310 } Notes to Chapter 3
Reisebilder are, therefore, acts of freedom, defiant and decidedly political acts creating cracks
for the survival of a little bit of Jewish alterity” (ibid., 144 ).
100. Gans, “Zweite Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,’” 66 – 67. After the sentence “That into
which it merges shall become that much richer for what has merged with it, not merely that
much poorer for the opposition that has been lost,” Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz
add a note (The Jew in the Modern World 218 , note 4 ) quoting from page 79 of the 1956 Dover
edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of History lectures—lectures that, they point out, Gans was the
first to edit and publish in book form. True, but Hegel gave these lectures only after this ad-
dress by Gans. A chronologically better comparison would be to the History of Philosophy
lectures, which have the same sentiment—the eternal present of spirit—and were indeed the
basis of the Philosophy of History lectures. Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz identify the internal
quote at the end of the extract I have used from Gans as from Johann Gottfried Herder, Re-
flections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, translated by T. O. Churchill, abridged
and edited by Frank E. Manuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968 ), 15.
101. Probably the most bewildering aspect of what David Myers characterizes as Gans’s
“bewildering metaphor” (Myers, “The Ideology of Wissenschaft des Judentums,” 711 ) is
that the Jews will “seem” or “appear” to have disappeared yet they will live on—presumably,
then, only in invisible ways. But it seems plausible to interpret such a “disappearance” as re-
ferring only to Jews understood as a people emphatically apart. If we take nonintegration into
the surrounding society to be an essential quality of Jewishness, then the Jews will indeed
seem to have disappeared once they have “flowed into” the “ocean” of European life. But
we must at the very least assume that organizations like the Verein and the Hamburg Reform
Temple, with which the Berlin Verein attempted, not very successfully, to collaborate, were
compatible with Gans’s vision of integrated Jewish existence. There is no obvious reason not
to believe that the vast majority of institutions of American Jewish life—including Reform,
Reconstructionist, Conservative, and modern Orthodox Judaism as well as Jewish charities,
cultural organizations, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—could be accom-
modated within Gans’s vision, mutatis mutandis, of particular currents in the wider sea of
American life. Presner’s reading of Gans’s metaphor (Mobile Modernity, 129 – 30 ) forecloses
the possibility, which Gans’s text keeps open, of Jews being not Jewish or European, but
both. In his reading of this passage, Emil Fackenheim endorses Heinrich Graetz’s view of it
as a combination of naiveté and gibberish, and of Gans as having been led astray by Hegel’s
abstruse sophistry (Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, 127 – 28 ). Rachel
Livné-Freudenthal (“Kultur als Weltanschauung,” 65 ) and Waszek (“Hegel, Mendelssohn,
Spinoza,” 197 ) read Gans’s metaphor in a more Jewishly affirmative way, as does Schorsch,
who sees in it an emphasis not only on “unity and conformity” but also on “a notion of the
right to be different” (TC, 216 ). Gans’s allusion to Herder here also supports a nonradical
reading of the ocean metaphor, for in endorsing Herder’s vision of a Europe in which no
one will any longer ask who is a Jew and who is a Christian, Gans—like Herder—can hardly
be hoping or predicting that Jews and Christians will cease to exist, only that there will be
a secular sphere of European life in which people will be able to participate without having
their participation fundamentally defined by their religious affiliation.
102. Rachel Livné-Freudenthal (“Der ‘Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,’”
115 , note 54 ) finds it “auffallend” that Gans uses the term “Europe” here but does not specify
how she interprets the term’s significance. Roemer (Jewish Scholarship, 28 ) also strains to