, his forehead was high; in proﬁle there was something antique about the face, and out from his deep dark eyes, his higher spirit and his splendid mind shined.3

Kayserling’s description draws from the stereotypical paradoxes that the Mendelssohn narrative embodied among liberal German thinkers: a Jew who arose among Christians to garner almost universal respect, he was also physically deficient, even as the greatness of his spirit was unmistakably mirrored in his face. Mendelssohn’s “ugliness” became a useful trope: it stood in as a foil to his intelligence and showcased the disadvantages under which he lived. Yet, as this book has attempted to show, the word “ugly” is fraught with impossible to bracket implicit and explicit connotations. Repeated assessments of Mendelssohn’s unattractive physicality beg the question of why it matters; by certain lights, Kant’s appearance (he was only five feet two inches tall4) could be taken to be deficient. Hume was fat.5 Lichtenberg was also a hunchback. Kayserling’s appraisal of the disconnect between Mendelssohn’s “unsightly” appearance and his “higher spirit” and “splendid mind” articulates a paradox in the imaging and imagining of Mendelssohn specifically, yet it works as a trope only by collaborating in the suppositions behind that paradox by calling attention to his appearance as less than his “well-formed” head, “high” forehead, and “antique” face promised. Though his “ugliness” may reference the irregularity and asymmetry in his body, references to it seem to belie the negative associations his contemporaries (and our own) have with calling someone ugly. Under the icon of the wise but ugly Jew, a problem arises concerning the intersection of cultural norms and aesthetic norms. What is at stake in retaining the idea of Mendelssohn’s ugliness?

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 In recent decades, intellectual historians have become increasingly aware of the importance of visual culture and the need for tools of analysis that will break with the positivist notion of “the doctrine of immaculate perception,” as Chris Jenks puts it; that is, the notion that what is visually given is in some kind of one to one correspondence with what is actually there.6 In understanding how visual cultures are produced, historians have recognized that visual representations accrue different meanings under different semiotic circumstances and that those meanings are not assumed passively by the observer but are interactively produced among artists, copyists, connoisseurs, popular The Ugly made Beautiful 147 audiences, sponsoring institutions, the print media, and the like. Especially in modernity, motifs, styles, subject matter, and the very quantity of the diffusion of images engage with what might seem like the most abstract of philosophical, political and aesthetic issues; they generate a powerful rhetoric that stylizes and determines perception. In this light, it is important to return to the question of ugliness with regard to Mendelssohn, whose image has received little scholarly notice.7 That noticeable lacuna in Mendelssohn studies reflects the general trend that Richard I. Cohen noted in his monumental study of Jewish art: “the visual image of Jewish life has often been overlooked in the study of the Jewish past, reflecting the centrality of the written text and Jewish literary tradition.”8 Indeed because of the sheer volume of Mendelssohn’s literary output (as witnessed in the first 23 volumes of the comprehensive Gesammelte Schriften Jubiliäumsausgabe) the value and significance of Mendelssohn iconography has gone relatively unnoticed. This chapter takes advantage of Cohen’s debunking of the myth that Jews did not have, use, or participate in visual art prior to modernity and his rich explanation of the context in which portraiture figured in Jewish life. Even more so, it builds on his description by investigating the way Mendelssohn portraits reflect the trends of popular art (and commerce) in Friedrich II’s Prussia. The pictorial representations, while they may, on one level, simply provide us with evidence of Mendelssohn’s physical appearance, provide us, on other levels, with the way that appearance bore a social meaning. This study of eighteenth-century projections of (and later rejection of) “standards” of beauty and ugliness has made it clear that the project of objectively defining either was fed by suspect imperial, denominational, and racial currents that continually generated unresolvable contradictions with the aesthetic domains to which they sought to bring principles of consistency and coherence. Therefore it is hardly surprising – but well worth noting – that Mendelssohn’s image should serve as a very ambiguous limit case. Mendelssohn’s pictorial appearances inscribe both the flexibility of the social coding of his image and the varying intentions to which the image responded.

The paradox As a Jew, Mendelssohn was subject to the legal restrictions of Prussia and the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 cultural bigotries that dominated Christian Europe. Mendelssohn’s reception in the “republic of letters” was coded by negative perceptions of Jews, which were realized in negative depictions of Jewish physicality and negative comments on Jewish behavior. Being the “good” Jew – and the Jew with privileges – Mendelssohn puts into question the structure of reflexive anti-Judaism among the educated and uneducated class. As “Mendelssohn,” however, his influence had little to do with his physical presence. Paradoxically, given the anomaly of his fame and popularity, Mendelssohn has often been called the representative Jew of the German Enlightenment, even though, in reality, his 148 The Ugly made Beautiful prominence in intellectual circles and his effectiveness in influencing sympathetic non-Jews with whom he associated marks him as a clearly atypical eighteenth-century Prussian Jew. The respect of his contemporaries for his intelligence, philosophical clarity, and integrity may have, in his case, allowed for the suspension of certain legal proscriptions against Jewish aliens living within Prussian territory,9 but it did not annul those proscriptions. The admiration shown to him by his contemporaries does not fit the traditional iconography of Jewish behavior that marked both medieval and early modern non-Jewish representation of Jews.10 Because so much of the received understanding of Mendelssohn relies on the impressions of his public reputation, his fame cannot be divorced from the general (i.e., non-Jewish) curiosity generated by his continued and publicized fealty to Judaism. Yet most portraits disconnect Mendelssohn the idea from the physical reality of Mendelssohn the man even while including the hunchback, the stunted body, the dark hair, and the beard. That divorce reflects, in part, the reception of Judaism by German liberal culture and the erasure of the circumstances under which it existed in Germany and Christian Europe. In doing so, these images foster an impression that corresponds neither to the physicality of Mendelssohn’s misshapen body nor to the social reality of Jews in eighteenth-century Prussia. The disjuncture between person and personage is thrown into stark relief in the art of portrait painting. Richard Wendorf has argued in his study of biography and portraiture that in examining the subject and his/her context,

we need to focus as well on the relations between artists and their subjects or patrons. But we can also gauge these conceptual changes by inter- preting representational form as implicit theory of characterization. Pose, setting, format … [t]he formal choices writers and painters make may well reveal their attitudes toward social, political, or professional dec- orum, but they are also tied to epistemological issues, to the question of how human character is to be understood and, ultimately, to the problem posed by contemporary philosophy whether it can be understood at all.11

The hidden complexity of the Mendelssohn portraits exposes far more about the particular meanings encoded in the records of his appearance (given the myriad ways that meaning was and is interpreted12) than the way he actually

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 looked. Though this exchange may seem paradoxical – his actual appearance is, of course, only accessible through those portraits and what we can deduce from written and visual testimony – it nevertheless forces one to question the truthfulness of the representations themselves. But neither simple imitation nor apolitical representation, according to Wendorf, portraiture is and must be an intentional approach by the portraitist to depict the physical appearance of the portrayed that consciously and unconsciously assembles itself from different technical and semiotic variables. (Think of Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe as an example of the way an artist can represent The Ugly made Beautiful 149 appearance while simultaneously manipulating that appearance for aesthetic gain.) The artist’s method of interpretation plays as large a role in the success of the picture as does the notability of the subject’s personality. Impinging on the weave of feelings that determine the impression of the artist to the subject, the subject to the artist, and both to the observer is the dissemination of the portrait as a commodity with an exchange value that is realized both in the market itself and in cultural capital. Thus, the variety in characterizations of Mendelssohn plays more on the interpretations of his situation and his larger meaning in German and/or Jewish culture than on the various alterations in his physical body. Celebrated as “the Jewish Luther” and “the juif de Berlin,” Mendelssohn presented a quandary for Enlightenment circles that clung to Christian privilege: he was a “good Jew.” Given the opposition that we have traced between the semantics of “good” and that of “ugly,” as well as that of “Judaism” and of “rational,” the combination in Mendelssohn was a charged event: Men- delssohn’s person touched on the complexities of contemporary taste and views toward Jewishness and physical deformity while his thought touched on the “mixed feelings” that he diagnosed as inextricable to aesthetic sensations and judgments. Due to the high level of his work in the 1760s and his association with figures such as Lessing and Nicolai his fame grew and he became a figure of curiosity and, thus, a subject fit for portraiture. His visage – like those of other prominent philosophical and literary figures – appeared on canvas, in marble, on porcelain, in print, on medallions, and in sketchbooks. Like Lessing and Lavater, Mendelssohn’s face was sketched and painted by Christian Bernhard Rode (1725–97), Anton Graff (1736–1813), Adrian Zingg (1734–1816), Chodowiecki, and Johann Frisch (1737–1815), some of the most well-known painters of the German Enlightenment. He seemed to embody philosophical morality, religious irrationality, and physical ugliness, thus presenting something of a challenge to artists who sought to represent both his (physical) ugliness and his (intellectual) beauty.13 The disjuncture between his appearance and his status created a certain anxiety – a state of mind that Mendelssohn himself theorized as mixed feelings – in the pictorial expression of his “ugliness” and religiosity. Con- temporary portraits privilege his intellectual prominence over both his physicality and his religion, as though representing the liberal solution to the post-Christian discomfort over the presence of practicing Jews in Europe:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 intelligence would soften and dissolve the “ugliness” of their practices. His participation in that license, indeed, his contribution to it, helps underscore the awareness he had in fostering an image of an exemplary Jew. Indeed, Cohen contends that Jews “adopted and learned from their fellow citizens that activity on behalf of Jews, or study of what seemed uncultured and unaesthetic, was as legitimate a pursuit as the study of other cultures’ ways.”14 Because portraits were valued for representing what Mendelssohn himself represented – a gracious spirit and a keen intellect – they project an idealized image that provides the context for Kayserling’s assessment that 150 The Ugly made Beautiful “Mendelssohn’s outer appearance contrasted starkly with his inner nature.”15 Cohen’s analysis thus provides an important context for Mendelssohn’s active and passive participation in the speciﬁcally applied aesthetics of the portraits. In agreeing to be portrayed, Mendelssohn allowed artists to smooth out the rougher edges of his appearance with the sentiments his reputation generated; he became the ugly Jew beautiﬁed. There was nothing neutral about glossing the disjuncture between appearance and status: as artists attempted to “perfect” within a mimetic aesthetic the “realistic” portrait of the man, their realism was actually a transaction that incorporated the perceived needs of the viewer as both the sitter and the artist imagined them.

Mendelssohn as art We recognize Mendelssohn’s appearance primarily through certain portraits that – over the two and a quarter centuries since his death – have constructed what are now familiar images of him. Painted by the well-known artists of the German Enlightenment, the “data” of Mendelssohn’s eyes, nose, beard, lips, forehead, hair, wig, and hunchback appears remarkably variable. Just how much they resemble his actual physical appearance is diﬃcult to assess. Marcia Pointon has argued that

[l]ikeness … is a shifting commodity, not an absolute point of reference; it is an idea to be annexed, rather than a standard by which to measure reality. The notion that portraits “attempt to render a speciﬁc, existent element of reality, a single human being” is highly problematic in most if not all cases if we take into account the ontological problems associated with human identity and its perception. … 16

The shifting images of Mendelssohn reinforce the idea that resemblance can be neither objective nor permanent. Yet in the paintings and etchings there is a rather remarkable diversity of ideas on how Mendelssohn should look. Rode, Graﬀ, Zingg, Chodowiecki, and Frisch created an iconography of Mendelssohn, even as they portrayed him remarkably diﬀerently from one another. As was common at the time, those portraits were copied and sold as keepsake pieces, used as frontispieces for various books, and collected avidly by his admirers. In creating a marketable Mendelssohn, they imbued their

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 portraits with a sentimentality that highlighted the ideals of the late eighteenth century, particularly those suggested by Mendelssohn’s reputation: erudition, civility, modesty, and self-consciousness. Their different portraits suggest that his image was determined at least by what he represented as by “likeness.” Even when portraying a more “natural,” realistic likeness of his “ugliness” (as was the case with Chodowiecki), the case of seeing what one wants to see – that is, of projecting onto an image that which one expects to find – holds true in the Mendelssohn prints. Though all the portraits cut off below the shoulder – emphasizing bust over body – not all support Kayserling’s The Ugly made Beautiful 151 observation that Mendelssohn’s head contradicts his frame. To borrow from Cohen’s paraphrase of Richard Brilliant, “Of the image of [Mendelssohn] it could be said … it ‘corresponded so exactly with the mental image of him … (that) viewers found the portrait they were looking for.’ Indeed, ‘the temptation of such an identification can be overwhelming given the desire to embody great persons’ with an appropriate image and distinctive features.”17 Joanna Woodall supports such an analysis, explaining that “portraits could either be theorized as exact, literal re-creations of someone’s external appearance, or as truthful accounts of the artist’s special insight into the sitter’s inner or ideal self. Both could be assimilated to the concept of realism.”18 Together the portraits make up the context for the appearance of the “Jewish philosopher.” The “real” Mendelssohn is, however, almost impossible to locate in the mass of images that project upon him a longing for what he represented which of course changed over time. And as it varied, the reading of Mendelssohn’s importance through the lens of later historical and hagiographic material conditions the icon that Mendelssohn became. Pointon has remarked that portraits “open onto a politics of representation in which the historical human subject is not a separate entity from the portrait depiction of him or her, but part of a process through which knowledge is claimed and the social and physical environment is shaped.”19 Indeed, Mendelssohn’s image has served many purposes, only one of which became apparent in the generation after his death: by appearing more distinguished than deformed, he seems Jewish in a way that provided proponents (and historians) of Emancipation with a positive model of the enlightened, citizen Jew. In this way Mendelssohn has become, in Altmann’s words, the “archetypal German Jew.”20 The term, Altmann explains, “suggests that the image of Moses Mendelssohn served German Jewry as a model upon which to form itself, as a potent directive, and as an assuring symbol of what it stood for.”21 Yet one should be careful nevertheless not to dismiss the powerful physical references that bodies projected in the eighteenth century as is evident in the mania for physiognomy and the cult of the portrait current even among Aufklärer. When one returns Mendelssohn to his historical context, one must take into account the abun- dant testimony from Prussian writers and artists as well as Jewish ones that Jews in Prussia were identified as Jews by way of their appearance, which included their clothing and hairstyles.22 Chapter 2 of this book explored the curious murkiness of the Jewish physical difference that puzzled the early

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 pioneers of physical anthropology as they theorized into existence the distinctions among the races, since Jews were supposed to look “Oriental” even as the Jews Prussians encountered deﬁed this stereotype. Well into the modern era, as Cohen has explained,

Christian art … depicted Jews as mean, deceiving, and frightening individuals who could desecrate the holy bread, betray Christ, conspire with the devil, and seize Christian children. This was rendered by diverse, recognizable signs: an emblem on their clothing, the shape of the clothes 152 The Ugly made Beautiful themselves (a special hat or a prayer shawl), distorted and repelling facial features, identiﬁcation with questionable and cursed images (for example, Cain and Judas Iscariot), or emphasis on special or exaggerated traits such as horns, red hair, exaggerated lips, or gaping eyes. All of these mechanisms set Jews apart and marked them as a source of evil, hostility, and betrayal.23

Pictures that portray Mendelssohn positively are crucial for identifying the partiality of the public conceptualization of a token Jew, seen variously as representative of Enlightenment (with its liberal tolerance) and of Judaism (suitably enlightened). This public conceptualization of the image of Men- delssohn, necessarily distinct from his “actual” appearance, displaces the question of speciﬁc resemblance. “The catch here,” Brilliant explains, “is the common assumption, perhaps most strongly engendered by portraits, that there is some substratum of mimetic representation underlying the purported resemblance between the original and the work of art, especially because the sign function of the portrait is so strong that it seems to be some form of substitution for the original.”24 The icon of Mendelssohn – the man who reputedly startled Kant’s students and endured their derision – replaces the “true” appearance of the man himself. Mendelssohn was idolized even while he was alive. The esteem in which Mendelssohn came to be held by many of his non-Jewish contemporaries – the index for which might be the roll call of the noble acquaintances he began to make after he made his reputation – was a response to his particular personality, intellectual output, and personal charisma as well as the “anomaly” of his Jewishness. The portraits seem to represent what Robert Norton has described as the cult of the “beautiful soul,” a concept which, during the time period, carried tremendous intellectual and social value:

One of the most signiﬁcant – and most characteristic – stages in the evolution of the beautiful soul was that it did not remain bound to the sphere of philosophical abstraction, but emerged at mid-century in most of the other major literary media as well, … the ﬁctional treatment of the beautiful soul lent the idea a credibility that it could never have otherwise possessed. It seemed so real, in fact, that later eighteenth-century writers no longer thought of “beauty of soul” as nothing more than a noble,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 utopian ideal, which as such every person should strive to attain, but which no one could ever fully achieve. Many assumed, instead, that people not only could but actually did exist who exempliﬁed the attributes it entailed.25

As becomes clear when we map Mendelssohn’s portraits against his increasing reputation over his lifetime, it is possible to capture the way his image changes to reﬂect his growing popularity. Those changes are not random; rather, Mendelssohn comes to represent one or more of the ideals that existed The Ugly made Beautiful 153 in the diﬀerent sectors of Prussian and Jewish society, extending into art what the meeting of the soul and the body could only suggest.

The portraits and their artists Volume 24 of Mendelssohn’s Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumausgabe, edited by Gisbert Porstmann and published in 1997, is devoted to representations of Mendelssohn.26 The editor identified 13 portraits, four miniatures, 11 copper engravings, six shadow silhouettes, and one bust (which itself inspired two more portraits); innumerable copies of the originals have been made since his death in 1786. Research by other scholars has located additional works of art that increase that total number.27 Only the representations made for publication by Daniel Chodowiecki – for Johann Bernhard Basedow’s Elementary Book (1774) and Lavater’s Fragments (1774–78) – seat him in profile.28 Avoiding the irregularities of his short and deformed body, the portraits expose just the aspects of Mendelssohn that caught Kayserling’s notice, that is, his head and inner spirit. In her study of eighteenth-century portraiture in Britain, Pointon has argued that “the head – and above all the face – with its cognitive and physiognomical particularities, stands in metonymic relation to the body as a whole.” Bust paintings “serve to separate head from body, indeed privilege the head over the body [and] that symbolic structure must be understood in its relation to a hierarchical process in which society’s disparate parts are inscribed in a hegemonic order.”29 In a context that praised and prized Mendelssohn’s intellectual accomplishments, the concentration on his head reinforces that “heady” contribution over other aspects of his life. Like other scholars represented by busts, Mendelssohn is his head, in other words, and the portraits need not bother with his body. Yet the focus on the bust in Mendelssohn’s case has an unexpected salience: the thinker in Mendelssohn is separated from the Jewish hunchback; he and his intellectual colleagues all exist in their faces and foreheads on the commemorative metals, the illustrations, and the paintings. Thus, at least two levels – the included and the excluded – operate in creating meaning in these portraits; the (deformed) body is literally repressed while various aspects and interpretations of the head are viewed mostly from the front. The artists extract him from a specific background that would indicate physical movement and form; indeed in setting his bust into the oval used to represent scholarship they purposefully

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 framed his intellectual idealization. To borrow from Cohen’s point about portraits of Jews in seventeenth-century Italy, the Mendelssohn paintings function as “an instrumental means of building an internal imaginary world not enslaved to the ghetto reality.”30 None of the contemporary portraits portray any symbols of Judaism or Mendelssohn’s adherence to it; commissioned and painted by non-Jews, the portraits do not contain the familiar stereotyping or tropes of Jews or Judaism that formed part of the vernacular of other paintings. This absence was a motivated one; like contemporary portraits that avoided the physical imperfections of their subjects (e.g., scars 154 The Ugly made Beautiful or disfigurement caused by disease or unflattering signs of aging), Mendelssohn’s portraits idealized his image by removing those elements that would disturb the ideal audience, who preferred the philosopher to the believing Jew. By diminishing the reality of his body, Mendelssohn’s portraits emphasize his role as respected scholar and “beautify” what would otherwise be a convenient stereotype by which to strike at the physically ugly Jew. Indeed in agreeing to pose for these portraits, at least two of which were painted as part of a series of contemporary philosophers collected by wealthy admirers, Mendelssohn participated in the creation of his idealized image. Wendorf explained that “[t]he degree of self-consciousness is thus greater in the creation of visual portraiture: the sitters usually know that their portrait is being painted, and that they are officially posing for it.”31 Mendelssohn’s willingness to pose reflects both his awareness of the significance attached to such art collections and the increasingly popular acceptance of portraiture among Jews, particularly in the educated circles with whom Mendelssohn associated in Berlin. Although historians have attributed an iconoclasm to Jewish culture in Europe that has some footing in reality, by the early modern period, affluent Jews were attracted by the idea of the portrait and such works were often commissioned among the Sephardi and converso communities in Holland. By the early eighteenth century there was a distinct rise in formal portraitures of communal leaders in the Ashkenazi community, a development that can be attributed in part to demographic changes in European Jewry. Cohen explains that “personality cult[s] evolved around certain rabbinic figures and inspired individuals to incorporate into their own lives an idealized and glorified image of the rabbi’s life and legend.”32 Though Cohen’s argument pertains specifically to the collecting of rabbinical portraits by Jews, a similar argument can be made about the personality cult of Men- delssohn, whose many admirers were also located throughout parts of Europe in which numerous learned societies and correspondents linked themselves together to form a republic of letters. In one of Mendelssohn’s few mentions of being painted, he informed his friend Nicolai, on September 3, 1778, that he was being painted “in cameo” by Frisch but made no other remark about it.33 Cohen’s remarks point to the similarities between the philosopher and the rabbis: “Always appearing alone, without their families, the rabbis were rarely seen as individuals with whole bodies: the portraits are truncated around the stomach, and their focus is invariably facial, emphasizing the 34 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 mind and the spirit, as the rabbi gazes directly at the viewer.” Cohen also argues that, even during his life, Mendelssohn was highly aware of the significance attached to his own image.35 Because of that level of awareness, the absence of any signifiers of Mendelssohn’s religiosity – symbolic references of which Mendelssohn would have certainly been aware – appears to have been at least passively sanctioned.36 One of the differences between the private and the public Mendelssohn is illustrated in two types of portraiture: miniatures of a youthful Mendelssohn and the formal portraits painted in his maturity. The first known The Ugly made Beautiful 155 representation was completed in 1750, before Mendelssohn’s famous relationship with Lessing and his rise to intellectual fame.37 A second miniature, which seems to be a copy and improvement on the first, is dated 1767, well after his marriage and at the height of his scholastic success.38 Both these pieces were meant for private consumption. And both follow the pattern of rabbinical portraits of the same period, sharing little in common with the more formal portraits that characterize the idealized Mendelssohn. As with other pictures of scholarly Jews, Mendelssohn is set against the backdrop of a full bookcase. Absent, however, are Hebrew books, a head covering, and the long dark robe typically worn in rabbinical portraits (though learned and well versed in rabbinic literature and texts, Mendelssohn was not a rabbi).39 These “traditional characteristics,” Peter Freimark explains in his essay on eighteenth-century rabbinical portraits, like “clothing, hats, beards” and specific books (authored by the one portrayed) visually contextualize the subject for the viewer.40 Without those traditional markers, but in the same position, Mendelssohn faces forward with a slight smile; his image is drawn with a long, straight nose, wide forehead, and clear brown eyes. Both miniatures cut off below mid-arm; in each he is wearing a dark, curled wig and a buttonless cloak over an open-collared white shirt that reveals his neck and the opening of his shirt. He is dressed plainly. His very short trimmed beard runs just under and along the length of his jaw line and chin, leaving his face completely exposed.41 Just behind him to the left, a gathered sheet of fabric sym- bolizing his work as a silk manufacturer (one of the few professions available to Jews in Prussia) balances the stretching of his left arm forward; inside the cleft of that arm several volumes are gathered, and his finger holds his place in the book. The book-lined shelves in the background, along with the globes and skull that sit on the top shelves, symbolize scholarship, scholastic achievement, and some amount of financial stability. Set against the objects of his trades, yet without specific reference to his religiosity, Mendelssohn appears open and comfortable.

Christian Rode and Anton Graﬀ Oil portraits present us with a more mature and diﬀerently crafted Mendelssohn, one who appears cognizant of his fame and the purpose of the portrait. The earliest oil portrait was painted by Rode the year after the second miniature

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 was painted and after Mendelssohn’s extremely successful Phaedon: Or On the Immortality of the Soul, In Three Dialogues was published (the work that earned Mendelssohn the moniker the “German Socrates”).42 Rode was a well- known Berlin artist, trained at Friedrich II’s court, who was a prestigious member of the Academy of Fine Arts (of which he would later become director). He was contracted to paint the philosopher by Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803), a Halberstadt religious official who was a great patron of poets and writers and who had been a close friend of Ewald von Kleist (1715–59). Gleim collected portraits of popular scholars for what he 156 The Ugly made Beautiful called his Freundschaftstempel.43 As is evident from his correspondence, and his repeated references to Mendelssohn as “our Plato” and “our Socrates,” Gleim considered Mendelssohn’s literary and philosophical success to warrant his inclusion in the “Temple of Worthies.”44 He contacted both Mendelssohn and Rode in order to facilitate the sitting and all three men were aware of the other commissions for the collection. Such complicity in fulfilling the criteria for inclusion in Gleim’s portrait gallery shows that both men found it to their own advantage to satisfy the desire of their patron. As David Lomas has noted, “in addition to the financial transaction that takes place, artist and sitter are implicated in a transaction of a more subjective character which may have an effect on how the person is represented.”45 Pointon contends that the importance and popularity of creating such collections indicates not just expendable wealth but a vested interest in assembling representations of men and women considered particularly “important”: “Collecting historic ‘heads’ is not unrelated to the commissioning of portraits of contemporaries: if history was to be read through representations of individuals, it was important to ensure that portraits were supplied for the records of future generations.”46 And Woodall notes that such “collections of ‘famous men’ were often included in the universal exemplary collections known as Kunst- and Wunderkammers, constituting personal identity as a product of divinely produced nature and human self-fashioning.”47 Certainly Gleim, Rode, and Mendelssohn had much to gain from the transaction. Mendelssohn’s increasing fame is codified by its inclusion by Gleim; his face is invested with significance by the very context of the collection. The choice of Rode as artist adds further to the importance of the portrait; as a major leader in the reform and rejuvenation of German art at mid-century, Rode was well known for his historical portraits and representations of biblical scenes.48 Gleim’s interest in paying for the Mendelssohn portrait, Rode’s willingness to paint it, and Mendelssohn’s interest to pose for it, indicate that all were aware that the latter was playing an important role in the intellectual milieu of the time. As noted in the chapter on Lavater, the trope of Socrates’ physiognomy had long played a major role in the folk and academic psychology of Europe. The new trope of the “Jewish Socrates” was thus not an idle one. Mendelssohn suggests it, moreover, by the main role he delegates to Socrates in his Phädon. Thus, Mendelssohn’s portrait by Rode emerged in an echo chamber of refer-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 ences and its existence certainly motivated the creation of others. To borrow from Brilliant: “Portraits make value judgments not just about the specific individuals portrayed but about the general worth of individuals as a category.”49 Indeed, the portrait illustrates a man aware of both artist and audience. Differently than the miniatures, Rode’s painting (Figure 4.1) as we know it from reproductions, reflects the portrayal, collection, and displaying of a Jew by non-Jews; a major distinction from the orchestrated portraits of wealthy Sephardi Jews of the previous generation and rabbinical portraits of the time (paid for and collected by Jews), and one that certainly had to be negotiated by The Ugly made Beautiful 157

Figure 4.1 Moses Mendelssohn painted by Christian Berhnhard Rode (1768). Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Handschriftenabteilung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Art Resources, NY.

Mendelssohn, who may not have been, at the time, as aware of the symbolic danger of such moments as he became following the Lavater affair a few years later. Rather than as a product of what Cohen described as the “glorification” of rabbinical figures in order to “overcome the distances of time and space and have an impact upon the lives of the followers,”50 Mendelssohn represents a different inspiration; as Gleim confessed in a letter to Nicolai, Mendelssohn’s work had “renewed his soul.”51 Collecting Mendelssohn then seems to operate similarly to the impulse that Cohen describes as a means of “deriv[ing] a certain security and inspiration.”52 And it harkens to the role ascribed to art in eighteenth-century aesthetics, that is, to render pleasure so as to improve one’s moral acuity. Thus, Rode’s portrait creates a different element of Mendelssohn’s persona. As Pointon articulated,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Once portraiture is acknowledged as a mechanism to bridge the chasm between material existence and the interiority of the individual rather than as a means of recording the physical appearance of a particular historical personage, we can begin to explain the fascination with the collecting of “heads.”53

Indeed, Rode understood what he was called upon to do: the comfortableness of the previous miniature of Mendelssohn has been replaced with a serious expression, indicated by the slight gathering of his thick eyebrows between 158 The Ugly made Beautiful his eyes and unsmiling mouth. The beard remains in the same trimmed style, but is slightly longer. He appears alone in the frame which he fills completely. His buttoned dark overcoat fades his shoulders into the background. Though the second miniature was painted only one year earlier, Rode’s philosopher can carry the weight of the frame without the symbols that helped fill the space around the silk merchant shown with his collection of books. The second of the oil paintings was also commissioned by a wealthy col- lector, who, like Gleim, wanted to possess an assembly of the great persons of his age. Philipp Erasmus Reich (1717–87) asked Graff to paint a series of well-known personalities for his own collection; Graff painted the Mendelssohn portrait in 1771.54 Reich was a publisher and editor with a particular interest in philosophy and literature; through his connections he was able to make the acquaintance of (and keep up correspondences with) some of the best known figures of the German Enlightenment.55 As Pointon has noted,

Whilst portraits constituted for the owner who hung them, at one and the same time, a material acquisition, a symbol of wealth and position (and sometimes) a source of aesthetic pleasure, for the artists who produced them portraits were … a commodity for sale, but one that implicated the artist as producer in a dense web of commerce and ideology.56

It was therefore in Graff’s vested interest to produce a Mendelssohn that would please his patron. At this point in his life Mendelssohn was of particular interest not only because of the great success of his Phaedon, but also because of the notoriety he had accrued in his brief debate with Lavater, which had begun with Lavater’s public challenge to Mendelssohn’s religious faith in 1769. Many of Mendelssohn’s colleagues and acquaintances remarked on the changes in Mendelssohn’s demeanor and energy; he was diagnosed with a mysterious “nervous illness” and ordered to stay away from philosophy.57 It was after the encounter with Lavater that Mendelssohn turned toward his biblical translation work and took up writing more specifically on Jewish themes. Thus, Graff’s portrait intersects with an important change in Mendelssohn’s life. The result, however, is that even more than Rode’s painting, Graff’s portrait accomplishes an aestheticization of Mendelssohn, whose actual appearance that same year had caused such uproar in Kant’s Königsberg classroom.58 His deformity and Jewishness, which by this time have been

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 inscribed as facts in the European consciousness of Mendelssohn are purged in the depiction; rather, Mendelssohn is elevated to membership in an elite intellectual group, among whom he takes his place as an equal to the others that Graff painted.59 To promote intelligence over body, Graff highlights the wide, gleaming forehead by framing it between thick eyebrows and the stark line of a wig (a significant normalizing feature in that we know that Men- delssohn, at this time, had ceased to wear a wig).60 Porstmann surmises that Graff painted Mendelssohn’s brow to represent “the philosophical spirit.”61 Mendelssohn gazes out of the frame, glancing slightly to the left of the artist. The Ugly made Beautiful 159 His beard is much fuller and therefore more apparent; his mouth is set. By emphasizing the facial lines around his nose, mouth and cheek, then playing with the light and shadows over the face, Graff makes this Mendelssohn appear wiser and more mature. Like Rode, the artist “set the small, hunchbacked philosopher in the picture just so that through a natural perspective the bodily defect of the portrayed fades into the background.”62 The freshness of expression so evident in the early miniatures is missing, instead Graff’sgrave Mendelssohn presents the philosopher as self-aware and sage-like, as befits the other pictures in Reich’s collection. Graff’s portrait became the frontispiece of a biography written of Mendelssohn by the farmer and amateur astronomer Johann Georg Palitzsch (1723–88).63 The three years separating the Rode and the Graff portraits saw an enormous increase in Mendelssohn’s fame and notoriety. Mendelssohn’s portrait was painted for a similar collection of philosophical faces owned by the bookseller and publisher Johann Jacob Kanter (1738–86), above whose bookstore Kant lived. Though the picture Johann Gottlieb Becker (1720–82) painted of Mendelssohn has not been found,64 the iconographic preference for the portrait of the scholar is embodied in Becker’s painting of Kant, which displays him holding a book on anthropology.65 Lavater’s challenge had captured the interest of Enlightenment circles throughout the German-speaking lands and brought into focus the divisions between Nicolai–Mendelssohn– Lessing’s circle and a proto–Sturm und Drang circle that welcomed Lavater’s valorization of “enthusiasm.” (Eventually, the most famous figure from that circle, Goethe, rejected Lavater’s missionary obsession.) As mentioned above, Mendelssohn was forced, due to the illness that worsened as he felt himself under attack, to withdraw from public life. But his long cure did not dampen the desire felt by members of the educated Christian public to know more about the Jewish Socrates. In much the way that Pointon suggests, and as today’s celebrity system has conclusively proven, “the portraitist could profit from the celebrity of his sitter. …”66 Both Rode and Graff must have profited in expanding their connections and monetarily from the notoriety of their sitter. Famous enough to warrant Lavater’s original appeal, Mendelssohn’s continued fealty to Judaism added to his allure, yet Altmann describes the disappointment many of Mendelssohn’s admirers felt when he did not convert (despite their rejection of Lavater’s unseemly method).67 The idealization of Mendelssohn’s diplomacy and steadfastness, however, had been further

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 enhanced by his response to Lavater’s conversionary challenge.

Daniel Chodowiecki One of the contemporaries who did not understand Mendelssohn’scommit- ment to Judaism but whose respect endured nonetheless was the hugely prolific artist Daniel Chodowiecki.68 Chodowiecki forms a fascinating link between Lavater, Mendelssohn, and the Berlin Enlightenment circle; he had associations with both sides of the physiognomic controversies, including 160 The Ugly made Beautiful Nicolai, Lessing, Basedow, Lavater, and Lichtenberg. Probably the most popular engraver of the time, and certainly the most productive, Chodowiecki illustrated volumes for a large range of contemporary literature and scholarship; over the course of his long career, he produced thousands of different pictorial vignettes and portraits.69 Chodowiecki’s friendship with Mendelssohn was influenced by his fascination with Mendelssohn’s Judaism and his own deep Huguenot roots.70 That fascination is implicit in the cultural assumptions that are articulated in his work. In a monograph on the artist Rudolf Vierhaus maintains that

Chodowiecki’s pictures relate to … the middle, north German Protestant Enlightenment of the time from 1750 to 1770/1780. In his pictures, especially in his illustrations, he expressed the atmosphere of sober, Protestant, practical, prosaic, Prussian-Berlin Enlightenment of this time, that – like the literature – was free neither from sentimentality nor from rational pragmatism.71

The balance between those two poles – sentimentality and pragmatism – characterizes his approach to Mendelssohn as subject. In the 1770s, Chodowiecki made several drawings of Mendelssohn for different commissions; he experimented with different media (engraving, red chalk, feather) and produced a startling range of different images of the same man (Figure 4.2). In many ways, the differences express the tension between his commitment to the realistic portrayal of his subject and his sense of the varying needs and desires of his patrons. The portrait created for Basedow’s Elementary Book (1774), for example, provides us with a clear-sighted and bearded Mendelssohn, sitting full profile to the left of center. Basedow had picked Chodowiecki to illustrate his four-volume primer both for his talent and his Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016

Figure 4.2 Moses Mendelssohn, Red chalk on paper, by Daniel Chodowiecki. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resources, NY. The Ugly made Beautiful 161 popularity; the work itself was meant to inspire a generation of young children towards a rational understanding of humanity, logic, religion, history, natural science, and grammar while systematizing their cultural education. Mendelssohn’s picture was included in the section on comparative religion; he appears after a picture of Jesus carrying a cross and before a depiction of an anti-Jewish riot taking place in front of a synagogue. Mendelssohn’s expression shows very little emotion; Chodowiecki placed his bust within a circular frame that sits on a table or shelf; a book with the spine facing right (possibly a subtle indication that the book is in Hebrew) seems to keep the picture propped up. A silk sheet is gathered at the top and to the left of the internal frame; together the book and the fabric indicate Mendelssohn’s vocation and avocation. The thin line of Mendelssohn’s beard comes to a pointy tuft at the point of his chin; his (own) dark hair is styled into distinct curls. Chodowiecki plays with the light in the portrait; the darkness into which Mendelssohn faces contrasts starkly with the light emanating from behind his head. The effect highlights the contours of Mendelssohn’s facial structure, the dark shadow of his beard, his dark-colored hair and overcoat. The result is a pointy nose, prominent lips, and stubble on his cheeks and jowls that serve to distinguish a wide, white forehead. The caption for the print reads: “Portrait of Moses Mendelssohn drawn naturally,” which redundantly assures the reader that the referent – Mendelssohn – really looks like the way he appears.72 Gone is the sagacious forehead; instead we have a picture of a man whose bone structure is fully exposed. Chodowiecki was well known for his naturalistic approach; though far less satirical, the acuity of his style has been compared to that of Hogarth. Unlike Rode (with whom Chodowiecki studied and who he would later replace as the director of the Academy of Fine Art) and Graff (a close confidant), Chodowiecki was unwilling to beautify Mendelssohn’s image, a decision that seems to have accorded with Mendelssohn’s own. Indeed, Mendelssohn himself noted, “Rode is an ‘imitateur de la nature embellie,’ whereas Chodowiecki is ‘la Nature!’”73 Chodowiecki sought to portray his subject as truly as possible, nose, forehead, and all. Writing about Mendelssohn, Chodowiecki noted in his private journal that “For the sake of … resemblance the ugliness of the features will be put up with consciously; they will be more than offset by the spiritual energy of the expression.”74 Unlike artists who were influenced by the decorous aesthetic of the first half of the eighteenth century,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Chodowiecki had evidently absorbed the lessons of Mendelssohn himself. He felt an honest portrayal was more respectful to his subject, an assessment that is supported not just by the success of his illustration in attracting other commissions for portraits of Mendelssohn but also the copies he made and sold. As was the custom in eighteenth-century portraiture, copies in the form of engravings and sketches were made for those who wanted their own version. Quite a few of their contemporaries wanted to own both a Chodowiecki and a Mendelssohn.75 The realism of Chodowiecki’s pictures of Mendelssohn was noted by Nicolai’s son-in-law, Daniel Friedrich Parthey (1745–1822), 162 The Ugly made Beautiful

Figure 4.3 Moses Mendelssohn by Daniel Chodowiecki. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/ Mendelssohn-Archiv, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin/Art Resource, NY.

who described a copy of a Mendelssohn his traveling companion commissioned during his visit to Chodowiecki in 1777: “He [Mendelssohn] appeared so natural, as if one had preserved him.”76 Later sketches of Mendelssohn appear much harsher; the philosopher appears almost bestial (Figure 4.3). In the late 1770s, as part of the hundreds of engravings that Lavater ordered from Chodowiecki for his Fragments, an entirely different image of Mendelssohn was created. As was discussed in the preceding chapter, Lavater gathered pictures and silhouettes from a huge array of acquaintances, colleagues and friends using them as data and “empirical proof” for his pseudo- scientific reading of faces. Though he had included a very favorable reading of Mendelssohn’s silhouette in the first volume of the work (1774), he added a portrait of his profile in the fourth volume (1778). Again Chodowiecki sets Mendelssohn’s head and shoulders into a round internal frame and uses the play of light to augment the distinction between his broad, lightened forehead and his much darker cheeks (Figure 4.4). But this representation is entirely Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016

Figure 4.4 Moses Mendelssohn in Volume IV of Lavater’s Fragments. The Ugly made Beautiful 163 different. Gone are the contextualizing silk sheet and upside down book; he is alone in the frame, staring steadily ahead. Unlike the curled wig of the earlier portrait, here Mendelssohn’s (own) hair has natural curls and is not as highly styled. His beard is thicker and trimmed; it runs evenly at his jaw-line. Rather than pointy, the nose has a slight bump; Mendelssohn’s mouth is set. Like Basedow, Lavater included this second image of Mendelssohn in a section that highlights the spiritual and intellectual significance of certain types of faces; in doing so, he attempts to highlight the dual significance of his figure as a Jew and as a philosopher. Yet the picture purposefully removes any Jewish signifiers; in the text, Lavater identifies the face in his commentary, which betrays his disappointment that the engraving did not capture what he knows Mendelssohn expresses. “As imperfect as this quite similar image may be (especially the area around the eyebrows seems to miss the very characteristic sharpness) – merely the outline of a profile – and none of the Men- delssohnian spirit! Just such a forehead without illuminated acuity – an eye beneath such an eyebrow without self-vitalizing reason – such a mouth without wisdom.”77

Adrian Zingg and Johann Frisch In the late 1770s, Mendelssohn’s health – seriously damaged in the aftermath of the Lavater Affair – improved slightly and allowed him to travel. He embarked on a trip to Dresden where he visited with August Hennings, who seems to have prevailed on him to sit for a portrait by Adrian Zingg.78 The pastel drawing (1776), held by the Hennings family in a private collection and thought lost during WWII, was found in the basement of the Reichskulturkammer; it is now in the possession of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Described by Hennings as “very cleanly drawn,” the portrait presents another and entirely different Mendelssohn (Figure 4.5).79 Both the coloring and the style of this portrait contrast sharply with the more sedate portrayals of Rode and Graff; they do not, however, follow Chodowiecki’s realistic approach. Though Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016

Figure 4.5 Moses Mendelssohn painted by Adrian Zingg (1776). Photo credit: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner. 164 The Ugly made Beautiful we know from Hennings that Mendelssohn had begun to wear his own hair, in Zingg’s pastel depiction, he wears a freshly curled wig that sits awkwardly on his head; it frames the whiteness of his skin tone and makes him appear pasty. The decision to wear a wig must have been a response to the formality of the portrait, for Hennings had made a point to mention to Elise Reimarus that Mendelssohn’s “appearance had improved since he wore his own hair.” “You know,” he wrote, “what a noble, gentle expression is in his physiognomy. The various discussions with different visitors seem to exhaust him somewhat, but one sees so clearly, that his spirit always appears in the noblest balance of peace.”80 Zingg captures the downward line of an elongated nose that hangs over large red lips. Unlike the grooved face of the Chodowiecki pictures, only a single wrinkle creases the face. The red-rimmed eyes are asymmetrical and the heavy brows broadcast the dark circles under them. Though his trimmed beard helps distinguish his neck, it is weighed against the rise of Mendelssohn’s back, which his grey coat clearly augments against the darker background. Zingg’s flat portrait seems hardly to resemble the other portraits; indeed it jars the mental image of Mendelssohn the others create. In contrast to the realism of Chodowiecki and the softness (even sentimentality) of Rode and Grass, Zingg’s Mendelssohn appears almost dandyish and unsympathetic. Zingg was particularly well known in Saxony; as professor of engraving and landscaping at the Dresden Art Academy he was in close contact with the Berlin circle of artists that included Rode and Chodowiecki as well as Graff (who traveled between Saxony and Prussia). Compared to the others, Zingg’s portrait is singular in its depiction of Mendelssohn; it serves neither to beautify nor to frame him as a subject of note (or notoriety). It calls to mind Richard Brilliant’s remark that portraits “may also confront the viewer with an image so apparently ‘different’ from the expected that the portrait seems to be of a stranger, yet not completely so, thus forcing the viewer, upon reflection to respond to the artist’s interpretation.”81 Indeed, the contrast between Zingg’s Mendelssohn and the well-known figure painted by Johann Christoph Frisch sets in stark relief the surprise of the other portrayal. Like the other artists, Frisch was a well-known and well-respected portrait artist. He became particularly close to the Marquis d’Argens and through him to Friedrich II. Frisch’s eminence as a portrait artist was such that he had a wide range of subjects; in addition to the king and the royal court, he painted

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 d’Argens, Isaac Daniel Itzig (a wealthy member of elite Jewish Berlin), and Kant. The Mendelssohn portrait, completed in 1778 just two years after the trip to Dresden, presents us with a purposefully distinguished, symbolic, and highly aestheticized picture (Figure 4.6).82 Frisch’s portrayal has none of the awkwardness of Zingg’s; if anything, it comes far closer to Henning’s “noble, gentle expression.” The heavy red jacket with dark green lapels – and the lace trim of a white shirt that pokes out between the lapels under his beard – are meant to mark Mendelssohn’s modesty, largely because the outfit is not cut in the style of the elaborate fashions of late eighteenth-century Germany.83 In Figure 4.6 Moses Mendelssohn painted by Johann Christoph Frisch (1780). Photo credit: Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 bpk, Berlin/Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin/Ruth Schacht/Art Resource, NY. 166 The Ugly made Beautiful choosing to fill the entire oval border with Mendelssohn’s bust, Frisch sweeps away the impressions of smallness, infirmity, weakness, or weariness. The Mendelssohn that Frisch creates appears mature and grave; his choice of warm tones presents a gentle, brown-eyed man with a softly grooved face. His goatee outlines his chin; the thinly drawn eyebrows, much different from the previous portraits, frame eyes that peer out directly at the viewer. Porstmann contends that Frisch’s portrait of Mendelssohn’s high and heavy shoulders, hinting at but not portraying his hunchback, became a prototype for later Mendelssohn representations, so much so that the overcoat itself “became the symbol of the philosopher.”84 There is little doubt that it has become the “standard” picture of Mendelssohn; more than any other, Frisch’s portrait was reproduced and copied throughout the nineteenth century (used for busts, engravings, porcelain vases) and now graces the cover of Altmann’s biography85 (as well as many Websites). The popularity of the image suggests that his Men- delssohn has become the Mendelssohn. As Brilliant noted, “The immanent power of a portrait image stimulates cognition with such force that the psychody- namics of perception interfere with the comprehension of the image as something different from the image of the actual person.”86 Older, mature, looking straight out of the frame at the viewer, Frisch’s Mendelssohn seems to dominate the whole series of Mendelssohn images, and we tend to judge them in relation to it. Indeed, Porstmann reads Frisch’s conception of Mendelssohn as a collection of signifiers to be the man’s meaning: “he was ugly, anything but rich, and he thinks. The ugliness in this context symbolized the independence and moral integrity of the thinker.”87 It is unclear what Porstmann means here by “ugly”; Mendelssohn is neither malformed nor asymmetrical and the harsh- ness of the Zingg and Chodowiecki portraits is entirely absent. Frisch is surely further from the unflattering works (Zingg’s stark portrayal of Mendelssohn’s pale complexion and Chodowiecki’s unrelenting depiction of his hairiness and pointy nose) and closer to the Mendelssohn of the first iconographic sage, beautified by Rode and Graff into the way the author of the inspirational Phädon must have looked. Perhaps Porstmann is influenced by the way Frisch has painted Mendelssohn’s nose, which appears large and hooked, hanging down over full, fleshy lips. In any case, he reads Frisch as presenting a subject whose wisdom and intelligence are as starkly evident as his lips, nose, and hair.88 Porstmann’s commentary is indicative of the way in which Frisch’s portrait manages to negotiate the tension between Mendelssohn’s physical

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 ugliness and his intellectual beauty; though contemporary viewers can only guess at the level of aestheticization Frisch employed, for those who knew Mendelssohn’s likeness, the Frisch portrait must have served as an aesthetic reminder of the power of representation.

Politics and reality Mendelssohn’saffability, and the respect, interest, and friendship he inspired in artists and collectors, served as one determinant of how he came to be The Ugly made Beautiful 167 shown. His reputation, at first for his aesthetics and Phaedon, and then for resisting the public pressure to convert and defending Judaism, generated enormous interest among the educated bourgeoisie and curiosity about his person. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, his image became his painted or engraved image, which was often produced for collectors and copied as frontispieces, medallions, and paintings as part of the visual culture of the German Enlightenment period. It was as a member of the German Enlight- enment intellectual elite that Mendelssohn warranted the same artistic attention as his contemporaries, but it was as an Enlightenment Jew that he gained his true fame and came to represent not only Judaism to a Christian public but the cultural ideals of upper-class Berlin Jews. The anomaly of his Jew- ishness and the marginality of his religiosity coupled with the deformities of his body could have made Mendelssohn the kind of caricature Jew one sees in prints by Hogarth, that is, a perfect example of eighteenth-century ugliness. Yet portraying him for what he inspired does more than suggest that the Ugly can be beautiful in its portrayal, even if it is deformed or imperfect in its natural state; rather, his portraits create the model for how ugliness should be depicted. Chodowiecki’s realism demonstrates the “true” appearance of Mendelssohn but even he intended to unleash the inspiration of Mendelssohn by exposing the implicit meaning in the “spiritual energy” of his expression. The mix of Mendelssohn’s physical ugliness and his moral beauty in the paintings illustrates his theory of mixed sentiments; as he explained in an early aesthetic treatise, “if a few bitter drops are mixed into the honey sweet bowl of pleasure, they enhance the taste of the pleasure and double its sweetness.”89 The pleasurable mix of pleasantness and unpleasantness in Mendelssohn’s appearance balances his depiction as an object; the reputation of the artists who painted him and their skill in rendering his image acceptable, hinting at the “beautiful” soul within, promoted not just greater interest in the Mendelssohn portraits but actually served to increase the depth to which the viewer was affected. Whether as a member of Gleim’s Temple of Worthies or in Reich’s private collection, Mendelssohn’s picture participates in the moral pleasure of perception. As a commodity – codified in books and in privately sold copies – his image produced an initial shock that required the observer to increase and refine his/her taste by understanding how to harmonize the portrait with standard representations of the Beautiful. His fame was enshrined in portraits that increased his popularity in a virtuous

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 circle of celebrity that was, in fact, a tool that could be used by Aufklärer to diffuse the message of rationality, progress, and taste. According to Mendels- sohn’s aesthetics, the pursuit of perfection in art forms promotes both intellectual reflection and cultural improvement. Thus to observe Mendelssohn’s “beautification” has the potential of leading the viewer (past and present) to a higher morality. As Gleim, Reich, Basedow, and Lavater understood, when the viewer is informed of all that Mendelssohn is and represents, his image can lead to intellectual and emotional improvement. Indeed, one needs to hint at his “true”“ugliness” in order to record his inner beauty. 168 The Ugly made Beautiful Mendelssohn’s image also serves a different purpose: by appearing more distinguished than deformed, he seems Jewish in a way that provides proponents (even historians) of Emancipation with a positive model Jew, or, more critically, a privileged token Jew. As Hannah Arendt argues in her 1946 essay “Privileged Jews,” Mendelssohn served as an exemplar of the new knowledge that Jews were also human beings; the knowledge that Germans “could be friends with … Mendelssohn was for them the salvation of the dignity of the human race.” As a scion “of a despised and oppressed people, [he was] a purer and more exemplary model of humanity.”90 The representations of Mendelssohn’s physical appearance seem both to affirm and contradict stereotypical images of a “Jew.” While the nose and the lips could easily have been taken up in an anti-Jewish caricature, the direct impact of his “true” outward appearance is depicted in such a way that what seems to matter is what Lavater longs to see in his Fragments, that is, a mouth with wisdom, eyes that beam, a nose that speaks of the beautiful soul. From the point of view of this unexpected physiognomic “liberalism,” it no longer seems to matter that Mendelssohn’s image does not reference his physical stature; instead, one pictures Mendelssohn in the way Graff and Frisch portrayed him and not through the realism of Zingg or Chodowiecki. Historically, of course, there is a heavy irony in the fact that Mendelssohn’s image, portrayed by Christian artists for a primarily Christian audience, was retained and preserved by a largely Jewish one. Nevertheless, one should be careful of dismissing the powerful physical reference that bodies projected in the eighteenth century. When one returns Mendelssohn to his historical context, it is clearer that Jews in Prussia were identified as Jews by way of their appearance. It was only after his death, inspired by the famous marble bust created by Jean Pierre Antoine Tassaert (1785), that Mendelssohn was depicted as a character in biblical scenes and Greek-themed allegorical drawings.91 One comes back, then, to the tangled semantics of the Ugly in an aesthetics that shifts from perfectionism to disinterest, from art for moral purposes to art as an autonomous domain that traverses the eighteenth century. Ugliness lies in wait to complicate any notion that the goal of pictorial or verbal art is “true” perfection in that this idea lies in contradiction to mimesis and even interest. True perfection tends to bore. This truism in turn problematizes the characterization of the Ugly, especially when ugliness intersects with the expelled, “immoral” Jew. The Jew “Mendelssohn” is ugly in a different sense.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 As an anonymous Jew and not as the famous philosopher Mendelssohn remained socially unappealing. Yet the fascinating anomaly of Mendelssohn arose from the most unpromising of environments; he became a success in an environment that was hostile to Jews. His success came not as a privileged banker or trader, or as a Court Jew, but as a thinker, an Enlightened human being. At various points, this study has touched on the ongoing debate that was to take up much of Mendelssohn’s energy in the early 1780s concerning the question and possibility of Jewish Emancipation. It is interesting to return to The Ugly made Beautiful 169 this issue through Mendelssohn’s image. The question hinged, in part, on whether Jews could “improve,” that is “beautify” themselves in much the same way that Mendelssohn’s portraits beautiﬁed him. One challenge came from Michaelis, who argued against Jewish Emancipation on the grounds that Jews were too short, too criminal, and too clannish. Many years earlier, Mendelssohn had been stunned by Michaelis’ particularly vehemently negative review of Lessing’s play Die Juden (1749), a one-act drama in which a Jewish protagonist saves a Christian merchant from a band of thieves. The Christian, upon discovering his hero’s “true” identity, exclaims, “Oh, how commendable the Jews would be if they were all like you.” To which the Jew responds, “And how worthy of love the Christians, if they all possessed your qualities.”92 Several mistaken identities occur within the play – the merchant assumes his attackers are Jews because they disguise themselves with fake beards. The clean-shaven savior, who is outed as a Jew only at the end of the play, discovers the masquerade but worries that he has succumbed to the same prejudice based on external appearances as the rest of the anti-Jewish characters. Beards, fake and real, identify the true criminal as immoral (both as a thief and a liar) and expose the non-Jews in their own stereotyping of Jews. As an external identiﬁer, the beard in particular demarcates the line between Jews and non-Jews. In his review of the play, Michaelis charged that the Jewish character was an impossibly positive portrayal of an imaginary creature; his enjoyment of the work itself was diminished because he knew that no such righteous Jew could possibly exist:93

… the unknown traveler is so completely good, so noble, so concerned that he may perchance have wronged his neighbor and insulted him with his suspicion, that while it is not impossible, it is certainly all too improbable that, among a people of these principles, this life-style and this education … such a noble spirit could evolve, as it were, on its own. This improbability disturbs our enjoyment all the more, the more we wish that such a noble and beautiful image could be true and could really exist. But even mediocre virtue and probity are to be found so rarely among this people that the few examples thereof do not diminish the hatred against them as much as one would wish.94

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 The imaginary Jew, who is “completely good, so noble, so concerned,” seems a falsification that goes beyond “mere” fiction; Michaelis rejected the “beautiful soul” that Lessing created because “even mediocre virtue and probity are to be found so rarely” among Jews. The beauty of the play’s sentiment (not an ugly Jew beautified, but a beautiful Jew exposed) is lost on Michaelis, who found he could not enjoy what he took to be its implausibility. In an essay written later, Lessing quoted Michaelis’ review at length, investing it with a power and longevity its original appearance might not have accomplished. Lessing also cited Mendelssohn, who had shared with him a letter he had 170 The Ugly made Beautiful written to their mutual acquaintance Aaron Gumpertz (who served as the model for the Traveler) about Michaelis’ comments. Surprised by Michaelis’ disbelief that “such a noble and beautiful” Jew could exist, Mendelssohn paraphrased the opinion of the review: “The pleasure, so they say, which we experience in the beauty of such a character, is disrupted by its improbability, and that, finally, nothing remain in our hearts but the mere desire for his existence.”95 Replacing disbelief with longing, Mendelssohn exposed what one might now call the passive aggressive technique of Michaelis’ appraisal; Michaelis managed both to deny that his disparagement of Jews as inherently immoral and existentially unable to act ethically (or, at the very least, altruistically) has anything to do with his own desire and to deny the theory that art is able to represent the unpleasant as representationally good. The Jewish traveler appears too good; the only ugliness in the character is the “idea” of his Jewishness which is reconciled only at the end of the play. In effect, Michaelis is not able to separate his interests from his observation of the art; indeed, he enacts the very opposite of Mendelssohn’s theory: he could not enjoy Lessing’s play because he could not acknowledge the depiction of the good Jew even as a fantasy. The morally upright Jew is too improbable even to work as a fiction. Jews, he claimed, could not be trusted to be virtuous, truthful, or even patriotic; he did not allow for the reinterpretation of the “unpleasant” Jew. Michaelis was a lifelong opponent of Jewish emancipation and his prejudice against Jews never changed. Mendelssohn’s understanding of the power of “beautification” develops alongside the images that portray him. By 1781, Mendelssohn argued that society itself should be redeemed, improved by the mixed sentiment of Bildung – a coupling of culture and enlightenment – that can render the unpleasant pleasant. Outside of the advantages that accrued to him by spreading his image, this reason may be why Mendelssohn allowed himself to be portrayed so frequently. Every time Mendelssohn was beautified, he allowed the ugly Jew archetype to be beautified; when he participated in the educated circles of the high bourgeoisie, it was not only Mendelssohn who was accepted as a dialogue partner in non-Jewish learning but the ugly Jew as well. Finally, his character and Socratic wisdom made it impossible to portray him and not to portray a Jew; he exemplified the acceptable Jew. Just as an unpleasant object can be rendered beautiful in its representation, the physical unpleasantness, rightly or wrongly, associated

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 with the Jews, that is, their own mixed sentiment, can be improved by including the Jews in the communal project of social Bildung, education. In her study of portraits, both visual and literary, in eighteenth-century British novels, Alison Conway described the portrait as participating in “an alternative spectatorial dynamic”:

This agency ﬁnds its starting point in a number of diﬀerent places. The portrait’s materiality – the conditions of its making and consumption, and its status as an object of exchange and possession – complicated the The Ugly made Beautiful 171 sentimental ethos, as well as the violence, that its representation maintains. The portrait can refuse revelation and limit access to the person it represents by insisting on one aspect of the sitter’s identity. The portrait may overwhelm its beholders, functioning as a sublime object, or establish competing responses to its representation. With the power of the spectacle it represents, the portrait may embolden its beholder.96

Perhaps it was the process of emboldening its beholders that accounts for the popularity of portraits of Mendelssohn among German Jews after his death. Nineteenth-century portrayals of Mendelssohn reflected the aestheticization of the man as artistic image. Oppenheim’s well-known painting of Mendelssohn arguing with Lavater over a chess board (1856) naturally uses the first accepted Jew as an icon of assimilation and not conversion. At once the archetypal and the anomalous Jew, he and his image reflect the moral aesthetic in both its material and representational forms. Indeed, for Mendelssohn, the aesthetic is not only a metaphor for understanding the divine, but a part of the historical dynamic in which, by presenting the human, humanizes manners and morals.

Notes 1 Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London: 1611; reprinted 1777 and 1905), pp. 232–33. 2 Johann Georg Zimmermann, “Von der Diät für die Seele,” quoted in Auguste Bouvier, J. G. Zimmermann: Un représentant Suisse du cosmopolitisme littéraire au XVIII siècle. (Genf: Georg and Company, 1925). Pp. 246. 3 Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 477. 4 See Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology, p. 102. 5 Unless, of course, one does so for oneself. Goethe famously wrote about his own appearance and the shock it caused in people who had not been prepared that he was not as fine looking as they expected from his prose. See his discussion of his first meeting with Lavater in Poetry and Truth, J. W. von Goethe, Poetry and Truth: From My Own Life (trans. Minna Steele Smith). Part III, Book XIV (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1913). 6 Chris Jenks, Visual Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 5. 7 See Cyril Reade, Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (Oxford/New York: Peter Lang, 2007), especially Chapters 2 and3, pp. 29 –96. 8 Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 4. Cohen’s study dispatches the mistaken preconception that Jews did not have a tradition of visual art and the false understanding, perpetuated by Kant, that Jews and Judaism avoided visual Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 representation altogether. Certainly by the eighteenth century, the halakhic considerations regarding the second commandment (prohibiting “graven images”) were lenient and had adapted to contemporary society: “No uniform halakhic position predominated. Some rabbis took an extreme position rejecting any form of human figure, while many others, from different countries and periods, permitted it so long as the portrait showed only half the body and was not executed in any form of sculpture of relief. … Nonetheless, since the advent of print, Jews across Europe had become accustomed to seeing the human depiction in a vast array of noncanonical texts and on objects of material culture since the seventeenth century.” Ibid, p. 126. 172 The Ugly made Beautiful 9 Jews were allowed residency privileges on an individual basis but no rights. 10 See Cohen, Jewish Icons,pp.11–16. 11 Richard Wendorf, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 19. 12 For an excellent survey of the meaning of Mendelssohn’s image for German Jews (in particular) see Guy Miron, “The Emancipation ‘Pantheon of Heroes’ in the German-Jewish Public Memory in the 1930s,” German History, 21:4 (November 2003), pp. 476–504. 13 The oft-quoted passage by Coryate at the beginning of this chapter makes the paradox of “good Jews” clear. Coryate encountered Jews in the Near East who did not at all fit his preconceived notions. Cohen comments, “Coryate manifested a clear inner struggle and sense of self-understanding: he was aware that his encounter with such comely figures clashed with a received, stereotypical image of what ‘the Jew’ oughttolooklike.” See Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 11. See also Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), pp. 42–43 and Michael Zell, Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 2. 14 Cohen, Jewish Icons,p.7. 15 Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 477. 16 Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eight- eenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 8–9. Poin- ton is quoting (and disagreeing with) Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 4–5. 17 Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 145, as quoted from Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 55–56. Cohen writes about Moses Maimonides; Brilliant refers to Capitoline Brutus. 18 Joanne Woodall, “Introduction: Facing the Subject,” Portraiture: Facing the Subject, J. Woodall, ed. (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 5. 19 Pointon, Hanging the Head,p.1. 20 Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” pp. 17–31. For adifferent assessment, see Shmuel Feiner, “Mendelssohn and ‘Mendelssohn’s disciples’: A Re-examination,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 40 (1995), pp. 133–67. 21 Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” p. 17. 22 The physical mark of the male beard, for example, is a clear indication of Jew- ishness, as were the specific head coverings required by married Jewish women. 23 Cohen, Jewish Icons,p.14. 24 Brilliant, Portraiture,p.30. 25 Norton, Herder’s Aesthetic,s pp. 6–7. 26 See JubA, XXIV. In addition to collecting and describing all the known representations of Mendelssohn, the editor included pictures of immediate family members, intellectual mentors, successors, and an extended circle of acquaintances. For another reading of the same figures of Mendelssohn, see Jörgen Bracker, Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 “Moses Mendelssohn, ein Gegenbild des ‘Ewigen Juden,’” in Ich handle mit Vernunft: Moses Mendelssohn und die europäische Aufklärung, N. Hinske, ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1981), pp. 23–30. Michael Albrecht discusses a smaller collection of portraits in Moses Mendelssohn, 1729–1786 Das Lebenswerk eines jüdischen Denkers der deutschen Aufklärung (Weinheim: Ausstellungskataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek Nr. 51, 1986). 27 See Richard I. Cohen, “Representations of the Jewish Body in Modern Times – Forms of Hero Worship,” Representations in Religion: Studies in Honor of Moshe Barasch, J. Assmann and A. Baumgarten, eds. (Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 2001), pp. 247–57. The Ugly made Beautiful 173 28 Cohen mentions only two pictures that portray Mendelssohn standing, but a third imagines Mendelssohn’s visit to Frederick II’s summer palace Sanssouci. See Cohen, “Representations,” p. 248 and Eva Engel’s introduction to (and the main text of) Moses Mendelssohn in Potsdam am 30. September 1771, by Bruno Strauß, ed. Julius Schoeps and Hermann Simon (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994) (Original from Berlin: Herrmann Meyer, 1929.) 29 Pointon, Hanging the Head, p. 56. 30 Cohen, Jewish Icons,p.31. 31 Wendorf, The Elements of Life,pp.13–14. 32 Cohen, “Representations,” p. 116. 33 Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 328. 34 Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 127. 35 Cohen, “Representations,” pp. 253–54. 36 Indeed, Mendelssohn’s other writings seem to indicate his desire to be seen, read, evaluated, and judged not as a Jew but as a human being. See, for example, his essay “On the Question: What Does ‘to Enlighten’ Mean?” in JubA, VI:1, pp. 116–19 and PW, pp. 313–17. 37 JubA, XXIV:15. 38 Though we have the initials of the later artist, the full names of both the minia- turists remain unknown at the present time. The second artist also created a matching miniature of Mendelssohn’s wife, Fromet, dated the same year. The couple married in 1762. 39 See the examples in Peter Freimark’s “Porträts von Rabbinern der Dreigemeinde Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek aus dem 18. Jahrhundert,” in Juden in Deutschland: Emanzipation, Integration, Verfolgung und Vernichtung, P. Freimark, A. Jankowski, and I. Lorenz, eds. (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1991), pp. 36–57. Freimark has collected several portraits of well-known rabbinic figures, beginning with Jakob Aschkenasi (Chacham Zvi) (1660–1718), the father of Jakob Emden. The portraits show various rabbis with their hands in a book, seemingly lost in contemplative thought, dressed in black and wearing a traditional fur hat. Cohen’s longer study discusses the history of such rabbinical portraits and their importance in the modern period in Jewish Icons, esp. pp. 114–53. 40 Freimark, “Porträts von Rabbinern,” p. 51. 41 Jews who lived in Frederick II’s Prussia customarily wore beards, though there is evidence to suggest that there were legal restrictions (both Jewish and Prussian) requiring them to do so. As discussed previously, Frederick II issued a royal statement requiring non-Jews to shave their beards expressly so “not to pass as Jews.” The same edict required Jews to wear beards. Such physical identifiers were in direct conflict with the increasing desire, among wealthy Berlin Jews at least, to assimilate into the general Prussian community. See a facsimile of the edict in “Prussia,” Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 13, p. 1291 (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House Ltd., 1978). 42 The painting itself is lost, though there is a 1929 auction photograph that records it. 43 JubA, XXII:47 and XXIV:18. Gleim’s “Musen-und Freundschaftstempel” was also Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 called Tempel des Verdienstes. Portsmann quotes the note Gleim had written on the back of the portrait: “wegen seines Phaedon gemahlt für Gleim von Bernhard Rode 1769.” See JubA, XXIV:20 and footnote 19, XXIV:352. 44 JubA, XXII:46–47. Gleim urged Nicolai to make himself available to Rode, so that he could have his portraits of “Leßing, Moses, Nikolai.” In a letter to Lessing, Gleim inquired when he might have a similar portrait of Lessing: “Wann werd ich so glücklich seyn, in diesem kleinen Tempel meinen Leßing zu sehen?” JubA, XXII:47. See also Lessings Werke (ed. C. G. Redlich), V. 20, Part 2, pg. 254 and JubA, XXIV:18, footnote 18, XXIV:352. (The letter is dated September 28, 1768.) 174 The Ugly made Beautiful 45 David Lomas, “Inscribing Alterity: Transactions of Self and Other in Miro Self- Portraits,” Portraiture: Facing the Subject, J. Woodall, ed. (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 122. 46 Pointon, Hanging the Head, p. 62. 47 Woodall, “Introduction,” p. 2. 48 See the collection of Rode’s engravings collected in Kunst im Dienste der Aufk- lärung: Radierung von Bernhard Rode (1725–1797), Jens Christian Jensen, ed. (Kiel: Der Kunsthalle, 1986). 49 Brilliant, Portraiture,p.12. 50 Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 117. 51 JubA, XXII:46–47. 52 Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 117. 53 Pointon, Hanging the Head, p. 62. 54 The painting now hangs with other Graff portraits from the Reich collection in the Jagdschloss Grunewald in Berlin. 55 See Julius Vogel, Anton Graff: Bildnisse von Zeitgenossen des Meisters in Nach- bildungen der Originale (Leipzig: Verlag von Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898). 56 Pointon, Hanging the Head, p. 14. 57 See Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, pp. 266–69; Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn,pp. 102–3, and Aron Brand, “The Mysterious Illness of Moses Mendelssohn,” Koroth, 6:7–8 (1974), pp. 421–26. 58 See the treatment of Mendelssohn’s appearance in Kant’s classroom in the introduction to this work. 59 Reich commissioned over 43 portraits, 27 of which were painted by Graff; those include portraits of Lavater, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Spalding, Sulzer, Nicolai, Reich himself, and fellow artist Chodowiecki. Graff also painted one of the most famous portraits of the Berlin salonniere Henriette Herz. 60 JubA, XXIV:25–26. 61 Ibid., XXIV:26. 62 Ibid. See also Bracker, “Moses Mendelssohn, ein Gegenbild,” p. 27. 63 See the account in Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 339. Altmann quotes from a letter of August Hennings to Elise Reimarus on August 21, 1776. See Nachlass Hennings, no. 45, letter 36, fol. 125v–127v. 64 The painting is mentioned by Johann Georg Hamann in a letter to Johann Gottfried Herder dated August 28, 1768, which also mentions the Kant portrait. Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, Vol. II, W. Ziesemer and A. Henkel, eds. (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1956), p. 419. See also Heinrich Lange, “‘Verkauft an einen Kaffetier …’Das Schicksal von Kants Wohn-und Sterbehaus in Königsberg,” Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung, Das Ostpreußenblatt, April 22, 2000, and Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology, p. 104. 65 See Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology, p. 293. One wonders what book Mendelssohn held in his portrait. 66 Pointon, Hanging the Head, p. 49. 67 Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, pp. 226–42. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 68 See the discussion by Willi Geismeier in Daniel Chodowiecki (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1993), p. 110. Geismeier quotes from a letter Chodowiecki wrote to Gräfin Christiane von Solms-Laubach in 1783 in which Chodowiecki wonders how Mendelssohn could remain a Jew. Footnote 134, p. 231 which reads: “In: Briefe Daniel Chodowiecki an die Gräfin Christiane von Solms-Laubach, a.a.O., S. 39ff u. 43” and refers to Briefe Daniel Chodowieckis an die Gräfin Christiane von Solms-Laubach ed., Charlott Steinbrucker in Studien zur deutschen Geschichte Heft 250 (Straßburg: Verlag J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1928). 69 In a catalogue description of Chodowiecki’s work, Rebecca Müller estimates that the illustrator left a huge amount of his work to his heirs, around 4,000 drawings The Ugly made Beautiful 175 and over 2,000 engravings. See Rebecca Müller, Zeichungen von Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801) (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000), p. 7. 70 See Wolfgang von Oettingen, Daniel Chodowieckis Handzeichungen (Berlin: J. Bard, 1907), p. 32. Von Oettinger explains, “…Chodowiecki, a believing Christian, sought to discover the character of Mendelssohn’s Judaism and continually wondered why the compassionate, foresighted man clung to his religion when so little seemed to keep him from Christianity.” 71 Rudolf Vierhaus, “Chodowiecki und die Berliner Aufklärung,” in Daniel Chodo- wiecki (1726–1801): Kupferstecher, Illustrator, Kaufmann, Ernst Hinrichs and Klaus Zernack, eds. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, XXII:8. 72 Daniel Chodowiecki, Zeichungen zu Johann Bernhard Basedow Elementarwerk. Frankfurt Johann Bernhard Basedow, Daniel Chodowiecki: 62 Bisher Unver- öffentlichte Handzeichnungen zu dem Elementarwerk (foreword by M. von Boehn) (Frankfurt am Main: Voigtländer-Tetzner, 1922), Plate 57. 73 Quoted by Porstmann, JubA, XXIV:41 from von Oettingen, p. 33. Von Oettingen relates that Chodowiecki and Mendelssohn were very well acquainted, consulted on the drawings for Basedow’s Elementary Book, and that Chodowiecki and his children spent Sukkot at Mendelssohn’s house. See von Oettingen, who also describes the public recognition of Mendelssohn’s image: “…die häßlichen, aber geistreichen Züge in sprechender Schärfe erhalten und lassen keinen Zweifel, dader Dargestellte niemand anders als Mendelssohn, der Freund Lessings und Nicolais, der bekannte Philosoph der jüdischen Aufklärung ist.” p. 32ff. 74 JubA, XXIV:41, quoted from Michael Albrecht, Moses Mendelssohn, 1729–1786, p. 116. Like the physiognomic trope of Socrates discussed in Chapter 3, here Mendelssohn’s “true” appearance signifies the truth of his philosophical influence and grace. 75 See von Oettingen who specifically names Lavater, Herr Nanetzki, Baron Medem, and Grafin Solms as private consumers, p. 33. 76 JubA, XXIV: 43. The full quote reads: “Fritz liess für Sie Moses Mendelssohn zeichnen, und so sieht er natürlich aus, wie Sie ihn erhalten werden.” Parthey wrote his journal for Elisa von der Recke; he recorded both his visit to Chodowiecki and to Mendelssohn a few days earlier. “Fritz” is Fritz von Kurland, who was Elisa’s half brother. She, along with her half sister, had visited both Chodowiecki and Mendelssohn in 1785. See Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 720. 77 Fragments, IV: 387. 78 See the account in Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 339. 79 JubA, XXIV:29. As quoted by Porstmann from Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 253. See Mendelssohn’s Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, 547ff and Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn,pp.249–54. Kayserling quotes Hennings’ letters to Elise Reim- arus at length, in order to show just how ecstatic he was when Mendelssohn came to Dresden for a visit; the quote above, however, comes in Kayserling’s summary. 80 Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 252. 81 Brilliant, Portraiture, p. 141. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 82 There are two portraits by Frisch, the first on canvas (called the “big Frisch”) and the second (called the “small Frisch”) on wood. This is the portrait on the cover of Alexander Altmann’s monumental biography of Mendelssohn. 83 Interestingly, Frisch reverses the colors of the Graff portrait of Mendelssohn; in the latter Mendelssohn wears a green vest and a reddish-brown overcoat. Frisch left no notes regarding the Mendelssohn portrait, so it is impossible to know whether his choice of colors was intentional or coincidental. 84 JubA, XXIV:33. 85 See Altmann’s description in Moses Mendelssohn, p. 329. 86 Brilliant, Portraiture,p.24. 176 The Ugly made Beautiful 87 JubA, XXIV:33. 88 Frisch’s second portrait of Mendelssohn in 1784 was modeled but not identical to the first portrait. In the second picture, the artist presents Mendelssohn with a thinner face, more pronounced eyes, distinct lips, and a less officious jacket. It was common practice to paint replicas of major portraits. Several years earlier, Frisch has also painted a cameo of Mendelssohn – a black and white profile meant to suggest an engraved stone. See JubA, XXIV:34–35. 89 JubA, I:110. PW,p.74. 90 Hannah Arendt, “Privileged Jews,”Jewish Social Studies, 8:1 (Jan., 1946), p. 15. 91 See JubA, XXIV: 50–73. 92 Quoted from Lessing, Die Juden,inThe Jew in the Modern World,p.56.SeeDie Juden, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, J. Petersen and W. v. Olshausen, eds. (Berlin, Leipzig, Wien, Stuttgart: Deutsches Verlahshaus Bong and Co., 1925–36). The play was written in 1749 but was published in 1754; the review appeared the same year. 93 Cf. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn,p.40ff. Also, see the additional comments following the English translation of The Jews in Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, P. Demetz, ed. (NY: Continuum, 2003), pp. 166–72. In German, these comments are found in “Über das Lustspiel ‘Die Juden’” in the first publication of his works. See Lessing, Werke und Briefe, W. Barner, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), Vol. 1, pp. 492–96. 94 Quoted from Michaelis by Lessing in “Concerning the Comedy: The Jews,” in Nathan the Wise, p. 167. The original appeared in Michaelis’ Göttingische Anzeige von gelehrten Sachen, 40. Stück, June 13, 1754, pp. 620–22. 95 Quoted by Lessing, “Concerning the Comedy: The Jews,” p. 169. 96 Allison Conway, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791 (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 6.

Bibliography Albrecht, Michael, Moses Mendelssohn, 1729–1786 Das Lebenswerk eines jüdischen Denkers der deutschen Aufklärung (Weinheim: Ausstellungskataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek Nr. 51, 1986). Altmann, Alexander, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Sketch (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973). ——“Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, J. Reinharz and W.Schatzberg, eds. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), pp. 17–31. Arendt, Hannah, “Privileged Jews,” Jewish Social Studies, 8:1 (Jan., 1946), p. 15. Basedow, Johann Bernhard, Daniel Chodowiecki: 62 Bisher Unveröﬀentlichte Hand- Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 zeichnungen zu dem Elementarwerk (foreword by M. von Boehn) (Frankfurt am Main: Voigtländer-Tetzner, 1922). Bouvier, Auguste, J. G. Zimmermann: Un représentant Suisse du cosmopolitisme littéraire au XVIII siècle (Genf: Georg and Company, 1925). Bracker, Jörgen, “Moses Mendelssohn, ein Gegenbild des ‘Ewigen Juden,’” Ich handle mit Vernunft: Moses Mendelssohn und die europäische Aufklärung, N. Hinske, ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1981), pp. 23–30. Brand, Aron, “The Mysterious Illness of Moses Mendelssohn,” Koroth 6:7–8 (1974), pp. 421–26. The Ugly made Beautiful 177

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Michaelis, Johann David, “Vierter Theil,” Göttingische Anzeige von gelehrten Sachen, 40. Stück. June 13, 1754, pp. 620–22. Miron, Guy, “The Emancipation ‘Pantheon of Heroes’ in the German-Jewish Public Memory in the 1930s,” German History, 21:4 (November 2003), pp. 476–504. Müller, Rebecca, Zeichungen von Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801) (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000). Norton, Robert E., Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth-Century (London/Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Pointon, Marcia, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth- Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 8–9. Porstmann, Gisbert, ed. JubA, XXIV (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromann Verlag/Günther Holzboog, 1997). “Prussia,” Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 13, p. 1291 (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House Ltd., 1978). Reade, Cyril, Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (Oxford/New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Steinbrucker, Charlott, ed., Briefe Daniel Chodowieckis an die Gräﬁn Christiane von Solms-Laubach, Studien zur deutschen Geschichte, Heft 250 (Straßburg: Verlag J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1928). Steiner, Wendy, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Strauß, Bruno, Moses Mendelssohn in Potsdam am 30. September 1771 (Berlin: Herrmann Meyer, 1929). Vierhaus, Rudolf, “Chodowiecki und die Berliner Aufklärung,” Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801): Kupferstecher, Illustrator, Kaufmann, Ernst Hinrichs and Klaus Zernack, eds. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, Vol. 22, pp. 1–11. Vogel, Julius, Anton Graﬀ: Bildnisse von Zeitgenossen des Meisters in Nachbildungen der Originale (Leipzig: Verlag von Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898). Von Boehn, Max, Daniel Chodowiecki – Zeichungen zu Johann Bernhard Basedow Elementarwerk (Frankfurt: Voigtländer-Tetzner, 1922). Von Oettingen, Wolfgang, Daniel Chodowieckis Handzeichungen (Berlin: J. Bard, 1907). Wendorf, Richard, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Woodall, Joanne, “Introduction: Facing the Subject,” Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. J. Woodall (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1–28. Zammito, John, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Zell, Michael, Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Amsterdam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Zimmermann, Johann Georg, Von der Diät für die Seele, ed. Udo Benzenhöfer and Gisela vom Bruch (Hannover: Laurentius, 1995). Conclusion

In many ways, this book has been a long footnote to the story with which it began: a small Jew walked into a lecture hall, was reviled and mocked, and left as an accepted intellectual, embraced by the most famous philosopher of the German Enlightenment. The reversal of Mendelssohn’s fortune in Kant’s classroom betrays the ﬁckleness that accompanies the appraisal of others who enter into a circumscribed space; it also exposes the unexpected shifts that attend judgments based on physical appearances. Though the narrative initially constructs a version of events that presents Mendelssohn as a victim of prejudice and hubris, its moral is suggestive of the adage about not judging a book by its cover. The ill will of the students is overthrown by the calming power of the philosophical spirit; they saw a Jew and found Mendelssohn. I wish that story was a metaphor for the study of modern ugliness. Though the elements for exclusion inverted as I have described them in this book are there – philosophy, human behavior, physiognomical judgment, hagiography – unlike in the story, the modern Ugly is not mitigated by Kantian approval. In the time since Mendelssohn’s death, public opinion about appearances has been fueled more by sentiment and projected images of a culturally determined perfection than restrained by rational reﬂection and an idea of a common Good. Emboldened by a sense of intellectual and political superiority, those judging the value and quality of ugliness for their respective societies have walked a tightrope between the presumptions of moral beauty and the repercussions of repulsive immorality. While it is true that Mendels- sohn’s ugliness – in its theoretical and physical forms – pushed the limits of judgment and taste, ultimately its staying power remains connected to the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 anomaly he presented: a small, ugly Jew turned beautiful by philosophy. The limitations of his personage – Mendelssohn is made into a paradigm of Enlightenment possibility but not European reality because he remained a Jew – speak to the ultimate failure of the Ugly to avoid the negativity beauty endowed (however unintentionally) to it. In the construction of ugliness through moral aesthetics, I attempted to show that the expression of the benefits of the Beautiful – refinement, taste, the exercise of freedom – initially conveyed the oppositions they seemed to intimate: immorality, vulgarity, and irrationalism. As the ideas of beauty and 180 Conclusion ugliness grew more complex and more connected to the shifting political investments of religious and civil change in the mid- to late eighteenth century, illustrations of im/morality not only helped identify the positive and negative influences of both; they also provided the means for augmenting what was morally beneficial while reducing what seemed detrimental (both for individuals and the body politic). The Ugly served as the foil of the Beautiful; as such, it was used to outline beauty, identify its most worthy beneficiaries and empower them with political power. The discussions of beauty included the classification of those who could (and should) take advantage of it as well as those who could not. In other words, the description of beauty’s exclusivity and the inclusiveness of ugliness aided in the construction of a hierarchy that effectively served to separate those with taste from those without. As the philosophical categories of “good” (virtue) and “evil” (vice) developed into publicly recognized forms, God-like perfection became a metaphor used to answer questions about wholeness and harmony of form as well as to improve moral and intellectual abilities. Those questions happened on both an individual and a societal level. By encountering beauty and avoiding ugliness one – a person, a culture – avoided the dullness of institutional forms of religious expression and, instead, sought out encounters with the manifestations of the Beautiful to augment perspicacity. Ingeniously, Mendelssohn modified aesthetics by forcing open the restricted avenues by which one could be morally, intellectually, socially, and religiously “improved.” In his schema, the Ugly represents a philosophical flexibility that is inherent within (and not categorically opposed to) misshapen forms and their beautiful representations; he reads that flexibility as a positive, edifying, valuable force and thereby halts a trend – even if temporarily – that deprived imperfection of any progressive benefit. Even more importantly, he prioritized ugliness because he felt that imperfection – more than a harmonious agreement – provided complicated and advantageous exercise of the mind. The stronger the mind the better one – a person, a culture – could contemplate (if not also represent) the highest moral good. In other words, juggling multiple intellectual and emotional responses to an encounter heightened the effect of that experience and made it more productive, progressive, and profitable. For Mendelssohn, juggling the dissonance between an object and its reassessment in art, literature, or concept exhibited the same mental agility Kant would later identify as a mark of freedom inherent in the Beautiful. Mendelssohn made the Ugly an

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 elastic category that could – actually, that should – be utilized to provide moral benefit because it functioned at a higher intellectual level than symmetrical, harmonious beauty. In effect, he opened the door to the Sublime, which seemed to be an organic extension (and ultimately rejection) of the limitations of moral aesthetics. Superseding the categorization of beauty and ugliness, the Sublime conflated the difference between what was perceived as Beautiful (and therefore acceptable) and what was understood as Ugly. In his identification of God as “the most Sublime being,” Mendelssohn exposes his desire to make God universally accessible while safeguarding the morality Conclusion 181 he saw as inherent in monotheism.1 Beyond beautiful and ugly, the moral benefit of the encounter with God, especially through aesthetic means, erases the limiting functions of societal and religious boundaries and improves both the person and the culture. In reading Judaism as the exemplar of that action – its ceremonial script is a literature of divine language “spoken” through Jewish ritual action – Mendelssohn paves the way for a rationalist, positive, affirming modern assessment of Judaism as morally constructive to all. The natural history accounts of different people around the globe showed what happens when ugliness is not redeemed in the manner that Mendelssohn suggested. Here the Ugly was used to break down the kind of intellectual elevation Mendelssohn thought ugliness could bring. The public accounting of body types, the interpretation of varying skin colors, and the attribution of meaning to those different colors helped created a racial aesthetic that married physical appearance with perceived (read: projected) morality. “Practical” ugliness – the physical manifestation of a theoretical ideal – included evaluations of body and manner and promoted a mutual construction of beauty and ugliness as irredeemable opposites. Eighteenth-century anthropological research not only created but also nurtured hierarchies of form, color, manner, and morals. People – along with actions and objects – considered physically atypical or ethically irregular came to represent the range of possibilities of physical ugliness and immoral character. Deviations measured against a white, European, Christian normative ideal established a measure for both action and size; cultural and physical evaluations were linked to evaluative judgments of religious behaviors and beliefs. Taking advantage of the intellectual assumptions of the modern aesthetic the classification of differences among human beings in Enlightenment anthropology forced people into a continuum of progressive and regressive; descriptions of “beautiful” and “ugly” people were neither innocent nor naïve because they created and fostered social hierarchies that justified and rationalized assertions of intellectual, physical, and religious inferiority. The practical application of the category of the Ugly led directly to ideas about racial degeneration and an “inherent” connection to both behavioral impropriety and religious immorality. Rather than the edifying possibility that Mendelssohn located, early anthropology codified a negativity that fostered disconnection and distinctions between people and cultures. That Mendelssohn himself could represent the possibility of the Ugly that is

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 so absent in those early anthropological assessments is the possibility that takes up the second portion of the book. The discussion of ugliness in the first section – framed first by the religious critique of moral aesthetics and then by an increasingly nefarious system of cultural perceptions of physicality – expresses the range of Enlightenment sentiments, concerns, and anxieties. Mendelssohn saw in the idea of the Ugly a possible means of promoting the irregular – objects and art and people who do not fit a prescribed notion of “normal”–and expressed his own anxiety about the insecurity of Jewish acceptance and approval. The philosophical opportunity he provided sought 182 Conclusion to introduce new ways of reconceiving judgments based on appearance. Thus, the examples of ugliness instantiated – through the revival of physiognomy and the hagiographic portraiture of Mendelssohn himself – afforded concrete models of the positive potential that was available in the marriage between aesthetics and appearance, religion and culture. Lavater’s theological reading of the physicality of the face relied on his interpretation of Mendelssohn as an absolute moral referent – one he connected to both Jesus and Socrates – making the ugly Jew a savior in philosophical clothing. Mendelssohn represented the possibilities of the Enlightenment conceits of tolerance and reason; that the two seem to clash in Lavater’s highly subjective and impressionistic science proves that Mendelssohn’sconfidence in the flexibility of the Ugly was not misplaced. Lavater’s elaborate theology read external appearance as both a marker of internal morality and an absolute indicator of moral stature and intellectual aptitude; he manufactured a code of ugliness that influenced generations of Europeans and Americans and created the most overt example of the power of the Ugly to arise out of the eighteenth century. Yet he was not so entrenched as to be unaffected by the kind of moral beauty he perceived in Mendelssohn himself. And so, the most appealing exemplar of all comes in the form of Men- delssohn’s own face. As a beloved and revered short, hunchbacked, dark- haired Jew, Mendelssohn embodies the paradox of his Ugly: moral beauty wedded to physical ugliness. The many pictures and portraits painted of Mendelssohn attempt to synthesize his external appearance with his public popularity. The aesthetic response to Mendelssohn comes not as objective shape but as subjective figure. Mendelssohnian representations separate his person from the appearance that his body suggests; his role as philosopher beautifies the ugly within. As a philosopher, as a man, as a Jew, and as an idea, Mendelssohn exemplifies the most radical difficulties associated with a relationship between the Good and the Beautiful. And because of that difficulty, Mendelssohn comes to epitomize the very possibility he theorizes in his understanding of ugliness. The elasticity of his representations affirms the power of contemplating – and comparing – the ugly. His account of artistic creation highlights the benefits of experiencing complex intellectual and emotional responses to objects rendered beautiful through art; thus, one must surmise that the effort required to exercise one’s intellect in perceiving the perfection of Mendelssohn as art provides the kind of gain he described and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 for which he advocated. The skill his portraiture artists used in rendering him “beautiful” promoted not just greater interest in Mendelssohn, but actually serves to increase the depth to which we – as observers – are affected. Men- delssohn’s picture continues to participate in the moral pleasure inherent in perception. The uglier he is understood to have been in person and the more sage-like he was portrayed on canvas, the more he embodies his own aesthetic theory. Thus, to observe Mendelssohn’s “beautification” is to lead the viewer (past and present) to a higher morality. And it is, at the same time, a way of redeeming ugliness even now. As his artists and collectors understood, when Conclusion 183 the viewer is informed of all that Mendelssohn is and represents, his very image has the moral power to improve those who observe him. It is the unfortunate ending that, for Mendelssohn’s contemporaries, beautified Jews seemed available only in theory. In the ongoing debate that was to take up much of Mendelssohn’s energy in the early 1780s and continued to plague German society through the twentieth century, the question, possibility, success, and security of Jewish Emancipation and acceptance hinged on questions about whether Jews could “improve”–that is, “beautify” themselves in much the same way that Mendelssohn’s portraits beautified him. Though Mendelssohn’s contributions to the notion of ugliness reveal the anomaly of a Jew defining taste and beauty for a society that accepted him as the exception to a rule, he nevertheless provides an answer to the political questions of whether Jews could be made beautiful, and consequently, whether they can be made to benefit the public good. Aestheticized, he became “Mendelssohn,” the Jew beautified whose very ugliness attempts to improve society. Yet he remained an anomaly and his philosophy was swept away by the Kantian critique that accepted him in the classroom. Perhaps now is the time to reassess the worth of the Ugly and reconsider the moral benefits of distinction.

Note 1 “Ueber das Erhabane und Naive,” JubA, I:458. PW, p. 195. Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 Index

Page numbers in bold refer to ﬁgures.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin Arabs 86, 98 of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Arendt, Hannah, “Privileged Jews” Beautiful (Burke) 50 4, 168 Addison, Joseph8 ,9 , 110–11 Aristotle 80, 106–9, 114–15 admiration 52–53 art: and nature 63; representation by 45 aesthetic achievement 31 artistic interpretation 148–49, 150–53, aesthetic assumptions 75 164 aesthetic effect: of mixed sentiments assimilation4 44–49; of ugliness 45–46 aesthetic judgment, Kant and Bacon, Francis 32 61–64 Basedow, Johann Bernhard 160–61, 167 aesthetic pleasure, and ugliness 31 Baum, Bruce David 74 aesthetics 167; critical 10; deistic 38; Baumgarten, Alexander 32, 34, 42, 44, Enlightenment7 , 11–12; and ethnicity 45, 65–66n3 8–9; hierarchy 10; intellectualization beautification 167, 169–71, 182–83 10; medieval 11; modern 20; Beautiful, the 8; benefits of 179–80; modernist 10–12; and morality 5–6; British school 32–34; and Good perfectionist 7, 20; and religious faith 42–43; Hobbes on 32–33; 36–37; subject 11 self-improvement 43; and truth 35; Aesthetika (Baumgarten) 32 and the Ugly 180 Älteste Urkunde des beautiful soul, cult of the 152, 169–70 Menschengeschlechtes (Oldest Record beauty: Baumgarten on 42, 45; of Humanity) (Herder) 122–23 boundaries of 34; Buffon’s theory of Altmann, Alexander 133, 151, 159 89; definition7 , 11; divine 11; animals 82–83, 101n56, 107, 114–15 Enlightenment aesthetic7 ; function anthropological assessments, Jews 35; and holiness 38, 39; inner 167; 17–19 Kant and 64, 97–98; Lavater’s Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 anthropology 5, 6, 60, 181; comparative physiognomy of Jesus 127–28; Leibniz 93–97; philosophical 9–10 and 39–41; Mendelssohn on 44–45; anti-Jewish scholarship 15 moral and physical 136; and morality anti-Jewry 14–15 32–34; natural, spontaneous reaction anti-Judaism 22n14 to 10–11; and physiognomy 105, 106; anti-Semitism 10 and politics 35; secularization of appearance: and climate 76, 79–81, 36–39; and truth 34, 42–43; types 86–89, 95–97; decoding 6; diversities of 44–45 in 74–75; ideal 181; Kant on 97–98; beauty eugenics 139–40 the modern Ugly 179; and soil 90–93 Beck, Lewis White 66n20 Index 185 Becker, Johann Gottlieb 159 Christian universalism 9 behavior: and appearance 82–83; Christianity: and Judaism 11–12, 15; Buffon’s theory of 83–89; and climate Kant on 60–61, 70n94; Lavater’s 79–81, 86–89; and soil 90–93 attempt to convert Mendelssohn to Beiser, Frederick 30, 50 132–35, 158, 159; Lavater’s union of Bernasconi, Robert 21n2, 24n24, 98, Christianity and physiognomy 99n1, 103n75 129–30; Mendelssohn on 60 “Betrachtungen über das Erhabene und Cicero 108 das Naïve in den schönen citizenship 18 Wissenschaften” [“Observations on civil liberties 15–16 the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine civil worth, and physical judgment Arts”] (Mendelssohn) 50–54 17–18 Bible, the 15 climate: and appearance 76, 86–89, biblical norm, the 74–75 95–97; degenerative effects of 91–92; Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften role of 79–81 und freyen Künste [Library of Fine climatic deformities 79–81 Sciences and Free Arts] Clubb, Louise George 110 (Mendelssohn) 30, 50–51 Cohen, Richard I. 147, 149, 151, Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 60, 151–52, 154, 157, 171n8 78–79, 93–97, 101–2n57, 101n56, comparative anthropology 93–97 102n58 Conway, Alison 170–71 bodily differences, awareness of 74–75 counter-Enlightenment, the 11 bodily foreignness 18 Counterreformation, the 109–10, body types 181; Buffon’s theory of 128 83–89; hierarchy 86–87 critical aesthetics 10 Bonnet, Charles 132–33, 134, 135 Critical philosophy7 Boyer, Ernest 33 Critique of Judgment (Kant)5 –6, 61–62, Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur 64–65 betreffend 30 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) “Briefe über die Empfindung” [“Letters 2–3, 20 on Sentiments”] (Mendelssohn) 44–45 cruelty 47–48 Brilliant, Richard 164, 166 Buffon, George Louis le Clerk, Comte d’Argens, Marquis 164 de 15, 18, 60, 75, 90, 100n23; and deformity 83–84; true 116 beauty 89; and behavior 83–89; and degeneracy 16, 83–84, 88, 90 body types 83–89; and human nature Deism 12 82–83; and language 82–83; natural deistic aesthetics 38 history 81–89; Natural History, della Porta, Giambattista 109–10, 115, General and Particular 81–89; on skin 140n23 color 87–89, 100–101n41 depravity 88 Burke, Edmund 50 determinism 108 bust paintings 153 deviance 181; hierarchy of 18–19 Catholic Church, and physiognomy Die Juden (Lessing) 169–70 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 109–10 difference9 –10, 76 Caucasian, abandonment of 74 disapproval 49 Ceylon 85 Discours de Metaphysique Characteristics of Men, Manners, (Leibniz) 40 Opinions, and Times (Shaftesbury) Diseased, the8 33, 39 disgust 49, 63–64 Chodowiecki, Daniel 123–24, 124, 149, Disgusting, the8 150, 153, 159–63, 162, 163, 164, displeasure 64; and pleasure 45 166, 167, 168, 174–75n69, 174n68, divine mercy 121 175n73, 178 divine providence, and free will 109 186 Index Dohm, Wilhelm von 12; On the Civil German rationalism 39–44 Improvement of the Jews 14–16; Germans, Jews and the Claims of Michaelis’s response to 16–19 Modernity (Hess) 14–16, 17–18 Dresden 163–64 Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumausgabe (Mendelssohn) 153 Eagleton, Terry 10, 35 Gilman, Sander8 , 10, 23n18 ecclesiastical power, Mendelssohn’s Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig critique of 55–56 155–56, 167 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard 78 God 38, 41–42; and the Beautiful 42–43; Eisen, Arnold 58 and beauty 11; divine mercy 121; the Elementary Book (Basedow) 160–61 Enlightenment and 15; man made in emotional responses, mixed sentiments 6 image of 119, 120, 122–23; and English Civil War 34 morality 39; perfection of 43; Enlightenment, the: aesthetics 7, 11–12; physiognomy and 106, 119–21; attitude to Jews 77–79; definition of sublimity 51–54, 180–81 ugliness 5; and God 15; and Judaism Good 32, 180; and the Beautiful 42–43; 11–12, 14–15; and physiognomy and reason 38–39 110–11; and secularization 37–39; goodness9 and truth 34–35 Gothic poets 45 environmental determinism 90–93 Graff, Anton 149, 150, 157–59, 166, environmental quasi-determinism 79–81 168, 174n59, 175n83 Eskimos 92–93 Gray, Richard 19 Essay on the Causes That May Affect Greeks, Ancient 43–44, 106–9, 110–11, Men’s Minds and Characters 114–15, 115–16 (Montesquieu) 80–81 Greenlanders 84 ethnicity, and aesthetics 8–9 Grimm Brothers, the7 European type 75 Gumperz, Aaron Salomon 14, 170 Evil 33, 180 Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden 84 executions, the attraction of 47–48 Guyer, Paul 44, 61 external appearance, and internal worth 8 Hacking, Ian 75–76 harm, ugliness as 34 facial morality 105 harmony 45 faith 60 hate, and ugliness 7 Fraenkl, David 13 Hennings, August 163 Frederick the Great 3, 13 Herder, Johann Gottfried 33–34, free choice 58–60 122–23 free will, and divine providence 109 Herz, Markus 2–3 Freedman, Jeffrey 19–20, 119–20 Hess, Jonathan 79; Germans, Jews and freedom 14, 34, 58–60, 64, 180 the Claims of Modernity 14–16, 17–18 Freimark, Peter 155 Hobbes, Thomas 32–33, 35 Frey, Siegfried 117–18 Hogarth, William 7, 33–34 Friedlander, A. H. 7 Holbein the Younger 125, 125, 127, 138 Frisch, Johann 149, 150, 154, 164, 165, holiness 9, 38, 39 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 166, 168, 175n83, 176n88 human nature, Buffon’s theory of 82–83 Fritsche, Baron Thomas von3 humanity 74–75 Furniss, Tom 50 Hume, David 30, 146 Fuseli, Henry 132 identity9 Garve, Christian 41 immorality8 , 131, 180 Geismeier, Willi 174n68 imperfection 36, 40, 49 Georgia 87 India 80–81 German Enlighteners (Aufklärer)33 industriousness 80 German Enlightenment 33 inner harmony 35–36 Index 187 instinct, and reason 94–95 perfection 57; ritual 56–58, 59–60, intellectualization 47 62–63, 65; seen as deformation 12 interiority 157 Judaism and Enlightenment internal worth, and external (Sutcliffe) 14 appearance 8 Judas 125, 126, 127, 130–31, 138 interpretation, artistic 148–49, 164 Israelites 16–17, 78 kalokagathia (beautiful-and-good)5 Italy 153 Kant, Immanuel 18, 50, 75, 180; and aesthetic judgment 61–64; Jenks, Chris 146 on appearance 97–98; appearance Jerusalem (Mendelssohn) 14, 32, 54–65 146; and beauty 64, 97–98; Becker Jesus Christ 105; Lavater’s physiognomy portrait 159; on Christianity 60–61, 122–25, 124, 125, 127–30, 128; second 70n94; Critical philosophy 7; Critique coming 134 of Judgment 5–6; Critique of Pure Jewish art 147, 154, 156–57, 171n8, Reason 2–3, 20; definition of Judaism 173n39 65; first meeting with Mendelssohn Jewish Emancipation 13–19, 15–16, 1–3, 179; influence 65, 70n100; and 18–19, 25n35, 78, 84, 151, 168–71, 183 Judaism 58–65, 70n94; Lewald on Jewish national pride 17 2, 4; on race 97–98; and ugliness 20, Jewish particularity 9, 15 63–65 Jewishness 4, 6, 8, 167 Kanter, Johann Jacob 159 Jews: adaptability 89; aesthetic Kantian ugliness 20, 63–65 judgments of 12; anthropological Kayserling, Meyer 6, 146, 149–50, assessments 17–19; beards 137; 150–51, 153 beautification 169–71, 183; knowledge: and moral authority 42; and Blumenbach on 96–97; characterized moral behavior 32 as Oriental 9; Dohm on 14–16; Enlightenment attitude to 77–79; language, Buffon’s theory of exoticism 78; guilt 77; humanity 82–83 15–16, 168; insecurity 13; Lavater’s Laplanders 83–84 physiognomy of 130–36, 130, 131, Lavater, Johann Caspar 3, 18, 54, 149, 136; legal restrictions 11–12, 147, 148, 159, 167; antecedents 106–11, 114–15; 173n41; Michaelis on 16–19; mixed attempt to convert Mendelssohn sentiments 170; negative images 132–35, 158, 159; attitude to Jews 137–38; Orientalism 18, 151; 131–32; beauty eugenics 139–40; and otherness 78–79; paradox of 76–77; facial morality 105; goals 118; personality cults 154; portraiture influence 137–40; on Judaism 137; among 154, 155, 156–57, 173n39; motivation 104; on national smells public conceptualization of 151–52; 137; physiognomic apprenticeship skin color 89; stereotypes 8–9, 14, 114; Physiognomische Fragmente 19, 151–52, 168–71; taxonomy 76–77 104–6, 111–16, 116–18, 123, 126, 127, Judaism: aesthetic judgments of 12; and 128, 131–32, 131, 135–36, 136, 145, Christianity 11–12, 15; commandment 162–63, 163; physiognomy of Jesus against graven images 62–63; 105, 122–25, 124, 125, 127–30, 128; Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 discrediting of9 ; Enlightenment view physiognomy of Jews 130–36, 130, of 14–15; and immorality 131; 131, 136, 137–38; physiognomy of irregularity 15; Kant and 58–65, Judas 125, 126, 127, 130–31, 138; 70n94; Kant’sdefinition 65; language physiognomy of Mendelssohn 135–36, of 57–58; Lavater on 137; legal code 136, 162–63, 163, 182; physiognomy 55–56, 59–60; Mendelssohn and 14, of Moses 132; physiognomy thesis 181; Mendelssohn’s defense of 7, 12, 104–6; relationship with Mendelssohn 54–65, 133; Mendelssohn’s description 132–36; rejuvenation of physiognomy of 31–32; mixed sentiments 56–57; 20–21, 104, 111–16; on Socrates moral improvement through 58; 115–16; theology 104–5, 112–13, 188 Index 119–21, 134; union of Christianity and German rationalism 39; Graff and physiognomy 129–30; Vistas in portrait 149, 150, 157–59, 166, 168, Eternity 119–20, 134 175n83; hagiographic portrait of 2; Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses hair 163; honest portrayal 161–62, Mendelssohn (Oppenheim) 3 162; and humanity of Jews 16; image laws 55 150–53; influence 1, 44, 147; inner laziness 80 nature 150; Jewishness 6, 8, 167; and legal oppression 7 Jewish Emancipation 168–71; and Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 7, 39–41, 42, Judaism 14, 181; Lavater’s attempt to 66n18, 67n30 convert 132–35, 158, 159; Lavater’s Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold 137 physiognomy of 135–36, 136, 163, Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim1 , 13, 182; Lewald on 6, 8; literary output 30–31, 43–44, 45, 149, 169–70 147; on mixed sentiments 6; modesty Letters on the Sentiments (Mendelssohn) 164; moral and physical beauty 21, 49–50 136; moral subversion 47; nervous Leviathan (Hobbes) 32–33 illness 158; Oppenheim portrait 3, Lewald, August 2, 4, 6, 8 171; painted image 21; paradox of Lichtenberg, Georg 114, 139, 146 146, 147–50, 182; and perfection 44, likeness 150–51 54; Physiognomische Fragmente Locke, John 11, 14, 30, 33, 83 portrait 162–63, 163; physiognomy Lomas, David 156 20–21; pictorial representations 147, Longinus 53 148–66, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 182; on pleasure 48–49; political McKeon, Michael 36–37, 38, 66n12 interpretation of image 166–71; McLean, Daniel 108, 109, 116 portrait backgrounds 155; portrait Maimonides 67n30 exclusions 153–54; portraits 153–55; Meiners, Christoph 12, 74–75, 76, 99n4 profession 155; public Mendelssohn, Fromet 3 conceptualization of 152; relationship Mendelssohn, Moses: adherence to with Lavater 132–36; and religious Judaism 133; and aesthetic toleration 13–14; on representations secularization 37; aesthetic writings 6; 68n43; Rode portrait 149, 150, aesthetics 7, 11, 12, 30–32, 44–49, 155–57, 158, 159, 164, 166; on 63–65, 167, 180–81; appearance 2, 6, sensation 50–51; standard picture of 146, 148, 150, 168; artistic 166; status 4–5, 7, 12, 13, 145, interpretation 150–53; beautification 147–48, 149, 152, 156, 159, 166–67; 167, 170, 182–83; on beauty 44–45; and the Sublime 49–54, 180–81; on Becker portrait 159; biographies 1; the sublimity of God 51–54; theory of bust paintings 153; Chodowiecki and mixed sentiments 30–32, 32–36, 159–60, 175n73; Chodowiecki portrait 44–49; and ugliness 20, 44–49, 149, 150, 153, 159–63, 162, 163, 164, 64–5180–2; ugliness of6 , 146, 149, 166, 167, 168, 178; on Christianity 60; 161, 166, 167, 168, 179, 182; creation of idealized image 154, 155; universalism 52–54, 54, 180–81; visit critique of ecclesiastical power 55–56; to Sanssouci 3–4; withdrawal from defense of Judaism 7, 12, 54–65, 133; public life 159; Zingg portrait 149, Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 description of Judaism 31–32; dual 150, 163–64, 164, 166, 168 significance 162–63; early portraits Michaelis, Johann David 12, 154–55; education 67n30; as an 25n36, 84, 169–70; Mosaisches Recht Enlightened Jew 14; enters Berlin age 16–19 14 3–4; exceptionalism 4; external mind/body connection 107 appearance and internal worth 8; Mirabeau, Comte de 1 fame 1–2; first meeting with Kant mixed sentiments, theory of 6, 30–32; 1–3, 179; first philosophical treatise and aesthetic effects 44–49; published 13; Frisch portrait 149, 150, development of 32–36; and Jews 170; 154, 165, 166, 168, 175n83, 176n88; and Judaism 56–57; and reason Index 189 38–39; secularization 36–39; naturalism 161–62, 162 and the Sublime 49–54; and ugliness nature, and art 63 44–49 Nicolai, Friedrich 30–31 modern aesthetic 20 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 107 modern Ugly, the 179 noble savage, the 90 modernist aesthetics 10–12 non-beautiful, the7 –8 Monadology (Leibniz) 39–40 North America 90–93 monogenesis 74–75, 77 Norton, Robert 41–42, 66n20, 152 monotheism 181 novelty 8 monstrous, the9 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Observations on the Feelings of the Secondat, Baron de 11, 16, 18, Beautiful and the Sublime (Kant) 24–25n33, 60, 76, 77–78, 79–81, 86, 97, 98 90, 95, 96 Occidental civilization, privileging of 7 Moore, C. 138 Of Human Physiognomy (della Porta) moral aesthetics 6, 30–32, 179–80; and 110, 115, 140n23 aesthetic effects 44–49; development On the Civil Improvement of the Jews of 32–36; and Jews 170; and Judaism (Dohm) 14–16 56–57; and reason 38–39; “On the Different Human Races” secularization 36–39; and the Sublime (Kant) 97–98 49–54; and ugliness 44–49 “On the Main Principles of the Fine moral authenticity 32 Arts and Sciences” (Mendelssohn) moral authority, and knowledge 42 45–46 moral behavior 32, 43 On the Natural Variety of Mankind moral character5 (Blumenbach) 93–97 moral education 40 Oppenheim, Moritz Daniel 3, 4, 171 moral freedom 58–60 Orientalism 18, 151 moral improvement 108 Original Sin 109, 120 moral judgment, and physicality 10 otherness 18 moral knowledge 39 Outline of the History of Humanity moral sense 33 (Meiners) 74–75 moral value, of ugliness 49 moral values 33 Palitzsch, Johann Georg 159 morality 180; and beauty 32–34; Parthey, Daniel Friedrich 161–62 definition 32; deformed 84; and God Paulson, Ronald 34, 36–39 39; Leibniz and 40–41; and physical Pauw, Cornelius de 60, 90–93 bearing 84–85; physicality 36; and perfection 18, 35, 36–39, 38, 40–41, 43, skin color 99n4; Wolff and 41–42 44, 49, 54, 57, 62, 63–65, 66n20, 88, Mosaisches Recht (Michaelis) 16–19 168, 180 Moses 132 perfectionist aesthetic7 , 20, 168 Mosse, George 10, 22n14 Persian Letters (Montesquieu) 77–78 Persians 85–86 national character 76 personality cults 154 national identity9 Phaedo 108 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 national pride, Jewish 17 Phaedon, or On the Immortality national smells 137 of the Soul (Mendelssohn)1 , nation-state, move to 37 155, 156 natural cause 81 physical bearing, and morality 84–85 natural history, Buffon’s theory of 81–89 physical judgment7 ; and civil worth Natural History, General and Particular 17–18 (Buffon) 81–89 physicality: and moral judgment 10; and natural philosophy 33 morality 36 natural religion 11, 38 Physiognomics, pseudo-Aristotle 106–7, natural slavery 80 114–15 190 Index Physiognomische Fragmente (Lavater) racial difference 96; Kant on 97–98 19, 104–6, 111–16, 116–18, 123, 126, racism 10, 22n14, 99n4 127, 128, 131–32, 131, 135–36, 136, Raphael 125 145, 162–63, 163 rationalist theogony7 physiognomy 18, 19; and beauty 105, reaction, natural, spontaneous 10–11 106; Chodowiecki and 159–60; Reade, Cyril3 , 171n7 Christological infrastructure 104–5; realism 161–62, 162, 167, 168 determinism 108; divine ideal 122–23; reason 38–39, 182; and human and facial morality 105; feeling 113; superiority 95; and instinct 94–95; and God 106, 119–21; Lavater’s goals misuse of 87 118; Lavater’s physiognomy of Jesus Recherches philosophiques sur les 105, 122–25, 124, 125, 127–30, 128; Américains (Pauw) 90–93 Lavater’s physiognomy of Jews recognition 4 130–36, 130, 131, 136, 137–38; redemption 109, 120, 134, 170 Lavater’s physiognomy of Judas 125, Reich, Philipp Erasmus 157, 159, 167, 126, 127, 130–31, 138; Lavater’s 174n59 physiognomy of Mendelssohn 135–36, Reimarus, Elise 163 136, 162–63, 163, 182; and Lavater’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere theology 119–21; Lavater’s thesis Reason (Kant) 58–64, 70n94 104–6; Lavater’s union of Christianity religious authority 36–38 and physiognomy 129–30; liberalism religious discrimination 10 168; mania for 138; materialist religious faith, and aesthetics 36–37 principles 116; mind/body connection religious legitimacy 5, 32 107; potential for harm 139–40; religious positivism 11 rejuvenation of 20–21, 104, 111–16; religious revelation 38 rise of5 ; subversion of 111; theology religious toleration 13–14, 36 112–13; tradition 106–11, 114–15; and Rembrandt 130, 131 ugliness 105–6 representation 151; aesthetic effects Pietism 42 45–46; power of 166 Plastik (Herder) 33–34 reputation 4 pleasure 40, 42, 48–49; and displeasure 45 Revolution of 1688 34 Pointon, Marcia 151, 153, 156, 157, “Rhapsody, Or Additions to the 158, 159 Letters on Sentiments” (Mendelssohn) political heterogeneity 36 48–49 political identity9 Rode, Christian Bernhard 149, 150, politics, and reality 166–71 155–57, 158, 159, 161, 164, 166 Pope, Alexander 45 Roger, Jacques 88 popular philosophy 20, 26n57 Roma, the 23n22 Porstmann, Gisbert 153, 158, 166, Romantic aesthetic, the 5 175n73, 175n79 Rosenkranz, Karl 23n21 positive morality 39 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 30, 90 pragmatism 160 primordial body type 75 Sanssouci 3 Prince, Michael 36 Savage in Judaism, The Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 “Privileged Jews” (Arendt) 4, 168 (Eilberg-Schwartz) 78 progress 75; and ugliness 76 savageness 87 Protestant Reformation, the 112 secularization 36–39, 66n12 Prussia 24n29 self-improvement 43, 142n60, 183 pseudo-Aristotle, Physiognomics 106–7, sensation, Mendelssohn on 50–51 114–15 sensory overload 51 sentimentality 160, 164 rabbinical portraits 154, 155, 156–57, Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 173n39 Earl of 8, 30, 33, 39, 40 race, Kant on 98 Sinaitic revelation, the 52, 69n66 Index 191 Sinti, the 23n22 ugliness: aesthetic effect of 45–46; skin color 84–85, 181; Blumenbach on aesthetic pleasure and 31; definition5 , 95–96, 101–2n57, 102n58; Buffon on 7–8; as harm 34; and hate 7; Kantian 87–89, 100–1n41; genuine 89; Jews 89; 20, 63–65; Mendelssohn’s6 , 20, Meiners on 99n4; and morality 99n4; 44–49, 64–65, 146, 149, 161, 166, primordial 75, 88, 89, 97, 167, 168, 179, 180–82, 182; mixed 100–1n41 sentiments and 44–49; moral slaves and slavery 81 aesthetics and 44–49; moral value of smells 137 49; physiognomy and 105–6; and Smith, Adam 25n33, 35–36 progress 76; taxonomic hierarchy social acceptability 5, 32 76–77; unredeemable 64 social contract, the 55 ugly: correlates8 ; definition7 –8; social education 170 Enlightenment definition of5 social identity 9 ugly objects, aesthetic pleasure 31 social policing 5 universal natural rights 14 social responsibility 55 universalism9 , 52–54, 54, 61, Socrates 107–9, 110–11, 115–16, 121, 156 180–81 soil, influence of 90–93 unpleasant, the, aesthetic effects Spalding, Johann Joachim 42–43, 45–49 67n27, 142n60 unredeemable ugliness 64 Spectator, The 8, 110–11 Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu) 76, 78, value judgments 156 79–81 Vierhaus, Rudolf 160 spiritual development 43 vigor 80 state, the, role of 55 virtue 39–40, 66n18 statistics 75–76 Vistas in Eternity (Lavater) stereotypes 14, 131–32, 131, 138, 119–20, 134 151–52, 168–71 visual cultures 146–47 subject–object relations 35 Volkskunde (folk studies) 75 Sublime, the 8, 31, 49–54, 57, 62–63, 180–81 Wendorf, Richard 148, 154 superiority, sustainability of 91–92 whiteness 88, 89, 90, 93, 97, superstition 86 100–1n41 Sutcliffe, Adam, Judaism and Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Enlightenment 14 43, 127 wisdom 111, 166 Tassaert, Jean Pierre Antoine 168 Wolff, Christian 41–42, 44 taste 63, 167, 180 Woodall, Joanna 150–53, 156 Thoughts on the Destiny of Man (Spalding) 42–43 Zammito, John H. 19–20, Toland, John 14 26n57, 44 tolerance 11, 182 Zantop, Susanne 98, 99n4 travel literature 75 Zingg, Adrian 149, 150, 163–64, 164, true deformity 116 166, 168 Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:57 07 August 2016 truth: and beauty 34, 42–43; and Zopyrus 108–9, 110–11, 115–16 the Enlightenment 34–35; impartial Zurich, expulsion of Jews 34–35 134–35 eBooks from Taylor & Francis-^ Helping you to choose the right eBooks for your Library

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