Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 57

laxed professional and residence restrictions for Jews but also curtailed Jewish

autonomy, including in education.^52 Several prominent rabbis promptly excori-

ated Wessely’s tract. They saw a threat not only in the encroachments of the

modern state but also in Wessely’s unprecedented gesture of speaking as a Jew

to Jews about the welfare of Jews from a position outside of, and contesting, rab-

binic authority.^53 Fellow Jewish enlighteners such as David Friedländer, Herz

Homberg, Moshe Hirschel, and Saul Berlin in the 1780 s and early 1790 s radi-

calized the challenge to rabbinic authority, a stance that for many of them went

hand in hand with promoting Jewish integration into modern states.^54 Like the

later intellectuals of the Verein, these enlighteners tended to express contempt

for the common Jewish masses, who could not muster the same enthusiasm for

their cultural program or embrace of the modern state.^55

The precedent of maskilim looking up to the state, down at common Jews,

and spoiling for a fight with the rabbis is an important one for the defiantly

elitist program of the Verein, although it also highlights the Vereinler’s histori-

cal singularity. The interests of economically elite Jews and Jewish intellectu-

als had sometimes converged, as when Court Jews in Berlin, who had amassed

great wealth through army provisioning during the Seven Years’ War ( 1756 – 63 ),

supported the Berlin Haskalah, which they viewed as in harmony with their

goals of acculturation and removal of legal restrictions. In Sorkin’s words, “as

a state-dependent mercantile elite, the Court Jews served as a surrogate for the

state, making it possible for some of the maskilim to function in the penumbra

of the state.”^56 This new relationship to the state in the form of the economic

dependence of the maskilim on “the state’s surrogates—the mercantile elite”

accelerated the Haskalah’s “entrance into the political realm” insofar as it led

many maskilim to adopt aspects of their patrons’ mercantilist outlook and thus

to assess the value of their own projects partly in terms of utility to the state.^57

Yet neither financial dependence on the state’s surrogates nor anything in the

ideology of the Haskalah led its practitioners to imagine that their intellectual

labors embodied the essence of the state in a way comparable to how the Hege-

lian Vereinler—with virtually no financial support and no real place in or influ-

ence on the actual Prussian state—imagined that their wissenschaftlich prowess

empowered them to guide the wider Jewish community and effectively repre-

sent the state in matters concerning the community. What inspired the Vereinler

to displace the terms of meaningful involvement in the workings of the state

from a basis in real economic resources and political access to a power they

imagined to inhere in intellection and scholarly or wissenschaftlich discourse?

Overwhelmingly, I maintain, their engagement with Hegelian thought. Both the

Vereinler’s continuity with and novel departure from the history of the relations