Notes to Chapter 2 { 289as the religion of egoistic self-separation from the human community—a character portrait
Hegel sketches out largely through an interpretation of Abraham.
12. Peter Hodgson, for example, sees Hegel moving toward a far more positive view of
Judaism in his lectures on the philosophy of religion in 1824 and, even more so, 1827 (“The
Metamorphosis of Judaism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion”). Steven Smith likewise con-
tends that “Hegel’s writings on the Jewish Question underwent a considerable change—one
could almost say a paradigm shift” (Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity,
186 ) Smith, however, does not privilege the Philosophy of Religion among Hegel’s later writ-
ings; instead, he argues that Hegel’s “later writings, especially the Philosophy of History and
the Philosophy of Right, are attempts to remove from Judaism the stigma of a purely ‘statutory’
or ‘positive’ religion and to situate it within a larger dialectic of history and culture” (ibid.).
Yirmiyahu Yovel finds that Hodgson “exaggerates [the] pro-Jewish content” of Hegel’s 1827
Philosophy of Religion lectures (Dark Riddle, 208 , note 1 ). Unlike Hodgson, who sees a sig-
nificant change in Hegel’s interpretation of Judaism between the 1821 manuscript and the
1824 lectures, Yovel groups the 1821 and 1824 lectures together as giving “a harsher, but also a
richer and more complete, account of Judaism” than the 1827 lectures (ibid., 70 ). Other fun-
damental contributions to the literature on Hegel’s interpretation of Judaism and/or the Jews
include Nathan Rotenstreich, “Hegel’s Image of Judaism”; The Recurring Pattern, chapter 3 ;
and Jews and German Philosophy, part 2. Shlomo Avineri highlights the distinction between
Hegel’s interpretation of Jewish theology and his views on Jewish emancipation in “A Note
on Hegel’s Views on Jewish Emancipation.” See also Lars Fischer’s reconstruction of Hegel’s
support of Jewish emancipation in Heidelberg in 1817 – 18 as a deliberate intervention on be-
half of the universalistic, antinationionalistic minority within the Burschenschaft movement
(“Hegel in Support of Jewish Emancipation”). See also Otto Pöggeler, “L’interprétation hé-
gelienne du Judaïsme.” On the problem that Judaism poses for Hegelian mediation, see Emil
Fackenheim, “Hegel and Judaism” and Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy,
chapter 3.
13. Heinrich Graetz helped establish the hostile reading of Hegel’s influence on the Ve r-
einler. He describes Hegel as a “church and court philosopher” who led the naive Verein-
ler astray with abstruse sophistry (Vom Beginn der Mendelssohn’schen Zeit [ 1750 ] bis in die
neueste Zeit [ 1848 ], 439 – 41 ). Norbert Waszek observes that many scholars who touch on
the Verein’s Hegelianism are not Hegel scholars, get their (generally very negative) image of
Hegel secondhand, and neglect to analyze what the Vereinler do with the Hegelian theory
they deploy (“‘Wissenschaft und Liebe zu den Seinen,’” 92 – 93 ). In a seminal 1935 article on
the Verein, Sinai (Siegfried) Ucko downplays Hegel’s influence on the Verein (“Geistesge-
schichtliche Grundlagen der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” 321 ).
14. As Michael Graetz argues, Zunz and Jost provide the only possible argument for con-
tinuity between the Verein and Jewish scholars of the 1840 s and 1850 s (“Renaissance des
Judentums im 19. Jahrhundert,” 212 ). Nils Roemer points out that Jost and Zunz “functioned
as mentors to younger university-trained scholars like Abraham Geiger, Zacharias Frankel,
Michael Sachs, and Moritz Steinschneider during the 1830 s and 1840 s, mainly through elab-
orate correspondences” (Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany,
34 ). Nahum Glatzer’s analysis of the first generation of modern Jewish scholars in “The
Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies” also understandably focuses on Zunz.
15. A Dr. G. Adersbach notes that “Jost ist ausgetreten” (“Secretarialbericht über die