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Chapter Three

Locating Themselves in History

Hegel in Key Texts of the Verein

In the previous chapter I analyzed the Hegelian inspiration for the Vereinler’s

politicized self-understanding. This chapter examines how different Vereinler

engaged with Hegel in key texts in the Verein’s early days, when its members

were flush with optimism, the period of its demise, and even its afterlife. These

texts—Immanuel Wolf ’s famous lead essay introducing the Verein’s Zeitschrift,

Eduard Gans’s presidential addresses to the Verein, and the post-Verein cor-

respondence between two of its erstwhile members, Wolf and Moses Moser—

let us see a rich variety of interpretations of and lived relationships to the Ver-

ein project, as well as a range of creative engagements with Hegelian thought.

Wolf ’s essay is a programmatic statement of the scope and meaning of the new

discipline of Wissenschaft des Judentums. In my close reading I try to unearth

ways that Wolf is both thinking with, and also subtly against, Hegel’s narrative

of the world-historical evolution of spirit culminating in Wissenschaft and how

the Jews figure into it. Gans was the most systematically Hegelian member of

the Verein, and in his presidential addresses he sought to show his colleagues

the world-historical significance of the work in which they were engaged, a task

that became increasingly vexed as the Prussian authorities pursued reaction-

ary policies rather than the sort of progressive agenda that Hegel had come to

Berlin to help usher in, and that had initially filled the young Vereinler with

such confidence and optimism. In the final section of this chapter I analyze

how Hegel and Wissenschaft haunt Moser’s and Wolf ’s private letters following

the collapse of the Verein as they attempted, in ways ranging from the hilarious

to the poignant, to make sense of their personal circumstances and even quotid-

ian existences.

Wolf, Hegel, and Spinoza, or Doing

(Wissenschaft) without Christianity

Among the most famous of all Verein writings is Wolf ’s programmatic essay

“Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums” (On the concept of a