Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
92 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
spirit of epistemological limits also defined the need of the age (das Bedürfnis
der Zeit). Regarding this requirement Hegel remarks that “the common require-
ment of religion and philosophy is directed toward a substantial, objective content
of truth.”^4 Religion has its own tasks to perform to meet this need (distinct from
those of philosophy proper): it must counter arbitrary opinion, enhance respect
for religion’s content, and establish itself as a bond [Band] of objective belief,
doctrine, and worship.^5 Although religion and philosophy have distinct spheres
and tasks, they coincide to the extent that it has become a need of the age to know
what it believes:^6 “When... the element of rational principles [Grundsätze] has
infiltrated the religious requirement, then that requirement is no longer separate
from the requirement and activity of thought, and religion demands, according
to this aspect, a science of religion [Wissenschaft der Religion]—a theology.”^7
Hegel defines the convergence between religion and philosophy as the
sphere where religion itself has come to require cognitive knowledge, and he
calls the religious and philosophical project that will satisfy this need (a “need
of the age,” which will overcome the subjectivist malady of the age) Wissenschaft
der Religion. Wolf, in the passage quoted above, characterizes Wissenschaft des
Judentums, too, as an urgent need of the age (nothwendiges Erforderniß unserer
Zeit) that arises, as in Hegel’s description, out of a religious group’s (the Jews’)
inner need (“the formation of a science of Judaism is an essential need for the
Jews themselves”). Insofar as a science of Judaism has become an essential need
of the Jews, they are on their way to overcoming their strangeness vis-à-vis the
surrounding world, Wolf claims. Just as, in Hegel, it falls to Wissenschaft der
Religion to help combat self-isolating religious subjectivity, so Wolf posits Wis-
senschaft des Judentums as the means by which Jews and Judaism will overcome
their isolation and strangeness and enter a universal human communion. On
this reading it appears as though Wolf concludes his essay with an almost dutiful
application to the Jews of Hegel’s wissenschaftlich program to combat the politi-
cal ills of deleterious religious subjectivity. Here, however, I will try to show how
creatively and at times subversively Wolf draws on Hegel’s thought for his own
purposes.
Wolf ’s essay is rightly seen as shot through with Hegelian borrowings.^8 The
first sentence already betrays Hegel’s profound influence on the conception of
the new Wissenschaft des Judentums: “If we are to talk of a science of Judaism,
then it is self-evident that the word ‘Judaism’ is here being taken in its com-
prehensive sense—as the essence of all the circumstances, characteristics, and
achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, history, law, litera-
ture in general, civil life and all the affairs of man—and not in that more limited
sense in which it only means the religion of the Jews.”^9 The various fields of