Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

118 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Welt theilhaftig zu werden] .”^95 In other words, with monotheism, the Jews en-

gendered the world that would follow, but they did so through what we could

call an act of immaculate estrangement that left no Jewish residue.^96 Instead of

taking part in the new world of which it was the matrix, Judentum sustained

a certain unity through concentration in a commercial estate (Handelsstand).

Though effectively closed off from others, as a commercial class Jews were also

potentially open to all other estates (Stände).

Gans somewhat normalizes the Jews’ purported failure to realize their poten-

tial for integration when he notes that premodern corporate society was, after

all, characterized by an Auseinander of different groups.^97 Social isolation was

the rule, not the exception. Given the harmony between the particular and the

universal in contemporary Europe, however—with its open, noncoercive pos-

sibility of exercising freedom as a particularity within a broader organic unity—

it has become incumbent on the Jews to overcome their vestiges of bad par-

ticularity and to bring themselves into harmony with the diversified unity of

modern European life. Refusal to integrate into contemporary Europe becomes

increasingly obnoxious. Gans locates Jews at a historical crossroad: they must

define themselves in concert with the historical evolution of freedom taking

shape in “Europe” (Hegel’s state) or define themselves in increasingly intoler-

able opposition to Europe’s differentiated whole. The memorable metaphors

Gans uses to refer to the process of Jewish integration into European totality

can be, and have been, variously understood. On the one hand, one can read

Gans as advocating a coercively assimilationist position. On the other hand,

Gans’s vision is not a demand for Jewish capitulation, but an argument that his-

tory has advanced and will now allow Jews to take up a place in a noncoercive

totality of European life. Gans offers this vision, I would argue, very much in

defiance of reactionaries who would define the state and the Jews as mutually

incompatible:

The issues that have been articulated in the last decades regarding the cause

of the Jews and that have emerged as an important concern,... these find

their resolution in the concept of contemporary Europe given above.... The

fewer unintegrated particulars [Einzelheiten] there are, the more disturbing

these few become, and the compelling drive [Drang] of the age, one that can-

not be refused, is to integrate these remaining formations into the harmoni-

ous unity. Where the organism requires a wavy line, a straight line is anathema

[to it]. Thus the demand of present-day Europe—that the Jews should com-

pletely incorporate themselves [into Europe]—is one that issues from the

necessity of its concept [seines Begriffes]. If it [this demand] were not made,