Eduard Gans

Origins and early life

Eduard Gans was born in Berlin on 22 March 1797 — some sources say 1798 — the son of the Jewish banker Abraham Isaac Gans, and studied law at Berlin, Göttingen and Heidelberg, where he became the disciple of Hegel.

Work and career

In 1819, with Leopold Zunz and Moses Moser, he founded and presided over the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, the society that invented the scientific study of Judaism — the Wissenschaft des Judentums — and of which Heinrich Heine was a member; it aimed to give the Jews of Germany a scholarly knowledge of their own history and a place in European learning. Prussia answered by closing the universities to Jews: the cabinet order of 1822 known as the 'Lex Gans' was drafted to keep him off the law faculty.

In December 1825 he was baptized a Protestant, and this fiche says so plainly, as Heine did with bitterness in verse and as Gans's own generation understood it — a ticket of admission, in Heine's phrase, to a career that was otherwise closed; he became full professor at Berlin in 1828. His masterpiece, Das Erbrecht in weltgeschichtlicher Entwicklung, four volumes published from 1824 to 1835, traced inheritance law through the history of the world in Hegel's spirit; he edited the Philosophy of Right and the Lectures on the Philosophy of History after Hegel's death, and his lectures, the most crowded in Berlin, were heard by the young Karl Marx. He died of a stroke on 5 May 1839, at forty-two.