Kant’s anti-semitism? On the question of the “Return of Israel” in the Vorarbeiten zur Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft

Kant’s relationship to Judaism is highly controversial. In this paper I will try to address a specific question that is related to many of the passages where Kant speaks of Judaism: the one concerning the so-called ‘return of Israel’. That expression involves two different issues: on the one side, the idea of the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. On the other side, some Christian thinkers understood this idea as the necessity of the inclusion of the Jews in the Church. Both ideas are rooted in the fact that the Jews are dispersed among other nations in the world, and despite that they have conserved unity; a fact that Kant describes as a ‘miracle’. This problem is deeply discussed by Kant in the Vorarbeiten dedicated to the work Die Religion…. Analyzing those passages can shed new light on the question of Kant’s controversial relationship to Judaism.