Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

114 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

contrasts Judaism’s manner of honoring “the purest and highest thought” with

the admixture of idolatry that has marred Christian and Muslim devotion to an

exalted idea. Those who idolize the crusaders and first followers of Mohammed

do so because they are unable to comprehend [begreifen] the idea for which the

crusaders and early Muslims made sacrifices. The “we” that Gans distinguishes

from those who commit such Christian and Muslim errors when he says “We

have chosen the better part. We honor the purest and highest thought, without

means that dishonor it” inhabits a locus at which the purity of Hegelian rea-

son and that of Jewish thought intersect: it is a “we” of Jewish Hegelian civil

servants.

As will have become apparent, Gans’s ethical redefinition of the Jews pro-

ceeds largely by way of a recoding of the matrilineal ties that traditionally define

inclusion in the Jewish community. Just as Hegel explicitly defines the modern

ethical family as patriarchal, so Gans writes “subethical” matrilineal bonds out

of the picture as he reconstitutes the community as a rational and distinctly pa-

triarchal subunit of the Vaterland.^79 The Jews’ Verderbtheit inheres in their sta-

tus as Geschlecht, understood not in a modern racial sense but as a subrational,

subethical ordering principle. Gans parallels Hegel’s distinction between the

bourgeois family and older familial arrangements such as the largely economic

unit of the medieval family, the tribe [Stamm], or the Greek oikos. As he incor-

porates Jews into the Hegelian paradigm, Gans assigns the Vereinler the role of

masculinizing, rationalizing, and rendering ethical an older verdorben form of

subethical and maternally mediated community. Hegel argues that each newly

formed modern family assumes autonomy vis-à-vis the wider kinship network

that had defined premodern families (Stämme, Häuser): “When a marriage

takes place, a new family is constituted, and this is self-sufficient for itself in rela-

tion to the kinship groups or houses from which it originated; its links with the

latter are based on the natural blood relationship, but the new family is based

on ethical love.”^80 In Hegel’s interpretation every marriage reenacts the histori-

cal leap from older familial models to the modern family by severing ties with

the extended family and establishing a new unity through bonds of ethical love.

The Vereinler should enact a comparable messianic leap out of the Geschlecht’s

maternal ties of “natural blood relationship” into the Vaterland. As would-be

Familienväter the Vereinler are bound to their fellow Jews by ties of ethical

quasi-familial love that are continuous with those of the politicized fraternity

(Verbrüderung) of the Verein itself and, ultimately, with the Sittlichkeit of the

state.

Gans returns to this line of thinking in his final address to the Verein, on May

4 , 1823. Adapting the critique of Enlightenment subjectivism that Hegel had re-