Fackenheim's academic career was based on his competence as a professor of Hegel's philosophy. In spite of his awareness of the Holocaust, he attempted to reconcile Hegel's concept of Absolute Spirit with traditional belief in the Hebrew God. An example of his erudition is his following judgment regarding Hegel's seemingly self–contradictory wordplay: "It is not perverse to say that [Hegel] could have written with the elegance of a Schopenhauer only if he had shared that thinker's superficiality."