Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

140 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

register [Stammbuch], just as if Moses had been born and brought up on the

Burstah [Der Große Burstah] and had achieved such a level of style that he

could contribute to the Leipziger Literaturzeitung.”^160

Like Wohlwill, Moser associates what remains of Judaism with a certain

pain, though Moser, much less generously than Wohlwill, reduces this pain to

subjective sentimentalism (der Schmerz in einigen Gemüthern). For Moser, the

pseudo-universalism of the Hamburg reformers is so misguided that fossilized

Orthodoxy remains truer to Judaism. Moser implies that Judaism is more mean-

ingful in mummified form than as articulated in the clichés to which the reform-

ers had reduced the hieroglyphs this mummy bore. Moser even remarks that a

stuffed rabbi in a zoological museum would embody more of Judaism than the

living Reform preachers.^161 This is so, he argues, because Judaism is essentially

a Volksreligion and, as such, incapable of being “modernized” and assigned uni-

versal significance once Jews have begun to lose their consciousness of them-

selves as God’s chosen people (it is in this sense that the “mummy” of Judaism

can only crumble on contact with modernity’s “atmosphere”): “From that point

there is no other religion than world religion, as Christ and Mohammed testify

to [zeugen] .”^162 Unlike the Reformers, according to Moser, the Vereinler never

tried to derive the content of world religion (Weltreligion) from the spirit of Ju-

daism. On the contrary, he implies, they assessed Judaism from the perspective

of world religion.^163 To Moser, the Reformers are guilty of smugly justifying a

particularist spirit with unconvincing universalist trappings. Despite its esthetic

beautification, this form of Judaism remains a form of purely subjective sectar-

ian spirit, disguise itself how it might as universal: “The Jewish reflection of the

present leaves behind its truth and becomes sectarian spirit, esthetic bric-a-brac

[Kram], etc. when it adopts the posture of a universal objective principle, as it

in fact is a purely subjective one, which merely has to displace [versetzen] itself

from the ground of folk religion to that of world religion. Hovering in the middle

is the necessary manifestation of a certain form of this movement, but it cannot

mean anything if it would claim to be the ultimate and highest [stage].”^164

In the course of this retrospective defense of the Verein and critique of early

Reform Judaism, Moser intimates a new position on the acceptability of Jewish

conversion that he will return to and elaborate on in his next letter. He writes:

“Let it not be viewed as an inconsistency that the Verein is dissolving itself.

What we in truth wanted, we still want now, and could want [even] if we had all

been baptized.”^165 As we saw in chapter 2 , Moser’s memorandum of November

1819 deployed a Hegelian logic to argue against Jewish conversion as a means

of achieving greater civil rights. That early vision of the Hegelian state, how-

ever, had presupposed that the state would offer a noncoercive space in which