Reconsidering Kant’s Legacy for Modern Judaism: Critical Philosophy and the Making of a Jewish-Kantian Tradition

• In Event: Modern Thought: Mysticism and Rationality

Abstract

In an important article on nineteenth-century German Orthodoxy, David Ellenson stated that Immanuel Kant has, more than any other modern philosopher, “entered into Jewish religious thought.” A number of other scholars have, like Ellenson, recognized Kant’s significance for modern Judaism. Yet none of these scholars have sufficiently demonstrated the nature and extent of Kant’s considerable influence on the development of Jewish thought in the modern period. At the same time, classic studies on the topic of Kant and Judaism—including by Jacob Katz, Julius Guttmann, Nathan Rotenstreich, and Heinz Moshe Graupe, to name the most important—mostly focus on Kant’s well-known and harsh critique of Judaism in his RELIGION WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF MERE REASON (1793/4), in which Kant depicted Judaism as a coercive form of legalism fundamentally irreconcilable with his ideal of a rational religion.
This paper attempts to reconsider Kant’s legacy for modern Jewish thought. The first part focuses on Kant’s critique of Judaism and argues, contrary to the established scholarly consensus, that Kant’s views of Judaism are far more complex than the existing scholarly literature seems to suggest. Kant’s anti-Jewish prejudice notwithstanding, I argue that it is wrong to reduce Kant’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism to his negative appraisal of the Jewish religion in his RELIGION. To do so is to ignore the considerable influence that Kantian philosophy—especially the moral theology that Kant developed in his critical works in the 1780s—exerted over the direction and development of Jewish thought in the modern era. The second part of the paper highlights the writings of several early—and largely understudied—Jewish adherents to Kantian philosophy: Saul Ascher, Lazarus Bendavid, and Salomon Maimon. Convinced that Kant was the greatest philosopher of the time, these Jewish thinkers sought to render Judaism commensurate with the basic principles of Kantian philosophy. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for a tradition of Jewish Kantianism stretching from the late eighteenth century to well into the twentieth.

Author

• Yoav Schaefer, Princeton University