Difference and the Modern State: Debates on the Emancipation of Jews and Women

• In Event: Legal Constructions of Gender and Marriage

Abstract

This paper considers the interrelations between the development of the modern state and the ways in which Jewish and gender difference emerged as new kinds of political and social problems. It does so with reference to debates on the emancipation of Jews and women in late 18th century Prussia, notably Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s influential call for Jewish emancipation, 'On the Civil Improvement of the Jews' (1781), and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s satirical attack on gender discrimination, 'On the Civil Improvement of Women' (1792). I argue that exclusions along the lines of gender, religion and ethnicity do not simply indicate that Enlightenment universalism was only insufficiently realised. Closer analysis reveals more complex and contradictory relationships between universalism and discrimination, rationalism and essentialism, which have to be understood in the context of the rise of bourgeois, capitalist society and a modern legal system. More specifically, I will investigate how, despite the universalist aims of both authors, the complex interrelations in their texts between conceptions of 'homme', 'bourgeois', and 'citoyen' and the ambiguities in the notion of ‘nature’ and ‘natural rights’ foreshadow the common difficulties the emancipation of Jews and of women would encounter in later decades, as well as the diverging effects that the rise of civil society and the modern state subsequently had on their respective situations.

This analysis is part of a more extensive research project on the roles of ideas of femininity and Jewishness in discourses of modernity and modernisation between the late 18th and the turn to the 20th century. Contrary to approaches that predominantly emphasise the commonalities between these different figures of alterity, my work also focuses on their specificities and on the diverging and often complementary functions of constructions of ‘woman’ and ‘the Jew’ for definitions of modern gentile masculinity, for debates about the boundaries of citizenship and the nation and for attempts to make sense of the experience of alienation, rapid social and economic change and the disappearance of familiar forms of life.

author

• Christine Achinger, University of Warwick