Ibid. Gans would have derived this view from the last section of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right on world history, as this speech by Gans (delivered, as noted above, on April 28 , 1822 )
preceded Hegel’s first course of lectures on world history, in winter 1822 – 23.
Ibid.
Gans, ”Zweite Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 64 – 65. Here I have used, but signifi-
cantly modified, J. Hessing’s translation (Gans, “A Society to Further Jewish Integration
( 1822 ) ,” 215 ).
Gans, “A Society to Further Jewish Integration ( 1822 ) ,” 216 (translation modified),
and Gans, ”Zweite Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 65.
Gans, “Zweite Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 65.
Ibid.
As Yirmiyahu Yovel remarks on Hegel’s version of Judaism’s role in what Yovel calls
“the birth pangs of Christianity,” “post-Christian Judaism remains locked outside the gates
of the salvation it offers. Judaism’s own project is aborted, and the Jews are ejected from his-
tory at the moment of their highest achievement” (Dark Riddle, 59 ).
Gans, “Zweite Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 66.
Ibid.
Todd Presner reads this passage by Gans through the lens of an overly neat opposi-
tion between Hegel (whose narrative of history offers no possibility of Judaism surviving as
Jewish) and Heine (who heroically deconstructs Hegel’s master narrative in the name of Jew-
ish particularity). Consequently, he misses the oppositional thrust of Gans’s Hegelian Jewish
politics and sees Gans as purely assimilationist: “In this extraordinary passage... Gans de-
sires a Judaism that is no longer Jewish in its particularity; he wants a people who have been
assimilated into the ‘ocean’ of Europe and are as historically indistinguishable from other
people as one ‘current’ is from another. In other words, the specificity of Judaism and Jewish
history is to be absorbed into the totality of European world history to survive not as Jewish
but as European” (Mobile Modernity, 129 – 30 ). In order to underscore the antisemitic nature
of Hegel’s narrative of world history, Presner claims that there is “complete accordance” be-
tween “Hegel’s anti-Semitic description of Judaism in ‘The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’
( 1798 – 1800 )” and Hegel’s mature philosophy of history (ibid., 127 ). Although there is much
to object to in the role(s) that Hegel assigns to the Jews and Judaism in his mature work, his
understanding of Judaism’s significance in his mature, dialectical historical schema is signifi-
cantly different from his early, undialectical portrayal of Judaism. Presner’s elision of Hegel’s
treatment of Judaism in “The Spirit of Christianity” and the lectures on world history more
than twenty years later might inadvertently leave readers with the erroneous impression that
Heine or his colleagues in the Verein would have been aware of Hegel’s early texts (Presner
nowhere mentions that Hegel’s early theological writings remained unpublished in his life-
time). Heine’s ironizing of Hegel is not a response to Hegel’s early views on Jews, nor does
Gans’s Hegelianism imply a tacit approval of these early views. Presner’s gloss on Heine’s
ironic presentation of “Systematie” and “ideas” in Buch le grand exemplifies his tendency
to cast Heine in the role of a Jewish hero doing battle with the alterity- killing Hegelian be-
hemoth: “For Heine the Hegelian concept is complicit with violence because the enclosed
logic of any system forces some people into exile, if it does not kill them straight out. Heine’s
