Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 59

cognitive prowess, understood in a Hegelian key, as the paramount means of

gaining access to the state. The breakdown of the traditional mode of negotia-

tions between the Jewish community and the state, in which well-positioned

Jews would negotiate financial arrangements with the state on the community’s

behalf, was a necessary condition for the Vereinler’s novel conception of their re-

lationship to the state. But we can also see the latter as an imaginative usurpation

of the traditional elite’s role. The Vereinler tried to take over the role of a Jew-

ish elite that could negotiate with the state by redefining the expertise required

for such negotiations in terms of wissenschaftlich rather than financial prowess,

and indeed by displacing the negotiations themselves into theoretical territory.

Similarly, although the interface between associational life and the state was well

established in early-nineteenth-century Germany, Hegel’s emphasis on the im-

portance of political associations, or on associational life as political, inflected

and greatly enhanced the Vereinler’s interpretation of their modest institution.

The Vereinler responded to and appropriated both performative and sub-

stantive aspects of Hegel’s thought. Although much in Hegel’s style of thought,

theorization of the role of Wissenschaft, and understanding of the function of

specific institutions and forms of social and political mediation encouraged the

Verein’s members dramatically to overestimate the association’s significance and

agency, we must not forget that Hegel’s political vision—including his position

on Jewish civil rights—was decidedly on the progressive end of the spectrum.

Hegel intervened in the political culture of Prussia with a conception of the state

based on principles of universal rationality and constitutionalism. He spoke

out against antisemitism, adamantly rejected völkisch conceptions of ethical

community, and took on the romantic nationalism of his academic rivals in the

historical school. Moreover, as Friedrich Wilhelm III reneged on promises of

constitutional reform and began to consolidate the alliance between throne and

altar, Hegel’s political theory provided a secular countermodel to the emerging

Christian-German state.^61 Hegel’s deep appeal to the young Jewish students of

the Verein—in Schorsch’s apt description, “immersed in the best of German

culture, alienated from traditional Judaism, and vulnerable to the counter-attack

of the resurgent Right”—is entirely understandable.^62 The Vereinler explored

Hegel’s thought because it theorized modern politics and institutions in ways

they found suggestive for their own attempts to theorize politics and reinterpret

the nature of the Jewish community in ways that would enable Jews, as Jews, to

become fully integrated into the modern state. We should take this seriously.

For all the many ways it made good sense for the Vereinler to turn to Hegel

to conceptualize and navigate their self-consciously modern relationship to the

state, however, Hegelian theory was also a heady and seductive discourse. As