German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses

238 Pages·2013·4.63 MB·English

by  Michael Mack

GERMAN
IDEALISM
AND THE JEW

MICHAEL MACK
GERMAN
IDEALISM
AND THE JEW
The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses
the university of chicago press • chicago and london
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2003 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2003.
Paperback edition 2014
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 2 3 4 5 6
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 50094- 2 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 50096- 6 (paperback)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 11578- 8 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208 / c hicago / 9 780226115788.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Mack, Michael.
German idealism and the Jew : the inner anti- semitism of
philosophy and German Jewish responses / Michael Mack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0- 226- 50094- 2 (alk. paper)
1. Idealism, German. 2. Antisemitism—Germany—History.
I. Title.
B2745.M33 2003
305.892'4043—dc21
2002152500
o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Political, Philosophical,
Theological, Sociological, and Literary Critical
Ramifications of Anti-Semitism 1
Part One: Narratives
1 Positing Immutability in Religion: Kant 23
2 The Metaphysics of Eating: Jewish Dietary Laws
and Hegel’s Social Theory 42
3 Transforming the Body into the Body Politic:
Wagner and the Trajectory of German Idealism 63
Part Two: Counternarratives
4 Moses Mendelssohn’s Other Enlightenment and
German Jewish Counterhistories in the
Work of Heinrich Heine and Abraham Geiger 79
5 Political Anti-Semitism and Its German Jewish
Responses at the End of the Nineteenth Century:
Heinrich Graetz and Otto Weininger 98
6 Between Mendelssohn and Kant: Hermann Cohen’s
Dual Account of Reason 108
v
vi / CONTENTS
7 Franz Rosenzweig, or The Body’s Independence
from the Body Politic 117
8 The Politics of Blood: Rosenzweig and Hegel 125
9 Freud’s Other Enlightenment: Turning the
Tables on Kant 136
10 Walter Benjamin’s Transcendental Messianism,
or The Immanent Transformation of the Profane 155
Conclusion: Elias Canetti, Franz Baermann Steiner,
and Weimar’s Aftermath 169
Notes 179
Index 221
Acknowledgments
Several institutions and individuals supported the conception and the com-
pletion of this study and substantially influenced its content and form. Sander
L. Gilman invited me to work with him at the University of Chicago. I am
most grateful to him for his generous encouragement, help, and advice. His
pioneering work on anti-Semitism has been invaluable. In the same way, his
groundbreaking work on the interrelations between perceptions of the body
and conceptions of the mind helped sensitize me to issues that dwell at the in-
terface between the biological and the spiritual.
At the University of Chicago, where much of this book was written, Paul
Mendes-Flohr provided the sincere support, invaluable advice, and untiring
encouragement that enabled its completion. His work on German Jewish
writing and thought shaped the conception of counternarrativity as devel-
oped inGerman Idealism and the Jew. Moreover, his work on dual identities
substantially influenced my approach to German Jewish writing and thought.
Paul Mendes-Flohr introduced me to T. David Brent of the University of
Chicago Press. I am most grateful to David for all his invaluable help, brilliant
advice, and strong encouragement. I cannot imagine a better editor and inter-
locutor than he. Many thanks, too, to Jane Zanichkowsky for her meticulous
copyediting.
I am most grateful to the anonymous readers for the University of
Chicago Press. Each has helped improve the structure and the content of this
book. I am particularly grateful to Dominic Boyer (one of the anonymous
readers who dropped his anonymity) for his detailed and invaluable report.
At the University of Chicago, Eric L. Santner encouraged me to discuss Franz
Rosenzweig’s work as part of the argumentative structure of German Ideal-
ism and the Jew.He gave me a copy of his manuscript for On the Psychology
vii
viii / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. I am most grateful to
him for his brilliant advice and for very stimulating and helpful conversations
about Sigmund Freud, Franz Rosenzweig, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek.
Moishe Postone offered helpful advice as regards my analysis of Marx’s notion
of value. He also contributed to a critical reading of Kant and Hegel. Michael
Fishbane invited me to teach the university’s Judaic civilization course. I am
most grateful for his help. Teaching this course was a very enriching and stimu-
lating experience and furthered the completion of this book. Françoise Meltzer
and Rick Rosengarten encouraged and supported work on the manuscript.
Donald Levine helped me focus on sociological issues related to the topics dis-
cussed. Conversations with Oded Schechter about Kant, Hegel, and counter-
narratives proved to be very creative and very helpful. I thank the following
friends and interlocutors at the University of Chicago: Leo Kass, Joel L. Krae-
mer, Robert Pippin, Jonathan Lear, Homi K. Bhabha, Franklin J. Gamwell,
David Levin, Samuel Jaffee, Cass Fisher, Jenny and Ben Sachs, Sivan and
Daniel B. Monterescu, Todd Herzog, and Katie Trumpener.
Work on this project has benefited from conversations with several schol-
ars in different disciplines. I am most grateful to the encouragement and com-
ments of Aleida and Jan Assman, Gillian and John Beer, Berel Lang, Nonica
Datta, Andrei Markovits, William Collins Donahue, Jakob Johannes Köll-
hofer, David Roberts, Seyla Benhabib, Hans Otto Horch, Michael Brenner,
Andreas Gotzmann, Hans Joas, Jonathan M. Hess, Martin Jay, Anson Ra-
binbach, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Bettine Menke, and Friedrich P. Vollhardt.
This book also has benefited from much institutional support. I thank the
German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which awarded me a generous
postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. I also thank the Calgary
Institute for the Humanities for awarding me its postdoctoral fellowship for
2001–2002. At Calgary, I completed the revisions to the manuscript. I am
most grateful to Joel Robert Schulz for all his help and encouragement.
A much earlier and shorter version of chapter 2 appeared as “The Meta-
physics of Eating: Jewish Dietary Law and Hegel’s Social Theory” in Philoso-
phy and Social Criticism 27, no. 5 (2001): 59–88. I am grateful to Sage
Publications for permission to reprint a revised version of this article. An-
other version of chapter 3 appeared as “Richard Wagner and the Trajectory
of German Transcendental Philosophy” in Telosno. 123 (spring 2002): 81–
105; reprinted by permission of Telos Press, Ltd. A different version of chap-
ter 9 appeared as “Freud’s Other Enlightenment” in New German Critique
85 (winter 2002): 3–32; reprinted by permission of New German Critique.
I thank the editors for their input and patience.
Introduction: The Political,
Philosophical,Theological,
Sociological,and Literary Critical
Ramifications of Anti-Semitism
There is not just one Enlightenment, but a number of Enlightenments.
—Rosenzweig,THESTAROFREDEMPTION
History and Philosophy
This book challenges a common paradigm underlying standard accounts of
the history of ideas. Historians, philosophers, theologians, psychologists, so-
ciologists, and literary critics tend to see anti-Semitism in general and Nazi
anti-Semitism in particular as a reaction against the Enlightenment. To be
sure, some studies have drawn attention to the presence of anti-Semitic mus-
ings in German idealist philosophy. Paul Lawrence Rose’s The German-
Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to
Wagner,for example, does precisely this but no more. There has been a lack
of attempts to critically reflect on the relation between anti-Semitism, on one
hand, and philosophy, aesthetics, and social theory, on the other.
Scholars of anti-Semitism could not make sense of the presence of irra-
tionality in the self-declared “rational” philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and
Feuerbach. Can one ignore anti-Semitism in philosophical writings? An affir-
mative answer would imply that anti-Semitism is an autonomous entity that
has nothing to do with other social and cultural issues. This, however, is
clearly not the case. One simply cannot appraise a body of work, disregarding
its prejudicial content. Moreover, “the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is never
discrete; it exists always and only as part of some larger complex.”1 This
implies that the anti-Semitic aspect of a larger entity has implications for the
understanding of this larger entity. Following Theodor W. Adorno’s herme-
neutic strategy, this study reads philosophical, literary, and documentary his-
torical texts with “X-ray eyes.”2It examines them in such a way as to make
their “hidden content” and their “hidden puzzles as transparent as the Cab-
balists of old tried to make the Torah.”3This kind of reading attends to the
1