In his essay on 'The Religion of Sublimity' (1982), Yirmiahu Yovel has pointed out a certain inconsistency in Hegel's systematization of religions, an inconsistency which does not result directly from the very principle of Hegel's philosophy but expresses rather a contingent, empirical prejudice of Hegel's as an individual, and can therefore be rectified by consequent use of Hegel's own dialectical procedure. This inconsistency concerns the place occupied respectively by Jewish and by ancient Greek religion: in Hegel's Lessons on the Philosophy of Religion, Christianity is immeditely preceded by three forms of the 'religion of spiritual individuality': the Jewish religion of Sublimity [Erhabenheit], the Greek religion of Beauty, and the Roman religion of Understanding [Verstand]. In this succession the first, lowest place is taken by the Jewish religion -- that is, Greek religion is conceived as a higher stage in spiritual development than the Jewish religion. According to Yovel, Hegel has here given way to his personal anti-Semitic prejudice, because to be consistent with the logic of the dialectical process it is undoubtedly the Jewish religion which should follow the Greek.
Slavoj Žižek, "The Sublime Object of Ideology" [1989], The Sublime, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press, 2010, p.56.
Hegel's own incoherent "dialectical procedure" or "process" is as arbitrary as he would want it to be. But there is something confused about accusing Hegel of "inconsistency" when his whole method is built on contradictions -- and, of course, the implication here is that the collective spirituality of Christianity, as imagined by Hegel, is superior to the individualism of the other three forms of religion, however prioritized. Slavoj Žižek, meanwhile, whatever his scruples about anti-Semitism, is himself a repellent advocate of communist terrorism and mass murder. No kidding.
Vade Retro Satana, Nunquam Suade Mihi Vana;
Sunt Mala Quae Libas, Ipse Venena Bibas.
Get thee behind me Satan!
Never tempt me with your vanities!
What you offer me is evil.
Drink the poison yourself!
Medal of St. Benedict
Anti-Semitism in Fries
Admirable and progressive as the republican movement, apart from the celebration of Sand, may make the political commitments of Jakob Fries seem, there was a side to it even darker than a fortunately unrepeated assassination. In criticizing Fries, Shlomo Avineri [Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge University Press, 1972, pp. 119-122], has correctly pointed out that German nationalism was already displaying some of its worst tendencies, including the book burning at the Wartburg Festival and anti-Semitism, which included attacks on Jews directly in the "Hep-Hep" riots of 1819 (from the cry, "Hep-Hep! Jude verreck [die]!"), to the distress of Jewish students who had actually participated at Wartburg.
These violent disorders, which continued from August to October and included direct attacks on the offices of the Rothschild bankers in the Judengasse, the street of the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, helped spur the actions of Metternich, with whose measures even the modern liberal might no longer find fault. Fries himself contributed an infamous and disgraceful anti-Semitic tract at the time, the Endangering of German Welfare and Character by the Jews (Über die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden, 1816). The truly horrifying overtones of this led Avineri to dismiss Fries and the Burschenschaften, not as "liberal, idealistic," but as proto-Nazis; and he attributed the affinity between them all to the subjectivism and irrationality of Fries's thought.
This repeats a charge from Hegel himself, who also conspicuously condemned Fries's anti-Semitism, in a passage that is often all that academic philosophers have ever heard of Fries. Morally, Hegel did have a leg up on Fries, since he defended civil rights for Jews and apparently protected Jewish students, ironically (perhaps) in the local (Heidelberg) chapter of the Burschenschaften -- although Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882) would later complain that Hegel had not condemned the Hep-Hep riots. But, as we shall see below, Hegel was not himself entirely free of the anti-Semitic Zeitgeist of the age, and he is rarely upbraided with this, while Fries receives full blame.
At the same time, the charge of subjectivism and irrationality in general is nonsense when applied to Fries. There was actually nothing particularly rational about Hegel's obscurantism and speculative dogmatism, whatever he called it -- and both he and later Hegelians absurdly called it "Logic" -- and Hegel's view of Fries's (and Kant's) system as subjectivist, however consistent it was with the Romantic and foolish overtones of German culture at the time (from which we get Sturm und Drang), is ridiculous. In taking Hegel's conception of "reason" and "rationality" seriously, Avineri is clearly an apologist for Hegel, willing to uncritically promote Hegel's own technical and tendentious characterization of his opponents -- and blind to the circumstance that "Hegel's Theory of the Modern State," in which the individual disappears, provided a theory of the later absolutist, totalitarian state of the Fascists and Communists. Is that inevitably the "Modern State" that Avineri describes? Doe he agree with it? What business does an Israeli Jew like Shlomo Avineri have promoting this stuff? It makes him sound like a fool.
Politically, there is certainly enough blame to go around. The mix of ideas found later in National Socialism owes as much to Hegel as to the evils advocated or practiced by Fries and the Burschenschaften. From the Neoplatonic (and perhaps Aristotelian) doctrine that God only knows universals, Hegel produced the modern totalitarian idea of the state, where the individual as such is "abstract" and irrational -- only the State, as the historical expression of Geist, "spirit" or "mind," is real and rational. 
While Hegel apologists often deny that Hegel's theory was of this sort, my impression is that, when the chips are down, the apologists themselves turn out to be collectivists and statists, with little sympathy for "bourgeois" individualism or classical liberalism, and sometimes even for individual rights and free speech -- rights and civil liberties that remarkably may be called "Fascism" at American universities -- someone once called me a "liberal fascist," which involves considerable confusion in different ways -- and it probably meant that the speaker would be one of those attacking free speech and honest debate in contemporary colleges. The project of creating a totalitarian police state has been adopted by the Democrat Party, in league with anarchists and communists, who have succeeded in spreading their lies and evils through much of American society, including the cowardly culture of business corporations.
Certainly, Hegel's doctrine was agreeable and conformable to the attitude and practice of the Kingdom of Prussia; and Hegel's Philosophy of Right of 1821 was widely regarded, by everyone from Schopenhauer to Marx, as Hegel's justification and rationalization for the regime whose employee, spokesman, and apologist he had become. The same regime, 
thus promoted, later co-opted German nationalism for its own purposes, grafting onto the same horrifying tendencies of German nationalism all the unlimited power and absolute authority of Hegel's Geist. This separated Republican Schwarzrotgold from the Nationalistic Schwarzweißrot -- black, white, and red -- the colors of the German Empire and 
Nazi Germany. Colors now used to smear, of all things, Snow White.
Anti-Semitism developed apace during the 19th century. There were even further riots against Jews, as in Stuttgart in 1873. There was a large-scale, political "Antisemitic Campaign" in 1879-1881. That culminated in the "Antisemite's Petition" of 1880, which was a bill debated in parliament to roll back the civil rights of Jews. Bismarck would have none of it, but the extent and virulence of anti-Jewish sentiment is still shocking [cf. Paul Lawrence Rose, German Quesiton/Jewish Question, Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner, Princeton, 1990, pp.236-244].
In the late Empire, it was a bad sign that Wilhelm II's Kaiserin simply refused to visit Wilhelm's Jewish friends -- like Albert Ballin, president of Hapag, Hamburg's largest shipping line and the principal means by which immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants (who were provided with kosher food), were reaching America. The Kaiser would be a guest at Ballin's estate, "Little Potsdam" (a miniature of the Imperial palace), and solicit his advice. The Kaiser's grandmother, the Empress Augusta (1811-1890), had earlier patronized Jewish charities.
But even Wilhelm would not be free of anti-Semitism, and by the 1920's he was actually saying, from exile, that the Jews should be gassed [Rose, p.386, note]. The review of a recent Wilhelm biography expands on this:
Wilhelm became increasingly anti-Semitic in the period covered by this volume, particularly after defeat in 1918; he believed the Jews to be behind an international conspiracy to destroy Germany. In his cranky retirement, he demanded that Germans not "rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated [ausgerottet]." [Brendan Simms, "The Last King of Prussia," Wilhelm II, by John Röhl, Cambridge, The Wall Street Journal, May 3-4, 2014, C6]
The new element into the mix was the anti-Semitism of Marx himself and other "revolutionary" socialists, for whom Jews now were class enemies, symbolic and more, of Capitalist exploitation.
The worse secret of the Twentieth Century is how the hellish payoff of all this was on both the political Left and the political Right. Where for Hitler the "plutocrat" Jews were rather more important as race enemies than as class enemies, Stalin's policies, beginning with class enemies, insensibly shaded over into racial interpretations also. The "Jewish doctors' plot" was the telling culmination of Stalin's career. Most importantly, both Hitler and Stalin, like Hegel's Geist, only knew people as universals -- as classes or races -- to be impersonally lauded or exterminated. True liberal principles of individual liberty have been steadily ground down, even in the democracies, between the statist millstones of Left and Right.
Neither in Fries's era nor in the 20th century can anti-Semitism as such be taken as a clue to either rightist or leftist political affinities. As Paul Johnson says in his A History of the Jews [HarperPerennial, 1987]:
On the one hand, following Voltaire, the rising European left began to see the Jews as obscurantist opponents to all human progress. On the other, the forces of conservatism and tradition, resenting the benefits the Jews derived from the collapse of the ancient order, began to portray the Jews as the allies and instigators of anarchy. Both could not be true. Neither was true. But both were believed. [p. 309]
Johnson's reference to Voltaire included a citation from his Dictionnaire philosophique [1756]:
Their [i.e. the Jews] residence in Babylon and Alexandria, which allowed individuals to acquire wisdom and knowledge, only trained the people as a whole in the art of usury ... they are a totally ignorant nation who for many years have combined contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all those nations which have tolerated them." [Voltaire, quoted by Johnson, p. 309]
A similar caution against applying modern political categories to 18th and 19th century anti-Semitism, especially German anti-Semitism, is recommended by Paul Lawrence Rose in German Quesiton/Jewish Question. The sort of initial observation above, that Fries's political activities were "at once admirable and horrifying," is well explored by Rose, who explains at length how what now to liberal opinion appears to be incoherent and paradoxical -- that the liberal and progressive opinion of its day, as in Kant, nevertheless could comfortably accommodate anti-Semitic views that now look to be the essence of evil and reaction.
Rose provides much more about the place and context of Fries than does Christopher Clark, although the two treatments are complementary in many ways. If we might not have suspected Voltaire of anti-Semitic sentiments, we learn that Immanuel Kant, and even Hegel (for all his denunciation of Fries), were not innocent of promoting anti-Semitic ideas. Thus, as I have discussed elsewhere, Kant denied that Judaism was even a religion, because it did not measure up, in his estimation, to the high and defining moral standard that Kant (absurdly and ahistorically) laid down for the meaning of "religion." But Kant also had objections to the Jews in a vein similar to those of Voltaire:
The Palestinians [!] who live among us owe their not undeserved reputation for cheating (at least the majority of them) to their spirit of usury which has possessed them ever since their exile. Certainly it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheats, but it is just as strange to conceive of a nation of [pure/honest] traders, most of whom -- tied by an ancient [admitted] superstition -- seek no civil honor from the state where they live, but rather to restore their loss at the expense of those who grant them protection as well as from one another. [Rose, op.cit., p.94, color and bracket added]
Die unter uns lebenden Palästiner sind durch ihren Wuchergeist seit ihrem Exil, auch was die größte Menge betrifft, in den nicht ungegründeten Ruf des Betruges gekommen. Es scheint nun zwar befremdlich, sich eine Nation von lauter Kaufleuten zu denken, deren bei weitem größter Teil, durch einem alten, von dem Staat, darin sie leben, anerkannten Aberglauben verbunden, keine bürgerliche Ehre sucht, sondern dieser ihren Verlust durch die Vorteile der Überlistung des Volks, unter dem sie Schutz finden, und selbst ihrer untereinander, ersetzen wollen. [Immanuel Kant, «Anthropologie», Werkausgabe XII, Schriffen zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politk und Pädagogik 2, Herausgeben von Wilhelm Weisschedel, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 193, Insel-Verlag Wiesbaden 1964, pp.517-518, note, color added; note]
This disturbing and extraordinary passage not only reflects the prejudices just seen in Voltaire, but it exposes attitudes in philosophy, against trade and finance (q.v.), that are not only ancient, ignorant, foolish, and dishonorable but which continue in the radicalized modern leftist academy, to the corruption and harm of education and political life in the advanced democracies -- contributing its own force to modern and continuing anti-Semitism, conspicuously manifest as calumnies and protests against Israel, but with a strong undercurrent of simple hatred for capitalism, commerce, and finance, where trade and finance, practiced by anyone and not just Jews (although they are still there), necessarily exploit, defraud, rob, and oppress the innocent and helpless masses (but for the intervention of a Leninist Vanguard, i.e. the Democratic Party).
Thus, while it is sometimes said that Otto's theory of numinosity was already covered by the earlier category of the sublime, we do not see in the description of the phenomena of the sublime in Edmund Burke or in Kant (the previous best theorists) the characteristic features that Otto discerned in numinosity. The numinous may be at times terrifying, which was a classical feature of the sublime, but the uncanny is a form of the frightening or terrifying that has a very different sense and valence from anything merely in aesthetic value. The respect owed to holy things is unique of its kind and is not to be found among merely natural objects, to which the phenomena of the sublime are otherwise confined. Indeed, the uncanny strongly bespeaks something supernatural, which escapes the judgment of both moral and aesthetic realms.
Belgium in 1830 (more yellow than gold), in the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848, by the 
Weimar Republic, and by both post-War German Republics. But these tendencies were not agreeable to Austria or Prussia, and Fries endangered himself by conspicuously associating with radical students and the Burschenshaften student fraternities -- which the Encyclopaedia Britannica still describes as "the Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenschaft (Young Germany Movement), a liberal, idealistic student association" -- a characterization that can be disputed but in some respects was accurate for the time.
In the aftermath of the Kotzebue assassination, Jahn was arrested, his gymnastic societies were closed, and he was subsequently imprisoned. This was much harsher treatment than what Fries and the other academics received. Also arrested was a noble military supporter of Jahn, Hans Rudolf von Plehwe. This man introduced jogging, which really only came into general vogue, of course, in the 1970's. Von Plehwe had been at Wartburg and was arrested after participating in a rally in support of Jahn.
, Ummah, the "Nation," of Islâm (such suspicions would be "
