Introduction
The history of the Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy is long, involved, and unfinished. This paper does not pretend to do justice to that history, only to provide an account of its initial phase, covering the years c.1780–1800. This has its own challenges, however, arising in part from the presence of two powerful yet divergent approaches to the problem, neither of which turns out to provide an adequate historiographical frame for the task.
Paralleling a long-standing liberal Protestant historiography, a major approach to the question has been to situate the early Jewish reception of Kantianism under the established rubric of the Aufklärung. In positing a Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah, often centered in the figure of Moses Mendelssohn, an important body of scholarship has formulated a history of Jewish modernity in terms of a liberal reform movement. This was born from the attempt to reconcile a particular revealed biblical faith with a universal and inherently emancipatory form of scientific or philosophical rationality.Footnote 1 Studies of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy written under this rubric tend to develop a philosophical historiography. According to this historiography, as a result of its confrontation with a universal rational moral philosophy, scriptural rabbinic Judaism was (or should have been) progressively transformed into a type of Kantian moral religion, typically by realizing a capacity for rational moral autonomy held to be latent within Judaism itself.Footnote 2 In treating Jewish Kant reception in terms of Judaism's recovery of its own inner Kantian moral religion, however, this historiography replicates a strategy that was first formulated in the 1790s to serve a specifically Kantian purpose, namely to show that all revealed biblical religions would eventually be superseded by their latent Kantian rational religious core. As such this philosophical-historical approach was only ever accepted by the Kantians themselves, and by particular groups and individuals within Germany's Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic cultures who adopted Kantianism for the purposes of factional reform. It will be shown that, far from accepting Kantian moral and religious philosophy as the latent rational kernel of an enlightened Judaism, leading Jewish intellectuals responded to this philosophy as a hostile rival religion, one whose historiography of the progressive rationalization of revealed biblical religions was itself a potent anti-Judaic intellectual weapon.
A second approach to the early Jewish reception of Kantianism has adopted a somewhat different strategy. Rather than viewing scriptural rabbinic Judaism as reforming itself around a latent Kantian rational religion, it argues that Kantianism itself contained a “Jewish philosophy,” in the form of a Platonic–kabbalistic metaphysics, and for this reason proved attractive to Jewish intellectuals. Conjectured by Jürgen Habermas,Footnote 3 and then developed in a series of stimulating papers by Paul Franks,Footnote 4 this approach assumes the form of a dialectical philosophical historiography. On the one hand, Jewish intellectuals are supposed to have discovered their own lost metaphysics within Kantian philosophy, which in turn permitted them to contribute to the “inner development” of German idealism.Footnote 5 On the other hand, Kantianism is supposed to have supplied these intellectuals with the cosmopolitan universalistic–rationalistic outlook needed to break free of a particularistic scriptural Judaism. Not only does this approach tend to exculpate the anti-Judaism of Kant and his followers—by treating it as a temporary glitch in German philosophy's recognition of its inner kabbalism—but it also provides a condescendingly optimistic account of the rosy future that awaited Jewish thought once it had been universalized via German philosophy.Footnote 6
Even more so than the optic of a Jewish Aufklärung, however, this positing of German idealism's inner kabbalism is unsuited to investigating the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy. First, not only do its authors provide no textual or contextual evidence that Kant made any use of kabbalistic metaphysics, but they also simultaneously overlook the abundant evidence and commentary pertaining to the Lutheran Christian metaphysics in which he was steeped. Second, in identifying something called “Jewish philosophy” with kabbalistic metaphysics, this approach ignores the fact that the leading Jewish Kant commentators seem to have had no affiliation to kabbalism. At the same time, it also tends to minimize the significance of the fact that the Christian kabbalism invoked by such philosophers as Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling had a long and checkered history as a device for Christianizing Judaism and importing esoteric metaphysics into Christian philosophy. Finally, in claiming that Jewish intellectuals were attracted to Kantianism's inner kabbalism, this approach flies in the face of significant evidence that several of them regarded Kantian philosophy as a threat to Jewish culture and identity. This was not least because it was presented to them in the form of a coercive trade-off, such that they might be rewarded with Prussian citizenship should they convert to Kantianism, or reform Judaism in its image.
In approaching it via the supposed inner Kantianism of an enlightened Judaism, the first way of framing the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy tends to overlook the degree to which leading Jewish intellectuals regarded this philosophy as rival faith or way of religious life that was inimical to Judaism. For its part, in ascribing its Jewish reception to Kantianism's supposed inner kabbalism, the second approach misleadingly imputes to Kantian philosophy a trans-confessional esoteric metaphysics. In doing so, it fails to grasp the fact that the Lutheran metaphysics informing Kantianism had been developed in order to attack the Catholic and Calvinist religions, and would inflict significant collateral damage on Judaism. In order to provide a historical frame for the Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy, it is thus first necessary to provide an account of the manner in which this philosophy emerged from Lutheran metaphysics in the form of a philosophical religion that sought to supplant all historical biblical faiths, especially Judaism. This was the Kantianism to which Jewish intellectuals responded.
Kant's philosophical religion
When Immanuel Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason was published in 1793 it unleashed a welter of attacks, defenses and explications, published in journal articles, pamphlets, sermons, and books, from across the religious spectrum. The immediacy, diversity, and intensity of these responses resulted from two mutually reinforcing factors. First, literary Germany had been primed for this conflict by a series of prior similar controversies, including those surrounding the “Neology” movement,Footnote 7 the pantheism dispute that broke out over Lessing's supposed Spinozism,Footnote 8 and the journal war that erupted around the Prussian Religious Edict of 1788.Footnote 9 An earlier scholarship tended to characterize these as conflicts over Christian rationalism, breaking out when champions of the autonomy of human reason, usually Wolffian philosophers, were engaged by defenders of revealed biblical and ecclesiastical faith.Footnote 10 More recent scholarship has begun to show, however, that what counted as “reason” for rationalists was frequently configured by theological modelling of divine and human intellection.Footnote 11 It has also been shown that some defenders of orthodox “faith” engaged in historicizing studies that were themselves radicalizing, revealing, for example, that key Christian doctrines such as the Trinity likely arose from post facto Platonic transformations of scripture.Footnote 12 Given this, “Christian rationalism” can perhaps best be understood only as an umbrella term for an array of tendencies that used theologically inflected reflection on human reason to transform practices of moral regeneration. The shared objective of these tendencies was to transfer such practices from the domain of public ecclesiastical worship and observance to the “inner” space of individual moral self-transformation. Emerging as the most powerful of all variants of Christian rationalism, Kant's religious philosophy could hardly be anything other than deeply unsettling for communal religious rites and observances, including, of course, those of Judaism.
The second reason why Kant's religious philosophy landed with such impact in the 1790s is that it was propelled by the reshaping of Protestant metaphysics that he had accomplished in his theoretical and moral philosophy during the 1780s. For this reshaping was so radical that it had the potential to undermine not only the theological doctrines and sacramental practices of the constitutionally recognized Protestant and Catholic confessions, but also the laws and rites of Germany's tolerated Jewish communities. In his theoretical philosophy, by positing man as a “sensibly affected rational being,” Kant had set limits to human reason and understanding. He had done so by arguing that, owing to their chaotic character, the sensations arising from man's sensibility require a priori or transcendental concepts and schemata to become intelligible. In simultaneously declaring that human reason could not intelligize things directly—as “things in themselves” or noumena—but only insofar as they appear on the screen of the sensibility, hence as appearances or phenomena, Kant ruled out the possibility of conceptual or theoretical knowledge of God.Footnote 13 Meanwhile, in his practical philosophy, Kant proclaimed that the morality of human conduct could not be determined by the “external” ends that humans pursue as sensuous beings, including the ends of temporal and eternal happiness. Morality had rather to be determined solely by willing in accordance with a command or law that issued from an “inner” rational or “supersensible” being, namely the command to realize this being as an end in itself.Footnote 14
Even before the publication of Kant's explicitly religious writings in the 1790s, there were leading intellectuals in Germany's Christian and Jewish communities who regarded his metaphysics of cognition and morals as presenting a double threat to their faiths. On the one hand, in pushing noumena, hence God, beyond theoretical understanding, while simultaneously transforming the spatio-temporal world into a domain of subjective appearances, Kant's theoretical philosophy undermined all Jewish and Christian teachings that presumed God's capacity to reveal himself directly in real space and time, whether in the form of miracles, holy scriptures, divine laws and covenants, and church sacraments, or through his incarnation as Jesus. On the other hand, in teaching that the highest principle of morality is a law lying in man's own reason, and that all “external” sources of morality violate man's capacity and duty to act only on the basis of this inner command, Kant's moral philosophy threatened to displace the entirety of Jewish biblical commandments and ceremonial laws, together with all Christian biblical laws and ecclesiastical statutes—in effect supplanting the “historical” religions with an autonomous moral philosophy. At the same time, however, there were other factions within the Jewish and Christian religious cultures who viewed the Kantian destruction of the sacred space and time of the synagogue and church as opening up an intoxicating new space of moral regeneration. This lay within individuals themselves, and took place as an inner act of spiritual self-transformation, in which they overcame the inclinations of their sensuous nature and began to act on the basis of their higher supersensible moral being.
This line of fracture—between the public holy spaces, scriptures, and rituals that Kantianism sought to close, and the personal holy space of inner individual spiritual self-transformation that it opened—ran through all of the crosscutting and conflicting receptions of Kant's religious philosophy. To understand its historical emergence and religious significance, it is necessary to take note of a little-understood feature of Kant's metaphysics, namely that the “anthropology” of Kant's “sensibly affected rational being” was actually a displaced Christology deeply rooted in seventeenth-century Protestant university metaphysics.Footnote 15 There is good evidence to suggest that Kant's double-sided model of humanity—in which man's rational being governs itself through pure intellection, while his empirical being is tied to worldly ends by his sensibility and sensuous inclinations—first appeared in seventeenth-century metaphysical constructions of the relation between Christ's divine and human natures.Footnote 16 Here it had been designed to explicate and defend Lutheran constructions of the incarnation and the Eucharist, which it did via the doctrine of the exchange of properties—the communicatio idiomatum—that permitted an intellectual or supersensible nature to be present in corporeal persons and things.Footnote 17
In a remarkable and extraordinarily consequential set of improvisations, Kant anthropologized and subjectivized this architecture.Footnote 18 He transferred spiritual beings’ capacity for intellectual self-determination to man, where it assumed the form of the “holy” willing of a higher or supersensible–rational being “inside” the subject. This made it possible to configure man's lower sensible nature in terms of the resistance that its “sensuous inclinations” offered to the rational willing of this self-legislative supersensible being.Footnote 19 And this in turn permitted a radical reconstruction of morality and the moral law, for it allowed suitably instructed Kantians to think of themselves as commanded to overcome the resistance of their lower sensible selves by purifying its sensuous inclinations, thence aspiring to conform themselves to their higher inner supersensible self. Despite the lack of scholarly attention to it as the source of Kant's metaphysics of morality and religion, the self-divinizing role of this subjectivized Christology is clear enough in this remark from his Opus postumum:
There is a God. There is a being in me, that differs from me, and that stands in a causally efficient relation to me. Itself free, i.e., without dependence on natural laws in space and time, this being inwardly judges me (justifies or condemns). And I, man, am myself this being, which is not some substance outside me; and, what is most surprising, this causality is a determination to act in freedom (not as natural necessity).
This inexplicable inner condition reveals itself through a fact: the categorical imperative of duty.Footnote 20
The whole point of Kant's subjectivized Christology was to program a spiritual–philosophical exercise through which, by overcoming their lower sensuous inclinations, Kantians could imagine their moral selves governed by a law issuing from the holy willing of higher rational being contained within them, and to whose purity they could aspire.Footnote 21 Only by grasping the self-transformative and self-regenerative promise of the Kantian spiritual–philosophical exercise is it possible to understand the manner in which Kantian metaphysics itself functioned as a type of philosophical religion, and hence why it was understood by both its adherents and its opponents as challenging the public rites of the biblical religions, especially Judaism.
Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason is best understood as a program for transforming biblical ecclesiastical Christianity into a Kantian philosophical religion, and for eliminating Judaism altogether. The work's central strategy is to take Christian theological doctrines designed to configure the sacramental relation between a transcendent divinity and a dependent humanity—the doctrines of original sin, divine incarnation, vicarious atonement, and redemption—and transform them into symbols of a relation internal to man himself: the relation between his supersensible rational being and his empirical sensuous nature. Rather than attempting to supplant Christianity with a naturalistic civil religion, the aim of the Religion was to transform the practice and location of Christian moral regeneration itself. It envisages a transition from the sacramental redemption promised by participation in Christianity's public ecclesiastical rites to the inner moral self-transformation promised by Kantian Christological metaphysics, when pursued as an individual spiritual exercise.
Kant and his followers put this transformation into effect in three fundamental intellectual operations or acts. The first such act—constituting the portal through which individuals enter Kantian moral space—required Kantians to suspend obedience to divine religious laws in favor of obedience to a moral law prescribed by their inner rational being.Footnote 22 Taking place as a fundamental turning inward, or act of moral self-conversion, this act involved establishing a new relation to a moral self, and was entirely dependent on Kant's Christological remodeling of human subjectivity. By reconstructing morality around an exercise through which individuals sought to conform themselves to an “inner” self-legislating supersensible being, Kantians could subordinate all “external” religious statutes to a moral law grounded in human reason. As a result, the moral law was itself imbued with the feelings of reverence and awe that had previously attached to revealed divine commands. In Kant's words, “The moral law is, in other words, for the will of a perfect being a law of holiness, but for the will of every finite rational being a law of duty , of moral necessitation and of the determination of his actions through respect [Achtung] for the law and reverence [Ehrfurcht] for his duty.”Footnote 23 This exchange permitted Kantians to interpret biblical commandments as symbolic expressions of the moral law, while revering the inner moral law as a divine command.
The second intellectual act that defined the Kantian philosophical religion involved translating core biblical Christian sacramental doctrines—regarding sin, incarnation, atonement, redemption—into the subjectivized Christological architecture of Kant's religion. This permitted the ecclesiastical–sacramental “exchange of properties” between a transcendent divinity and a dependent humanity to be transformed into a self-transformative exchange taking place between man's supersensible and empirical moral natures. In Kant's Religion, this transformation was executed in a radical reconstruction of two central biblical doctrines: those of original sin and of Christ's vicarious atonement for human sin. Without attempting to capture the details of these twin reconstructions it is possible to lodge two summary comments. First, in his account of radical evil, Kant reconstructed the Genesis story of man's diabolical temptation and fall into sin. He did so by treating this as a crude allegory for a metaphysical drama in which a supersensible being existing outside space and time chooses to embody itself in a sensible nature, thereby mortgaging its future choices to sensuous inclinations, and corrupting its moral nature at its root.Footnote 24 Second, in his account of moral regeneration, Kant reconstructed the biblical story of Christ's incarnation and vicarious atonement for human sin. He did so by treating this as a symbol for an act of self-redemption taking place within man himself.Footnote 25 This occurs when the Urbild or archetype of moral perfection that God timelessly emanates in human reason, and that Jesus manifested in human history, is used by human beings to transform their moral disposition, conforming themselves to their higher rational being, and thereby redeeming themselves, such that everyman is his own Jesus.Footnote 26
The third and final intellectual action that constituted the Kantian philosophical religion involved the ultimate displacement of biblically based ecclesiastical sacraments and Jewish observances by a “pure religion of reason” accessed only through a special way of reading the Bible. This action was executed through the deployment of two intellectual devices: a philosophical history of religion and church, and a philosophical biblical hermeneutics, both forged in the Christological space between man's self-determining supersensible being and his sensuously distracted historical being. Kant thus framed his ecclesiastical history in terms of the relation between an ideal community of rational beings subject only to the moral law (the “invisible church”), and a historical religious community of sensible beings governed by sensuous rewards and punishments (the “visible church”). Unfolded in this space, the Kantian history of religion took shape as a narrative in which the pure moral religion, passing from reason into time with the advent of Jesus, devolved into the historical form of the statutory “reward religions,” where it was corrupted, but whence it could be redeemed, through their progressive rational purification.Footnote 27
Situated in this dialectical philosophical history, Judaism assumed a fatefully culpable form and significance for Kant and his followers. In refusing to accept the religion of Jesus, the Jews not only threatened to block the historical realization of the pure moral religion on earth, but also supplied the prototype for all those sensuous religions teaching that man can be saved through external laws, propitiations, and ceremonies. As a statutory religion that promises salvation not to a universe of rational beings but to a particular people obeying positive laws, Judaism, Kant declares, is the most abject of these “mercenary faiths.” For this reason, Judaism cannot be regarded as a religion at all, only as a theocratic political regime masquerading as one.Footnote 28 Responding to Moses Mendelssohn's refusal of Christian conversion, Kant could thus argue that, regardless, Judaism was historically destined to undergo a “euthanasia” as the Jews converted to the pure moral religion.Footnote 29
For Kant and his followers, the Christian Bible held the key to the recovery of the pure moral religion, for it had preserved the teachings of that religion within it, albeit hidden within the crude historical stories—of man's seduction and fall into sin, the God–man's incarnation, and his vicarious atonement for man's sin—that served as “vehicles” to introduce these teachings to humanity in its unrefined sensuous moral condition.Footnote 30 It was thus necessary to approach the Bible as the historical vehicle for a concealed metaphysical truth, which only the Kantian “scriptural interpreter” could reveal. In fact, this was just what Kant had done in showing that the stories of man's fall into sin, and redemption through the God–man, were only crude symbols for intellectual acts taking place entirely within man.Footnote 31 Kantian biblical hermeneutics thus took the form of a literary spiritual exercise in which the suspension of the Bible's “sensuous” historical meaning was understood as an act of spiritual self-transformation that qualified Kantians to apprehend an otherwise inaccessible metaphysical truth. Enacted in this self-transformative hermeneutics, the Kantian history of religion envisaged the progressive elimination of the plurality of biblically based ecclesiastical faiths, beginning with Judaism, and eventually leading to the emergence of a single universal Vernunftreligion.Footnote 32
Jewish receptions of Kantian philosophy
Jewish receptions of Kantian philosophy were conditioned by three factors that differentiated them from the Lutheran and Catholic receptions that were also taking place in the last decades of the eighteenth century. First, as David Sorkin has observed, the absence of Jewish universities meant that the complement of German Jewish intellectuals was comparatively small. It was also characterized by high degrees of autodidacticism, and the academic study of specifically permitted disciplines such as medicine.Footnote 33 There was no equivalent in Jewish history to the explosion of university building that took place in seventeenth-century Germany when, driven by competing programs to confessionalize their populations and train their bureaucracies, Protestant and Catholic rulers had established rival university systems, the most coherent and successful of which were the Jesuit universities.Footnote 34 All of the Christian philosophers and theologians who participated in the debates surrounding Aufklärung were products of these systems. Most of them had been trained as clergy, and used forms of philosophical and theological thought that derived directly or indirectly from their confessional academic training, as in the case of Kant's reworking of Lutheran metaphysics.
Second, for this reason, at the end of the eighteenth century, German Judaism possessed no equivalent of the juggernaut scholasticisms that the Protestants and Catholics had constructed to destroy each other's religions during the period of confessional conflict.Footnote 35 In particular, Judaism possessed no equivalent of the weaponized Schulmetaphysik—Jesuit Thomism, Lutheran “Concordial” metaphysics—that had been built to attack and defend mutually antagonistic Christian confessions, and from which Kantian metaphysics had emerged as a late variant. In this regard, kabbalism cannot be understood as the Schulmetaphysik of a “Jewish theology.” This is in part because, rather than constituting the foundation of a “Jewish philosophy” or “Jewish theology”—terms not used prior to the nineteenth century—the Kabbalah named an assemblage of mystical texts and practices, focused in esoteric readings of the Pentateuch. Emerging in early modernity, the Kabbalah spread in Jewish communities as a particular spiritual practice, often in competition with Maimonidean rationalist spiritualism. But it is also because, since the sixteenth century, the Kabbalah had been appropriated by and inflected through Christian scholarship for a variety of interlinked purposes. These included Jewish conversion,Footnote 36 clandestine Christian theological innovation,Footnote 37 intra-Christian theological combat (between anti- and pro-Trinitarians),Footnote 38 the erudite historicization of religion,Footnote 39 and philosophical speculation. Seen in this light, rather than exemplifying the inner Jewishness of German idealism, the discussion of kabbalistic themes by such philosophers as Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling was a further instance of Christian kabbalism.
Finally, as a patchily tolerated alien religious minority—one existing at the margins of a Christian estate society that was still deeply marked by confessional conflict and intolerance—Jewish participation in public life was precarious and fraught, especially when it came to public religious debates. This was the case in “enlightened” Prussia during the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy, keeping in mind that the limited (and in the event temporary) extension of economic and civil rights to Prussian Jews did not take place until the Judenedikt of 1812, in which these rights were tied to Jewish assimilation.Footnote 40 As a result of the Jewish community's lack of basic civil and political rights, when confronted by the sheer academic–cultural power of Kantian philosophy—reflected in the impunity with which Kant could declare Judaism to be no religion at all—the Jewish reception of Kantianism and Christian rationalism more broadly was framed by a coercive trade-off to which the Lutheran and Catholic receptions were not subject, namely that transforming scriptural rabbinic Judaism into a Kantian or otherwise rational moral religion might be the price that Jews had to pay to be recognized as citizens.Footnote 41 Further, if the specifically Christological character of Kant's metaphysics is given due weight—especially the modeling of moral regeneration in terms of the relation between the intelligible and sensible natures of an inner Jesus—then converting to Kantian metaphysics would seem to have left little room for an identity formed through Jewish law and observance.
Profoundly shaped by these three factors, the fin de siècle Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy did not take place as the celebratory recovery of a shared metaphysics of freedom and rationality. It assumed the form, rather, of a spectrum of exigent responses to a Christian philosophical religion whose sheer academic–cultural power, combined with an extortionate proffer of citizenship, made Kantian philosophy into an offer that was difficult for Jewish intellectuals to refuse, or accept. In their responses to Kantian philosophy and Christian rationalism more broadly, Salomon Maimon, Lazarus Bendavid, Moses Mendelssohn, and Saul Ascher provide windows into the Jewish reception of Kantianism at different points along this spectrum.
Salomon Maimon and Lazarus Bendavid
Salomon Maimon and Lazarus Bendavid occupy the Kantian end of this reception spectrum. Both of them lectured and published on Kant's central critiques, albeit in rather different ways. In his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy of 1790, Maimon, an impoverished Jew from rural Lithuania, provided a remarkable autodidactic commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason. His central concern, however, was less to expound Kant's doctrines than to transform them through a practice of immanent critique. Maimon thus takes as his point of departure Kant's model of the sensibility delivering appearances to the transcendental understanding via the passive intuitions of space and time. He then seeks to transform this by treating space and time themselves as products of the transcendental understanding, thereby imbuing the latter with a capacity to think its objects without sensible intuitions, somewhat similar to the faculty of intellectual intuition that Kant reserved for God alone.Footnote 42 As with other variants of Christian rationalism, here the capacities of human reason are modelled on those of divine intellection. When he identifies the transcendental understanding with the “I” or soul, Maimon heads in the direction of Fichte and Schelling's absolute idealism, but he does so by treating the withdrawal from sensible perception into the “I” as a type of philosophical–spiritual exercise that permits a certain kind of self-transformation: “We therefore have not only a method by means of which we can approach the idea I ever more closely in construction, but also a practical rule by which we go into ourselves [in uns selbst gehen], as it were, or, better, by which we, as such, attain ever greater reality.”Footnote 43 In other words, Maimon's reception of Kant's metaphysics of cognition can be understood as an immanent reconstruction of Kant's original exercise in spiritual–philosophical self-reflection and self-transformation, with no evident relation to kabbalism or “Jewish philosophy.”
Lazarus Bendavid adopted Kantian philosophy in a different way and for other reasons. A prominent Berlin mathematician and philosophical publicist, Bendavid embraced Kant's philosophy as the key to a radical rationalist reform of scriptural–rabbinic Judaism. It was in this sense that his reception of Kant was Jewish, rather than in that of using Jewish teachings in order to engage with Kant's philosophy. Bendavid thus offered stock standard Kantian lectures on the Critique of Practical Reason, explaining to his students that knowledge must be understood in terms of possible experience and its transcendental grounds;Footnote 44 that morality is determined not by the happy or unhappy consequences of action but only by the conformity of the will to the inner moral law;Footnote 45 and that man's salvation rests not on the rewards and punishments of a law-giving God, but solely on the worthiness to be happy that arises from following the moral law, which itself proves the existence of God and the afterlife.Footnote 46 As with the Lutheran and Catholic Kantians, Bendavid's conversion was marked by his acceptance of the portal doctrine that Kant had actually discovered the transcendental conditions of knowledge, morality and faith in the universal structure of human subjectivity.Footnote 47 This meant not only that Kant was not propagating a body of positive doctrine, but also that positive religious teachings not grounded in Kant's discovery of universal reason were intellectually and morally deficient.
In congratulating “Ben Davie, a highly intelligent Jew,” for advocating the public conversion of the Jews to Christianity—permitting them in Kant's eyes to be recognized “as an educated and civilized people who are ready for all the rights of citizenship”Footnote 48—Kant had somewhat misread his follower. In fact, in his Etwas zur Characteristick der Juden (Something on the Character of the Jews) of 1793, Bendavid argued that even were the Jews to be baptized they would still not be good citizens, unless, that is, ceremonial–juridical Judaism had been transformed into a pure moral religion along Kantian lines. He thus declared that “unless … the Jews intervene by abolishing their meaningless ceremonial law, which in no way accords with present times, and unless they adopt a purer religion that is worthier of the divine father—the pure teaching of Moses—then, even after they have been baptized, they will necessarily remain indifferentists and citizens dangerous to the state.”Footnote 49 Only by turning Judaism into a pure moral religion would Jews acquire the capacity for rational self-governance, which is the condition of Kantian citizenship. For Bendavid, acceding to Kant's universal moral religion thus became a kind of conversion test through which Jews might gain access to Prussian citizenship.Footnote 50 As a good Kantian, Bendavid viewed the state as an “ethical commonwealth,” citizenship in which is conditional on the achievement of inner moral self-governance, rather than on conferral by public law independently of morality and religion.
Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn was less a receiver of Kant's philosophy than one of Kant's peers and interlocutors.Footnote 51 Mendelssohn had sent Kant comments on his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, but famously declined to wrestle with the Critique of Pure Reason. He invited Kant to comment on his Jerusalem of 1783, without living to see the negative responses that Kant published in the Religion in 1793 and The Conflict of the Faculties in 1798. For Mendelssohn, Kant belonged to a broader phalanx of Christian-rationalist writers—including Johann Zöllner, Johann Schulz, and August Cranz—whose enthusiasm for an aufgeklärte natural religion threatened to issue in a conversion test for granting Jews Prussian citizenship. In responding to these writers in his Jerusalem, Mendelssohn may be regarded as effectually preempting the anti-Judaic Christian rationalism of Kant's Religion. For Kant, Mendelssohn was an enlightened Jew whose refusal to convert to Christianity Kant criticized in those religious writings that appeared following Mendelssohn's death in 1786.
Despite Bendavid claiming him as a mentor, Mendelssohn's response to the pressure applied to Jews by the Christian rationalists differed from Bendavid's in almost every regard. Mendelssohn refused to accept that Jewish civil rights should be in any way conditional on Jews replacing their ceremonial law and rites with a natural or rational religion, or with a Judaism reformed in its image. In his Jerusalem, he argued to the contrary that the rights of citizenship should be completely divorced from religious affiliation, allowing Jews to maintain their ceremonial–juridical religion as citizens of a multi-confessional state.Footnote 52
It is widely held that Mendelssohn was a Wolffian and that Wolffian rationalism and natural religion provide the metaphysical foundations for the political theology of Jerusalem.Footnote 53 It will be argued here, though, that, despite Mendelssohn's own discussions of metaphysics, Jerusalem has no metaphysical or philosophical foundations. Mendelssohn was acutely aware that, owing to its transcendental and universalist truth claims, rationalist metaphysics could easily assume an absolute and totalizing character that was contemptuous and intolerant of biblically revealed Judaism. Given that he wanted to preserve Judaism as a revealed biblical faith, Mendelssohn's response to the lack of a weaponized Jewish Schulmetaphysik was to draw on rationalist metaphysics in a strategic and eclectic manner. This was not to provide Wolffian philosophical foundations for an all-encompassing political theology, but rather to provide ancillary access to a natural religion that was more readily accessible through “common sense,”Footnote 54 and that could sit alongside revealed Judaism in a multireligious order under the umbrella of a pluralist constitution. Jerusalem thus took shape as a defense of the centrality of Judaic biblical and ceremonial law to Jewish life and thought, framed by an eclectic discussion of ethics, politics and ecclesiastical law drawn from the natural-law writings of Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, and Wolff.Footnote 55
Adapting German natural law to his own purposes, Mendelssohn thus argues that while both church and state are concerned with forming the actions and convictions of human beings—to make them capable of exercising their rights to things and happiness—they do so in different ways: the church on the basis of educative truths addressed to reason, the state on the basis of contracts and coercive laws addressed to the will.Footnote 56 As distinct from Locke and Kant, however, for Mendelssohn the incoercible character of religious convictions arises not from their grounding in a self-determining rational nature or capacity,Footnote 57 but from their grounding in positive cognitive truths, in fact, in truths of quite different kinds.Footnote 58 The saving truths of rational religion—pertaining to the immortality of the soul and the existence of an all-knowing and providential God—are available to all human beings through the exercise of reason and the senses, making their conviction incoercible. The Jewish conviction that the Sabbath represents a covenant between God and the Jewish people, however, arises from acceptance of a different kind of truth, namely the historical truth revealed in the biblical account of the sealing of this covenant,Footnote 59 even if this conviction entails subordinating rational self-determination to divine guidance and obedience. It is for this reason that Jewish religious convictions should not be coerced by being tied to civil rights, and hence why states should tolerate a plurality of religious convictions.Footnote 60
Unlike Mendelssohn, his Christian-rationalist critics did not approach religious freedom in terms of the constitutional protection of a plurality of pedagogical religions and convictions. Rather, they viewed it in the Kantian manner, as grounded in the intrinsic freedom of a self-determining rational being. As a result, they felt empowered to hoist him on the horns of a dilemma. Either (as they believed) Judaism itself exercised ecclesiastical power to enforce its superstitious teachings, because such teachings could not possibly be grounded in the free use of reason, or (as they taunted) Mendelssohn must accept that all religions are ultimately grounded in a free and universal reason, which means that Judaism must dissolve into rational religion, and that Mendelssohn must be a Christian rationalist who should simply convert.Footnote 61
It is impossible to comprehend the remarkable response to this dilemma that Mendelssohn provides in Part II of Jerusalem unless it is understood that he rejected the entire Christian-rationalist model of reason in which it was formulated. For Mendelssohn, reason and sensibility do not constitute a Christological or Kantian duality, whether mediated sacramentally by the incarnation, ethically by the moral law, or philosophically by a rational religion. Mendelssohn rather treats reason and sensibility, the divine and the temporal worlds, as forming a continuum. He thus feels no compulsion to engage with the Christian metaphysical problems of how a supersensible divinity or rationality can be sensibly manifest in a spatio-temporal world, or how a universal rational religion can be reconciled with a particular positive faith historically revealed to a given people. According to Mendelssohn, rather than being something that lies beyond empirical experience, the minimal universal rational knowledge of an all-knowing providential God required for salvation is something that is immediately available to the senses and reason, through contemplation of the beauty and order of nature.Footnote 62 As such, this natural religion needs no theological or philosophical investigation, or abstract doctrinal formulation, and can be freely accepted by the members of different religious faiths, including the Jews.Footnote 63
While this means that the universal rational truths of natural religion are presumed by Judaism, and indeed functioned as a “preparation” for the Sinaitic revelation, it nonetheless does not mean that they are its philosophical foundation.Footnote 64 That is because, in addition to rational reflection, knowledge of God is also available through a second avenue, namely through the historical disclosure of his will, revealed to particular peoples in speech and writing, at particular times and places. God's will pertaining to the Jewish people—with regard to how they should worship him and conduct themselves in order to obtain temporal and eternal happiness—was thus spoken directly to Moses in the Sinaitic revelation, thence transcribed in the script of the Torah, and subsequently confirmed by prophecies and miracles.Footnote 65
For Mendelssohn, then, there is no dilemma to resolve between universal rational religion and historically revealed scriptural Judaism, since these represent two separate paths to God:
To say it briefly: I believe that Judaism knows of no revealed religion in the sense in which Christians understand this term. The Israelites possess a divine legislation—laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life, instruction in the will of God as to how they should conduct themselves in order to obtain temporal and eternal felicity. Propositions and prescriptions of this kind were revealed to them by Moses in a miraculous and supernatural manner, but with no doctrinal opinions, no saving truths, no universal propositions of reason. These [latter] the Eternal reveals to us and to all other men, at all times, through nature and thing, but never through word and script.Footnote 66
A dilemma only arises if the difference between the rational universal and the revealed historical paths to God is framed by the metaphysical–anthropological (or Christological) distinction between man's rational and sensible natures. In treating the Jewish historical revelation as merely the outer sensuous appearance of a universal rational religion,Footnote 67 this Christological metaphysics meant that Christian rationalists could respond in only one of two ways to Mendelssohn's insistence on the Jewish revelation as an independent path to God. They could either ignore it,Footnote 68 or else treat it as inimical to universal rational religion, meaning, as Kant argued, that Judaism is not actually a religion at all.Footnote 69 Only within that bipolar Christological framework could the Christian rationalists demand that Mendelssohn acknowledge either that biblical Judaism had to be compelled because it was not grounded in the free exercise of universal reason, or that it was grounded in the latter and hence ceased to be the revelation of God's will to the Jews. In Mendelssohn's account, however, rather than being that between inner rational ground and external empirical appearance, the relation between natural religion and positive Jewish law is that between two distinct but harmonious divine dispensations or paths to God.Footnote 70
For Mendelssohn, the natural knowledge of God required for salvation is available to all peoples and needs no abstract doctrinal formulation. For its part, the knowledge of the divine will revealed to Moses and transmitted in the Bible does not concern what men must believe in order to be saved, but what Jews must do in order to live in accordance with the laws of their way of life. On this basis, Mendelssohn argues that Christian and Jewish conceptions of revelation differ fundamentally. Christian revelation consists of the divine disclosure of abstract doctrines or articles of faith required for salvation, while Jewish revelation assumes the form of the divine prescription of rules of conduct necessary for the temporal and eternal happiness of the Jewish people. This allows Mendelssohn to declare that Judaism has no enforceable confession or articles of faith.Footnote 71 He thus sees no contradiction between the free exercise of reason and the transmission of positive religious teachings. This is in part because Jewish teachings are directed at conduct, not belief, and in part because freedom of religion consists not in rational self-determination but in the constitutional recognition of a plurality of religions, each transmitting its teachings without the bribery and threats of ecclesiastical power.
Interpreted in this light, Mendelssohn's conception of ceremonial law was designed to overcome the dilemma between a rational religion that is not revealed, and a revealed Judaism that is not rational. This is possible, Mendelssohn argues, because the God that reason contemplates in nature is revealed to “common sense” nonconceptually and immediately, while the God who historically revealed his laws to the Jews did so in a “script” that also permits reflection on rational truths.Footnote 72 By suspending the linkage between abstract religious doctrine and civil rights, this conception of ceremonial law was also designed to defend Judaism against the charge of exercising ecclesiastical power. According to Mendelssohn, prior to the destruction of the Second Temple such a linkage was impossible, because during this period God himself was the civil sovereign of the Mosaic state, meaning that religious and civil law were the same thing, and that crimes such as breach of the Sabbath “had to be punished civilly, not as erroneous opinion, not as unbelief, but as misdeeds.”Footnote 73 Following the destruction of the Temple, however, religious and civil laws were sundered, separating sin and crime, and giving rise to the bifurcated relation between church and state discussed at the beginning of Mendelssohn's discourse.Footnote 74 But here too the linkage between doctrinal purity and civil rights is impossible, since the separation of religious persuasion and political coercion precludes it.
According to Mendelssohn, it is this post-Temple existence that defines the lives of those in today's Jewish diaspora, requiring them to accept the laws and morals of a non-Jewish state, while simultaneously preserving the memory of the Temple and the Mosaic state in their ceremonial laws. In a striking move, Mendelssohn suspends the messianic and eschatological dimensions of this ritual memory by declaring that ceremonial law provides no insight into any possible future return of the Mosaic constitution, for this was a singular historical occurrence, and the old ritual sacrifices and purifications are now preserved only in the prayers and ceremonies of the synagogue.Footnote 75 In conceiving of the ceremonial law as the ritual memorializing of an ethical state with no knowable point of future return, Mendelssohn's history of religion was informed by a conception of historical time quite unlike that characteristic of Christian and Kantian philosophical historiographies. For, in viewing historical time as closing the gap between the supersensible and sensible worlds, these philosophical historiographies assumed an eschatological form, in Kant's case prefiguring the asymptotic emergence of a single universal moral religion as the foundation of a unified ethical commonwealth.Footnote 76 In treating time as a cycle linking the destruction of the Second Temple to the present ceremonial preservation of its memory, however, Mendelssohn was able to suspend all Enlightenment doctrines of history as the progressive rational “education of humanity,” including that of his friend Lessing.Footnote 77 In doing so, Mendelssohn was able to declare that, rather than progressing, human morality remains roughly constant across history, “oscillating” between better and worse conditions.Footnote 78
Despite earning him another of Kant's censures, this time for failing to grasp the relation between “theory and practice,”Footnote 79 Mendelssohn considered it crucial that the Prussian Jews reject the notion of universal historical progress towards a single rational religion and state. Only by preventing the fearful progressivist convergence of Christian-rationalist theory and governmental practice in an “ethical state” could the Jews preserve the civil pluralism on which their cultural and political survival depended.Footnote 80 The Mendelssohn that emerges from this interpretation of Jerusalem is thus not the German philosopher manqué who failed to reconcile universal rational religion with Jewish historical revelation. Rather, he steps forward as a Jewish intellectual who argued that such a reconciliation was a threat to contemporary Judaism, whose renewal had to be undertaken on the basis of intellectual resources internal to Jewish history, culture, and language. Mendelssohn thus preempted the pure religion of reason that Kant would elaborate in the Religion, to which, nonetheless, he would be held posthumously accountable.
Saul Ascher
Saul Ascher's reaction to the circumstances threatening Prussian Jewry paralleled Mendelssohn's, thereby differing fundamentally from Maimon's and Bendavid's, as reflected in Ascher's armed response to Kantian and Fichtean religious philosophy. In responding to the twin problems posed by Christian-rationalist conversion pressure and the absence of a defensive Jewish Schulmetaphysik, Ascher sought neither to transform rabbinic Judaism into a Kantian moral religion, nor to recover a lost kabbalistic metaphysics. Instead, like Mendelssohn, in a remarkable feat of autodidacticism, this home-schooled Berlin bookseller and political publicist sought to confront these problems by “purifying” Judaism from within, while preserving it against the circling Christian rationalists. If Mendelssohn had sought to secure the survival of Judaism by renovating its scriptural culture and ceremonial laws, however, then Ascher proposed to do so by supplying it with consolidated articles of faith or doctrines (Lehren), departing from Mendelssohn in this regard.
Ascher is thus easily misunderstood if he is read as a philosopher, especially as a Kantian.Footnote 81 So too if he is read in accordance with the canons of dialectical philosophical history, as if he were attempting to overcome an opposition between a too-credulous Judaism and a too-rational Enlightenment, thence turning to Kant for assistance.Footnote 82 The text of Ascher's that some have read as grounded in Kantian philosophy—his Leviathan of 1792—in fact has a quite different, sui generis character.Footnote 83 In this work, Ascher approaches Judaism not as an autotelic reverencing of the moral law, but in the entirely non-Kantian terms of its end or purpose, understood in no less non-Kantian terms as providing the grounds for human happiness in an educated society: “Notice, friends, how it is with Judaism. All of our moral rules or laws are necessary conditions of our happiness.”Footnote 84 Further, despite Ascher promising to provide a philosophical account of the “essence” of Judaism and religion more broadly, his discourse in Leviathan is actually a bricolage of anthropological, historical, and biblical arguments governed by a programmatic purpose: to elevate the cultural level and standing of Jews without compromising Judaism as a distinctive way of religious life.
Rather than establishing transcendental philosophical grounds for his discourse, Ascher thus begins his account of religion with an “anthropological rule,” namely that all religions are grounded in the idea of a being who is higher and more excellent than humanity, thereby supplying a pattern or model for the moral shaping of man in society. Since all religions are thus only different means to the same end, none should be privileged over any other.Footnote 85 On this basis he draws up a tripartite taxonomy of religions, dividing them into natural, revealed, and rational, depending on whether they locate the grounds for moral conduct in naturally known norms, divinely revealed rules, or inner principles of human reason.Footnote 86 Ascher refrains from ranking the religious types in terms of philosophical truth—Kantian rational religion is not privileged—characterizing them instead in terms of the kind of “educated society” to which they give rise. He thus declares that in grounding morals in universal natural or cosmic norms, natural religion gives rise to a “religious society,” where religion is “regulative” in the sense of being grounded in the common spiritual attitude or disposition of the nation. For its part, in grounding morals in rational principles of justice, rational religion becomes a “social religion,” where religion is “constitutive” in the sense of imposing a single normative constitution on society. Only revealed religion, Ascher argues, moves continuously from a regulative to a constitutive form, and this, he declares, holds the key to understanding Judaism.Footnote 87
In order to understand Ascher's account of the nature and purpose of Judaism in Part II of Leviathan, it is important to observe that he grounds this not in a philosophical investigation of rational or moral principles, but in something else altogether, namely in a biblical history of God's dealings with the Jewish people, which will form the basis for his reconstructive program. Treating the first two books of the Pentateuch or Torah as divinely warranted history, Ascher declares that under the dispensation of the patriarchs, until the time of Moses, God communicated his wishes and guidance directly to the Jewish people in revelations. He did so not by prescribing laws, however, but through actions and teachings, such as the covenant of circumcision and the symbolic feast of the Passover. This indicates that the purpose of Judaism is to make man capable of leading a happy life in society by transmitting God's guidance and teaching rather than his commands and laws.Footnote 88
Of particular importance to Ascher's account is his claim that the first two books of the Bible show that faith is the condition of receiving revealed truth. He is not talking about Kantian moral faith, through which human reason posits God for its own ends.Footnote 89 Rather, he has in mind the faith in God of righteous men—preeminently Noah and Abraham—which spiritually qualifies them to receive revelations from a transcendent divinity. According to Ascher, the faith that was revealed to the faithful and recorded in the Bible is one that teaches the doctrines necessary for men to obtain happiness in an edifying society. It was also a regulative faith in the sense that it arose as a common spirit or cast of mind among a people who knew only one way of life, and hence required no coercive laws to govern them, only divine signs and guidance.Footnote 90
In showing how Judaism changed from a regulative faith into a constitutive religion, Ascher travels a long and winding road, but it is possible to draw out a repeated theme that delineates the crossing of this threshold. The first such transition occurred when, during their enslavement in Egypt, the Jews fell into spiritual lassitude and sinfulness, ceasing to make their own laws. This led God to prescribe divine laws through Moses, after which Judaism became a constitutive religion, or a religion constituting the normative order of a society.Footnote 91 The second stage of the transformation of Judaism into a juridified constitutive religion was the product of a second period of exile—the Babylonian captivity—when, as a result of the enforced commerce between the Jews and foreign peoples, Judaism was exposed to Greek and Roman thought. Jewish borrowing from these alien philosophies gave rise to the rival scholastic sects of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, later the Karaites. The rivalry between the Pharisees and the Sadducees—over the relative importance that should be accorded to the written scriptures of the Torah versus the oral commentary of the Talmud or “Oral Torah”—plays a key role in Ascher's history of Judaism. For he argues that the victory of the Pharisees made the oral tradition of the Talmud into the law book of Jewish religious and moral life, resulting in the dominance of oral-juridical Talmudism in modern rabbinic Judaism.Footnote 92
In outlining his program for the reform of Judaism in the third and final part of Leviathan, Ascher declares, somewhat unexpectedly, that the immediate obstacle to this reform arises not from the existence of an ossified and juridified Judaism as such, but rather from the freethinking anti-religious Aufklärung that this form of Judaism has provoked. As a result of this rationalist backlash, Ascher argues, it is imagined that religion is based in ideas, and that human beings can thus form their own ideas of God grounded in reason, with this in turn leading to an “anarchy” of principles for founding society. It is striking that the sole reference to Kant in Leviathan comes at this point, when Ascher declares that this problem cannot be resolved by “critical philosophy.” This is because, in offering an “ideal of reason” as the solution, this philosophy relies on an idea accessible only to a “particular circle of men” for whom it is only “an ideal hope.”Footnote 93 Only faith can overcome this social and intellectual fragmentation, Ascher argues, substituting itself for reason as the common social ground for human thought, such that “faith becomes the general condition for an educated society.”Footnote 94 Outside this domain, men should be free to explore other foundations, as long as this has no influence on faith.
In this way, Ascher framed his reform of Judaism as the resolution of a particular historically situated problem. How was it possible to suspend the Talmudism that had frozen the regulative nexus between faith and revelation, without falling into an anarchic philosophical idealism that threatened to supplant communal faith with an ideal of reason accessible only to an intellectual elite? In addressing this problem, far from turning to Kantian moral religion to supply the spiritual qualification of Jews for Prussian citizenship, Ascher looked in a quite different direction. He sought to restore Judaism as a revealed faith by supplanting the ceremonial laws with refurbished doctrines or articles of faith.Footnote 95
In fact the key to Ascher's solution lies in his conception of doctrine or Lehre itself. He treats doctrine as the nexus for a specific reciprocal relationship: between an objective revelation that founds a faith, and a subjective faith that is the spiritual qualification for receiving this revelation. Conceived thus, doctrine holds the key to reestablishing Judaism as a regulative faith. This would be a faith whose common moral acceptance obviated the need for constitutive religious law, while still requiring written articles as the condition of this common moral acceptance. By treating doctrine as establishing the mutual dependency of faith and revelation, Ascher argued that it was possible to both constitute Judaism as a religion, and simultaneously permit the freedom of reason necessary to reform this religion, as long as reason remained subject to faith as its regulative principle.Footnote 96
As a result, Ascher concluded his reform program by providing Judaism with a doctrinal confession, listing fourteen articles of faith that prescribed a wide array of Jewish beliefs. These ranged from the biblical account of God's revelations to Moses and the prophets, through to the hope for salvation and resurrection through a future Messiah. But they also included acceptance of the covenant of circumcision, observance of the Sabbath and commemorative feast days, and the pursuit of grace through penances.Footnote 97 Ascher thus culminated his reconstruction of Judaism neither by turning it into a Kantian moral religion nor by recovering a lost Jewish metaphysics, but by providing Judaism with positive written articles of faith. This doctrinal confession was intended to displace the Oral Torah or Talmud, while protecting Judaism against a philosophical idealism that sought to make Jewish acceptance of a pure religion of reason into the condition of citizenship.
With the publication of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Critique of All Revelation in 1792,Footnote 98 and his Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (Contribution to a Correction of the Public's Judgment regarding the French Revolution) in the following yearFootnote 99—the latter coinciding with the publication of Kant's Religion—Ascher's attitude towards the champions of German idealism and Kantian philosophical religion hardened significantly. Finding in these works an account of Judaism as the superseded relic of a nonmoral, statutory, and mercenary faith—one that had to be relinquished before Jews could be accepted as citizens, and that Kant declared to be no religion at all—Ascher sharpened and intensified the rather moderate criticisms that he had levelled at “critical philosophy” and philosophical idealism in his Leviathan. Far from viewing these philosophies as finally sympathetic to Judaism—whether on account of their putative inner kabbalism or of his supposed inner Kantianism—in his Eisenmenger der Zweite of 1794 Ascher treated them as inimical sources of “Jew hatred” (Judenhaß). This arose, he would argue, from the fact that their universalist rationalism disguised a particularistic and supremacist Christian metaphysics.
Making the most of his ironical self-presentation—as an obscure autodidact who could scarcely lift his eyes to such august German philosophy professors—Ascher launched the Eisenmenger as a frontal assault on these recent works by Fichte and Kant, with Fichte cast in the role of malignant apprentice to Kant's misguided “teacher.” In attacking Fichte's claim that Judaism constituted a state within the states of Europe—a state grounded in hatred of the human race and thus itself hatedFootnote 100—Ascher comments that “the reader will find the true key to this viewpoint in Kant's book, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason.”Footnote 101 Citing page 177 of the 1793 edition, Ascher directs his readers to those passages of the Religion where Kant declares that as a result of its refusal to accept the supersensible moral religion taught by Christ, and its obstinate persistence as a crudely external, statutory faith under the control of a repressive priest class, Judaism must be understood as a political regime rather than a religion.Footnote 102
Fichte's critique of revelation takes place wholly within Kant's Christological metaphysics of morals and religion. According to Fichte, since their supersensible rational being is attached to a sensuous empirical nature, humans cannot do without empirical religious revelations. But they need them only as an external prompt to attend to the commands of their inner rational being, at which point they can drop away.Footnote 103 In adhering to their own “ridiculously childish representations” of a speaking, legislating, and punishing God, the Jews failed to develop the capacity for inner moral feeling and moral religion. This left them mired in the crudest sensuous religious particularism, and proves that their revelations are fraudulent.Footnote 104 Due to their lack of an inner moral disposition—as shown by their refusal of Jesus, their worship of an inhumane God, and their acceptance of different ethical standards for themselves and Gentiles—the Jews, Fichte argued, should not be awarded civil rights and equality.Footnote 105 In bizarre testimony to the intellectualist character of Kantian politics, Fichte “joked” that this problem could not be solved unless Jewish heads were cut off and replaced with ones emptied of Jewish ideas, or, failing this, the Jews were expelled from Germany to Palestine.Footnote 106
Ascher launches his counterattack by observing that the criterion that Fichte uses for determining the divinity and authenticity of a revelation—namely agreement with Kant's moral law—is itself nothing more than a controversial philosophical doctrine. Commenting that this style of philosophy is one that attempts to “make us distrustful of ourselves … to suppress our senses, to withdraw into ourselves and obtain the source of our salvation solely from ourselves,”Footnote 107 Ascher declares that it is unacceptable to make the doctrine of a particular philosophical school into the criterion of all revelation.Footnote 108 Fichte, Ascher argues, purports to uncover the theoretical and practical principles of a universally valid revelation. For this to be possible, however, he would have to derive them from the form and purpose of some actual revelation, which he cannot do because he imports the form and purpose of revelation from the Kantian moral law.Footnote 109
Ascher then sardonically observes that, as it turns out, for Fichte, there is one revelation that does agree with moral reason and thus satisfies his criterion for being a true revelation. It just so happens, however, that “this revelation is—the Christian.”Footnote 110 In fact, Ascher continues, it is Fichte's teacher, Kant, who has made it clear that the Christian faith is the only one that could be grounded in a divine revelation. Given, though, that this determination is made on the basis of the arbitrary privileging of Kant's moral philosophy, Ascher treats it as a sectarian elevation of a Kantianized Christianity, mockingly thanking heaven that the polemical sermonizing banned from church pulpits is being preserved by philosophers preaching from theirs: “Is it any less a controversial sermon [Kontraverspredigt] if a philosopher, a transcendental thinker, undertakes to measure revelation and religion according to his fixed principles?”Footnote 111 Ascher thus regarded Kant's religious philosophy not as a universal philosophical account of revealed biblical Judaism but as a proselytizing rival to it, intent on denigrating and undermining Judaism through the sectarian privileging of a particular kind of Christian rationalism.Footnote 112
Ascher unerringly locates the source of this denigration of Judaism in Kant's account of the relation between Christianity and Judaism in the Religion. Citing pages 139 to 142 of the 1793 edition, Ascher shows that once Kant has identified the universal moral law with Christianity and its empirical or historical appearance with Jewish statutory law, Kant can construct a “systematic” or philosophical history of religion according to which the advent of Christ signaled the sudden appearance the pure moral ideal in time. For Kant, the radical break between Christianity and Judaism entailed by this metaphysical manifestation marks the beginning of the history of religion, from which Judaism is excluded owing to its attachment to historically revealed statutory laws. In divorcing it from the universal moral religion that was emerging from Christianity, this attachment reduced Judaism to the status of a political regime, requiring it to enforce its statutory laws through superstitious rewards and punishments, and destining it for elimination with the spread of the pure Vernunftreligion.Footnote 113
In responding, Ascher rejects out of hand Kant's claim that Judaism's historically revealed character made it morally unedifying and reduced it to the role of Christianity's physical or empirical occasion. Citing his Leviathan, and venting his annoyance that Kant had not bothered to read it, Ascher argues that in its “regulative” dispensation Judaism too is focused on moral guidance and forming a moral disposition. Judaism's “constitutive” form as a body of religious laws derives not from its philosophical status as the outer empirical appearance of an inner moral religion, but from a specific historical development, namely its juridification by Moses as a defense against proselytizing during the Egyptian captivity.Footnote 114 Invoking his anthropological conception of religion—as the various means by which different peoples establish their edifying relation to an exemplary higher being—Ascher declares that Judaism is no less a religion than Christianity, and Kant's claim that it is nothing more than the political regime of a particular people arises from an unworthy sectarian and misanthropic impulse.Footnote 115 Similarly, in positing a radical break between Judaism and Christianity, and excluding Judaism from the history of religion, Kant is engaged in an annihilating “philosophical politics” that betrays his calling: “At the moment he wrote this, Mr. Kant wholly renounced his philosophy; that is, as a thinker whose calling is to investigate the causes and consequences of all appearances. Consider, dear reader, Christianity arose suddenly … Suddenly, Jesus stood there and proclaimed himself sent from heaven—What philosophical Deus ex machina!—What philosophical Saltus mortalis!”Footnote 116
Perhaps nodding towards eighteenth-century Christian–Hebraist scholarship that focused on the continuity between Judaism and Christianity,Footnote 117 Ascher argues that if due consideration is given to the political constitution and religious culture of the Jews in Palestine at the time of Jesus’ birth, then, far from arising suddenly, it becomes clear that one will “find the entire spirit of Christianity in the Judaism of that time.”Footnote 118 In keeping with his exposé of the Fichtean–Kantian universalist critique of revelation as the product of a particularistic Christian philosophy, Ascher now rejects Kant's universal philosophical history of religion as similarly particularistic. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity is thus not a philosophical one between a particular historical appearance and a universal moral ideal, but the purely historical one holding between an established religious culture and the modified form that developed from it. With regard to the discontinuation of the rite of circumcision in Christianity, for example, Ascher argues that this was not due to Christianity's vocation as a universal moral religion, but rather to the fact that the Apostles had to modify “Jewish Christianity” to suit foreign peoples unused to this custom.Footnote 119 Christianity and Judaism thus parted company for purely historical reasons, not because Christianity signified the historical advent of a pure Vernunftreligion that reduced Judaism to the status of a superseded empirical Lohnglaube or mercenary faith.
In refusing to allow that Judaism could play the role of a morally formative religion—on the grounds that it is not a suitable temporal vehicle for the manifestation of a Christian metaphysical archetype of moral perfection—Kant, Ascher argues, was asserting that Jews could not be morally good people. Further, by declaring that only Kant's pure Vernunftreligion is capable of realizing the ideal moral community, thence founding an ethical commonwealth, and finally the kingdom of God on Earth, Kantians were refusing to tolerate a plurality of public religions. This was harmful to both church and state, and was especially pernicious for the marginalized Jews.Footnote 120 As a result, Ascher concludes, “One sees from this, how, after making the principle of a critique of all revelation into the criterion of all revelation, and then using this principle to develop a theory of religion that is the antinomy of Judaism, critical philosophy itself has made it possible to deduce a priori the legitimacy of the concept of Jew hatred [Judenhaß].”Footnote 121
As a member of a religious minority that was under pressure to convert or reform in order to join a “universal” moral community and thence obtain civil rights, Ascher shared Mendelssohn's acute awareness of the cultural and political dangers lying within Christian rationalism and German idealism. In treating Kantian moral universalism as nothing more than the positive teaching of a faction of Protestant rationalists, Ascher understood that were the Kantian moral community to provide a model for a German nation and state, this could facilitate the birth of a polity that might require Jews to convert to some form of Christian rationalism in order to obtain citizenship rights, or that would deny them the protections offered by such rights. Were this to happen, Mendelssohn's fears of a philosophical Kulturkampf waged against Judaism would be realized.
It was Ascher's fate to live through a period in which academic philosophical idealism gained political traction. This was in part due to the destabilization of the political order brought about by the Napoleonic occupation and dismantling of the German Empire (1792–1806), and in part due to the nationalist movement that arose among German academics and students in response to these events. Ascher was primed to grasp how such circumstances could permit the pure moral community of the idealist philosophers to give shape to the purified political community of the German nationalists, among whom were to be found such leading idealists as Fichte and the neo-Kantian Jakob Friedrich Fries.
In his Germanomanie or “Germanomania” of 1815, Ascher thus recorded his fraught observation that, in the wake of the wars of national liberation (1807–13), transcendental idealism and (Schellingian) “identity philosophy” had made it possible for philosophers to identify the pure moral religion with “Germanness” (Deutschtum), and the pure ethical commonwealth with the German nation. These pseudo-universalist philosophies, he argued, permitted their academic adherents to dissolve the constitutionally guaranteed plurality of religious communities into the philosophical idea of a unified moral community, the “German people,” from which the Jews would be excluded should they refuse to accept Christian rationalism.Footnote 122 From here it was only a short step for academics like the Kantians Fichte and Fries, the rationalist theologian Wilhelm de Wette, the mythographic historian Friedrich Rühs, and the educational reformer Friedrich Ludwig Jahn to turn their backs on Germany's underlying multi-confessional constitutional order. They could instead envisage “Germany” as an ideal moral community grounded in an immemorial language, culture, religion, and Volk, from which all alien ideas, tongues and peoples would be excluded.Footnote 123 This was the menacing complex of teachings that Ascher called Germanomania.
The milieu that permitted these philosophical teachings to step from the lecture hall into the world of political demonstrations and torchlight processions was supplied by Germany's universities and the German student movement. Deeply informed by philosophical idealism, inspired by charismatic academic orators like Fries, and galvanized by the anti-French war of national liberation, the university student corporations or Bursenschaften emerged as an idealistic, republican and nationalist force. They thus provided the portal through which the Judenhaß that Ascher had uncovered within philosophical idealism's pure moral character and community could cross over into acts of overt anti-Semitism and political violence.Footnote 124 This was the setting in which, at a festival of nationalist student corporations held at the Wartburg castle in October 1817, Ascher's Germanomanie, placed on a list of “anti-German” books that Fries helped to compile, was burnt in effigy, in a joyous and hate-filled celebration of German culture, identity, and idealism.
Conclusion
Looking back on the preceding argument, it is possible to see the limits of the “liberal” or “progressivist” historiography of the Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy. The twin viewpoints discussed at the beginning of the article—that this reception took place via the reconfiguration of a particular biblical–historical faith in accordance with a universal rational philosophy, or else via the recovery of a hidden kabbalistic metaphysics common to Judaism and Kantianism—may both be regarded as variants of a Christian metaphysics of history. Each treats the reception of Kantian thought by Jewish intellectuals as the nexus through which a supersensible rationality entered into a dialectical exchange with a sensuous historical faith, allowing history to progress towards the emergence of a pure moral Judaism, or a true metaphysics common to Judaism and German philosophy. In treating Christian rationalism as a philosophical religion that was inimical to Judaism as a way of religious life, Mendelssohn and Ascher simultaneously rejected the Christian philosophical history that framed Judaism so injuriously in terms of the progressive manifestation of supersensible reason in sensuously burdened historical religions. Mendelssohn's reception of Christian rationalism and Ascher's reception of Kantianism were both governed by the fraught understanding that, in forming themselves through inner ascent to a “higher” rational self, the adherents of these supremacist philosophies felt spiritually qualified to tread on a religious minority that continued to seek moral regeneration in the “lower” sensuous rites, laws and observances of the synagogue. In their preparedness to extort acceptance of their pure moral religion by making Jewish citizenship conditional on it, the Christian rationalists and Kantians provided Mendelssohn and Ascher with a unique insight into the history that confronted them. Rather than assuming the form of a progressive unfolding of supersensible reason in empirical time, this was a history of inexplicable struggle against those into whose whip hand that philosophical view of history had been placed.
