Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 11 9

it [contemporary Europe] would be denying itself and its concept. The time

for this demand, and its fulfillment, has come. What, then, to many, who do

not go beyond the surface of daily phenomena, looks like the age of atavistic

and incomprehensible hatred, as an age of resurfaced barbarism, is nothing

but the manifestation [Aeußerung] of the struggle that issues from the need

for unity, and that must occur before this unity can ensue. The true triumph

of the necessity of world-historical development is that those who believe

they could impede or indeed destroy it serve the ineluctable course of events

no less than its so-called supporters.^98

It is crucial to grasp the double-edged nature of Gans’s recourse to a version of

Hegel’s List der Vernunft. On the one hand, Gans insists that Jews must remake

themselves in accord with the ineluctable advance of world history. On the other

hand, he asserts that history is indeed ineluctably advancing, and that those who

try to obstruct it will be crushed. Phenomena that seem to reveal the age as one

of recrudescent hatred and barbarism (an ostensible allusion to the Hep-Hep

pogroms) will be powerless to halt the necessity of freedom’s progress; indeed,

they are but epiphenomena of such progress. So although Gans is calling, in very

stark terms, for Jewish self-transformation and integration, he is also insisting—

against mounting evidence—that there will in fact be an organic unity (a version

of Hegel’s state) for the Jews to integrate into. What is easy to miss in Gans’s call

for Jews to bring themselves into harmony with Europe is the political defiance

in his vision of the Hegelian state (here, Europe): history is advancing toward

greater freedom, including for Jews, reactionaries notwithstanding.^99

It is in this context that Gans deploys his most vivid language about the fu-

ture of Judaism in the new Europe, including his famous metaphor of Judentum

flowing into European life like a stream into the sea:

How such a merging of the Jewish into the European world must be thought

follows, once again, from the concept invoked above. To merge is not to perish

[Aufgehen ist nicht untergehen]. Only the independence that is disruptive

and self-preoccupied [Nur die störende bloß auf sich reflectirende Selbststän-

digkeit] shall be destroyed, not that which is subordinated to the whole;

since it serves the totality [the latter] shall not need to lose its substance [sein

Substantielles]. That into which it merges shall become that much richer for

what has merged with it, not merely that much poorer for the opposition that

has been lost.... What was characteristic of Europe was after all the fullness

and richness of its particularities. It cannot reject the very thing in which

its vitality [Kraft] consists, nor can it ever have enough of it. No particular-

ity harms it [Europe]; all that must cease is its [a particularity’s] autocracy