Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

128 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

un-Hegelian Jewish community as reckless. To see in either of these a gesture of

acquiescence to the Christian state, however, would be a mistake.

Gans’s insistence that the Jews and the state can be reconciled is not a gesture

of state conformism but one of political defiance. It is a fantasy, on the part of

the marginalized Jewish Hegelian intellectual, of triumphing not only over his

incorrigible coreligionists but also over the reactionary Prussian state. In rais-

ing Wissenschaft to the position of the Richterstuhl of history and reality, Gans

assumes, however ineffectually, a vantage point from which he can declare the

essential nullity of existing Prussian realities. Gans insists that there is no essen-

tial flaw in the Vereinler’s understanding of Judentum, the state, or the reconcil-

ability of the two. True, Jews as they actually exist, and the state as it actually

exists, fail to grasp their true natures; but the banal Jewish community and the

reactionary Prussian state are ephemeral and not really real. Wissenschaftsjuden

and Hegel’s state are.

If the Verein disintegrated in a very real sense as a result of Prussia’s ruling to

exclude Gans and all Jews from state positions, it is because the ruling strained

to the breaking point the Vereinler’s guiding illusion of an essential equivalence

between reason, science, the state, Europe, and the age, and relegated the Verein

to a position of rude exteriority. Try as they might to think their way across it,

a chasm yawned between Restoration realpolitik and the Vereinler’s Hegelian

ideals and fantasies. In June 1823 the Prussian government offered Gans a travel

stipend, and, needing money badly and having no other good options, he took

it. After accepting what could be seen as hush money, Gans’s credibility as Ver-

ein president was irreparably compromised, and there was no one else with his

charisma and skill to take over.^126 Gans went to Paris but failed to find a niche or

meaningful employment there. He had himself baptized in Paris in December

1825 and was subsequently given the position on the law faculty of the Univer-

sity of Berlin from which he had been barred.

The arc of the Verein’s Hegelianism stretched from confidence to delusion,

from triumphalism to ressentiment, but we should not be too hasty to condemn

or lament Hegel’s effect on the Vereinler’s thought, or to dismiss their Hegelian-

ism as an unnecessary distraction or an intellectual seduction. It is true that by

the time of Gans’s final address to the Verein he had nothing but Hegelian the-

ory with which to legitimize and substantiate the Verein’s project of politicized

Wissenschaft, which had manifestly failed. Only recourse to a Hegelian fantasy

of conceptual agency that inverted an intolerable reality could sustain the vi-

sion that Wissenschaft would provide a bridge into a political universalism with

a place for Jews. The Vereinler could continue to embody Hegelian universal

subjectivity only through contorted strategies of self-evacuation: a nicht-Ich ad-