The question calls for a divided answer, because the young and the late Hegel say different things – and because the passage at which the matter becomes practical is unusually plain.
The young Hegel
In the early theological writings of the Bern and Frankfurt years, above all in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate (about 1798/1800, unpublished in Hegel’s lifetime), the judgement on Judaism is harsh: it stands there for a relation of law and obedience in which reconciliation is lacking. These are judgements about a shape of religion within a developmental scheme, but they are disparaging, and they should not be explained away.
The late Hegel, and precisely where it has consequences
In the Philosophy of Right the issue is no longer the assessment of a religion but civil rights. At the time of writing it was disputed whether Jews should receive full rights of citizenship; the opponents’ argument was that they were a foreign people and therefore did not belong. Hegel writes on this in the note to § 270:
However much formal right one might have had, say, against the Jews with regard to the very granting of civil rights … the outcry raised from this and other points of view has failed to see that they are, first and foremost, human beings – and that this is not merely a shallow, abstract quality …
Groundlines, § 270 note
And further: the separateness charged against the Jews „would, on the contrary, have persisted, and would rightly have become a matter of blame and reproach for an excluding state“. The blame lies with the state that excludes, not with those excluded. Experience, he adds, has shown the assertion of this exclusion to be „the most foolish course“.
The grounding stands a few paragraphs earlier, in the note to § 209, and it is one of the few sentences of Hegel’s that can be quoted without commentary:
The human being counts, thus, because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, and so on.
Groundlines, § 209 note
The surroundings, so that one has the measure
In 1816 Jakob Friedrich Fries – the same man Hegel attacks in the Preface – had demanded in a pamphlet that Judaism be extirpated root and branch. At the Wartburg festival the pamphlet was burned. Against this background Hegel’s position in § 270 is no lukewarm middle but the counter-position.
It is worth noting who praises Fries: in The Open Society and Its Enemies Karl Popper sets him against Hegel as the better thinker. Walter Kaufmann pointed this out.
The verdict
On the religion of Judaism Hegel judges disparagingly, most sharply as a young man. On the rights of Jews he judges without any qualification: they have them because they are human beings. Whoever takes the two together has before him neither an antisemite nor an unprejudiced observer, but an author in whom the place in the system decides – and the place of right is in him the place where all particularity falls behind being human.
Sources. § 209 note, § 270 note · Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal, in: Frühe Schriften (TWA 1) · Walter Kaufmann, „The Hegel Myth and Its Method“, 1959 · Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies II, ch. 12. – In the glossary: The Person, Abstract Right.