Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

112 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

the state, the particular and the universal do not cancel but reflect and sustain

each other. In their concern for their fellow Jews, the Vereinler help render them

“loyal citizens and reverent subjects, including insofar as their inward journey

and cultivation are concerned”—that is, model subjects of Hegelian political

theory, possessing a profound inward sense of piety before the greater ethical

totality. Hegel enables Gans to redefine loyalty to fellow Jews, widely maligned

as a stubborn form of particularism pernicious to the state, as a kind of altruistic

devotion and a necessary prerequisite for the individual’s full integration into

the state’s higher substantive unity.

Gans goes on to evoke and reconfirm the position he had articulated six

months earlier—namely, that in the event of failure, the Vereinler could not claim

they had grasped and willed the right thing and had been inhibited only by “an

external obstacle completely independent of us and impossible to conquer.” A

hypothetical failure would show, on the contrary, that they had not grasped and

willed the right thing (das Rechte), or, “what amounts to the same thing, that we

did not approach it in the right way.”^74 Gans closes this address on a messianic

note that extends his reconceptualization of the Jewish community in terms of a

Hegelian metaphorics of the family in complex ways:

In our circle, devoted to a noble cause, where only the holy and pure may

have a place, we must above all diligently guard against letting morbid apathy,

vicious ill will, and capricious temperament—these internal mortal enemies

of every better pursuit—arise in any of us. Let the purity of thought that

every ethical brotherhood represents, the highest being the state, also imbue

every individual soul. No longer is there a column of fire in Israel by night,

but clouds aplenty by day. Disperse these clouds.... [O]ne has idolized the

crusaders, and the first followers of Mohammed—because they indeed made

sacrifices for an idea, which none of these idolizers could comprehend [be-

greifen]. We have chosen the better part. We honor the purest and highest

thought, without means that dishonor it. Onward, then, all of you who are of

more noble spirit; onward, those whom the hundredfold shackles and their

incisions could not enslave; onward, you who place your Wissenschaft and

love of your own and good will above all; attach yourselves to this noble so-

ciety, and I see in the firm manifestation of brotherhood [festen Verbrüder-

ung] between such good souls the dawning of the messianic age of which

the prophets speak, and which alone the perpetual depravity of the race [des

Geschlechtes jederzeitige Verderbtheit] has reduced to a fairy tale.^75

Gans makes a number of significant conceptual and performative moves in this

rich passage. He admonishes the Vereinler in terms that echo Hegel’s high praise