Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

106 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

tion for an academic appointment in the law faculty of the University of Ber-

lin; however, Friedrich Carl von Savigny and his colleagues in the historical

school rejected his application. This faculty’s letter to the ministry of education

advising against Gans’s appointment explicitly raised the question of whether

or not Gans, as a Jew, was eligible for public service.^52 Although Gans would

eventually convert in 1825 to gain the appointment he sought, during his years

at the head of the Verein, in Terry Pinkard’s words, he “defiantly continued to

apply for a position on the juristic faculty.”^53 From 1819 , when he applied for the

privilege to lecture in the law faculty, until the ruling in August 1822 definitively

denied him this privilege—that is, during most of the Verein’s existence and

throughout what was certainly its most optimistic and productive period—Gans

was fighting to be granted an appointment to a university that Hegel envisioned

would play a key role in shaping the future of the state.^54 Throughout the Ver-

ein’s productive existence Gans was a Jewish Wissenschaftler peering into the

state, very much hoping that it was indeed moving toward Hegel’s vision and

would let him in. If Gans at times elides Wissenschaft and the state, this is in part

because he imagined, and not entirely implausibly, that he was on the verge of

entering the state as a Jew on the basis of wissenschaftlich achievement.

At the Verein’s inception Gans drew on Hegel to theorize how Jews would

be integrated into a wider ethical totality. As time and circumstances belied this

hopeful prognostication, Hegelian theory came increasingly to provide a fragile

alternative to the reality that it was meant to grasp and transform. The effort

Gans led to enact a Jewish Hegelian politics resulted in failure, but it illuminates

what the possibilities and limitations were for ambitious Jewish intellectuals in

Germany around 1820 , positioned as they were on the periphery of German

social, political, and academic life but on the cutting edge of one of the most

productive currents within what contemporary critical discourse refers to with

a hypostatizing capital letter: Theory.^55

Gans closes his first address as the Verein’s president, on November 2 , 1820 —

almost exactly one year after the organization’s founding—with a self-assessment

that expresses contempt for popularly elected Jewish leaders and hubristically

equates the Vereinler’s own superior intelligence with absolute power:

Representatives of Israel, who have not been elected by meaningless [nichts-

sagende] popular votes [Volksstimmen] but rather called together here

by virtue of higher intelligence and a deeply felt need, and by virtue of an

absolute power to which you are entitled [und aus einer euch zustehenden

Machtvollkommenheit], fulfill the task that you have taken upon yourself; let

our actions in the future consist not only of words, and let our future disputes