306 } Notes to Chapter 3
academic appointments was brought about as an immediate consequence of the sheer obsti-
nacy (ertrozt ward) in “the way the famous Gans in his youthful passion [Feuer] pursued the
issue,” something Jost claims to have heard directly from Minister of Culture Karl vom Stein
zum Altenstein. See Jost, “Actenmäßige Darstellung,” March 14.
55. On Hegel as a prime genitor of Theory, see Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Future of The-
ory, chapter 1.
56. “Transkription einiger Dokumente aus ARC 4 792 B 11 ,” 5.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 6.
59. Ibid., 7. Later in this address Gans proclaims: “Before you lies the Magna Carta of our
institutions, and if no edifice in high style is erected upon this foundation, then it is not the
foundation but we who are at fault” (ibid.).
60. Ibid., 7 – 8.
61. See, in particular, PR § 296 , in which Hegel ties the development of disinterested
integrity in civil servants to “direct education in ethics and in thought,” and which ends with
the declaration that subjective passions like revenge and hatred “disappear of their own ac-
cord in those who are occupied with the larger interests of a major state, for they become
accustomed to dealing with universal interests, views, and functions.”
62. For a reconstruction of Hegel’s 1822 – 23 lectures on the philosophy of history, based
on three separate sets of lecture notes, see VPW.
63. Gans, “Erste Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 57.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 57 – 58.
66. Richard Schaeffler’s account of “Die Wissenschaft des Judentums in ihrer Bezie
hung zur Allgemeinen Gesistesgeschichte im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts” usefully
distills aspects of Kantian moral philosophy, Fichtean philosophy of the subject and of his-
tory, and Hegel’s philosophy of Geist that would have been salient for any thinker trying to
adapt these philosophical strains for a Wissenschaft des Judentums. Yet the links Schaef-
fler suggests between the wider German intellectual context and actual articulations of Jew-
ish academic scholarship remain generally vague, and the specific examples he highlights
are frequently questionable, as when he seems to point to Salomon Maimon and Marcus
Herz as the first Jews to draw on Kant’s moral philosophy to articulate a Kantian philoso-
phy of Judaism (ibid., 119 ). Neither Maimon nor Herz did this. Moreover, Schaeffler associ-
ates Wolf ’s Zeitschrift essay most closely with Fichte (while acknowledging that Wolf was
not “ein schulgetreuer Anhänger Fichtes” [ 123 ]) and uses Zunz as an example of a prac-
titioner of a Wissenschaft des Judentums who drew inspiration from Hegel ( 123 , 124 – 25 ).
Nonetheless, Schaeffler is one of the few scholars to note that Hegel’s theory of Geist allows
for a philosophy of Judaism that breaks with the Enlightenment model of the sovereign in-
dividual who stands in an unmediated relationship to universal humanity, and that opens
up the possibility of thinking of Jews and Judaism as making a contribution to universal
spirit as a distinct community ( 124 , 127 ). This was a possibility that clearly animated the
Verein Hegelians. Since he does not engage any of the many moments in Hegel’s work that
would complicate such an assertion, Giuseppe Veltri’s reply to Schaeffler that Hegel’s con-
cept of Spirit demands, ultimately, the dissolution of all particularity in the universal, under-