Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 107

be nothing more than indefatigable rivalry. No revolution is more difficult

than the reconstruction and radical change of dispositions. Here no external

power or movement will do; the psychic malady requires a psychic cure. You

will effect it. It will be my joy and my pride that I was once the president of

this honorable assembly.^56

In a move he would repeat in subsequent addresses, Gans establishes su-

perior intelligence rather than “meaningless” popular support as the basis of

the Vereinler’s rightful authority, and ability, to reshape the Jewish community.

Gans presents the Verein’s task of integrating the Jews into the state as both a

“revolution” and a “cure” for a sick Jewish Gesinnung. Thus he casts the Verein

as a quasi-political assembly whose authority, however, derives from its mem-

bers’ cognitive prowess and whose mission it is to convert bad Jewish subjects

into good rational ones. Confident that he has discerned the telos toward which

history is advancing, Gans even speaks from a temporally doubled—a prolepti-

cally retrospective—vantage point. So surely was the Verein destined in Gans’s

mind to rationalize the Jewish spirit that he looks forward to being able to look

back, with joy and pride, at his role at the helm of the association that will have

ushered in this epochal change.

In his next presidential address, on April 1 , 1821 , Gans locates the Verein at

a crossroads. The Verein’s formal preliminaries (Vorarbeiten)—that is, the work

on the statutes—are now over, and its members have arrived at a moment of

truth when they will discover whether all their conceptual labor over the previ-

ous eighteen months will bear practical fruit.^57 Ever the Hegelian, Gans insists

that there is no strict distinction between comprehending (Erfassen, Auffassen)

and executing (Ausführen) an idea; on the contrary, “the correct comprehension

and execution are one.”^58 Yet the broader point Gans makes is that, given this

basic equation between the accurate comprehension and the execution of an

idea, the Vereinler will have no alibi should their theoretical vision fail to cor-

roborate itself in tangible transformation (Gans’s jaunty confidence that history

will bear his and his colleagues’ vision out was not merely a momentary posture,

moreover; as we shall see, he will refer back to and reiterate this position six

months later):

If we return to what was said earlier—that we find ourselves at a crossroads

between willing and executing—it should not be understood in such a way—

should we fail, and take home, instead of the glory of the accomplished deed,

the shame of the failed one—that we would then, I say, be allowed to think

[meinen] that we had willed and grasped what was right and only an exter-

nal obstacle completely independent of us and impossible to conquer had