The Status of Women and Jews in Moses Mendelssohn's Social Contract Theory: An Exceptional Case 1

In part taking up Steven Achheim's call not to retrospectively essentialize the terms Deutschtum and Judentum but, rather, to think them in their “co‐constitutionality”, I argue that such re‐reading points not only to the ways in which a “minority” culture helped shape a “majority” culture in the past, but forward to the claims of contemporary critical political and cultural theory as well. Instead of reading Moses Mendelssohn—the main focus of this essay—as an accommodator to German enlightenment mandates who simply traded Jewish autonomy for civil emancipation, therefore, I suggest re‐reading his Liberal social contract theory in light of contemporary feminist and critical political thought in order to gain a better sense of its novelty and, even, radicality, as well as of how it may provide an alternative, if still imperfect, model of critically thinking together the terms “gender,”“Jewishness,” and “emancipation.”