290 } Notes to Chapter 2
Sitzungen von Mai und Juny [sic], 1820 ,” 3 , ARC 4 ° 792 /B 11 , Archive of the “Association for
the Culture and Science of the Jews,” Zunz Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem
(henceforth Zunz Archive). (Most items in the Zunz Archive are available online at http://
http://www.jewish-archives.org/.)) Reissner indicates that Jost quit on May 14 , 1820. Roemer mis-
takenly states that Jost left the Verein in 1822 (Jewish Scholarship, 32 ).
16. Rachel Livné-Freudenthal draws on her extensive knowledge of the Verein docu-
ments in the Zunz Archive to interpret the Verein’s political philosophy and Weltanschauung
in several highly illuminating essays, including “Der ‘Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft
der Juden,’” “Kultur als Weltanschauung,” and “From a Nation Dwelling Alone to a Nation
Among the Nations.” She acknowledges the origin of the Vereinler’s conception of the state
and society in Hegel’s PR, yet she reads the Vereinler—to my mind, unconvincingly—as op-
posing Hegel’s vision of the state from within a liberal conception of an oppositional public
sphere (see, for example, “Der ‘Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,’” 114 ). I see
this interpretation as subtended by the assumption that Hegel was an apologist for the Prus-
sian state, which leads Livné-Freudenthal to see in the Vereinler’s criticism of the Prussian
state distance from or opposition to Hegel. In contrast, I read the Vereinler as using Hegel as
the yardstick by which they measure and critique the Prussian state. The arguably illiberal
elements of Hegel’s theory of the state—in particular, his intellectual elitism and consequent
wish to contain, rather than cultivate, the open expression of subjective opinion—are in fact
mirrored, not contested, in the Verein’s orientation. In “From ‘A Nation Dwelling Alone’ to
‘A Nation among the Nations,’” Livné-Freudenthal, as I read her, aligns the Vereinler’s vision
of the state more decisively with Hegel’s, against that of their common adversaries, Friedrich
Carl von Savigny and the historical school.
17. Yerushalmi writes: “Modern Jewish historiography... originated not as scholarly
curiosity, but as ideology, one of a gamut of responses to the crisis of Jewish emancipation
and the struggle to attain it” (Zakhor, 85 ). See also, for example, Max Wiener, “The Ideology
of the Founders of Jewish Scientific Research.”
18. Other scholars who look to the Verein primarily as an origin of modern Jewish schol-
arship include Michael Graetz (“Renaissance des Judentums im 19. Jahrhundert,” 213 ), who
sketches a trajectory from the Verein to Fränkel’s Jewish Theological Seminary (founded
in Breslau in 1854 ) to the Hochschule für die Wissenschafte des Judentums (Berlin, 1872 )
to the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin, 1919 ) to the Freie Jüdische
Lehrhaus (Frankfurt, 1920 ) and to the Jewish studies department that was at the core of the
Hebrew University when it was founded in 1925. David Myers likewise begins his narra-
tive of the intellectual and institutional antecedents of the Jerusalem school historians with
a brief discussion of the Verein (Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, 16 – 19 ). As an example of the
extent to which some contemporary Jewish studies scholars see their scholarly pursuits as
part of the legacy of the epochal program articulated in Wolf ’s programmatic Zeitschrift
essay and exemplified in the Zeitschrift itself, see Christoph Schulte, “Über den Begriff einer
Wissenschaft des Judentums,” 279 and 284.
19. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 83.
20. Ibid., 81.
21. Schorsch, TC, 6. In Jewish Scholarship, Roemer examines the popular pedagogical
uses of Wissenschaft des Judentums and illuminates a history of trying to mediate Jewish
memory through Jewish historical consciousness. In “Two Persistent Tensions within Wis-