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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes how Lazarus Bendavid and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in their 1793 texts, presented similar fantasies of integrating Jews into the state by decapitating Jewish heads. Such fantasies reached back to the Kantian foundation of each philosopher's conception of humanity and morality. Approaching the question of extending civil rights to Jews from the standpoint of the normative Kantian moral subject, both Bendavid and Fichte came to the conclusion that the only way to accommodate Jews into the civil sphere was through the paradoxical and gruesome means of (symbolic) decapitation. Because it dramatically exemplifies possible dangers in Kantian moral universalism, Bendavid's peripheral and aberrant contribution to the celebrated corpus of Jewish Kantian philosophy can productively complicate how that tradition understood itself and how we continue to see it.
Key words: Lazarus Bendavid, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Immanuel Kant
The year is 1793. While the Terror rages in Paris, two German proponents of the new Kantian philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Lazarus Bendavid, theorize the desirability, legitimacy, and possible means of incorporating Jews into the state as citizens. This question implies different stakes for the two thinkers, yet each envisions a scenario in which the very gesture that would integrate Jews into the polity also seems to threaten their existence. Fichte writes, "But to give them [the Jews] civil rights-I at least see no means of doing so other than, in one night, to cut off all their heads and replace them with others containing not a single Jewish idea."1 Weighing the possibilities for integrating Jews into the state, Bendavid deploys a similar image: "It [Judaism] is 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."2
In this article, I analyze how the uncanny similarities in Bendavid's and Fichte's rhetoric reach back to the Kantian foundation of their conception of humanity and morality. Approaching the question of extending Jewish civil rights from the standpoint of the normative Kantian moral subject, both Bendavid and Fichte come to the conclusion that the only way to accommodate Jews into the civil sphere is, in fact, through the paradoxical and gruesome means of (symbolic) decapitation. Both Kantians come to view decapitation as the...