Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 83

meeting on May 27 , 1821 , when he suggested the association adopt the name

“Verein zur Beförderung der Kultur unter den Juden und der Wissenschaft des

Judentums.”^127 In other words, Gans and his associates would have attended

the first month of Hegel’s philosophy of religion lectures immediately before he

proposed this now-famous phrase. In contrast to the ample attention scholars

have paid to the inspiration that Zunz’s teachers Friedrich August Wolf and Au-

gust Wilhelm Böck provided for his conception of Wissenschaft des Judentums,

the inspiration that Hegel’s theorization of a new, politically urgent Wissenschaft

der Religion provided for Gans’s conception of—and name for—a Wissenschaft

des Judentums has been relatively neglected.^128 Although Zunz’s philological

version of Wissenschaft des Judentums bore real fruit in the form of a substantial

program of research that is widely viewed as one crucial origin of modern Jew-

ish scholarship, the Hegelian version of the new Jewish science has more to tell

us about the Vereinler’s political aspirations and self-understanding. Analyzing

key passages from the philosophy of religion lectures will illuminate how the

Vereinler appropriated Hegel’s politicized conception of the new Wissenschaft

der Religion for a vision of a Wissenschaft des Judentums intended to reconcile

Jewish particularity with the universality of the state.

Hegel maintains that his cognitive approach to religion had never been so

important or necessary as exactly then, in 1821 : “I wanted to make this cogni-

tive knowledge [of God and religion] the object of my lectures because, <in the

first place,> I believe it has never been so important and so necessary that this

cognition should be taken seriously once more. <The special interest and im-

portance of the philosophy of religion for our time lies here.> For the doctrine

that we can know nothing of God, that we cannot cognitively apprehend him,

has become in our time a universally acknowledged truth, a settled thing, a kind

of prejudice.”^129 Hegel presents his work as a corrective to two harmful misun-

derstandings of religion and its relation to rational thought: the epistemological

limits of Kantian subjectivism and religious subjectivism as theorized by post-

Kantian thinkers. He bemoans the Kantian “doctrine that we can know nothing

of God, that we cannot cognitively apprehend him,” characterizing this view as

“the last step in the degradation of humanity” since it places ultimate knowledge

of the nature of the world beyond human cognition.^130 Hegel bemoans the fact

that “humanity [has reached] the conclusion through cognition itself [that] its

cognition grasps everything else except the true.... This [is] the more specific

concern of the science of religion [Wissenschaft der Religion (my addition)] in

our time, which has been handed [to us].”^131 As Peter Hodgson and others have

noted, one of Hegel’s prime motivations for introducing this course in summer

1821 was his wish to get out in front of his rival Schleiermacher, who was prepar-