Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

94 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

out the Verein’s formative years, then, Hegel disparaged Judaism’s historical

contribution to the dialectic of spirit and located Judaism, nearly without quali-

fication, on the wrong side of the dyadic typology of religions of unity and reli-

gions of diremption. Wolf ’s famous definition of Judaism’s central principle as

the “the idea of unlimited unity in the all” [“Idee der unbedingten Einheit im

All”] and as “the living unity of all being in eternity, the absolute being outside

defined time and space” evokes Hegel’s conception of unity and totality.^15 But it

also contests Hegel’s assessment of Judaism as structurally (“sublimely”) inca-

pable of grasping the essence of the unity of God and world. Wolf ’s insistence

on the relevance of the Jewish idea of unity beyond space and time, moreover,

makes no concessions to Hegel’s critique of the purported deficiencies of this

sublime, unmediated idea. On the contrary, Wolf holds up as a standard of spiri-

tual and intellectual purity the idea that Hegel finds so wanting. Wolf ’s defini-

tion of Judaism implies a very different narrative of the development of human

spirit and, crucially, a different path to Wissenschaft than Hegel’s.

The key figure in Wolf ’s account of the route to Jewish Wissenschaft is Spi-

noza, in whose philosophy Wolf sees the quintessential expression, in the pre-

modern world, of the Jewish idea of unity. Noting Spinoza’s ostracism from his

seventeenth-century Amsterdam Jewish community and his renunciation of Ju-

daism, Michael Meyer remarks aptly: “That [Wolf ] could see Spinoza as a great

representative of ‘pure’ Judaism is the best indication of the degree to which

Jewish history was for Wolf the history of a concept, one not even necessar-

ily present at all times in the consciousness of the people.”^16 As Meyer notes

further it is in Wolf ’s “conception of the substance of Jewish history” that his

“debt to German idealist philosophy is most apparent.”^17 Yet even as it would

be unthinkable without the key Hegelian texts on which it draws (Lectures on

the Philosophy of Religion, The Philosophy of Right, Lectures on the History of

Philosophy, and Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Wolf ’s interpretation

of Jewish history, and of Spinoza as the quintessential expression of its “idea,”

significantly revises the Hegelian script from which it works. In asserting that

Judaism shares with Wissenschaft the essential principles of unity and totality,

and that these Jewish and wissenschaftlich principles converge in Spinoza, Wolf

subverts Hegel’s narrative of world history, in which Jews play a bit part, and

casts them in a leading role.^18

Albeit brief, Wolf ’s remarks on Spinoza are of great consequence. Embed-

ded as they are in a discourse that owes so much to Hegel, they must be read

alongside, and against, Hegel’s own assessment of Spinoza. Hegel’s engagement

with Spinoza dates from his Jena period,^ and there is much continuity between

Hegel’s critique of propositional argumentation and mathematical truth in the