Moritz Lazarus was one of the most influential Jewish intellectuals of the 19th century. A pioneering philosopher and cultural theorist, he championed a liberal vision of society grounded in individual freedom and civic participation. For Lazarus, the strength of a nation lay not in uniformity but in the ability of its citizens – whether Christian, Danish, Polish, or Jewish – to flourish together. His career unfolded during a period of unprecedented emancipation and integration for German Jews, yet it also witnessed the emergence of the antisemitic ideologies that would later have catastrophic consequences.
We spoke with Dr Mathias Berek about the enduring significance of Lazarus’s work and why his ideas – of a pluralistic, inclusive society – resonate so strongly today.
Dr Mathias Berek is a cultural studies scholar at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin and the Research Institute for Social Cohesion. He completed his doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 2008, focusing on collective memory and the social construction of reality. He has led a major research project on Moritz Lazarus, based at Leipzig and Tel Aviv University’s Minerva Institute for German History, the findings of which were published by Wallstein Verlag in 2019. He has also contributed to European research on antisemitism and migration and is a member of the academic working group at the Leo Baeck Institute.
A Society in Which Everyone Can Participate
Lutz Vössing in conversation with Mathias Berek
Mr Berek, who was Moritz Lazarus?
Moritz Lazarus was one of those national-liberal German Jews who actively supported the creation of a unified German nation under Prussian leadership. His life spanned the second half of the 19th century, a period during which he achieved prominence as an author, speaker, professor, organiser, and entrepreneur.
What kind of era was that?
It was a time when Jewish emancipation in Europe was beginning to yield tangible results. Jewish men and women were gradually being allowed to participate more fully in public life and society. This was the age of Jewish social mobility: legal restrictions and open discrimination were being dismantled – most notably through the North German Confederation’s constitution of 1869 and the Imperial Constitution of 1871. Politically, it was also the golden age of national liberalism, a movement shaped largely by educated middle-class men. Though limited in its inclusivity, it was democratic in spirit and played a major role in the founding of the German Empire. Until Bismarck’s conservative turn in the late 1870s, the national liberals were his main governing partners.
That sounds relatively progressive. How did Lazarus fare personally?
Despite the progress, emancipation was far from complete – as Lazarus himself discovered. Both before and after the founding of the Reich, he was repeatedly denied a full professorship in Prussia and other German states. Only Switzerland offered him such a position. He also lost his teaching post at the Prussian War Academy in the early 1870s when the new director, an antisemite, took over.
Yet Lazarus remained remarkably well connected within elite circles. He taught philosophy to Prussian army officers, chaired numerous charitable and cultural organisations – both Jewish and non-Jewish – and his publications were widely discussed in the arts pages of the leading newspapers. He held a professorship in Bern, where he even served as rector, and continued to lecture in Berlin. He was friends with leading literary figures such as Berthold Auerbach and Paul Heyse, and belonged to the prestigious Rütli literary society alongside Theodor Fontane. During the Franco-Prussian War, he used his international contacts – particularly in Switzerland and France – to help secure the release of prisoners of war.
Who influenced his thinking?
Lazarus’s intellectual world was rich and diverse. He drew on Greco-Roman antiquity and Jewish tradition, as well as figures from the Enlightenment and beyond – Leibniz, Kant, Spinoza, and John Stuart Mill. He was also shaped by contemporary psychologists such as Beneke and Herbart, and by linguists like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Heyse. His interests ranged widely, from history to biology.
At the University of Berlin, his teachers included leading scholars such as Heyse, Trendelenburg, Beneke, Ranke, and Wilhelm Grimm. Unusually for a scholar of his stature, he also drew inspiration from beyond the academy – for instance, from the popular science writer Aaron Bernstein.
Who admired him? Whom did he influence?
His admirers included his second wife, the writer Nahida Lazarus (née Remy), as well as former students like Alfred Leicht and Aron Tänzer. But Lazarus’s influence extended well beyond these circles. His ideas about what it meant to belong to a collective – such as a people or a nation – were remarkably forward-looking.
Can you explain that a bit more?
Lazarus rejected definitions of nationhood based on language, origin, or race – which he regarded as dangerous, even barbaric. Instead, he saw nations as defined by shared history, moral values, and above all, voluntary identification. For him, a person belonged to a people if they felt they did.
He viewed collective identity not as something fixed or natural, but as a process – something continuously shaped and reshaped. That idea was strikingly modern – almost proto-constructivist – and had lasting implications. It even resonated with some early Zionist thinking.
For the liberal majority of German Jewry in the late 19th century, Lazarus served as a kind of philosophical lodestar. His theory of belonging through participation and self-identification captured the experience of German-Jewish life at the time.
Academically, his influence was just as significant. He taught at the universities of Bern and Berlin, where his students included Georg Simmel, one of the founders of sociology; Franz Boas, the father of American cultural anthropology; and the cultural philosopher Ludwig Stein. His close friend from earlier years, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, also found inspiration in their conversations.
Lazarus is often described as a popular philosopher. What does that mean?
Lazarus was a gifted communicator – not only in academic settings, but also in public venues like the Berlin Sing-Akademie or the Grand Council Hall in Bern. Yet his popular appeal extended beyond oratory.
He wasn’t interested solely in abstract philosophical questions about language, the mind, or the individual and society. He also wrote insightfully about everyday topics: friendship, humour, music, markets, games, honour, and social customs. His goal was to speak to an educated general public, and he did so through lectures and essays published in widely read magazines like Westermanns Illustrierte Deutsche Monatshefte.
Lazarus was determined to reach beyond the university and to democratise knowledge. His contemporaries saw him as someone who had succeeded in making philosophy and psychology accessible.
One concept often linked with Lazarus is Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology). What exactly does that mean?
Völkerpsychologie was a collaborative project between Lazarus and his close friend Heymann Steinthal. It has nothing in common with the later, nationalist term völkisch. Quite the opposite: Lazarus and Steinthal were trying to chart a path between idealist philosophy and the emerging empirical sciences. Today, we might describe their approach as a precursor to social psychology or cultural studies.
One strand of their work focused on theory – the relationship between the individual and the collective – and had a formative influence on disciplines such as sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology, through the students they taught.
There was also a more popular strand: a kind of characterology of peoples, which sought to describe the distinctive traits of different historical and contemporary cultures. This second strand sometimes reflected the Eurocentric or essentialist biases of the period.
It is only this second, more dated aspect that corresponds to the word Volk in the sense of ‘a people’ or ‘ethnic group’ – a term that later became politically charged due to the rise of völkisch movements. For Lazarus and Steinthal, however, Volk simply meant a collective, a society, or a nation.
When studying Lazarus, one inevitably encounters his concept of Volksgeist (national spirit). What was distinctive about his understanding of it?
Lazarus’s interpretation of Volksgeist – or what he also called ‘objective spirit’ – was strikingly modern. He conceived of it not as a fixed essence unfolding through history (as in Hegel), nor as some immutable core of a people imagined as a living organism. Instead, Lazarus saw Volksgeist as a dynamic process.
In his view, what we call Volksgeist corresponds to what we might now describe as culture in the broadest sense: the world of human-made things, institutions, rituals, and systems of meaning – from statues and markets to stories, music, and moral values. This spirit is ‘objective’ because it is externalised: it exists independently of any one individual, can be shared among individuals, and is accessible to understanding.
Lazarus thus offered a way of thinking about the world that humans create – and how, in turn, this world helps make us who we are.
How did this idea of Volksgeist shape his political thought?
If national spirit – or culture – is not something God-given or natural but rather something historically created by people, then it is open to change. It can be revised, improved, and reimagined by those who live within it. In this view, belonging does not depend on birth, language, religion, or race, but on participation. Anyone who contributes to shaping society belongs to it.
This was a core belief for Lazarus. Like many of his German-Jewish contemporaries, he considered himself both German and Jewish, and he rejected any suggestion that these identities were incompatible. In his eyes, the German Empire was a society also built and sustained by its Jewish citizens – though this has often been erased from historical memory. The antisemitic impulse to cast Jews as outsiders persists today, evident in phrases like ‘the Germans and the Jews’ when referring to the Imperial or Weimar periods – as if Jews were never fully part of the national story.
So one could be both Jewish and German in relation to the state. But how did Lazarus understand the relationship between the individual and society more broadly?
Lazarus developed another important political idea from his concept of objective spirit: the individual and the collective exist in a mutually constitutive relationship. He did not argue, like some nationalist thinkers, that the individual should subordinate themselves to the collective ‘we’. Nor did he endorse the opposite extreme: that individuals are isolated atoms who relate to others only through contracts or fleeting associations.
For Lazarus, true collectivity is only possible when individuals are fully developed as individuals – but this individuality always exists in a state of profound connection to others. It is through our shared world – the realm of objective spirit – that we come to be ourselves and to form enduring bonds with others.
He explicitly spoke of society, not community. That sounds progressive today. Was it considered so at the time?
The distinction between society and community only entered academic discourse later, most famously through Ferdinand Tönnies’s influential Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Lazarus, by contrast, had already published his first work on folk psychology in 1851, long before the terms had become central to sociological debate.
Yet this chronological gap may be precisely what gives his approach its modern resonance. From today’s vantage point – knowing how Tönnies’s nostalgic idealisation of community would later echo ominously in National Socialist thought – it seems striking that Lazarus showed little interest in setting up a dichotomy between community and society, let alone privileging one over the other. What mattered to him was the mode of coexistence, not the label attached to it. Whether it was called society, community, nation, or people, his ideal was a collective in which all individuals, in their diversity, could participate, flourish, and grow together. In this sense, his thinking now appears prescient and inclusive.
Did his liberalism have blind spots?
Yes, undoubtedly. Although Lazarus supported women’s right to work in certain professions, he remained committed to conventional gender roles. He believed women were more emotional and inherently suited to caregiving rather than intellectual or political pursuits.
Similarly, despite his own modest origins and a lifelong commitment to charitable causes, questions of social exclusion based on poverty or class rarely featured in his work. His liberalism was ultimately shaped by the worldview of an educated, economically secure man – and it showed. It did not interrogate the deeper structural inequalities that limited access to the very ideals of participation and self-realisation he championed.
What was his view of religion? How did it relate to identity and society?
The modern concept of ‘identity’ was not part of Lazarus’s framework. But religion certainly was. While engaging with a wide range of philosophical ideas, he remained throughout his life a devout, practising Jew and a key figure in liberal Judaism.
He chaired the Reform Synods of 1869 and 1871, co-founded and led major Jewish organisations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the German-Israelite Community Association, the Berlin Jewish community, and the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies). Within liberal German Judaism, he was a central figure.
In his view, religion was an integral, self-evident part of social life. He firmly believed that all religious groups should enjoy equal rights and recognition – particularly important in the German context of his day. However, he did not extend this pluralism to include freedom from religion. Secularism, as we understand it today, had no place in his thinking. This proved a vulnerability: the antisemite Heinrich von Treitschke seized upon Lazarus’s elevation of religion to argue that Germany’s majority faith – Christianity – should therefore dominate public life. In striving to defend pluralism, Lazarus inadvertently left open the door to majoritarian claims.
You mentioned the conservative turn. The situation deteriorated significantly…
Indeed, the political climate shifted markedly in the late 1870s. The liberal era gave way to a more conservative order. With the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Laws, Bismarck sought to suppress the rising Social Democratic movement, and the liberal camp itself fractured into left and right wings. The cohesive, reformist spirit of the earlier decades dissipated.
How did this affect Jews?
For Germany’s Jews, the consequences were profound. As they secured greater civil rights, these advances provoked a powerful backlash. A new, virulent form of Jew-hatred emerged – not merely religiously based, but racialised and ideological. In 1879, Heinrich von Treitschke published his notorious attack on Jews, echoing a growing hostility that found institutional voice through figures like Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term antisemitism, and Adolf Stoecker, who preached it from the pulpit of the Prussian court.
Antisemitic parties and movements quickly gained traction. Some even mounted a petition to roll back Jewish emancipation altogether. Universities, in particular, became hotbeds of antisemitic thought. The seeds of exclusion, violence, and eventual annihilation were planted in this period of growing intolerance.
When did the idea take hold that Jews and Germans were fundamentally separate?
Such ideas were never entirely absent. Even when Jews actively shaped the German Empire – contributing intellectually, culturally, and economically – there remained many Christian Germans unwilling to accept them as full members of society.
The situation invites a modern analogy: just as postwar Germany was rebuilt by millions of immigrants and their descendants – who are no less German than the descendants of Nazis – there are still those today who insist on policing the boundaries of belonging. In the late 19th century, similar forces were emboldened by the conservative turn. What had been a simmering undercurrent became more visible and mainstream. Antisemites gained platforms, confidence, and a sense of ideological coherence.
How did this affect perceptions of Lazarus?
From the 1880s onward, Lazarus was increasingly identified in the public sphere primarily as a Jew – and often attacked using anti-Jewish stereotypes. Even his pioneering work on folk psychology was at times dismissed as a ‘Jewish science’, part of an effort to delegitimise Jewish intellectual contributions to German culture.
This was part of a broader campaign by antisemites to homogenise German society and cast Jews as alien to it. Even some liberals who opposed antisemitism fell into the trap of conditional acceptance: they urged Jewish Germans to assimilate further, even convert, as the price of full belonging. Lazarus, once seen as a philosopher of the German nation, was now portrayed as standing outside it.
When did Lazarus begin to fight antisemitism?
Lazarus was among the very first to take a public stand against Treitschke’s attacks. Shortly after the publication of Treitschke’s notorious article Unsere Aussichten in December 1879, Lazarus called on Berlin’s Jews to form a response committee. His speech at that meeting was soon published as a pamphlet in early 1880. From that moment onward, the fight against antisemitism became a consistent thread in his work – and it can be seen as one of the motivations behind his later focus on The Ethics of Judaism.
When did he come to realise that his ideals could not be realised?
In 1881, though deeply shaken by the resurgence of antisemitism, Lazarus still clung to a hope that many Germans remained faithful to what he called ‘the banner of ideal conviction and culture’. He appealed to the ‘innate nobility and purity of the German national spirit’, as he wrote in the preface to a new edition of his book The Life of the Soul. But by the end of the century, even that last vestige of hope had faded. In the 1896 preface, he admitted with resignation: ‘My confidence has not been justified. – I am silent.’ That same year, he published the first volume of his Jewish Ethics. He died in 1903.
What do Lazarus’s ideas have to offer us today?
In my view, his work offers at least three enduring insights.
First: societies are created by people – and what people build, they can also change.
Second: individuals become truly human only in relation to others, within society. These two ideas together provide a powerful model of mutual interdependence: individuals and collectives are not opposed, but dynamically linked. Solidarity and social cohesion do not require uniformity; on the contrary, they can flourish through individuality. In this light, we must question whether violent, exclusionary groupings – where anxious individuals are herded together under authoritarian leadership – deserve to be called communities at all. Such formations are bound together not by shared purpose or mutual recognition, but by fear and the hatred of a common ‘other’.
Which brings me to the third insight: modern societies are, and always have been, diverse – what Lazarus’s time called multiplicity. Efforts to homogenise them invariably entail violence. They rely on fantasies of purity – whether racial, religious, or cultural – that distort reality and destroy human plurality. Such fantasies not only marginalise the different, but allow dominant groups to claim they represent society as a whole. Resisting this destructive urge for homogeneity is, I believe, one of the key political and moral imperatives we can draw from the 19th century – and from thinkers like Moritz Lazarus.
Text: Lutz Vössing
Many thanks to for the conversation.
This is the second article in the series ‘Civil Engagement and Democracy in German History: Jewish Experiences and Perspectives’, first published in German as Engagement & Demokratie in der jüdisch-deutschen Geschichte by the Freunde und Förderer des Leo Baeck Instituts.
Some books by and about Moritz Lazarus were part of the library of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin. Lazarus’ 1882 book Das Leben der Seele was rediscovered as part of the Library of Lost Books project and is now in the Jewish Museum in Prague. The 1906 edition of his memoirs remains missing.
You can read the original German article at: https://fuf-leobaeck.de/2025/03/moritz-lazarus-leitphilosoph-des-libera…
