Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 91

science of Judaism), which served as the lead essay in the inaugural, spring 1822 ,

issue of the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums. The essay’s conclu-

sion heralds a messianic age of Wissenschaft:

It remains to indicate in a few words that aspect, in the light of which the

establishment of a science of Judaism seems to be a necessity of our age. This

is the inner world of the Jews themselves This world, too, has in many ways

been disturbed and shaken by the unrelenting progress of the spirit and the

associated changes in the life of the peoples. It is manifest everywhere that

the fundamental principle of Judaism is again in a state of inner ferment,

striving to assume a shape in harmony with the spirit of the times. But in

accordance with the age this development can only take place through the

medium of science. This scientific attitude is the characteristic of our time.

But as the formation of a science of Judaism is an essential need for the Jews

themselves, it is clear that, although the field of science is open to all men, it

is primarily the Jews who are called upon to devote themselves to it. The Jews

must once again show their mettle as doughty fellow workers in the common

task of mankind. They must raise themselves and their principle to the level

of science, for this is the attitude of the European world. This attitude must

banish the relationship of strangeness in which Jews and Judaism have hith-

erto stood in relation to the outside world. And if one day a bond is to join

the whole of humanity, then it is the bond of science, the bond of pure reason,

the bond of truth.^1

Read against the background of Hegel’s account in 1821 of the necessity of a

philosophy (or science) of religion as a means of integrating inwardly focused

religious subjectivity into universal rational totality, this passage makes unmis-

takable the extent to which Wolf adapts of a distinctly Hegelian project of a sci-

ence of religion for a science of Judaism.

In a text composed only shortly after Wolf wrote his essay, Hegel distills key

themes of his own 1821 religion lectures in ways that strikingly parallel Wolf ’s

conclusion.^2 In the foreword Hegel penned for Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm

Hinrichs’s Die Religion im Inneren Verhältnisse zur Wissenschaft (Religion in

its inner relationship to science, published in 1822 ), Hegel reiterates (now for a

reading audience) his diagnosis of the malady of the age (das Übel der Zeit) that

he had used to highlight the urgency of his 1821 Lectures on the Philosophy of

Religion. In his foreword to Hinrichs’s book, Hegel characterizes this ill as “the

contingency and arbitrary will of subjective feeling and its opining, combined

with the culture of reflection which claims that spirit is incapable of the knowl-

edge of truth.”^3 The malady of subjective religiosity encouraged by the Kantian