Notes to Chapter 3 { 307stood as spiritually undifferentiated, seems hasty (“Altertumswissenschaft und Wissenschaft
des Judentums,” 46). Veltri (ibid.) and David Myers (“The Ideology of Wissenschaft des
Judentums,” 711 ) assume their conclusion when they argue that Gans’s eventual conver-
sion in 1825 reveals a truth implicit in his Hegelian interpretation of Judaism all along. Leon
Wieseltier also closely associates Gans’s Hegelianism and his eventual conversion when he
describes him as “a devoutly Hegelian historian of law who eventually fled to the font”
(“Etwas über jüdische Historik,” 147 ).
67. Gans, “Erste Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 58.
68. Waszek,“Vorwort,” 22. Michael Hoffheimer also notes the Hegelian inspiration be-
hind Gans’s metaphor of the family (Eduard Gans and the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, 111 ,
note 39 ).
69. Hegel distinguishes the state from civil society in PR § 258. Relations of civil society
are “optional” (and thus “external”); relations of the state are substantial. In Merold West-
phal’s apt description, “marriage as a non-contractual relationship is a double liberation.
It frees our self-consciousness from self-centeredness so it can participate in a We which is
larger than itself but with which it remains in a relation of identity” (“Hegel’s Radical Ideal-
ism,” 88 ). Similarly, “I the citizen am who We the people are. Like the family, the state frees
self-consciousness from self-centeredness” (ibid., 89 ). Not only Gans but also Wolf draws
on Hegel’s theorization of the ethical thrust of the family in his interpretation of Judaism.
Typically, however, even as he draws on Hegel, Wolf creatively adapts him to his own pur-
poses. Contesting Hegel’s narrative and timeline of the Jewish contribution to spirit, Wolf
celebrates the wisdom of the rabbis in displacing erstwhile public culture into the realm of
the family life, which he characterizes as “the source and training ground of ethical life” (die
Quelle und Übungschule der Sittlichkeit) (in “On the Concept of a Science of Judaism,” 148 ;
and “Über den Begriff,” 10 [translation modified]). Although Wolf ’s view of the relation
between family life and ethical life paraphrases Hegel’s remarks to the same effect in Philoso-
phy of Right, in contrast to Hegel, Wolf emphasizes the Jewish family as a sustaining force
of Sittlichkeit after the demise of the Jewish state. In Wolf ’s narrative of diaspora existence,
persecution eventually forced Jews to retreat from the active participation they had for cen-
turies maintained in the cultural and spiritual life of Europe into insular mediocrity, but even
under such adverse conditions they were sustained by the institution of the family ( 150 and
13 – 14 ).
70. Hegel, PR § 158.
71. Ibid. § 163.
72. Ibid. § 255.
73. On Hegel’s conception of corporations as a sort of family within civil society, see
Westphal, “Hegel’s Radical Idealism,” 82.
74. Gans, “Erste Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 61.
75. Ibid., 61 – 62. I understand this passage differently than Schorsch, who renders it: “I
see in the close fraternization of such noble people the approach of the messianic era, of
which the Prophets speak, and which only the common decadence of our generation has
turned into a fairy-tale” (TC, 209 ). Schorsch translates Geschlecht as “generation,” which
it can mean but not, as I see it, if modified by jederzeitig (perpetual or perennial). Thus,
whereas Schorsch represents Gans as finding fault only with the present generation of Jews,