Jewish hydra, German Heimat, and 'the Jewish question': Judaism and subjectivity in Lazarus Bendavid, Berthold Auerbach and Karl Marx

This dissertation examines aspects of the Jewish encounter with modern discourses of subjectivity. The project follows three interventions into discourses of Jewish subjectivity, two by Jewish authors who grapple with the question of how to speak as Jews in the modern German context, the third a discourse of radical social critique that strategically deploys flagrantly anti-Semitic stereotypes. Chapter One examines Lazarus Bendavid's caustic pamphlet On Jewish Characteristics of 1793; Chapter Two explores the early career of Berthold Auerbach from his first literary activity until his breakthrough into literary stardom as a Heimatdichter with his Black Forest Village Stories of 1843; and Chapter Three investigates the function of Jewish figures in Karl Marx's 1843 “On the Jewish Question” and The Holy Family of 1845 and compares Marx's rhetorical construction of “real Jews” to his treatment—in part invention, in part discovery—of the proletariat.; Highly politicized discourses on subjectivity proliferated in Germany in the period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the failed revolution of 1848. In this climate, Jews and Judaism became a privileged discursive site for interrogating subjectivity with the political imperatives this interrogation implied. The nexus of discourses on Judaism and subjectivity differed substantially in the two moments examined. Within Bendavid's Kantian paradigm, the universal subject was essentially isomorphic with humanity at large as a moral-political community, and the “Jewish question” (avant la lettre ) was about the deficient yet potentially redeemable subjectivity of the Jew. The Young Hegelian social ontology of the self that was important for both Auerbach and Marx in the 1830's and 40's understood subjectivity as an obstacle to the realization of collective humanity.; Each chapter explores the figuration of Jews as discursive objects in the works of the chapter's central author and in key intertexts. I also investigate the three central authors from the standpoint of a problematics of enunciation. That is, I ask not only how each author speaks about Jews, but also how he does so in order to authorize his own speech. Bendavid and Auerbach each speak as a certain kind of Jew in a cultural and discursive field that made Jewish speech a treacherous undertaking. Marx deploys the figure of the obscenely “real Jew” in an effort to construct a viable locus of enunciation for his radical social critique.