Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

92 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

spirit of epistemological limits also defined the need of the age (das Bedürfnis

der Zeit). Regarding this requirement Hegel remarks that “the common require-

ment of religion and philosophy is directed toward a substantial, objective content

of truth.”^4 Religion has its own tasks to perform to meet this need (distinct from

those of philosophy proper): it must counter arbitrary opinion, enhance respect

for religion’s content, and establish itself as a bond [Band] of objective belief,

doctrine, and worship.^5 Although religion and philosophy have distinct spheres

and tasks, they coincide to the extent that it has become a need of the age to know

what it believes:^6 “When... the element of rational principles [Grundsätze] has

infiltrated the religious requirement, then that requirement is no longer separate

from the requirement and activity of thought, and religion demands, according

to this aspect, a science of religion [Wissenschaft der Religion]—a theology.”^7

Hegel defines the convergence between religion and philosophy as the

sphere where religion itself has come to require cognitive knowledge, and he

calls the religious and philosophical project that will satisfy this need (a “need

of the age,” which will overcome the subjectivist malady of the age) Wissenschaft

der Religion. Wolf, in the passage quoted above, characterizes Wissenschaft des

Judentums, too, as an urgent need of the age (nothwendiges Erforderniß unserer

Zeit) that arises, as in Hegel’s description, out of a religious group’s (the Jews’)

inner need (“the formation of a science of Judaism is an essential need for the

Jews themselves”). Insofar as a science of Judaism has become an essential need

of the Jews, they are on their way to overcoming their strangeness vis-à-vis the

surrounding world, Wolf claims. Just as, in Hegel, it falls to Wissenschaft der

Religion to help combat self-isolating religious subjectivity, so Wolf posits Wis-

senschaft des Judentums as the means by which Jews and Judaism will overcome

their isolation and strangeness and enter a universal human communion. On

this reading it appears as though Wolf concludes his essay with an almost dutiful

application to the Jews of Hegel’s wissenschaftlich program to combat the politi-

cal ills of deleterious religious subjectivity. Here, however, I will try to show how

creatively and at times subversively Wolf draws on Hegel’s thought for his own

purposes.

Wolf ’s essay is rightly seen as shot through with Hegelian borrowings.^8 The

first sentence already betrays Hegel’s profound influence on the conception of

the new Wissenschaft des Judentums: “If we are to talk of a science of Judaism,

then it is self-evident that the word ‘Judaism’ is here being taken in its com-

prehensive sense—as the essence of all the circumstances, characteristics, and

achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, history, law, litera-

ture in general, civil life and all the affairs of man—and not in that more limited

sense in which it only means the religion of the Jews.”^9 The various fields of