"Michael Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew fills a grave void in philosophy’s self-critical scholarship. Mack seeks to clarify how the German Idealist philosophical tradition directly served toward the burgeoning of a new, more dangerous anti-Semitism that, under the blank eye of ’civilized’ nations and with the blessing of the Christian churches, resulted in the methodical slaughter of millions upon millions of European Jews. . . . German Idealism and the Jew is a work long overdue, of great importance to scholarly understandings of Nazi Germany and anti-Semitism and the larger problem of the functioning of the scapegoat mechanism in chaotic societies."

Wendy Hamblet | Philosophy in Review

"A slim but dense volume which is sure to delight and provoke in equal measure."

Jerome Copulsky | Azure

"Mack elucidates the antisemitic strains in the German idealistic presentation of the body, the body politic, legality, and revolutionism. Furthermore, Mack makes a strong case that nineteenth-century German Jews recognized and revised these caricatures of Jews and Judaism as best they could, anticipating a postmodern sense of human autonomy and responsible rationalism."

Alan Levenson | Shofar

“Mack’s argument is subtle and wide-ranging, but his major points can be roughly summarized.  First, he shows how deeply indebted German idealism was to the language of Christianity: In Kant and Hegel, the Jews keep their old role as the stiff-necked people, those who perversely refuse to see the light.  Second, he makes clear how frighteningly ready these thinkers were to turn Jews—individual human beings, with their own minds and beliefs, virtues, and vices—into ‘the Jews,’ a placeholder in a philosophical system.”

Adam Kirsch | The New York Sun

“This is the most lucid and penetrating effort yet to characterize the leading philosophers of the German idealist tradition as central figures in the history of modern antisemitism.”

Choice

“A major addition to the critical literature of German Jewry from the Enlightenment to the Shoah. Mack’s extraordinary study of the philosophical underpinnings of German anti-Semitism from Kant to Hegel picks up a thread of intellectual corruption that formed major Jewish thinkers from Rosenzweig and Benjamin and beyond. Focused on a thought which today still shapes modern philosophical discourse, Mack offers a sense of the productive deformation of German Jewish thought through its struggle with German philosophy.”<Sander L. Gilman, University of Illinois, Chicago

Sander L. Gilman, University of Illinois, Chicago

“The custodians of the German Enlightenment and philosophical culture nursed deeply ambivalent attitudes toward the Jews whom they formally invited to join them in the project of creating modern open and tolerant culture. Michael Mack revisits their writings and deftly discloses the deeper structure of their thought encouraging the construction of the Jew as a threatening Other. Mack argues that modern Jewish thinkers, from Moses Mendelssohn through Walter Benjamin and Freud intuitively grasped that at the heart of the modern votaries’ understanding of reason lies ‘unreason.’ Critically reflecting upon the dialectic tension between these two constitutive moments of the modern thought, Mack claims, German-Jewish writers anticipated a post-modern sensibility, endowing what it means to be an enlightened, autonomous person with a new depth.”<Paul Mendes-Flohr, University of Chicago

Paul Mendes-Flohr, University of Chicago

"Mack makes a significant and innovative contribution to two heavily traversed fields: the causes of the Shoah, and the ambiguous legacy of philosophical modernity."

Byron Smith | German Quarterly