See Norbert Waszek, “Vorwort,” 26 ; and Waszek “Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza,”
On the depth of the Verein’s Hegelianism, see Waszek, “Vorwort,” 11 – 26 ; “Hegel,
Mendelssohn, Spinoza,” 201 ; and “‘Wissenschaft und Liebe zu den Seinen,’” 89 – 92.
Livné-Freudenthal quotes the protocol of the meeting of 13 June 1820 : “Everyone was
adamant (von der Idee durchdrungen) that without the approval of the state they absolutely
did not wish, nor had ever wished, to found a Verein.... Their meetings currently are merely
the elaboration of their respective ideas about a future Verein, to be founded with state ap-
proval” (quoted. in “Der ‘Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,’” 111 ).
See Schorsch, TC, 207. Hostile to projects of religious reform (they would ban the
Beer Temple in September 1823 ), yet apparently also unable to fathom a connection between
Jews and a notion of secular Cultur, the Prussian authorities misread Cultur (in the name
Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden) as Cultus. Gans promptly clarified the point,
but the Verein was still denied permission to become incorporated (ibid.).
Quoted in Reissner, Eduard Gans, 65.
On the process of formulating and submitting the Verien’s formal statutes for govern-
ment approval, see ibid.
My account of Jewish relations to the state in this section is greatly indebted to Co-
hen’s essay.
The fact that Gans’s father had been a Court Jew may have contributed to Gans’s
readiness to imagine himself in a position of being able to negotiate with the state on behalf
of Jews.
On Joseph II’s Edicts of Toleration, see chapter 1 , note 7.
On Wessely’s tract and the reaction it provoked, see Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish En-
lightenment, 87 – 104.
See ibid., 271 – 83.
As Richard Cohen notes, “maskilim seldom envisaged political allies within the
broader Gentile or Jewish society. Whether it was for assistance in publishing Enlightenment
books... , setting up a new educational structure... or transforming the economic structure
of the Jews... , maskilim turned to the rulers, believing that only an imposed solution could
bring about the desired results” (“Jews and the State: The Historical Context,” 12 ).
Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah, 103.
Ibid., 95 and 104.
See Thomas Nipperdey, “Verein als soziale Struktur im späten 18. und frühen 19.
Jahrhundert,” 10. On Jewish associational life in this period, see Sorkin, The Transformation
of German Jewry, chapter 5.
Nipperdey, “Verein als soziale Struktur,” 3 – 4 and 27.
Ibid., 34. Nipperdey illuminates how the state-sanctioned Vereine were the place
where civil society and state bureaucracy, each sharing an interest in the dissolution of cor-
poratist feudal society, met in a spirit of cooperation.
As Warren Breckman notes, Hegel and Hegelianism were anathema to the Restora-
tion Prussian political theology of thinkers like the later Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich
Julius Stahl, who each subordinate the autonomy of reason to the sovereign will of a finally
unknowable personalist God. On Schelling’s positive philosophy as conceptually and politi-
cally opposed to Hegel’s dialectical rationalism, see Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians,
