The question calls for a divided answer, because the young and the late Hegel say different things \u2013 and because the passage at which the matter becomes practical is unusually plain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early theological writings of the Bern and Frankfurt years, above all in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate<\/em> (about 1798\/1800, unpublished in Hegel\u2019s lifetime), the judgement on Judaism is harsh: it stands there for a relation of law and obedience in which reconciliation is lacking.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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Philosophy of Right<\/em> 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\u2019 argument was that they were a foreign people and therefore did not belong. Hegel writes on this in the note to \u00a7 270<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n However much formal right one might have had, say, against the Jews<\/em> with regard to the very granting of civil rights \u2026 the outcry raised from this and other points of view has failed to see that they are, first and foremost, human beings<\/em> \u2013 and that this is not merely a shallow, abstract quality \u2026<\/p>\nGroundlines, \u00a7 270<\/a> note<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And further: the separateness charged against the Jews \u201ewould, on the contrary, have persisted, and would rightly have become a matter of blame and reproach for an excluding state\u201c. The blame lies with the state that excludes, not with those excluded. Experience, he adds, has shown the assertion of this exclusion to be \u201ethe most foolish course\u201c.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The grounding stands a few paragraphs earlier, in the note to \u00a7 209<\/a>, and it is one of the few sentences of Hegel\u2019s that can be quoted without commentary:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The human being counts<\/em>, thus, because he is a human being<\/em>, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, and so on.<\/p>\nGroundlines, \u00a7 209<\/a> note<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In 1816 Jakob Friedrich Fries \u2013 the same man Hegel attacks in the Preface \u2013 had demanded in a pamphlet that Judaism be extirpated root and branch. At the Wartburg festival the pamphlet was burned. Against this background Hegel\u2019s position in \u00a7 270<\/a> is no lukewarm middle but the counter-position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worth noting who praises Fries: in The Open Society and Its Enemies<\/em> Karl Popper sets him against Hegel as the better thinker. Walter Kaufmann pointed this out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 and the place of right is in him the place where all particularity falls behind being human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources.<\/strong> \u00a7 209<\/a> note, \u00a7 270<\/a> note \u00b7 Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal<\/em>, in: Fr\u00fche Schriften (TWA 1) \u00b7 Walter Kaufmann, \u201eThe Hegel Myth and Its Method\u201c, 1959 \u00b7 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies<\/em> II, ch. 12. \u2013 In the glossary: The Person<\/a>, Abstract Right<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe late Hegel, and precisely where it has consequences<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
The surroundings, so that one has the measure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The verdict<\/h2>\n\n\n\n