304 } Notes to Chapter 3
manent substantiality and freedom and renders it essentially passive. In contrast to Spinoza,
who could not progress beyond a nondialectical conception of negation (his purported
acosmism), Hegel deploys negation as a dynamic force in the form of subjectivity and the
negation of negation.
36. Ibid., 3 : 289.
37. Ibid.
38. Wolf, “On the Concept of a Science of Judaism,” 144 ; and “Über den Begriff,” 3 – 4.
39. Wolf, Wolf, “On the Concept of a Science of Judaism,” 150 ; and “Über den Begriff,”
13 – 14.
40. This is a major part of Wolf ’s argument in his Zeitschrift essay. In the second para-
graph he underscores “that influence on humanity Judaism has exercised, as history incon-
testably reveals” (“On the Concept of a Science of Judaism,” 143 ; and “Über den Begriff,” 2 ),
and he insists, contra Hegel, that Judaism remained vibrant beyond the demise of the ancient
Jewish commonwealth: “The Jewish State collapsed but not Judaism” ( 147 and 9 ). Wolf sees
the period from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 until the present as a period of
decline ( 148 – 49 and 11 – 12 ), yet even at the Jewish cultural nadir Spinoza emerged ( 150 and
14 ), and Judaism is a still-living principle ( 151 and 15 ). In contrast, Hegel, for example in the
“Weltgeschichte” section at the end of PR, with which Wolf would have been familiar, con-
tends that each people gets only one chance to make a contribution to Weltgeschichte or Welt-
geist. When natural and geographical factors conspire to make a certain nation hegemonic
at a given time, it becomes that nation’s task to advance “the self-development of the world
spirit’s self-consciousness. This nation is the dominant one in world history for this epoch,
and only once in history can it have this epoch-making role.... In contrast with this absolute
right which it possesses as bearer of the present stage of the world spirit’s development, the
spirits of other nations are without rights, and they, like those whose epoch has passed, no
longer count in world history” (PR § 347 ). Whereas Hegel theorizes a people’s contribution
to world spirit in terms of punctuated hegemony, Wolf conceives of contributions to world
spirit in terms of sustaining a significant spiritual presence in different moments. Being spiri-
tually significant does not require being hegemonic. For an analysis of how, in his 1822 presi-
dential address to the Verein, Gans also argues—against Christian bias and Hegel alike—for
the continuing relevance of Judaism’s conception of unity, see Jonathan Karp, The Politics of
Jewish Commerce, 226 – 27.
41. Waszek argues that the Verein intellectuals viewed Spinoza and Hegel as “closely
related philosophies [Lehren], which complement each other as groundwork and execu-
tion and are often identified with each other” (“Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza,” 192 ). For his
reading of Wolf ’s image of Spinoza as thoroughly compatible with Hegel’s, see ibid., 202 – 5.
I concur that Wolf constructs Spinoza as a precursor to Hegel, but I read Wolf as deploying
the perceived conceptual intimacy between the two thinkers to subvert aspects of Hegel’s
geschichtsphilosophisch narrative about the Jews (and Spinoza).
42. Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (hereafter DHA), 14
(part 1 ): 94.
43. Neither the Düsseldorfer Heine-Ausgabe (DHA, which has extensive apparatus) nor
the Säkularausgabe can link Heine’s anecdote to a passage in any text by Hegel. The DHA
states categorically that there is no passage in Hegel to which Heine is directly referring ( 14
[part 2 ]: 924 ), and none of the passages in which Hegel mentions dreams that the editors