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Chapter Two

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State,

or the Politics of Wissenschaft

des Judentums in 1820s Germany

In Berlin on November 7 , 1819 , seven Jewish intellectuals, most of them students

at the newly formed University of Berlin, founded a “society for the improve-

ment of the condition of the Jews in the federated German state” that in 1821 ad-

opted the name Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (association for

the culture and science of the Jews).^1 The context of the Verein’s formation was

one of crisis. The newfound German nationalist spirit that had emerged in the

campaign against Napoleon gave rise to conceptions of Germans as belonging

to a Volksgemeinschaft (folk community). Strains of antisemitism became preva-

lent, notably in the student fraternity or Burschenschaft movement—which, es-

pecially after the 1817 Wartburgfest, became popular not only among students,

many of whom were returning soldiers, but also among certain professors, such

as Friedrich Rühs of the University of Berlin and Jakob Friedrich Fries of the

University of Heidelberg.^2 In March 1819 , the dramatist August von Kotzebue

was assassinated by the militant Burschenschaftler Karl Sand, resulting in the is-

suing of the Carlsbad Decrees, which not only suppressed the Burschenschaften

but also severely restricted freedoms of academic life and the press. The Verein

was also established in no small part in response to the Hep-Hep pogroms that

broke out in August 1819 in Würzburg and, targeting Jews and Jewish property,

spread throughout August and September to many cities in southwestern Ger-

many—notably, to Hamburg.

Both the Burschenschaft movement and the reactionary policies issued in

response to the political assassination carried out by one of its most radical

members were deeply troubling—and the recrudescence of anti-Jewish violence

shocking—to the Verein founders, most of whom were first-generation univer-

sity students who had left the traditional Jewish community behind and had

good reason to hope that their future in Germany would be wide open. They

had come of age in the context of the liberalizing reforms that Karl August von

Hardenberg and Baron Karl vom und zum Stein had introduced in the wake of