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German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Hardcover)
$40.00
On Our Shelves Now
Description
In German Idealism and the Jew, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason.
Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality.
In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it.
About the Author
Michael Mack is a Minerva Amos de Shalit fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah.
Praise for German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses…
"Mack elucidates the antisemitic strains in the German idealistic presentation of the body, the body politic, legality, and revolutionism. Furthermore, Mack makes a strong case that nineteenth-century German Jews recognized and revised these caricatures of Jews and Judaism as best they could, antiucipating a postmodern sense of human autonomy and responsible rationalism."—Alan Levenson, Shofar
-Alan Levenson
“Mack’s argument is subtle and wide-ranging, but his major points can be roughly summarized. First, he shows how deeply indebted German idealism was to the language of Christianity: In Kant and Hegel, the Jews keep their old role as the stiff-necked people, those who perversely refuse to see the light. Second, he makes clear how frighteningly ready these thinkers were to turn Jews—individual human beings, with their own minds and beliefs, virtues, and vices—into ‘the Jews,’ a placeholder in a philosophical system.”—Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
-Adam Kirsch
“This is the most lucid and penetrating effort yet to characterize the leading philosophers of the German idealist tradition as central figures in the history of modern antisemitism.”—Choice
"Mack makes a significant and innovative contribution to two heavily traversed fields: tha causes of the Shoah, and the ambiguous legacy of philosophical modernity."
-Byron Smith
