Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

58 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

between Jews and the state come into focus when we understand them as “state

Jews” of the Hegelian state.

If a diachronic glance at the history of Jews and the state helps to contextual-

ize the Verein’s image of itself as a parastate institution at a transitional moment

between the erosion of Jewish autonomy and the full Verbürgerlichung of the

Jews, the political role of associational life in Germany after 1815 offers a crucial

synchronic perspective. In his study of associations as a social structure in Ger-

man lands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Thomas Nip-

perdey reminds us of the important way Vereine helped render palpable emerg-

ing identifications with abstract entities like “humanity” or “nation” (“imagined

communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s influential term), as these began to re-

place the more immediate group affiliations of traditional corporate society.^58

Nipperdey draws attention to three aspects of associational life after 1815 that

help contextualize the Vereinler’s project and self-understanding. First, associa-

tions devoted to expressly cultural pursuits such as Kunst, Gesang, and Wis-

senschaft began to proliferate after 1815.^59 Second, although such associations

were devoted to an ostensibly autonomous and apolitical cultural realm, they

were often political or cryptopolitical organizations. Third, there was broad co-

operation between the state and civil society or, more to the point, between the

liberal reform-minded state bureaucracy and the Vereine, civil society’s increas-

ingly popular organizational units. Thus Nipperdey sees the state-supported

associations as occupying a middle position between state “bureaucracy and

civil society.”^60 The Verein was part of a dramatic growth in associational life in

Germany in the early nineteenth century, and its devotion to Kultur and Wissen-

schaft was thoroughly compatible with its political aspirations. The Vereinler’s

understanding of their contiguity with the Prussian state bureaucracy was thus

not entirely outlandish, even if it ultimately proved to be illusory.

Although the history of Jewish negotiations with the state and the vitality of

associational life and its mediating role between civil society and state bureau-

cracy go far in illuminating the Vereinler’s aspirations and self-conception, it

was the powerful infusion of Hegelian theory into this mix that acted as the cru-

cial intellectual catalyst (to employ again Reissner’s apt phrase) that fueled the

Verein’s dream of itself as the hub of a thoroughgoing reorganization of Jewish

life. Hegel’s theory of the state provided the intellectual framework the Verein-

ler used to understand and misunderstand the political stakes of their project.

Against the background of this history of Jews and the state, the Verein’s relation

to “the state” (that is, the gray zone between the Prussian state and Hegel’s)

emerges as a theory-drenched iteration of a traditional Jewish political strategy.

The Verein’s novel and peculiarly modern intervention was to try to deploy