Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 103

ment as a way to explain the Jews’ contribution to world spirit would certainly

have been a creative use of Hegel for Wolf ’s own purposes. Heine’s use of the

remark in his 1843 essay on Michelet would then become more complex, too. If

Heine did not get the quote (unconsciously) from Wolf, but rather (with Wolf )

from Hegel, then Heine would presumably have known from reading Wolf ’s

essay that Wolf had also used Hegel’s remark to help theorize the Jewish con-

tribution to world history. It is likely that Heine would have been aware of the

resonances that Hegel’s remark had for the Verein, and Heine’s invocation of it

in his Michelet essay could be said to carry with it the memory of Wolf ’s version

of Judaism as a sort of spiritual Traumbild of world history.

Heine invokes Hegel’s purported remark in order to describe Michelet’s

French history as just the sort of “collection of dreams” or “dream book” (Tr a-

umbuch) that Hegel had signaled would be able to capture the spirit of an age.^46

It is interesting to note, however, that the wider context of Heine’s invocation

of Hegel’s remark, and what is centrally at issue in Heine’s thoughts on Mi-

chelet, is Michelet’s position in a dispute between clerical and secular factions

over what was being taught at universities. “The true meaning of this quarrel,”

Heine concluded, “is none other than the age-old opposition between philoso-

phy and religion.”^47 The relationship between philosophy and religion, as we

have seen, is what was centrally—and politically—at stake in Hegel’s elaboration

of his Wissenschaft der Religion, and in the Vereinler’s invention of Wissenschaft

des Judentums. Even if Wolf is paraphrasing Hegel with his remark on spirit

and dreams, he is using Hegel against Hegel to the extent that he deploys the

remark to stress the importance of Judaism’s principle of unity in diversity: Ju-

daism has borne witness to this idea, and history has, in effect, been a process

of catching up to it. The Jewish idea of unity is the dream that has always been

in advance of actions on the ground, a thought that flies in the face of Hegel’s

Christian- centric emphasis on the need for concretization, particularization,

and subjectivization of the absolute in active spirit. Whether Wolf is using Hegel

creatively or inventing an original image to counter Hegel (which Heine then

remembers as being Hegel’s image), the tension with Hegel remains significant:

Wolf ’s dream remark challenges the place of Christianity as an indispensable

stage for world spirit to pass through in order to remain relevant and, eventually,

to move beyond religion into science.

Especially as a continuation of his remark about Spinoza, Wolf ’s interpre-

tation of dreams aligns Judaism with Hegelian Wissenschaft even as it revises

Hegel. Wolf ’s remark, or adaptation of Hegel’s remark, inscribes dreaming Jews

or Jewish dreamers into the narrative of the world spirit, which we can be fairly

certain was not Hegel’s intent when he uttered it—if he did. In downplaying