The young Hegel manifested a harsh anti-Jewish attitude which his mature philosophy mitigated. Reversing his early claim that the Jews had contributed nothing worthwhile to humanity, the older Hegel went as far as to attribute to Judaism one of the most consequential turning points in human history: the recognition that absolute being is Spirit, not a thing or a natural entity, and that Spirit is higher than nature. Yet Judaism falsified its own revolution in the very act of performing it, because it shaped itself as "a religion of sublimity", by which Hegel means a religion of self-alienation and slavish submission to an infinitely remote Master, before whom the individual stands in dread as a complete nullity. In this dialectical fashion, the mature Hegel tacitly condemned the Jews in the very act of praising them. Furthermore, unlike Nietzsche, Hegel denied post-Christian Jews any historical significance and value. It followed from Hegel's logic of history that the Jews had lost their raison d'être already in antiquity and become the empty shell of their former self. Yet while he was puzzled and disturbed by their long survival as a theoretical paradox (a "dark riddle"), this did not prevent Hegel from supporting political emancipation and social acceptance for the contemporary Jews, an unpopular position in Germany at the time. Hegel looked down on German xenophobic nationalism, and as a philosopher of freedom he chose, without enthusiasm, to admit the Jews into the modern world as a necessary recognition of their humanity.Philippe Raynaud, "La Philosophie allemande, la raison et les juifs, Commentaire, summer 2001, 472-474.
