Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 129

dressing an audience of nicht-Sie. Only such games of conceptual and rhetorical

hide-and-seek enabled the Vereinler to evade both the banality they perceived in

the Jewish community and the status of excluded Jewish subjects that the Prus-

sian state had imposed on them. Still, without the home that Hegel provided for

the Vereinler—however equivocal, fragile, or delusional it may have been—they

would have had no home at all. There was never any real place in the Jewish

community, the Prussian bureaucracy, or the Prussian academy for the Verein’s

version of Wissenschaft des Judentums as a political project. From the Verein’s

inception to its demise, Hegelian Wissenschaft provided the Vereinler with a

place from which to articulate a vision of Jewish integration into the state. Even

if their feelings about this vision moved from hope and confidence to defiance

and delusion, we must realize that the problem was not finally that the Vereinler

were excluded from Hegel’s state, but rather that it was only Hegel’s state to

which they could gain access.

The Moser-Wohlwill Correspondence

In the previous two chapters I explored how the Hegelian conception of Wis-

senschaft served as the vehicle for the Vereinler’s bold, sometimes defiant, and

frequently chimerical political and metaphysical aspirations. Just as he was the

most serious Jewish scholar within the Verein, Zunz is the primary figure who

continued to develop Wissenschaft des Judentums as a scholarly practice be-

yond the group’s demise. The best source in which to follow the afterlife of

the Verein’s peculiarly freighted Hegelian version of Wissenschaft, however, is

the correspondence between two Verein members who produced virtually no

scholarship: Moser and Wolf, who adopted the name Wohlwill in 1822.

Klaus Briegleb has dealt extensively with the Hegelian elements in this rich

correspondence, which ensued when Wohlwill moved to Hamburg in late 1822

with great expectations of finding fertile ground there for spreading the Verein’s

vision of transforming Jewish society.^127 The circumstances, however, proved

inauspicious for the envoy of Jewish Hegelianism. The Berlin Verein began to

decline at this time, and its relationship with the Specialverein established by

members of the Hamburg Reform Temple was never productive. The young

Berlin Vereinler looked on the Hamburg crowd as so many Philistines, while the

Hamburgers must have viewed as simply laughable the Berlin upstarts’ repeated

insistence that they define their association and its activities in strict accordance

with the Berlin Verein’s abstruse and self-aggrandizing conception.^128

It is remarkable to what extent Hegel permeates this correspondence be-

tween close friends: Hegel informs how they understand their aspirations and