Kant and Hegel have traditionally had starkly different reputations in Jewish thought. Despite Kant's denigration of Judaism as a “political” religion defined by an external and irrational law, Jewish intellectuals celebrated his image as a hero of German Enlightenment and often appropriated Kantian epistemology and ethics for their philosophies of Judaism. These thinkers tended to view Hegel's historicist philosophy more warily, thanks to its depiction of Judaism as archaic and devoid of any reason to exist. It would not be a stretch to say that the contrast between the “good” Kant and the “bad” Hegel became one of the implicit, structuring oppositions of modern Jewish philosophy.

The upending of this conventional wisdom is one of several fresh arguments to be found in Sven-Erik Rose's Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany: 1789–1848. According to Rose, previous scholarship has largely overlooked the extent to which Jewish engagement with philosophy in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century was driven by political aspirations and concerns. The immense confidence the dominant Idealist philosophy invested in the power of thought, coupled with the reactionary political environment that closed off “more tangible possibilities for political engagement in these years,” led to the flourishing of a “philosophical politics” in pre-1848 Germany. Rose alleges that this distinctly German entwining of politics and speculative thought had a “Jewish variation.” In six chapters, he examines how the Jewish Kantian Lazarus Bendavid, the Jewish Hegelians of the early Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, the converted Jew and erstwhile Young Hegelian Karl Marx, and the Jewish Spinozists Berthold Auerbach and Moses Hess exploited “the conceptual tools of German philosophy to think through and intervene in the situation of Jews in political modernity.”

In entering the sphere of philosophical politics, these writers had to grapple with an “explicit cultural discourse” that “figured [Jews] as the embodiment of deficient and socially corrosive subjectivity.” German Idealism, as Frederick Beiser has argued, was characterized by a “struggle against subjectivism,” which it faulted for failing to guide the egocentric self toward an internalization of universal norms. While Kant, Hegel, and the Young Hegelians construed the problem of subjectivity somewhat differently, they concurred in identifying Jewishness as everything from its source to its symptom. Yet, Rose criticizes the tendency of much of the recent scholarship on German Idealism's Jewish problem to view the movement as constitutively anti-Jewish. Similarly, he denies that Jewish engagement with German philosophy was necessarily subversive. “Heroicizing narratives that pit intellectual Davids against the Goliath of the German intellectual tradition,” he writes, “are apt to miss crucial questions that certain Jewish thinkers pose … by trying to think, as Jews, not only against but also with some of the most powerful currents in the German philosophical tradition.”

Rose's opening chapter concerns Lazarus Bendavid, an important German Jewish thinker in the age after Mendelssohn, who played an influential role in popularizing Kant's thought. In particular, it focuses on a troubling passage in his major work, Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden (On Jewish characteristics, 1793), describing Judaism as “the hydra, all of whose heads must be cut off at once if two are not to grow back in place of every one severed.” This strikingly echoes Fichte's notorious claim, also in 1793, that the only way to emancipate the Jews would be “to cut off all their heads and replace them with others containing not a single Jewish idea.” Rose traces both of these gruesome images to the influence of Kant's philosophy. In addition to explicitly disparaging the “slavish” nature of Jewish obedience to the “ceremonial law,” Kant could conceive no path from subservient to autonomous selfhood short of radical transcendence and re-creation. The fantasy of Jewish decapitation, Rose argues, dramatizes the “violence that inaugurates the Kantian ethical subject,” even as it also suggests that destroying Judaism's collective character is a sine qua non of emancipation. Rose notes the different motivations of the two thinkers; while Fichte wrote to deny Jews civil rights, Bendavid ultimately called for their full inclusion in the state, albeit at the cost of “a total abolition of Jewish ceremonial practice.” This may be true, though the extremity of the price of emancipation renders Rose's assertion that Bendavid was mobilizing Kant in support of a “Jewish (not merely an anti-Jewish) Kantian politics” somewhat tenuous.

The remaining chapters address the early Jewish reception of Hegel and Spinoza, the illumination of which I consider the main contribution of Rose's book. Rose examines the former in two eye-opening chapters (chapters 2 and 3) on the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews). Founded by a group of young, mostly university-educated German Jewish intellectuals in 1819, the Verein has traditionally been regarded as the origin of modern Jewish studies. Rose challenges this perception, arguing, convincingly, that the Verein's chief concern was not philology or the historical-critical method, but the creation of a “Hegelian Judaism” that “would enable Jews, as Jews, to become fully integrated into the modern state.” Rose emphasizes what made “Hegelian theory” such a “heady and seductive discourse” for the Vereinler. Above all, they discovered in Hegel something missing in Kant—the possibility of locating a rational essence in Judaism that would bind it to the “broader ethical unity” of Hegel's state (such is the power of thought in Hegel), without entirely sacrificing the “collective aspect of Jewishness” in the process. Rose's chapters on the Spinozist Jews Berthold Auerbach (chapter 5) and Moses Hess (chapter 6) are similarly strong. Most work to date on the pioneering appropriations of Spinoza by the staunch liberal Auerbach and the communist-turned-nationalist Hess has focused on their fashioning of the Amsterdam heretic into an icon for freethinking Jews. Rose's is the best study I have read of the philosophical depth and import, as well as fractiousness, of this early stage in Spinoza's German Jewish reception.

Rose has written an analytically rigorous and illuminating, if somewhat loosely bound-together book. My main quibble is with the idea of “Jewish philosophical politics” as the thread that connects these Jewish interventions in German thought. To start, Rose never makes entirely clear how his chapter (chapter 4) on Marx's path to regarding the proletariat as the revolutionary class—a path, Rose argues, that crucially detoured through Marx's notorious essay “On the Jewish Question”—fits this schema. Is Rose claiming that Marx's early writings are an example of “Jewish philosophical politics,” in part because of Marx's own ancestry? Or, does Rose include them here simply because they shine a light on this phenomenon? Leaving the question of what makes this discourse “Jewish” aside, just the notion that “philosophical politics” constitutes the signature theme of German Jewish thought in this era is underdeveloped. Part of this may have to do with Rose's ambivalence toward historical analysis. Early on, he states that his book is “not meant to be a history,” yet one encounters historical arguments throughout, some persuasive (to wit, his thesis about the sources and ramifications of the Verein's Hegelianism), others less so. Disappointingly, Rose provides little in the way of a conclusion that might help to knit together the different set pieces. While the chapters, for all their substance, can be long winded, his conclusion tops out at a little over two pages.

If the book as a whole could be better integrated, the individual parts are quite formidable. Rose's rethinking of the intellectual origins and legacy of Wissenschaft des Judentums and his sympathetic and incisive elucidation of early nineteenth-century German Jewish Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Spinozism, deserve only praise.