Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

66 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

not yet comprehended its own significance or profoundest reality; and although

they identified their positions as “Protestant,” they opposed “all forms of reli-

gious faith” as forms of retrogressive subjectivism based on sentiment rather

than reason.^82 The politicized critique of religious subjectivity that character-

ized Henning’s and Förster’s Protestantism was, as we will see, likewise at the

heart of the Vereinler’s Hegelian project of a Wissenschaft des Judentums, and in

the early 1820 s the Vereinler and Henning and Förster had a similarly exuberant

faith in the power of thought to complete the world-historical trajectory toward

freedom. Förster’s and Henning’s rhetorical strategy in 1820 – 21 of critiquing

the shortcomings of Restoration Prussia in terms that superficially might appear

apologetic was one that Gans also deployed in his presidential addresses.

The amenability of Hegelian theory to various political orientations helps us

appreciate how Vereinler like Gans and Moser could remain within a Hegelian

idiom even as they reversed their positions, as I discuss in chapter 3 , on key

issues such as the lessons to derive from the Verein’s failure to achieve its ambi-

tious goals, or the acceptability of conversion to Christianity. Hegel provided

the Vereinler with a conceptual apparatus to use in understanding and justify-

ing the positions they took, but it did not determine those positions. Here, too,

a comparison with how the Vereinler’s non-Jewish counterparts negotiated their

identities and relationships to visions and realities of the state is illuminating.

Toews argues that “like his non-Jewish contemporaries who joined the ‘magic

circle’ of Hegel’s disciples during the early 1820 ’s, Gans was drawn toward

Hegel by the need to resolve the frustrating, debilitating dichotomy between

a subjective vision of communal integration and the social and political reality

of postwar Germany.”^83 Hegel’s narratives initially inspired Gans and the other

Hegelian Vereinler to believe they would achieve their “vision of communal

integration” despite the shortcomings they perceived in both the Jewish com-

munity and the Prussian government. Eventually they drew on Hegel to come

to terms with the impossibility of achieving their goals. In this movement from

flush optimism to perplexity and dismay, the Vereinler had to reassess both their

historical roles as Jewish intellectuals and the nature of the Prussian state. The

fact that Gans and his colleagues remained in a conceptually and rhetorically

Hegelian framework should not obscure the real shifts in their thinking. Gans

articulated his ultimate exasperation with Prussia and the Jewish community,

for example, in an idiom every bit as Hegelian as the one in which he had ear-

lier elaborated a sanguine view of Prussia’s trajectory and the possibilities for

Jewish integration. Hegelian thought provided the pliant conceptual medium

through which Gans negotiated a changing historical and personal situation. In

the late 1810 s and early 1820 s Hegel himself was trying to negotiate the widen-