Kant, Fichte, and the Jews in Poland: A Case Study of a Cliché

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”, often regarded as his most anti-Jewish statement. These remarks are contextualized within the framework of Kant’s Anthropology and the debates on Jewish emancipation in the late 18th-century debates on Jewish emancipation. The paper then turns to contemporary philosophical discussions on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s anti-Jewish polemics, where the trope of “the Jews in Poland” reappears, showing the enduring influence of the cliché.