Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 143

The lack of substantive bonds in the Jewish community—Jews’ failure to consti-

tute themselves as an ethical collective in a Hegelian sense—renders conversion

an individual choice. In the absence of meaningful community and the general

isolation (allgemeine Vereinzelung) it entails, individuals must come to terms

with their circumstances and loyalties as they see fit. As long as it appeared to

the Vereinler that Jews could constitute themselves as an ethical community

(around the central hub of the Verein) that would have a place in a (Hegelian)

rational state, they regarded conversion as opportunistic, as a betrayal of the

common cause for individual gain. Now Moser sees no ethical substance (nichts

Geistiges) binding the community and leaves the issue of conversion to each

individual to negotiate. Judaism lives on only as habit. The Hamburg reform-

ers are deluded about the ability of Judaism to keep pace with modernity. The

deeper transformation that is taking place, Moser’s words suggest, will leave

both traditional and early Reform Judaism behind.

In a letter of August 1825 Moser returns to the question of conversion one

more time, in response to a rumor that Gans had converted (in fact he would do

so four months later). Moser rightly doubts the accuracy of the rumor, yet even if

it were true, he writes, Gans would “in this simply be following a powerful char-

acteristic of his mind... , in which nothing could emerge more naturally than,

after the most intense embrace of the substance he presumed Jewry to have, an

equally strong aversion to it once it had proved itself to him to be insipid and

lacking in spirit [ungeistig] .”^170 Moser reasons that nothing would be more nat-

ural than for Gans to find Judaism disagreeable once it had become clear that

it lacked the ethical substance he had presumed it to posses. This “changing of

uniforms” would then not be a contradiction but rather a coherent evolution

of Gans’s character.^171 As Moser had argued in his critique of the Hamburg re-

formers, for Gans and the Verein it was never a matter of loyalty to Judaism per

se but to the trajectory of truth, history, and so forth, with which they believed

they could make Judaism harmonize. Since contemporary Judaism had revealed

itself to be ungeistig, however, Gans would be only consistent to abandon it.

Even as Hegel continues to structure much of the way they grapple with the

status and meaning of their own personal existences in the bleak landscape of

post-Verein Restoration Germany (“There is a terrible struggle within me be-

tween the universal and the individual,” as Moser put it in a letter dated May

27 , 1825 ), both Wohlwill and Moser enjoyed using Hegel playfully for comic

effect, and both could agree in spring 1825 that Gans’s Hegelianism had become

fanatical.^172 In a letter of May 28 , 1825 , Moser writes that Gans “is now prop-

erly systematically a fool [ordentlich systematisch ein Narr] .”^173 Wohlwill, who

had just had the unenviable opportunity to spend time with Gans as the latter