Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

46 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

sensus for some time that Hegel, despite engaging in a certain amount of fear-

ful equivocation, was a decided opponent of the German-Christian Restoration

state, and it is not necessary to argue that point again here.^6 Yet Meyer’s observa-

tion that aspects of Hegel’s philosophy made it more of an obstacle to contend

with than a source of inspiration for Jewish thinkers underscores the singular-

ity of the Hegelians in the Verein. Many Jewish thinkers were influenced by

Hegel to various degrees. Some, such as Solomon Formstecher ( 1808 – 89 ) were

only weakly Hegelian. Nachman Krochmal ( 1785 – 1840 ) was clearly inspired by

Hegel’s concept of absolute spirit and narratives of historical development, yet

his theory of Judaism as absolute spirit—essentially suprahistorical, and thus

perennially reborn—is incompatible with basic tenets of Hegel’s thought.^7

Noah Rosenbloom has argued that Nineteen Letters on Judaism ( 1836 ) by the

intellectual founder of modern Orthodox Judaism, Samson Raphael Hirsch

( 1808 – 88 ), draws heavily on Hegel’s philosophy of history.^8 As Gershon Green-

berg has shown, Samuel Hirsch ( 1815 – 9 ) was more profoundly engaged with

Hegel, yet he, too, drew on Hegel largely in order to reject him.^9 The Hegelians

among the Vereinler were certainly the first Jewish Hegelians, and they were

arguably the most faithfully Hegelian of all the nineteenth-century thinkers who

interpreted and appropriated Hegel’s thought to reconceive the philosophical

and historical meanings of Judaism. Much as Lazarus Bendavid, as we saw in

chapter 1 , drew on a still new Kantian philosophical framework to theorize Juda-

ism in ways that responded to the immediate political landscape, the Hegelian

Vereinler shuttled between Hegel’s lecture theater and their own meetings as

they theorized themselves as Jewish intellectuals, and the relationship of Jews

and Judaism (Judentum) to the state, according to Hegelian principles. And al-

though Meyer attributes Hegel’s influence on Jewish intellectuals of the 1830 s

and 1840 s to the enormous impact he had on German academic and intellectual

life in general, it is worth noting that the Vereinler were thinking with Hegel in

Hegel’s early Berlin years—when, in John Toews’s characterization, “Hegel’s

philosophy was still struggling for recognition and acceptance.”^10

The image of Hegel as antagonistic to the Jews also derives largely (though

by no means wholly) from his theological manuscripts from the 1790 s, which

articulate very negative stereotypical images of the Jew as egoistic and misan-

thropic.^11 (Since these texts were not published in Hegel’s lifetime, however,

they were unknown to the Vereinler.) Although hardly generous to Judaism,

Hegel’s mature work became increasingly nuanced and positive about Jewish

contributions to the development of spirit, though the debate over how fun-

damentally Hegel’s views about Jews changed is unresolved.^12 Whatever one

may think about Hegel’s compatibility or incompatibility with Jewish commit-