Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 63

to help overcome the disparity between the Jewish community, on the one hand,

and the state and contemporary European world, on the other.

The incongruity between the entire internal condition of the Jews and their

outward position among the nations, existing for centuries but emerging

more starkly than ever in the modern age which, through a mighty revolution

in ideas (Ideenumschwung) everywhere gave rise, including among the Jews,

to altered ambitions that daily render more universal the oppressiveness of

the contradiction, urgently requires totally reworking (Umarbeitung) the

particular education and purpose in life (Lebensbestimmung) that have ob-

tained among the Jews until now, and guiding them to the standpoint at which

the rest of the European world has arrived. If this reworking can essentially issue

only immediately from the Jews themselves, still it cannot be the work of the

totality, but rather must have the like-minded more cultured ones as its authors.

To be efficacious in these aims is the intention of an Association, which accord-

ingly proposes (vorstellt): an alliance of those men who feel within themselves

the power and the calling for the enterprise of bringing the Jews, through an

educational process to unfold from within, into harmony with the age and with

the states in which they live. As comprehensive as is the indicated purpose

of the Association, just as comprehensively must its law-governed activity be

conceived.^72

In the preamble to the Verein’s statutes, the Vereinler further propose to pursue

their work of harmonizing the Jews with the state both “from above,” through

scholarly pursuits and educational reforms, and “from below,” by strategies of

making the Jews productive, through which “every particularity recalcitrant to

the whole will eventually be surmounted (bezwungen) .”^73 It is important to bear

in mind that Hegel uses the term “state” both more narrowly, to designate a

legal and political framework, and more expansively, as incorporating—in Jo-

seph McCarney’s words—“a range of spiritual phenomena, including religion

and, it seems, science and art too.”^74 The slippage in the claim advanced in the

preamble to theVerein’s statutes that an inner process of Bildung among the

Jews will lead to harmony between them and the Zeitalter, and between them

and the actual Staate in which they reside, exemplifies the ambiguous way the

lens of Hegelian theory could refract the concept of the state. To take one fur-

ther example, the statutes define the Verein’s pursuits as an “activity, governed

by laws, for the highest aims of humanity and the state, relevant to the Jews.”^75

This formulation casts the Verein’s engagement with Jews as serving the ends

of “humanity” and “the state,” reducing these entities to a point of virtual indis-

tinction.