Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 139

precisely, he seems unreconciled to either place and speaks from the u-topia of

the wound that constitutes both the distance between the Jewish part and the

greater whole and the painful communication between them, the ghost pain.

In the wake of the Verein’s grand vision—articulated most paradigmatically by

Wolf himself in his programmatic Zeitschrift essay—of a reconciliation of Juden-

tum with the integrated rational totality of the contemporary world (the state,

the fatherland, Europe), Wolhwill’s metaphor mobilizes an opposed semantics

of violence, dismemberment, isolation, and ineffectual suffering. To be sure, the

polyp-like partial existence that Wohlwill attributes to Judentum corresponds

to his own existence in the face of the failure of the Verein’s grand synthetic

project. He is an individual Jew, excluded from the state and, to a great extent,

alienated from the Jewish community. He is the nerve that feels the pain issuing

from both sides of the cut.

Moser replies (May 3 – 4 , 1824 ) with an extended metaphor of Judaism sus-

pended between death and existence. As usual Moser remains in his outlook

more devoted to Hegel. The thrust of Moser’s letter is to belittle the parochial-

ism of the Hamburg Reform community (with which Wohlwill was not very

happily involved as a teacher and preacher). Once again Hegel serves as the uni-

versal standard by which to assess the narcissistic flaw that mars the Hamburg

crowd’s version of progress:

I hear that [ein mächtiges Geschwätz] has begun there [in Hamburg] about

us Verein people here [in Berlin]. By all means do not disturb them in this

innocent pleasure.—Hegel would never dream of the part his philosophy is

curiously playing there. They need, however, only flip through his works

and they won’t find the Temple [und sie werden den Tempel so wenig als ir-

gend etwas andres darin finden]. In his definition of the Absolute that runs

through the entire Encyclopedia it after all ultimately says: the Absolute is

Spirit, and not the Hamburg Temple, or its preachers, or their audience.^159

Moser goes on to stress that he has nothing against the efforts of the Hamburg

reformers, only that he finds that a “quite curious Weltanschauung” issues from

this sort of (pseudo-) “universal center of ideas.” He forecasts that the Ham-

burgers’ project will remain of merely local significance because it tries to raise

Judaism to a universal significance through navel gazing instead of a true (that is,

Hegelian) understanding of the wider movement of Geist: “For there is nothing

left of Judaism than the pain in a few souls [Gemüthern]. The mummy crumbles

into dust upon contact with the open atmosphere, and the meaningful signifi-

cance of the hieroglyph it bears is perverted into the latest entry in the family