Joel Ben-Yehoshua

This paper proposes a new perspective on the entanglement of antisemitism and philosophy by exploring the function and persistence of a cliché in philosophical discourse. It begins with an analysis of Immanuel Kant’s remarks on “the Jews in Poland” in a passage often regarded as his most anti-Jewish statement. These remarks are contextualized within the framework of Kant’s Anthropology and the late 18th-century debates on Jewish emancipation. The paper then turns to contemporary philosophical discussions on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s anti-Jewish polemics in which the trope of “the Jews in Poland” reappears, showing the enduring influence of the cliché.

In debates about chauvinism and anti-Jewish attitude in Fichte’s work in general and in the Reden an die deutsche Nation in particular, it is often emphasised that Fichte adheres to liberal and cosmopolitan ideals also in the Reden. This article aims to demonstrate how these ideals implicitly contain a devaluation of Judaism, even though Fichte doesn’t explicitly comment on Judaism in the Reden. To this end, the Reden are considered in the context of the lectures Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters and Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, which contain several statements about Judaism. It is shown that the anti-Jewish content of Fichte’s distinction between “Johannine” and “Pauline Christianity” recurs in the pair of opposites of “Germanness” and “Foreignism” and is thus transferred from a religious to an early nationalist discourse.