Notes to Chapter 3 { 3 11turn Gans slightly against Hegel by detecting a subversive quality in Gans’s use of “Europe”
in place of Hegel’s “German Reich,” even though Hegel uses “German nation,” “German
Reich,” and so forth, to refer to Western Europe, as Waszek (“Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spi-
noza,” 197 ) and Charles Taylor (Hegel, 398 ), among others, note.
103. Gans, “Zweite Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 67 – 68.
104. As quoted in chapter 2 , in his first address to the Verein (as its secretary) on March 11 ,
1820 , Gans likened the Verein—organically ordered within—to a state that “has only to look
where it wishes to make conquests” (ARC 4 º 792 /B 11 , 1 , Zunz Archive).
105. Gans ends with grandiose words about the importance of the Verein and the need to
devote youthful vigor and manly determination to its task, which the Vereinler should hold
as the highest cause (Angelegenheit) of their lives (“Zweite Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 74 ).
The success of the Verein depends on such heroic fortitude and on the subordination of the
personal to the universal: “Forget divisive strife and all personal discord. Remember the uni-
versal; let us, united, pursue the same goal, for humanity’s blessing and for the well-being of
the fatherland” (ibid.). The personal is corrosive (“personal discord”), whereas the universal
is the basis of harmony. Gans’s call to pursue the universal for the good of humanity and
the German “ fatherland” further exemplifies the instability between entities like “Europe,”
“humanity,” and the German “fatherland,” an oscillation between philosophical theorems
and actual states and governments. Both the Vereinler’s inflated self-importance and their
orientation toward integration into the state are evident when Gans goes on to apostrophize
princes, senates, legislative bodies, and other governmental entities (ibid., 75 ). Even if it was
merely a rhetorical gesture, such apostrophizing is a considerable stretch. Gans had just
reported that the Verein now had a handful of letters in its archive, that in the last semester
its members had taught twelve students in its Unterrichtsanstalt, and that four members
had read eleven papers in its Institut für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. This and the
Zeitschrift (which no one seemed interested in reading) hardly add up to activity likely to
command the attention of governments. Gans does say the Verein would be nothing without
government support (although the Verein had received no such support!), but he implies
that governments likewise have much to gain from the Verein. It is they who will reap the
fruit of Jewish integration into the state in the form of “vaterlandsliebende Bürger” (ibid.).
106. Waszek also (“Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza,” 199 ) sees in Gans’s position a version
of Hegel’s famous Doppelsatz.
107. Gans, “Dritte Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 76.
108. Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” 1 – 2.
109. In his 1938 “Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang,” a continuation of his earlier theoriza-
tion of the fetish as both denial and dramatization of castration, Freud analyzes the way the
ego sustains an illusion of integrity not in spite of but, paradoxically, by virtue of, an inner rift
(Gesammelte Werke, 17 : 59 – 60 ).
110. Gans, “Dritte Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 76.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid., 77.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid. In his first lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel defines the spirit of a
people (Geist des Volkes) as what unites and binds that people. As a spiritual principle, Geist
can only be understood intellectually. Spirit does not strive merely to serve particular ends