Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 11 3

for civil servants. Just prior to ending his address on this note, Gans asks what

action would be appropriate to their outlook [Gessinung] and (conveniently)

finds the answer to lie in the very existence [Daseyn] of the Verein and the con-

cept [Gedanke] it is realizing.^76 In Hegel’s idealization of the bureaucracy, civil

servants embody precisely the sort of universal rationality to which Gans alludes

with the phrase “purity of thought’ [Reinheit des Gedankens]. Hegel’s Beamten-

tum is an elite, selfless, universally oriented group that mediates between private

interests—including the sentimental ties of the family—and the true universality

of the state. Because their work embodies selfless altruism, moreover, “the work

of a civil servant... is as such a value in and for itself.”^77 The way Hegel imbues

bureaucratic work with universal ethical value opens the door wide to the Ve r-

einler’s own exalted self-interpretation: by adopting the posture and habitus of

civil servants, they could construe their activity as of the highest value in and

for itself.^78

The irreverence of Gans’s closing remarks tends to distract from the sub-

tlety with which they extend his reconceptualization of the Jewish collective

according to a Hegelian metaphorics of the family. The image of a column of

fire (by night) and a cloud (by day) by which God made his presence known

to the Israelites as Moses led them on their peregrinations occurs a few places

in the Bible, notably Exodus 40 : 38. In recasting the mark of divine guidance

as a source of befuddlement to be dispersed by reason and Wissenschaft, Gans

replaces Moses with Hegel as the prophet who will lead the way into the state,

the new promised land. The phrase “perpetual depravity of the race,” moreover,

redefines the traditional ties that bind the Jewish people as subethical. Gans

continues the ethical recoding of Jewish communal ties he began when he cast

the Vereinler in the role of Hegelian Familienväter of the reconceptualized Jew-

ish family. Now the Verein appears as an ethical fraternity (Verbrüderung) paral-

lel to the ultimate ethical fraternity of the state. As particularist attachments, the

Jewish community’s traditional ties bind together a pseudo-ethical community

that is deficient and, by definition, perpetually depraved. The Verein introduces

a central, universal orientation around which the Vereinler hoped the Jewish

community would reconceive itself as an ethical collective in Hegel’s sense. As

the embodiment of rational selfless altruism—a universal brotherhood bound

by purity of thought and devotion to a noble cause—the Verein was to mediate

between this reconstructed Jewish community and the ethical universality of

the state. In this way, Gans theorized the Verein as the corrective to the peren-

nial Verderbtheit of the Jewish Geschlecht: the Verein’s embodiment of universal

ethical substance heralds, at long last, the “messianic age.” Gans claims not only

a place, but a privileged place, for Jews within a Hegelian Beamtentum when he