Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
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114 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
contrasts Judaism’s manner of honoring “the purest and highest thought” with
the admixture of idolatry that has marred Christian and Muslim devotion to an
exalted idea. Those who idolize the crusaders and first followers of Mohammed
do so because they are unable to comprehend [begreifen] the idea for which the
crusaders and early Muslims made sacrifices. The “we” that Gans distinguishes
from those who commit such Christian and Muslim errors when he says “We
have chosen the better part. We honor the purest and highest thought, without
means that dishonor it” inhabits a locus at which the purity of Hegelian rea-
son and that of Jewish thought intersect: it is a “we” of Jewish Hegelian civil
servants.
As will have become apparent, Gans’s ethical redefinition of the Jews pro-
ceeds largely by way of a recoding of the matrilineal ties that traditionally define
inclusion in the Jewish community. Just as Hegel explicitly defines the modern
ethical family as patriarchal, so Gans writes “subethical” matrilineal bonds out
of the picture as he reconstitutes the community as a rational and distinctly pa-
triarchal subunit of the Vaterland.^79 The Jews’ Verderbtheit inheres in their sta-
tus as Geschlecht, understood not in a modern racial sense but as a subrational,
subethical ordering principle. Gans parallels Hegel’s distinction between the
bourgeois family and older familial arrangements such as the largely economic
unit of the medieval family, the tribe [Stamm], or the Greek oikos. As he incor-
porates Jews into the Hegelian paradigm, Gans assigns the Vereinler the role of
masculinizing, rationalizing, and rendering ethical an older verdorben form of
subethical and maternally mediated community. Hegel argues that each newly
formed modern family assumes autonomy vis-à-vis the wider kinship network
that had defined premodern families (Stämme, Häuser): “When a marriage
takes place, a new family is constituted, and this is self-sufficient for itself in rela-
tion to the kinship groups or houses from which it originated; its links with the
latter are based on the natural blood relationship, but the new family is based
on ethical love.”^80 In Hegel’s interpretation every marriage reenacts the histori-
cal leap from older familial models to the modern family by severing ties with
the extended family and establishing a new unity through bonds of ethical love.
The Vereinler should enact a comparable messianic leap out of the Geschlecht’s
maternal ties of “natural blood relationship” into the Vaterland. As would-be
Familienväter the Vereinler are bound to their fellow Jews by ties of ethical
quasi-familial love that are continuous with those of the politicized fraternity
(Verbrüderung) of the Verein itself and, ultimately, with the Sittlichkeit of the
state.
Gans returns to this line of thinking in his final address to the Verein, on May
4 , 1823. Adapting the critique of Enlightenment subjectivism that Hegel had re-