Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 105

mate homecoming. Wolf ’s Spinoza shows the way to do (Wissenschaft) without

Christianity.

Gans’s Addresses: Wissenschaft between

Triumphalism and Ressentiment

In addition to the numerous papers Gans presented as one of the most active

members of the Verein’s academic seminar, he made addresses as the Verein’s

secretary on March 11 , 1820 , and subsequently as president on five occasions be-

tween November 1820 and May 1823 , when the Verein was already in decline.^50

In these addresses Gans elaborates the most sustained Hegelian interpretation

of the association’s sociopolitical mission as well as the meaning of its inner

organization, its conceptual architecture. Although Gans’s framework remains

Hegelian throughout the various addresses, his positions evolve in relation to

an increasingly reactionary Prussian state and a Jewish community that took

precious little interest in the Verein. I am concerned here chiefly with two focal

points of Gans’s theoretical elaboration. The first is his conception of the rela-

tionship between theory and reality. The early speeches brim with confidence

that the Prussian fatherland is en route to becoming something akin to Hegel’s

state and that the Verein is at the vanguard of a Jewish community in the process

of bringing itself into harmony with this state. By the time of his last speech

before the Verein, delivered, notably, after the so-called Lex Gans had been de-

creed, it was no longer possible to sustain this vision. Seeing the Verein left with

only the most tenuous grounding in reality, Gans revised his initial position on

the relationship between theory and historical reality.

The second of Gans’s preoccupations I will analyze is the role of the Verein

and its vision of Wissenschaft as a political instrument in the project of recon-

stituting the Jewish community as a collective harmonic with the ethical totality

of the Hegelian state. In the course of theorizing this political and ethical reor-

ganization, Gans draws on Hegel’s political philosophy and philosophy of his-

tory, in particular his critique of subjectivism and the Enlightenment. Gans also

creatively deploys Hegel’s conception of the family and corporations as proto-

ethical moments in an extended metaphorics that seeks to redefine Jewish com-

munal bonds in ways that harmonize with Hegelian ethical totality.

Gans’s remarks on Wissenschaft and the state must be understood in the con-

text of his efforts to gain an academic appointment.^51 He had studied in Hei-

delberg with Anton Friedrich Julius Thebaut ( 1771 – 1840 ), an opponent of the

historical school of law, graduating in 1819. In the same year he published two

monographs and submitted an application to the Prussian minister of educa-