Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 11 5

cently articulated (for example, in his history of philosophy and his philosophy

of religion lectures), Gans contrasts the superficial bonds of the Berlin Jewish

community with the sort of ethical collectivity the Verein aspired to embody

and cultivate. He points to the “rupture in the hitherto purity of Jewish life”

[Bruch in die bisherige Gediegenheit des jüdischen Lebens] that Mendelssohn

and the Haskalah had effected fifty years previously, which had dissolved the

old Jewish community into so many individuals devoid of the “authenticity of

the old way of life” [Innigkeit des alten Seyns].^81 In Gans’s dialectical historical

schema, however, the Enlightenment’s atomizing effects and emphasis on the

rational individual were a necessary step toward a new, more profound ethi-

cal totality to which Jews should now aspire, for “this return... is what mat-

ters.”^82 In this context Gans again deploys a metaphorics of the family: “The

individual who has grown beyond his family in turn becomes the progenitor

of a new family; that which has truly liberated itself and become truly indepen-

dent celebrates this liberation by binding itself once again and returning to the

substance from which it detached itself. However, that which does not return,

after its individuality is sufficiently strengthened, perishes in this isolation... :

like the willful bachelor [Hagestolz], who, indeed, maintains his individuality

most steadfastly and longest, yet perishes unmourned, unpitied, and unre-

membered.”^83 The unresponsive Berlin Jewish community has not embraced

the Verein’s scientifically sanctioned ethical orientation, so that, regrettably,

“the more profound return to this authenticity has not occurred.”^84 The Jew-

ish community’s failure to respond to the Verein’s efforts serves Gans as the

“explanation [Erklärungsgrund]... for the still too-slow progress of this so-

ciety.”^85 The apparent symmetry between the old and new families in the dia-

lectical progression from family to individual to new family should not obscure

the fundamental reorganization of the Jewish community Gans is proposing.

The Jewish progenitor (or the progenitor of Jewishness), again, is the Jewish

mother; and the traditional ties that bind the Jewish people are—not only, but

certainly also—a system of the sort of Blutverwandschaft that Hegel associates

with preethical kinship systems. The “individual who has grown beyond his

family” has extracted himself from the kinship ties that Gans earlier associated

with the Jews’ ethical shortcomings. The new—male—progenitor will not ex-

tend the Jewish Geschlecht but found an ethical unit within the totality of the

state.

Yet if the post-Aufklärung Berlin Jews are so many atomized Hagestolze who

resist reintegration into the new family of which the Verein would be the hub,

what then is the status of Gans and his fellow Vereinler? Instead of the produc-

tive Familienväter they had hoped to become, they appear now like so many