Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

116 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

stranded individuals, bachelors despite themselves, hapless Hagestolze on the

outside of both the Jewish community and the state—the two entities they had

hoped to mediate between. When Gans delivered his angry final address, the

failure of the Verein’s mission had become manifest. The association had virtu-

ally no financial backing and had generated scant interest on the part of the Jew-

ish community. Moreover, its own unapologetic intellectual elitism had left its

journal not only unread but, as noted in chapter 2 , virtually incomprehensible

to even the likes of Heine.^86 The Verein’s death knell however, came only when

Gans was refused an appointment to the Berlin University law faculty—that is,

when he was literally excluded from participation in the state because he was a

Jew.

Gans’s scathing diagnosis of the Berlin Jewish community as bad subjects

par excellence—unproductive, isolated bachelors fated to live out an irrelevant

existence and die unreconciled to the organic movement of world history—thus

dramatizes his own crisis in the aftermath of the Lex Gans. The Verein’s central

objective had been to reconcile Jewish particularity with a Hegelian version of

rational universality, to integrate Jewish consciousness and institutional life into

the ethical totality of the state. Although the ire Gans directs at the perceived

shortcomings of the Jewish community is surely sincere, his crisis was precipi-

tated by the Vaterland’s definition of him as an unintegratable Jewish subject.

Below I will analyze the ways that Gans responded to this changed status in

his theorization of the Verein in his final presidential address. First, however, it

is necessary to scrutinize Gans’s penultimate address, of April 28 , 1822 , which

contains his most elaborate vision of Jewish integration into the state, even as

it also shows signs of marginalization and, correspondingly, more pronounced

political defiance on Gans’s part.

Gans’s opening gambit in this address is to impugn the either-or logic of the

debate about the political nature of the Jews that had been going on since the

end of the anti-Napoleonic German campaign (Freiheitskampf).^87 Both those

who oppose the Jews, frequently evoking “philosophy” in the process (this is

presumably an allusion to Jakob Fries and others), and those who counter by

listing the Jews’ moral virtues fall prey to what we could call a subjectivist fal-

lacy: “The fallacy of both these kinds of hubbub [Treiben] lies in the basic view

that world history moves according to the standpoint of the freedom of the indi-

vidual; as if one could say of world history that it too must accomplish good and

avoid evil.”^88 Few have avoided this for-or-against logic, which stems from an

inability to transcend an individualistic conception of freedom, yet the prereq-

uisite for grasping—and by correctly grasping, taking part in, rather than merely

ineffectually indicting—the movement of world history is that one transcend