Amit Kravitz’s essay explores the tension between the universalist aspirations of Kantian morality and the particular exclusions that structure its philosophical and theological foundations. Beginning with Emmanuel Levinas’s famous wartime anecdote about the dog “Bobby”—“the last Kantian in Nazi Germany”—the article examines the symbolic weight of Kant’s philosophy as the purest emblem of Enlightenment reason and moral universalism. Levinas’s description of the dog as a Kantian contrasts the animal’s moral recognition of Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing gaze of humans, thereby elevating the Kantian ethos as the paradigm of universal human dignity. Yet, Kravitz argues, this image conceals a deep conceptual ambivalence: Kant’s own writings express a systematic antipathy toward Judaism, not merely as a cultural prejudice but as a philosophical necessity internal to his moral framework.
Kravitz distinguishes between two levels of Kant’s thought:
(1) the universal structure of moral law—whose origin and justification are grounded in pure reason, independent of empirical differences; and
(2) the application of this moral law—where universalism is mediated through history, finitude, and moral “impurity”.
While Kant’s ethics claims to transcend all particularity, its realization depends on a process of overcoming specific, “impure” conditions. This is what Kravitz calls “tainted universalism”: a universal ideal that can only emerge through the negation of what it deems non-universal.
Within this structure, “Judaism” becomes the non-universal ideal par excellence, targeted for negation. For Kant, Kravitz shows, Judaism is not merely a historical religion but a conceptual obstacle to the realization of moral purity. Unlike his prejudices against women or non-white races—which can be understood as contingent biases—Kant’s rejection of Judaism is systematic: it plays a constitutive role in his moral theology. The “euthanasia of Judaism,” as Kant notoriously calls it, is not an incidental remark but a logical requirement of his philosophical project, marking the elimination of a particular tradition as necessary in order to make room for the “religion of pure reason.”
The essay reconstructs Kant’s argument in three “points of exit” from impurity:
- the individual’s moral revolution—leaving behind the “old self” governed by inclination;
- the collective passage from the political to the moral republic—leaving behind the empirical order of law for a community of moral agents; and
- the transition from revealed religion to the religion of reason—leaving behind “Judaism,” which for Kant represents the confusion of morality with divine command and political theocracy.
In each case, Kravitz argues, the movement toward universality is defined by a prior act of negation, and “Judaism” occupies the structural position of what must be overcome.
In the essay’s concluding section, Kravitz extends this analysis to a broader genealogy of the theological-political problem. Drawing on Jean Améry and Jean‑Paul Sartre, he shows how the “tainted” structure of universalism—its dependence on an excluded particular—has produced a persistent “Jewish predicament” within modern thought. The Jew becomes both the emblem and the exception of universality: condemned whether particularist or universalist, whether loyal or assimilated. This ambivalent positioning, Kravitz suggests, is not merely historical but metaphysical—a structural “predisposition” of universalist discourse itself.
In conclusion, the essay proposes that modern philosophy’s universalist aspirations carry within them a latent anti-Jewish logic, not reducible to personal prejudice but to the very form of universality that demands the erasure of particularity. Against this background, Kravitz hints at the need for alternative models of universality—forms of moral and philosophical universalism that do not depend on the negation of the Jewish or the particular as their condition of possibility.
