Customer Reviews

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

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Mack's book struck me as a kind of sequel. A few years ago, I read Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, with its thrilling enthronement of Spinoza at the heart of the Enlightenment. I was disappointed when the book ended with Christian Wolff, that is, just before Kant, who I had hoped to see exposed as the ultimate anti-Spinoza. Well, Mack picks up where Israel left off, criticizing not only Kant's "one-sided reading of Spinoza," but identifying Kant as an anti-Semite and the intellectual father of the Holocaust.
Mack's critique of Kant is well reasoned and indicative of a very sound knowledge of the Kantian conceptual universe. Mack makes good use of quotations in arguing his case, citing for example this horrifying example from Kant: "The euthanasia of Judaism is pure moral religion." Mack's charges against Kant alone makes his book not only worthwhile, but essential.
While Mack devotes only the first chapter to Kant, he remains the primary figure throughout the book. The second chapter, on Hegel, serves to demonstrate how the worm had got into the bud, that is, how Kantian anti-Semitism came to infect the whole German idealist project. Anti-Semitism lies at the heart of Hegel's project in that he basically subscribes to Christian supercessionism. Mack then proceeds to Wagner and the rise of anti-Semitism in its full flowering: social, political, economic, artistic, and racial.
These first three chapters describe the anti-Semitic core of German idealism. The rest of the book presents the responses of a selection of German Jews to this anti-Semitism. Mack starts with Mendelssohn, and then moves to Geiger, Heine, and Graetz. These latter struck back with "counter-histories" that overturned the conceptual framework into which idealism had cast Judaism. They proclaimed Judaism as a universal system that had effectively produced everything of value in Western culture, including Christianity. There was, inevitably, a backlash against these counter-histories, particularly where they "took issue with the most noteworthy exponents of German high culture." Mack describes how the renowned historian Treitschke led the way with a number of anti-Semitic articles which "contributed to making racism socially and intellectually acceptable in fin de siècle Germany." Thus anti-Semitism acquired an academic respectability, and "[t]he majority of professors, schoolteachers, and lawyers made anti-Semitism part of their professional calling." In the eyes of the anti-Semites, the essential dichotomy resolved itself as one between the idealist Germans and the materialist Jews.
Mack next cites a number of other well-known German Jews, including Cohen, Rosenzweig, Freud and Benjamin. These individuals by and large developed their thought along mainly materialist lines. As Mack states in his concluding paragraph: "German Jewish writers indeed may have contributed to the diversity of materialist philosophy when they undermined the discriminatory dimension of high-status registers of ideation. In this way, German Jewish thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries anticipated a postmodern sensibility concerning issues of narrativity, bodiliness, and timeliness." Thus much of materialist philosophy can be seen as a corrective to the excesses to which idealism can give rise, including anti-Semitism. The danger with this strategy lies, however, in the temptation to abandon the ground of idealist philosophy to anti-Semitism and other distorted thinking.

Three or three-and-a-half stars.

When Mack keeps to the historical and empirical evidence, reviewing the more substantial evidence as applied to Kant, Hegel and Wagner, and in reviewing some of the German Jewish re-actions to German high idealism, his (Mack's) essay on the subject is well worth a considered review. However, in the book's introduction, most of which could have formed a conclusion, Mack strays a great deal from more responsible lines of inquiry and resulting conclusions.

A brief glimpse of this is encapsulated in the contrast exhibited in the title vs. the subtitle of the volume - German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses. The volume does address problems within German idealism, but it does not address philosophy as a whole as the subtitle would imply. This juxtaposition might of course be dismissed as a minor editorial oversight, excepting there are passages, primarily within the extensive introduction, that do in fact (ambiguously) suggest philosophy as a whole is being indicted.

When keeping to the evidence, the historical and empirical facts (e.g., Mack cites a note by J.G. Herder, after attending one of Kant's lectures, that unequivocally hi-lights an anti-Semitic prejudice on the part of Kant), Mack's review is substantial. However, his analysis and too many of his conclusions are too often less than responsibly guarded, are formulated in less tentative terms than they should be. The idealism/realism nexus and divide, the general dialectic between idealism and "realism," reflects a perennial and in fact an on-going set of philosophical and broader cultural and anthropological issues. Mack fails to place his criticism within that larger sphere and too often substitutes assertions and unguarded presumptions in places where more tentative and more circumspect philosophical delineations are needed.