Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 the tauber institute series for the study of european jewry Jehuda Reinharz, General Editor Sylvia Fuks Fried, Associate Editor Eugene R. Sheppard, Associate Editor The Tauber Institute Series is dedicated to publishing compelling and innovative approaches to the study of modern European Jewish history, thought, culture, and society. The series features scholarly works related to the Enlightenment, modern Judaism and the struggle for emancipation, the rise of nationalism and the spread of antisemitism, the Holocaust and its aftermath, as well as the contemporary Jewish experience. The series is published under the auspices of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry— established by a gift to Brandeis University from Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber—and is supported, in part, by the Tauber Foundation and the Valya and Robert Shapiro Endowment. For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com Sven-Erik Rose Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Jay M. Harris, editors Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents, 1772–1914 David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye, editors The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History Federica K. Clementi Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma *Ulrich Sieg Germany’s Prophet: Paul de Lagarde and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide *Mordechai Altshuler Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964 Robert Liberles Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany Sharon Faye Koren Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism Nils Roemer German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms David Assaf Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit Glorious, Accursed Europe: An Essay on Jewish Ambivalence *A Sarnat Library Book Sven-Erik Rose Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 brandeis university press Waltham, Massachusetts l brandeis university press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2014 Brandeis University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Typeset in Bulmer by Integrated Publishing Solutions University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rose, Sven-Erik. Jewish philosophical politics in Germany, 1789–1848 / Sven-Erik Rose. p. cm.—(Tauber Institute series for the study of European Jewry) Summary: “Fresh look at how Jewish intellectuals thought about Judaism within a German philosophical tradition”—Provided by publisher. isbn 978-1-61168-578-7 (cloth: alk. paper)— isbn 978-1-61168-579-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)— isbn 978-1-61168-580-0 (ebook) 1. Jewish philosophy—Germany—18th century. 2. Jewish philosophy—Germany—19th century. 3. Judaism and philosophy. 4. Judaism—Germany—History—18th century. 5. Judaism—Germany—History—19th century. I. Title. b5800.r674 2014 181'.06094309034—dc23 2014003913 5 4 3 2 1 For Claire, Asher, and Noam Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 Off with Their Heads? Lazarus Bendavid’s Vision of Kantian Subjects at the End of Jewish History 14 2 Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State, or the Politics of Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1820s Germany 44 3 Locating Themselves in History: Hegel in Key Texts of the Verein 90 4 Marx’s “Real Jews” between Volk and Proletariat: Productivizing Social Abjection and Grounding Radical Social Critique 146 5 Patriotic Pantheism: Spinoza in Berthold Auerbach’s Early Career 200 6 Moses Hess: Beyond the Politics of Self-Possession 241 Concluding Remarks 272 Abbreviations 275 Notes 277 Works Cited 351 Index 371 Acknowledgments The earliest parts of this book grew out of my participation in a seminar on Kant and the Haskalah given by Christoph Schulte at the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam. At the University of Pennsylvania, Lilianne Weissberg guided the project as it developed. Her intellectual energy is an inspiration. I wrote and rewrote this book while at Miami University (Ohio). I am deeply thankful for the rigorous level of intellectual conversation that my colleagues in Miami’s Department of French and Italian maintain and for their kindness, col- legiality and good humor, and their enduring support of my work—even when, as in this book, it took me far afield of French studies. As this project developed over many years, Jim Creech, Elisabeth Hodges, Anna Klosowska, Sante Mat- teo, Mark McKinney, and Jonathan Strauss engaged generously and probingly with it in the department’s vigorous works-in-progress series. Jim and Jonathan also read portions of the manuscript and helped me tighten my thinking and my prose. Colleagues in Miami’s German studies works-in-progress group also read and discussed portions of the developing manuscript; I thank in particular Mila Ganeva, Ole Gram, Eric Jensen, and Pepper Stettler. Steve DeLue saw value in my work at a crucial time. This project has benefited from the advice and sup- port of many other colleagues and friends in the wider Cincinnati community, in particular Susan Einbinder, Adi Gordon, Eran Kaplan, and Michael Meyer. Miami University granted me a semester of research leave in spring 2009 that greatly facilitated the research and writing of this book. I am grateful to the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig and its director, Dan Diner, for granting me a fellowship in summer 2011, which gave me the resources and time to draft chapters 2 and 3. Colleagues there—in particular, Nicolas Berg, Jörg Deventer, Lutz Fiedler, Elisabeth Gallas, Natasha Gordinsky, Omar Kamil, and Susanne Zepp—were wonderfully welcoming, and their wide-ranging interests and ded- ication to research energizing. My office mate Yael Almog set a standard to emu- late for Sitzfleisch, even as our occasional coffee breaks provided a welcome dis- traction from things Hegelian. I am indebted to several people and institutions for inviting me to present work related to this book: Dan Magilow, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Julie Klein, Villanova University; Mark Raider, University of Cincinnati; David xi Biale on behalf of the Posen Foundation; Dan Diner, Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig; and Sylvia Fried and Eugene Sheppard, Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis University. I thank the audiences at these lectures for their questions and remarks, as well as the audiences of panels on which I presented aspects of this project at the Association for Jewish Studies, the Ger- man Studies Association, and the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop. My research was aided by the staffs of Hebrew Union College’s Klau Li- brary in Cincinnati; the University of Cincinnati’s Langsam Library; Miami University’s King Library; and the Shields Library at the University of Califor- nia, Davis. Thanks go also to Katharina Erbe, who transcribed several handwrit- ten documents of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. I am especially indebted to Eugene Sheppard for showing an interest in this project well before it was fully formulated and for encouraging me to submit it to be considered for publication in the Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry. As associate director of the Tauber Institute, Eugene read and most helpfully commented on the entire manuscript. Sylvia Fried, associate editor of the Tauber Institute series, and Phyllis Deutsch, editor-in-chief at the University Press of New England, have shared sage advice throughout the pro- cess of making final revisions, for which I am greatly appreciative. I thank Jeanne Ferris for the thoroughness with which she copy-edited my manuscript, and Michael Taber for preparing the index. I am enormously grateful to Jonathan Hess, who, as a reader for the press, could not have been more incisive in his evaluation of my project, or more intellectually generous in his suggestions for improving it. I also thank an anonymous reader for providing constructive criticism. David Biale, who read the manuscript as a reader of my tenure file at Miami University, likewise commented extensively on the project and made sug- gestions that have greatly improved this book. My new colleagues in the Department of German and Russian at the Uni- versity of California, Davis—in particular, Gail Finney, Jaimey Fisher, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Chunjie Zhang—have shown generous interest in my work and warmly welcomed me to my new institutional home. An earlier version of much of chapter 1 appeared as “Lazarus Bendavid’s and J. G. Fichte’s Kantian Fantasies of Jewish Decapitation in 1793,” Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 3 (2007): 73–102; I am grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to reprint material from that article here. I could not have written this book without my family and friends. Leah Hoch- man kept me on track during a critical half year or more by receiving, biweekly, my latest pages and consistently encouraging me no matter how meager or rough they were. Julia Scheffer shared her insights on a couple of particularly thorny xii } Acknowledgments translations. My deep appreciation goes to my intellectual companions Darcy Buerkle, Eric Kligerman, Dan Magillow, and Anna Parkinson. David Bathrick’s virtuosity in the genre of conversation is a keen pleasure and rich source of ideas, and his faith in my work has been an enormous support. My gratitude to John Wright and Phoebe Varinia DeMund for their enduring friendship grows with the years. I am fortunate to have a warm, supportive, and infinitely interesting family in the United States and Europe.