Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 49

Schorsch’s relationship to nineteenth-century Wissenschaft is more straight-

forwardly affirmative. He downplays the break between Jewish memory and

Jewish history that is structural to Yerushalmi’s essay, affirms the sustaining

quality of the work of his nineteenth-century predecessors, and remains san-

guine that Jewish historiography can continue to inspire Jewish identity: “In

short, emancipation altered the nature of Jewish memory; it did not destroy

it. Nor is the change as far-reaching as one might think.... Historical con-

sciousness was always the substratum of Jewish identity.”^21 Schorsch’s empha-

sis on continuity from preemancipation Jewish culture to the historical turn in

nineteenth-century Wissenschaft to his own scholarly practice—together with

his great admiration for Zunz—predispose him to see scholarship as the Ver-

ein’s raison d’être: “The decision to place a new type of Jewish scholarship at

the heart of the society’s agenda had been made possible by the publication of

a revolutionary tract just a year before its founding. Zunz’s Etwas über die rab-

binische Literatur has long been justifiably revered as the cornerstone of the

Wissenschaft edifice. Without it the Verein would have been just another Jewish

fraternal or cultural organization; with it the Verein became the testing ground

for the viability and application of rethinking Judaism historically.”^22 Although

it is true that, had it not produced “a new type of Jewish scholarship,” the Verein

would be of scant interest to contemporary scholars, it does not necessarily fol-

low that the Vereinler understood their group’s importance as coextensive with

the production of scholarship. In circumscribing the Verein’s meaningful activ-

ity within the vision of Wissenschaft that Zunz set forth in his epochal 1818 essay,

Schorsch belittles the aspects of the Verein’s project that exceeded Zunz’s par-

ticular vision of Wissenschaft. To inscribe the Verein in a narrative of intellectual

continuity leading, eventually, to practitioners of Jewish studies today virtually

requires such privileging of the least Hegelian member of the Verein’s thoroughly

Hegelian inner circle. Zunz was indeed the one member of the group who went

on, over the course of a half-century and without institutional support, to produce

a substantial and enduring body of scholarship on Jewish subjects.^23 It is surely

no coincidence, moreover, that the Verein’s most serious scholar was among the

least Hegelian of its active members.^24 Reflecting on the demise of the Verein in

a letter to Immanuel Wohlwill in summer 1824 , Zunz identified Wissenschaft des

Judentums as the one lasting element to emerge from the wreckage.^25 Even as he

did so, however, he effectively distinguished it from the Verein’s main project of

reforming die Juden and das Judentum:

I’ve come to the point of nevermore believing in a reformation of the Jews

[Juden-Reformation]... The Jews and Judaism that we wanted to recon-