Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

100 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Wolf ’s idealist reinvention of Judaism contests Hegel’s supercessionist narra-

tive. In the face of Hegel’s critique of Judaism’s and Spinoza’s conception of

unity as flawed, removed from or lacking mediation with the world, Wolf pre-

sents the Jewish idea of unity not as deficient and abstract in Hegel’s sense but

as enduring, demanding, and awaiting ultimate human comprehension. The

idea of unity revealed in Judaism was beyond humanity’s limited grasp, and—in

Wolf ’s account—humanity spends the next several millennia catching up with

the original Jewish idea of this “living, spiritual entity, incommensurable with the

world of matter and incapable of physical representation.” Concrete media-

tion of the Jewish idea of unity here fulfills a decidedly different need than

does actualization in the Hegelian dialectic of spirit. Rather than fulfilling the

function of Geist’s necessary apprenticeship in the real world, as actualization

does in Hegel’s speculative bildungsroman, concretization, in Wolf ’s concep-

tion, is a concession to those who cannot grasp the idea in its purity; it is Juda-

ism’s idea dressed up in more tangible garb for imperfect intellects. In this way

much of Judaism—and, by extension, virtually all of Christianity—becomes a

sort of primer for limited human understanding but not the indispensable

dialectical progress of the idea itself. Yet if the Jewish idea of unity has, since

its revelation, awaited the human capacity to grasp it in its purity, this is pre-

cisely what Wissenschaft des Judentums finally achieves. In Wolf ’s narrative,

Judaism’s purported lack of concrete mediation is less a deficit than a kind of

spiritual precociousness that the world spirit, as it unfolds in history, is only

ever catching up to. This changes Judaism from the Hegelian religion of ar-

rested development in need of being perfected (vollendet) in Christianity to

an idea to which religion can do justice only at its point of convergence with

science: it is the Jewish idea in its purest form that the world spirit realizes in

Wissenschaft.

Wolf stages Spinoza in a way that draws on yet subverts Hegel’s dialectic of

world spirit. Wolf credits Spinoza with having, long before Hegel, grasped Juda-

ism’s idea of unity wissenschaftlich, and he clearly understands the Vereinler to

be carrying on Spinoza’s legacy:

In the inner family life of the Jews there were preserved, together with old

customs and habits, ineradicable traces of a nobler human nature and an ac-

tive mind. But what is of the highest importance is this: that Judaism, in suc-

cumbing, so to speak, beneath the weight of years and external violence into

a debilitating lethargy, was yet depicted in accordance with its unique, vital,

and eternal idea, in the latter’s highest degree of definition, consistency, and

freedom—as though this were the last, exhausting act of its manifestation—in