Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 47

ments (and however one defines these), the Vereinler’s enormous respect for

and relative fidelity to Hegel stand out as unique. Although, as we will see, they

sometimes deployed certain possibilities that Hegel opened up to combat other

aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history that tended to belittle Jewish contribu-

tions, the Vereinler nonetheless remained more directly in dialogue with Hegel

than several later and more weakly Hegelian Jewish thinkers. The Verein is ar-

guably the only attempt to think Judaism in a truly Hegelian key.

The view of Hegel as bad for the Jews has led scholars sometimes to down-

play the Verein’s Hegelianism, or to acknowledge it with a certain embarrass-

ment.^13 Most scholarship to date appreciates the Verein chiefly as the insti-

tutional framework for the new scholarly project that Gans famously dubbed

Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism, or the academic study of

Judaism). The short-lived Verein—remembered by the name it adopted in 1821 ,

Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden—has in this way been enshrined

as one origin of modern academic Jewish studies. This image of the Verein finds

justification above all in the pioneering work of Leopold Zunz, and to a lesser

extent in that of Isaak Markus Jost.^14 Yet it is worth recalling that Zunz inaugu-

rated the field of Wissenschaft des Judentums (avant la lettre) in 1818 , before the

Verein was founded, with his seminal essay “Etwas über die rabbinische Lit-

eratur” (On rabbinic literature) and that Jost quickly became disillusioned with

and left the Verein.^15 I would argue that when we write the Verein into the nar-

rative of what we do as scholars today, we miss much of what they thought they

were doing, which—although articulated largely in and through academic, and

specifically Hegelian, discourse—was always thoroughly political. Accounts of

the emergence of secular Jewish studies out of the Verein during the pivotal

years in Berlin of the late 1810 s and early 1820 s may provide a satisfying tale of

disciplinary origins, but they tend to gloss too quickly over the political aspi-

rations that thoroughly saturated the Vereinler’s pursuit of Jewish scholarship

in a new key. In the next two chapters I describe some of the ways the Verein

aspired to transform the relationship of Jews to the state through the fascinating

if equivocal strategies of a lived Hegelianism.

Indebted to seminal work by Sinai (Siegfried) Ucko, Hanns Reissner, Ismar

Schorsch, John Toews, Rachel Livné-Freudenthal, and others, my intervention

constitutes a significant shift in emphasis rather than a radically new claim, for

all serious scholarship on early Wissenschaft des Judentums acknowledges its

implication in politics and ideology.^16 Yosef Yerushalmi, for example, locates

the emergence of the Vereinler’s ideal of Wissenschaft in ideology, and the ide-

ology of Wissenschaft receives serious attention in the secondary literature.^17

Moreover, virtually every scholar who has written on the Verein acknowledges