NEW Spirit and Secularity
NAHME - CHAPTER 3 DRAFT- NOT FOR CITATION Chapter 3 Race, Religion, and Identity: the (Theo-)Politics of Kantianism and the Predicament of German Jewish Liberalism In the century since their first, limited experience of emancipation in 1812, many German Jews gained an increasing awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of appealing to civic rights and individual freedoms to seek recognition in German public institutions. On the one hand, these liberal ideals of freedom and equality, duty and obligation to the rational legal state (Rechtstaat) gave German Jews a sense of belonging to the German Fatherland and held up the image of the rights-bearing citizen as an ideal to strive toward. But on the other hand, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Jewish Question was also increasingly framed as a problem implicit in the developing discourse of liberalism and gave rise to an anxiety over the secularization of political and moral public discourse about values, norms, and social ideals in Wilhelmine Germany. The Jewish Question, as I argued, was both an epistemological and a political predicament. Whether all “Germans” acknowledged Jews as belonging to a community and fraternity of national identity is less important, however, than the diversity in normative goals represented by the introduction of a liberal philosophical worldview in Imperial Germany as the means for articulating a still inchoate national identity. And because the Jews, like many of their compatriots, participated in a collective imagining of what a “civic” identity could be, their engagement with both the liberalism and idealism of the late nineteenth century gives voice to the significant influence of 197 NAHME - CHAPTER 3 DRAFT- NOT FOR CITATION this intellectual worldview on the broader social and cultural moment.
[Show full text]