Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Locating Themselves in History { 143
The lack of substantive bonds in the Jewish community—Jews’ failure to consti-
tute themselves as an ethical collective in a Hegelian sense—renders conversion
an individual choice. In the absence of meaningful community and the general
isolation (allgemeine Vereinzelung) it entails, individuals must come to terms
with their circumstances and loyalties as they see fit. As long as it appeared to
the Vereinler that Jews could constitute themselves as an ethical community
(around the central hub of the Verein) that would have a place in a (Hegelian)
rational state, they regarded conversion as opportunistic, as a betrayal of the
common cause for individual gain. Now Moser sees no ethical substance (nichts
Geistiges) binding the community and leaves the issue of conversion to each
individual to negotiate. Judaism lives on only as habit. The Hamburg reform-
ers are deluded about the ability of Judaism to keep pace with modernity. The
deeper transformation that is taking place, Moser’s words suggest, will leave
both traditional and early Reform Judaism behind.
In a letter of August 1825 Moser returns to the question of conversion one
more time, in response to a rumor that Gans had converted (in fact he would do
so four months later). Moser rightly doubts the accuracy of the rumor, yet even if
it were true, he writes, Gans would “in this simply be following a powerful char-
acteristic of his mind... , in which nothing could emerge more naturally than,
after the most intense embrace of the substance he presumed Jewry to have, an
equally strong aversion to it once it had proved itself to him to be insipid and
lacking in spirit [ungeistig] .”^170 Moser reasons that nothing would be more nat-
ural than for Gans to find Judaism disagreeable once it had become clear that
it lacked the ethical substance he had presumed it to posses. This “changing of
uniforms” would then not be a contradiction but rather a coherent evolution
of Gans’s character.^171 As Moser had argued in his critique of the Hamburg re-
formers, for Gans and the Verein it was never a matter of loyalty to Judaism per
se but to the trajectory of truth, history, and so forth, with which they believed
they could make Judaism harmonize. Since contemporary Judaism had revealed
itself to be ungeistig, however, Gans would be only consistent to abandon it.
Even as Hegel continues to structure much of the way they grapple with the
status and meaning of their own personal existences in the bleak landscape of
post-Verein Restoration Germany (“There is a terrible struggle within me be-
tween the universal and the individual,” as Moser put it in a letter dated May
27 , 1825 ), both Wohlwill and Moser enjoyed using Hegel playfully for comic
effect, and both could agree in spring 1825 that Gans’s Hegelianism had become
fanatical.^172 In a letter of May 28 , 1825 , Moser writes that Gans “is now prop-
erly systematically a fool [ordentlich systematisch ein Narr] .”^173 Wohlwill, who
had just had the unenviable opportunity to spend time with Gans as the latter